Capturing a moment: Talking with briston maroney about his new ep |
Hollie Sikes | January 2019
This interview was originally written and published for the now-defunct Red Canyon Records, and has been reproduced here in its entirety with full permission from the original publisher. |
If you ask anyone for a list of “Big Names” in Knoxville music, you’re guaranteed to hear the name Briston Maroney pop up at least once or twice, and for good reason. Maroney, a Knox local based in Nashville who’s built his musical career on an assortment of genres (from folk to alt rock), continues to make statement after statement on Tennessee’s alternative music scene. He’s most recently popped up on everyone’s radar with the release of his new EP, titled Carnival, a soulful five-track album with a steady pulse and distinct voice. It’s something special, no doubt; from my first listen-through on the day of its release I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that Briston Maroney is destined to hit it big.
We meet in Nashville at Bongo Java, a sweet little coffee shop built into an old house. I’m lucky to catch him at such a short notice; I had only messaged him on instagram the night before to see if he’d be able to meet somewhere for an interview. He responded with such enthusiasm that we scheduled a coffee date for the next day, and I pulled off the Nashville exit eager to finally dive into Carnival one-on-one. He immediately gives me a smile and a hug when he comes into the shop and thanks me for making the trip to see him. He’s kind and warm, easy to talk to, the kind of personality that you could be apart from for years and meet again as if no time passed. Over mochas and sodas we make it a mission to uncover the story behind Carnival, the changes his path has shown him since his breakout EP Big Shot (which gave us gems like Virginia and June), and the pursuit of music in a diverse and sometimes hard-to-decipher music scene.
So you released new music last month!
Briston: Yeah, dude! We put out a five-song EP as a whole, we had done singles and stuff but we put out the one record. We did it here at a studio called Quad Studios, which is like my dream studio, man. It’s where Neil Young did Harvest, and like, all these really really cool records, it’s super historic. It was super dope.
Has anything changed for you since then?
Briston: Holy shit. Oh my God, yeah.
'Cause I noticed Under My Skin got a lot of attention.
Briston: It’s crazy! Yeah, I don’t know how the hell that happened. I mean, a lot has changed on paper, like working with a label and the business side of things. It’s weird to, like, have people helping us pay for things and to have that kind of support. So working with a label and an agent and a manager and all that shit, that’s all a change for sure. But just musically and personally, so much has changed. It’s been a crazy year.
How so?
Briston: Dude, in every way. I mean, this time last year things were going smoothly, I guess. I had been in a relationship for a year, I was in school, doing all this stuff. Then all within, like, a month, the relationship ended, I dropped out of school, and I just lost everything. It was crazy. I haven’t really talked much about this, but I ended up going to rehab for like two months. I lost it. I had zero direction, I didn’t know what I wanted; I spent all my money to make that record, sold my car, was working some shitty job. I was working the morning shift at this super preppy Nashville restaurant, so I was hosting there from, like, 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. every day. I swear I’d show up still drunk from the night before. It was bad, dude, I had no idea what was gonna happen. I was living very day-to-day. So I ended up going to treatment and left that, then made a record. I actually went out to California to do that and made a record out there, which no one knows about. After that stuff I was broke, bought another car and sold that car too, sold guitars and all that stuff, so I moved back in with my mom in Florida this summer. So I went from being like, “I have to be in Nashville, I have to be involved in all this stuff,” to being in California without a phone away from everything, no close friends or family, then moving from there to a small town in Florida with literally 10,000 people and being like super far away from everything. That’s where I really had to evaluate what I was doing. I got sick of being in Florida, so I’d work all week at this pizza restaurant and then every weekend I would take my mom’s car and drive to Charleston or Atlanta and play a house show. I just started redoing it because it was just what I had to fucking do, there was nothing else I wanted to do. The label stuff was just a random chance thing, I met this guy Chris Klein at a show here in Nashville. We talked a little bit after the show and somebody came up and was like, “Dude, that guy is like, a record guy,” and I was like “Shit, I was so mean to that guy!” I was in a super bad mood that night, was just hating my life. But he actually ended up becoming one of my closest friends, he’s the sweetest guy I know.
There’s no question attached to this, but I just found out recently that you were on American Idol. I’m assuming lots has changed since then.
