After 3 years in the making, A.M. Stations are back with a new album called Nonsense. We spoke with the band in-depth about the new album and what went into crafting this 8-track masterpiece. Check out the interview below and pre-order Nonsense on CD or cassette using the links at the end of the article.
A.M. Stations, like many bands these days, are very hard to lump into just one genre. The music is heavy but melodic, catchy but also dissonant at times. Do you often have trouble fitting into a certain “scene” when it comes to booking shows and selling your music, or are you happy that you don’t quite fit any specific mold?
WESLEY: I don’t necessarily think we have a hard time “fitting in” in any scene necessarily. By not locking ourselves into one genre I would say it gives us even more room to play with bands and artists that are all over the map of the genre spectra.
ALEX: I think it does make things a little more difficult for us in those regards. we don’t really play popular music so we can’t really say “we’re in the vein of so-and-so”. but on the flip side we usually end up playing with bands who are also harder to categorize. it becomes really interesting and some of them are really great bands.
BILLY: For sure, we all like so many different styles of music, and none of us have ever been style purists per se. I think what makes us fit in isn’t so much music related but maybe just being a part of a raddd community of artists that are open to each other because we support each other in our differences. I like it when people come up to us after a set and say, “that was cool,” especially when we’re playing with more approachable bands that sound like this band or that band. That never gets old.
You self-recorded your latest album Nonsense, what kind of challenges did you encounter while making the album without the help of a studio or engineer?
WES: There are challenges with every recording. Regardless of spending $100 or $10,000 there are always gonna be peaks and valleys. I would say one major challenge was just not being together for the full recording process. But we are good communicators and Alex kept Bill and I in the loop the whole way through.
ALEX: we definitely had to be more creative and flexible with the spaces, the gear, and our time. it took a lot of coordinating and dealing with some sub-par equipment.
BILLY: I’ve always been a major fan of home recording, lo-fi, and bedroom pop, but working with each other to record Nonsense was next level, each space might as well have been a studio. It was hella fun to make and travel everywhere between Chicago and Detroit. And while we didn’t have an external non-Stations engineer, Alex was def our rock. The only challenges we ran into were minor and fixed quick and easily.
Alternatively, what were the benefits of recording on your own? I imagine there’s a great sense of independence that comes with the process.
ALEX: the process was definitely more lax. there wasn’t the pressure of “get it all done, right now, no room for error”. there was more freedom to get things sounding as close as possible to how we wanted it. this time around we got to shape it instead of it being a quick and dirty snapshot.
WES: Yeah, there was definitely a feeling of independence. Recording in different spaces of our choosing gave us really comfortable surroundings and the freedom to take our time and make the album WE wanted to make.
BILLY: Totally! This band is kind of a dream band in that way, because we are all writing songs, we’re all giving input, we’re all willing to take each others criticisms, and really work toward what Nonsense is as an album. The best part of it for me is how nerdy we got about gear, mic’s, sounds, etc. Years ago I found an AKG D1000E for $5 at a flea market. I looked it up and found a video where someone put this mic side by side with a SHURE SM57. First it would show one mic, then the other, then both. I was so stoked on it kept me up at night. Really, I’m that much of a nerd, and then I showed Alex. Alex was also sold on it and bought some D1000E’s as well. When it came to recording guitars, Alex worked with me to find the exact sounds I was looking for and we took our time to figure it out. We all kind of curated our gear too. Wes drove to Hattiesburg to pick up his drums, got a new ride cymbal, and Alex and I found amp and speaker combos to get everything to sound just the way we wanted. Everything we did was intentional, and it took a LONG time. I don’t think any of us have ever done anything like Nonsense before.
What’s your favorite track(s) to listen to from the new album?
BILLY: For me it used to be “Spelunk” because I never played guitar quite this fast before. I really challenged myself to get better at guitar and I was super happy with how comfortable it became. I would also picture it as the song that the Chicago Bull’s would run through the tunnel to. I can dream, right? But over time, the album started to unfold and it wasn’t about singular songs, it was about the album, the flow, the collaboration. There are a lot of dark and looming ideas that came into this process of songwriting and I feel like we tackled a lot of our fears, struggles, and personal experiences in a cohesive idea. If I had to choose a current fave, it’s Attic Money because it feels so full, but it’s so short, and def one of our loudest fastest songs. And I love the line “…all the moneys in the air.”
ALEX: I think “Charred Wings” is a pretty neat song. we ended up using three guitar lines for the second verse and I think the way they interact is cool.
WES: My favorite tracks come and go. “Twinflower” is always a fun one to jam because it was the most complicated one to nail. But I feel like we have some really high energy songs that always make for a good listen. The opening track, Even the Sunbeams, always gets me pumped up because it pulls back the curtain on what the album has in store; in a very jarring way.
Which tracks were the most fun or interesting to record?