Briston: Thank God, it has. That was, like, sophomore year of high school in Knoxville, that was an insane experience. It all just happened really quickly. I got to travel a lot for that, I missed, like, half of my sophomore year. We had “school” out there, there was, like, a tutor, but it was just this dude who always talked about how he used to tutor Frankie Muniz. We never actually did anything. It was a strange thing, and I made some great friends, but more than anything I saw a lot of what I didn’t wanna do. I saw a lot of how fake those things were, and I’m really glad I got out when I did. I never really rode that wave.
So the album is very vulnerable, but it’s not vulnerable in the way that Big Shot was. Big Shot was very emotional, it sounded emotional, but Carnival feels more like a blunt statement of hard truth.
Briston: For sure. With Big Shot we didn’t know what we were doing, and it happened around the time things started getting shitty; my friend had some studio space and it was for his production class, so it happened very quickly and we did it on our own without any money or anything. It was very much us just playing the songs live, no overdubs, just happy to be playing, so it relied a lot on the actual songs and the emotions with them. With Carnival we worked with a real producer (not that the guy who did Big Shot wasn’t great, his name’s Zander, he’s awesome) and recorded in a nicer studio. We had more of a vision, I knew what I wanted it to sound like, we had more time. It happened a couple weeks before I ended up going to treatment, so it was a super vulnerable time, and I think we really just captured a moment. That’s all we ever really want to do with a record. I’m not great with, like… musically, I’m not the kind of person who wakes up at three in the morning with these crazy ideas in my head and writes sheet music. It was definitely like, we didn’t know what was happening in life, but we had these songs that sounded a certain way for whatever reason, and we captured that.
I’m so curious because I saw you back in January, and you played Freakin’ Out on the Interstate. So it was a long time coming, I’m guessing, because the record just came out in November.
Briston: We actually tracked that in January, so we tracked the record almost a year ago.
What took it so long?
Briston: We just, like, wanted to wait until the right time. We had the songs done and he finished them and mastered them in like two or three weeks, but we wanted to wait until the right time to start putting stuff out. Releasing [Freakin’ Out on the Interstate] was a kind of motivation for me to get back home, because I released it when I was out in California. It was really just me getting to a point when I was clear enough in my mind to know how we wanted the rest of the year to go.
Yeah that’s crazy, because before it came out I always wondered, like, what song is this, and then the single came out and I was like oh that’s the one! But I still have a video of it from that January show.
Briston: Yeah! That’s absolutely crazy to me. We’re actually going back into the studio in, like, six days, and we played all the songs we’re recording on the last tour. It’s cool when people send us videos and stuff, and seeing how it’s going to change, that’s my favorite part of it. Seeing us play these songs for the first time live, looking back on those videos from old shows, or rehearsal videos, it’s insane to see where they go.
What song from Carnival would you say you feel most connected to?
Briston: I mean, Freakin’ Out really sums up the moment in the studio when we realized how new and interesting of an experience this was for us. We felt like it happened and we didn’t really know how it happened. So that one really sums up that time, and I feel like people really connect to that one in that way. The most personal one is Rose, probably. That one’s about all the relationship stuff that was going really poorly at the time, and it definitely summed all that up really well. It’s hard for me to listen to. It was the last song that we did, and the vocal take on it we literally re-tracked, like, 40 times. I sang it start to finish 40 times, because I really wanted to do it all in one. It was the last day and the last thing we recorded, and Tone (the producer) was like, “We have enough that I can comp a good take, you don’t need to keep doing it.” But he let me do it one more time and said he was just going to press record and walk out. All the lights were off in the studio and everyone was closing down, and he pressed record and walked out, and I sang the last take. So the vocals you hear are the last thing we recorded.
A lot of people compare you to artists like Bob Dylan. Who do you think you take from stylistically, or who inspires you?
Briston: Wow, yeah, Dylan’s a great example. His music was some of the first stuff I was really listening to on my own. I’m super into the Laurel Canyon group, and Neil Young’s old stuff, Dylan’s stuff. Favorite songwriter of all time is John Prine, I was listening to him on the way here. A lot of old folk stuff.
You were in a folk band.
Briston: Oh yeah, big time folk band. Banjo and everything. We put out a five-song record, I think it’s gone now.
You’ve honestly done a lot, I just forget.
Briston: Same! It’s crazy, man, I was talking to my roommate last night about writing, and there’s this Avett Brothers interview where they said that they don’t believe in writer’s block and all that stuff, like you have to work at it. I keep all my songs in a notebook; we’re recording four songs next week, and I look back at the 50 songs in my notebook and out of that batch we’re recording one of those songs. It’s a crazy thing, it doesn’t stop.
So you’re recording four songs soon, that’s exciting!
Briston: Dude, I’m so excited! We’re going to Franklin, Kentucky, to this old farmhouse studio, and we’ll stay at the house out there and track. It’s all 70s gear, it’s really cool.
What is it? Are you doing another EP, or is it something bigger?
Briston: It’ll be another EP. We were gonna do a full length album, but we decided to push it back. We do have songs for a full length with the intention of it being a pretty heavy record, with a lot more rock stuff. These four songs are songs that kinda fit into that, but not all the way, so they work together as a different thing.
Do you have an ideal release time for that, or are you trying to space it out?
Briston: It’ll all be out by the summer, but we’re probably gonna do a single in February or March. We’re trying to do a lot of South by Southwest dates this year, so we’ll wanna get it out by then.
It’s very quick after Carnival.
Briston: Yeah, the label was big on that. They were really pushing to get more stuff recorded. I’m okay with doing these four songs kind of quickly, because it’s just how it all came together, but for the full length it’ll be a longer process. The full length album will be next year, before the end of next year, and it’s weird to think that far ahead. Right now I’m just trying to focus on this; when we wrote the songs for Carnival, those were the songs I had, there weren’t many others. But now waiting this long between the two is insane.
I wanna know if there’s anything you’ve learned, or any words of wisdom you may have, that you’d give to people pursuing music, or people with these kind of unconventional passions that they want to pursue.
Briston: I’m a big believer that you don’t have a choice; if you care about something, you don’t have a choice but to commit to it. That’s always been my thing, there’s nothing else that I could do. I’m not trying to be self deprecating, I just literally can’t do anything else. So once you have an idea or something you want to do, in my opinion, you have to fucking do it. It may fail and it may suck, and it comes at a cost, but you have to commit to what you want to do. I mean, this is the first time in my life where I’ve kind of had some backlash for that, with the label opinions and things like that. They’re amazing people, but it’s strange to have that critical view of something that’s always just been fun. So I think just doing it purely for yourself and for the people that support you, that’s the key. Just doing it for the right reason. You have to do it with no expectation; if you have an idea or a dream, only hold expectations for yourself. I don’t know if that was wise.
Listen to Carnival now on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you get your music.
We meet in Nashville at Bongo Java, a sweet little coffee shop built into an old house. I’m lucky to catch him at such a short notice; I had only messaged him on instagram the night before to see if he’d be able to meet somewhere for an interview. He responded with such enthusiasm that we scheduled a coffee date for the next day, and I pulled off the Nashville exit eager to finally dive into Carnival one-on-one. He immediately gives me a smile and a hug when he comes into the shop and thanks me for making the trip to see him. He’s kind and warm, easy to talk to, the kind of personality that you could be apart from for years and meet again as if no time passed. Over mochas and sodas we make it a mission to uncover the story behind Carnival, the changes his path has shown him since his breakout EP Big Shot (which gave us gems like Virginia and June), and the pursuit of music in a diverse and sometimes hard-to-decipher music scene.
So you released new music last month!
Briston: Yeah, dude! We put out a five-song EP as a whole, we had done singles and stuff but we put out the one record. We did it here at a studio called Quad Studios, which is like my dream studio, man. It’s where Neil Young did Harvest, and like, all these really really cool records, it’s super historic. It was super dope.
Has anything changed for you since then?
Briston: Holy shit. Oh my God, yeah.
'Cause I noticed Under My Skin got a lot of attention.
Briston: It’s crazy! Yeah, I don’t know how the hell that happened. I mean, a lot has changed on paper, like working with a label and the business side of things. It’s weird to, like, have people helping us pay for things and to have that kind of support. So working with a label and an agent and a manager and all that shit, that’s all a change for sure. But just musically and personally, so much has changed. It’s been a crazy year.
How so?