WES: They were all fun to record. I think “Milk Siblings”, “Charred Wings” and “Wolves” were all fun because they’re a little different than everything else on this album and our last EP, Sign of Times.
ALEX: i don’t think there were any tracks i was more stoked about than any other. we had demo’d these before and had good idea about where we were headed with all of them. i think once we started doing vocals, it was easy to start hearing the album…it felt like stuff was coming together the right way.
BILLY: “Wolves” was probably the most fun for me because I played an unplanned solo on the recording. Alex kept egging me on to get noisier and to really “Weezer” it up. Haha! It was fun, and I’m sure it was intentional because Alex knows that I love improvising. Recording vocals during the demo was also a lot of fun, we had to do them all on one track, share a mic, and share one pair of headphones flipped out for gang vocals. There was a lot of laughing and goofing off.
Can you talk about some of the DIY recording solutions you came up with while recording Nonsense?
WES: No
BILLY: Haha! Alex was def the brains behind the operation, but we collaborated on some things here and there to come up with ways to dial in the spaces.
ALEX: all the different instruments were recorded in different spaces so we had to figure out where we could do what and how we could work with the space. at the magic shop, bill hung up a bunch of curtains and things to deaden the room. when we recorded guitar, we stuck a mic in an adjacent bathroom to get a weird resonant ambiance. we used what we had in terms gear and we ended up borrowing some stuff for drum tracking. when we recorded guitars, my interface crapped out on me and we had to drive an hour to the nearest guitar center to get a new one.
BILLY: Yeah, we def made the best out of our situation. And even that drive ended up becoming inspiration for the album. On a crackling radio station Alex and I listened to Edge of Seventeen by Stevie Nicks. I heard it like I’d never heard it before. We talked about how choir vocals aren’t something you hear that often anymore, and it def influenced how we recorded vocals. Conversations like these are a big part of what comes out of recording an album yourself. When inevitable problems arise, you have to think creatively, be patient, and work with what you have to make the album you want to make. And when it’s all said in done it’s hella rewarding.
There was a 3-year gap between your new album and your 2015 EP Sign of Times, are you glad you took your time putting out your 2018 release Nonsense or have you just gotten sick of hearing these songs by now?
WES: I wouldn’t say we’ve gotten sick of them. Any band wants to move on and continue writing after recording an album, we’ve kept our interest high though. We’ve been working in our friend, Ari Zrihen, as our 2nd guitarist this year, and that process is almost forcing us to look at all these songs with fresh eyes. Even songs from past albums, Tacoma, and Sign of Times, feel like they have new life these days. So I would say we’re still excited about our songs. But we’re also always looking forward to the next thing.
ALEX: there are a couple songs that we’ve been playing almost that entire 3 years that…well…we’re very familiar with. but songs like twinflower, we’ve never played live and are still pretty exciting to me.
BILLY: Totally, and these songs are different than those on Sign of Times and Tacoma because they weren’t written and recorded the same way we’ve always been used to, which was fast. We were able to really spend the time in our collaborative writing and composing, and nothing has gotten old at all, I feel like we are just starting to develop these songs even though they are recorded. I’ve never felt that recording a song finalizes it, it’s more like the beginning of it. With any song I’ve been a part of over the years it’s generally after the album is released that songs take to flight, and I’m stoked to see where we go with them, especially with another guitarist.
“Milk Siblings” reminds me a bit of Eric Gaffney’s erratic songwriting when he was in the band Sebadoh, what were some of your biggest influences on this album, musical or otherwise?
BILLY: Thanks! Love Sebadoh, that’s raddd! Milk Sibs started with Alex’s bass line. When he brought it to the table I had no idea how I could play along with it, I kinda wanted to just listen to it by itself and not mess it up with just any guitar part. Over time, and lots of listening Wes and I came up with our parts. It’s a super dynamic song.
WES: That’s definitely gonna be different for all of us. Not having one singular songwriter in the band means that we are constantly pulling from a multitude of influences. I wrote lyrics for several tracks on the album, Even the Sunbeams, Things that Just Happen, Attic Money, Spelunk, Charred Wings, but we all contribute heavily in the music writing process. During this process I was pulling lots of influences from The Paper Chase, Hot Water Music, Steve Winwood, and Hum; just to name a few.
BILLY: During the writing and recording process, my influences were all varied. The stuff I was rocking was MF Doom, Karp, FKA Twigs, Unwound, Lightning Bolt, Geena, D.J. Premier live radio sets, Polvo, old Ronald Jones Flaming Lips, Miles Davis, and Sun Ra just to name a few. Chicago in itself has a rich music culture and I’m always dialed in to what’s happening on my block, so to speak, as much as I can be. I was listening to a lot of Ensemble Dal Niente, J@K@L, Restroy, Maren Celest, and V.V. Lightbody. It’s amazing how much great music is out there, locally and otherwise. I could def keep going but I feel like this group is pretty representative .