Briston: Dude, in every way. I mean, this time last year things were going smoothly, I guess. I had been in a relationship for a year, I was in school, doing all this stuff. Then all within, like, a month, the relationship ended, I dropped out of school, and I just lost everything. It was crazy. I haven’t really talked much about this, but I ended up going to rehab for like two months. I lost it. I had zero direction, I didn’t know what I wanted; I spent all my money to make that record, sold my car, was working some shitty job. I was working the morning shift at this super preppy Nashville restaurant, so I was hosting there from, like, 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. every day. I swear I’d show up still drunk from the night before. It was bad, dude, I had no idea what was gonna happen. I was living very day-to-day. So I ended up going to treatment and left that, then made a record. I actually went out to California to do that and made a record out there, which no one knows about. After that stuff I was broke, bought another car and sold that car too, sold guitars and all that stuff, so I moved back in with my mom in Florida this summer. So I went from being like, “I have to be in Nashville, I have to be involved in all this stuff,” to being in California without a phone away from everything, no close friends or family, then moving from there to a small town in Florida with literally 10,000 people and being like super far away from everything. That’s where I really had to evaluate what I was doing. I got sick of being in Florida, so I’d work all week at this pizza restaurant and then every weekend I would take my mom’s car and drive to Charleston or Atlanta and play a house show. I just started redoing it because it was just what I had to fucking do, there was nothing else I wanted to do. The label stuff was just a random chance thing, I met this guy Chris Klein at a show here in Nashville. We talked a little bit after the show and somebody came up and was like, “Dude, that guy is like, a record guy,” and I was like “Shit, I was so mean to that guy!” I was in a super bad mood that night, was just hating my life. But he actually ended up becoming one of my closest friends, he’s the sweetest guy I know.
There’s no question attached to this, but I just found out recently that you were on American Idol. I’m assuming lots has changed since then.
Briston: Thank God, it has. That was, like, sophomore year of high school in Knoxville, that was an insane experience. It all just happened really quickly. I got to travel a lot for that, I missed, like, half of my sophomore year. We had “school” out there, there was, like, a tutor, but it was just this dude who always talked about how he used to tutor Frankie Muniz. We never actually did anything. It was a strange thing, and I made some great friends, but more than anything I saw a lot of what I didn’t wanna do. I saw a lot of how fake those things were, and I’m really glad I got out when I did. I never really rode that wave.
So the album is very vulnerable, but it’s not vulnerable in the way that Big Shot was. Big Shot was very emotional, it sounded emotional, but Carnival feels more like a blunt statement of hard truth.
Briston: For sure. With Big Shot we didn’t know what we were doing, and it happened around the time things started getting shitty; my friend had some studio space and it was for his production class, so it happened very quickly and we did it on our own without any money or anything. It was very much us just playing the songs live, no overdubs, just happy to be playing, so it relied a lot on the actual songs and the emotions with them. With Carnival we worked with a real producer (not that the guy who did Big Shot wasn’t great, his name’s Zander, he’s awesome) and recorded in a nicer studio. We had more of a vision, I knew what I wanted it to sound like, we had more time. It happened a couple weeks before I ended up going to treatment, so it was a super vulnerable time, and I think we really just captured a moment. That’s all we ever really want to do with a record. I’m not great with, like… musically, I’m not the kind of person who wakes up at three in the morning with these crazy ideas in my head and writes sheet music. It was definitely like, we didn’t know what was happening in life, but we had these songs that sounded a certain way for whatever reason, and we captured that.
I’m so curious because I saw you back in January, and you played Freakin’ Out on the Interstate. So it was a long time coming, I’m guessing, because the record just came out in November.
Briston: We actually tracked that in January, so we tracked the record almost a year ago.
What took it so long?
Briston: We just, like, wanted to wait until the right time. We had the songs done and he finished them and mastered them in like two or three weeks, but we wanted to wait until the right time to start putting stuff out. Releasing [Freakin’ Out on the Interstate] was a kind of motivation for me to get back home, because I released it when I was out in California. It was really just me getting to a point when I was clear enough in my mind to know how we wanted the rest of the year to go.
Yeah that’s crazy, because before it came out I always wondered, like, what song is this, and then the single came out and I was like oh that’s the one! But I still have a video of it from that January show.
Briston: Yeah! That’s absolutely crazy to me. We’re actually going back into the studio in, like, six days, and we played all the songs we’re recording on the last tour. It’s cool when people send us videos and stuff, and seeing how it’s going to change, that’s my favorite part of it. Seeing us play these songs for the first time live, looking back on those videos from old shows, or rehearsal videos, it’s insane to see where they go.
What song from Carnival would you say you feel most connected to?
Briston: I mean, Freakin’ Out really sums up the moment in the studio when we realized how new and interesting of an experience this was for us. We felt like it happened and we didn’t really know how it happened. So that one really sums up that time, and I feel like people really connect to that one in that way. The most personal one is Rose, probably. That one’s about all the relationship stuff that was going really poorly at the time, and it definitely summed all that up really well. It’s hard for me to listen to. It was the last song that we did, and the vocal take on it we literally re-tracked, like, 40 times. I sang it start to finish 40 times, because I really wanted to do it all in one. It was the last day and the last thing we recorded, and Tone (the producer) was like, “We have enough that I can comp a good take, you don’t need to keep doing it.” But he let me do it one more time and said he was just going to press record and walk out. All the lights were off in the studio and everyone was closing down, and he pressed record and walked out, and I sang the last take. So the vocals you hear are the last thing we recorded.
A lot of people compare you to artists like Bob Dylan. Who do you think you take from stylistically, or who inspires you?
Briston: Wow, yeah, Dylan’s a great example. His music was some of the first stuff I was really listening to on my own. I’m super into the Laurel Canyon group, and Neil Young’s old stuff, Dylan’s stuff. Favorite songwriter of all time is John Prine, I was listening to him on the way here. A lot of old folk stuff.
You were in a folk band.
Briston: Oh yeah, big time folk band. Banjo and everything. We put out a five-song record, I think it’s gone now.
You’ve honestly done a lot, I just forget.
Briston: Same! It’s crazy, man, I was talking to my roommate last night about writing, and there’s this Avett Brothers interview where they said that they don’t believe in writer’s block and all that stuff, like you have to work at it. I keep all my songs in a notebook; we’re recording four songs next week, and I look back at the 50 songs in my notebook and out of that batch we’re recording one of those songs. It’s a crazy thing, it doesn’t stop.
So you’re recording four songs soon, that’s exciting!
Briston: Dude, I’m so excited! We’re going to Franklin, Kentucky, to this old farmhouse studio, and we’ll stay at the house out there and track. It’s all 70s gear, it’s really cool.
What is it? Are you doing another EP, or is it something bigger?
Briston: It’ll be another EP. We were gonna do a full length album, but we decided to push it back. We do have songs for a full length with the intention of it being a pretty heavy record, with a lot more rock stuff. These four songs are songs that kinda fit into that, but not all the way, so they work together as a different thing.
Do you have an ideal release time for that, or are you trying to space it out?
Briston: It’ll all be out by the summer, but we’re probably gonna do a single in February or March. We’re trying to do a lot of South by Southwest dates this year, so we’ll wanna get it out by then.
It’s very quick after Carnival.
Briston: Yeah, the label was big on that. They were really pushing to get more stuff recorded. I’m okay with doing these four songs kind of quickly, because it’s just how it all came together, but for the full length it’ll be a longer process. The full length album will be next year, before the end of next year, and it’s weird to think that far ahead. Right now I’m just trying to focus on this; when we wrote the songs for Carnival, those were the songs I had, there weren’t many others. But now waiting this long between the two is insane.
I wanna know if there’s anything you’ve learned, or any words of wisdom you may have, that you’d give to people pursuing music, or people with these kind of unconventional passions that they want to pursue.
Briston: I’m a big believer that you don’t have a choice; if you care about something, you don’t have a choice but to commit to it. That’s always been my thing, there’s nothing else that I could do. I’m not trying to be self deprecating, I just literally can’t do anything else. So once you have an idea or something you want to do, in my opinion, you have to fucking do it. It may fail and it may suck, and it comes at a cost, but you have to commit to what you want to do. I mean, this is the first time in my life where I’ve kind of had some backlash for that, with the label opinions and things like that. They’re amazing people, but it’s strange to have that critical view of something that’s always just been fun. So I think just doing it purely for yourself and for the people that support you, that’s the key. Just doing it for the right reason. You have to do it with no expectation; if you have an idea or a dream, only hold expectations for yourself. I don’t know if that was wise.
Listen to Carnival now on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you get your music.