ALEX: Sebadoh’s a good band. we all come from pretty diverse musical backgrounds. what has influenced me is not the same as what has influenced Bill or Wes, but that’s kind of where the magic happens. our different styles come together and somehow it works. and sometimes that’s really just where the stuff comes from…a tune like attic money just started as a riff i was playing one day and wesley joined in and then it just evolved from there. i think we’re all kind of into having this sort of punk edge though. we’ve had some beers together too.
BILLY: Honestly, not everything that influenced Nonsense for me was music based. It was actually a really tough time. Kristen, my partner, was diagnosed with HER2+ breast cancer about the time we were wrapping up Sign of Times. I was meshugganah. I didn’t want to go to practice or hang out with anyone, I just wanted to be with her. Wes and Alex kept up with me though, made sure that I had a way to process it all creatively, a way to get all of my heaviness out. Things That Just Happen started out as a guitar part played through at 10 watt amp in our bedroom played super quiet, while Kristen was resting in the living room. I remember bringing it to Wes and Alex and they were into it, after months of forming the parts just right I still couldn’t find the words. Thankfully Wes tied it together putting his thoughts to words. Every time I play Things I think of her resting, which she had to do a lot, sometimes for the whole course of a day. I was with her everyday, for every treatment, and her experience and struggles were so close to me, especially her surprising positivity, all this while Nonsense was concepted. So in a way, Nonsense was kind of the last thing on my mind. Thankfully, during this album’s growth she was deemed cancer free after a long year of treatment, surgery, and radiation. While things have never really retuned back to any kind of normalcy before cancer, I feel like we both came out of a heavy fog, and when things started to become clear, I really started to see what Alex, Wes and I had been making. It was interesting because I feel like I wasn’t at all there during the writing process, lost in my own isolated world in a way, even though I was physically there the whole time. It’s like Nonsense is a document to a time when I was pretty disconnected. Outside of seeing Wes and Alex, I mostly saw people in the oncology office, all going through intense physical changes over time, and Kristen and I lost some people we saw regularly from cancer. All in all, I was pretty disconnected, and Nonsense kind of became a rope to climb from the bottom of a well.
The album as a whole feels cohesive and diverse all at once. It’s relatively short (clocking in under 30 minutes) but in that time the band really explores a lot of different musical territory, making it a really interesting listen. Was this track list a curated selection from a larger group of recordings or have these 8 songs always been the vision you had for the album?
ALEX: we’ve been pretty dead-set on these 8. our repertoire doesn’t really expand to far beyond these tracks and everything that came before it. that being said, we worked really hard on these songs to get them right.
BILLY: Nearing the end we tried to adjust the order just to see what it felt like, to see if there was a better way, but it’s kinda funny, all of the songs always kinda naturally fit in this order, a lot of them even ended up in the the order in which they were written. No matter what we did to change it up, it just wouldn’t work any other way.
WES: I wish I could say these 8 tracks were the best from a lot of 15-20 other tracks we recorded, but that’s not the case. We cut one or two songs in the writing process, but at the end of the day these were always the ones for this album.
The three of you are living in different stages, spread across the Midwest, but still managed to write and record this album independently. How do you keep this long-distance band relationship fresh and productive after all of these years?
ALEX: this album really started when i was still living in chicago, so since then, we’ve all gotten busier, and coming up with new material has been slower. but we got the album done and we’ve added a second guitarist, hi, ari!, to help us get a fuller sound when we’re playing live and that’s been a real treat to hear what he can do. i think from here, we have a much better understanding of each other. the new material might come a little slower (it might take us another 3 years for another album) but i think it’ll actually be easier for us to execute as a band and will probably be even cooler the next time around.
WES: Love and patience. That’s really all it takes. The 3 of us are really good friends and have been working together for several years now. We keep it fun, but we’re all very professional. The 3 of us are all owners and co-owners of record labels so I believe that experience spills over into how we handle the serious aspects of our band.
BILLY: Totally, and in a lot of ways, distance is just a drive. Staying tight isn’t a problem cuz we’re always connected one way or another. I feel like easy access to communication is one of the few positives of having smart phones. So, maybe distance doesn’t matter so much anymore? For us or anyone really. While we have a few hundred miles separating us, we’re tighter than ever. Even though we’ve been a band for almost 5 years, it feels like we’re just getting started somehow, and that’s a pretty cool feeling.
The album is available for pre-order via the links below but if you’re in the mood to party you can pick up a copy in person at 1980 Records Party Timessss 1988 fest the weekend of 9/27 – 9/30. The official release show for Nonsense is a stacked bill of Midwestern garage psych & shoegaze acts featuring Coffin Problem from Grand Rapids, Geena from Sheboygan, Basement Family from Chicago, and of course, A.M. Stations.
Pre-Order Cassette | Pre-Order CD
A.M. Stations Official | Bandcamp | Facebook
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