Everything With You

You either love indie pop—that C86-enshrined sound
typified by brightly fuzzed-out guitar jangle, bashfully hopping
backbeats, and fey boy/girl vocals—or you’re just flat out wrong.
(You jerk.) For fans of the genre, though, the past year has been a
veritable dirty dream of twee, spearheaded stateside by the venerable
and beloved Slumberland Records, and with no more perfect poster boys
and girls than Brooklyn foursome the Pains of Being Pure at Heart (twee
as fuck, they took their name from a friend’s children’s story). The
band’s self-titled debut full-length for Slumberland is one of the
year’s best records, indie pop or otherwise. Its melodies are familiar
and effortlessly catchy, its sound is dreamy and sweet, its songs
concise and clean pillars of pop songcraft, its lyrics clever and coy
and sometimes just a tiny bit crass. Heaven(ly) help you if you haven’t
totally fallen for this band. Singer/guitarist Kip Berman spoke to
The Stranger by phone from his apartment in Brooklyn.

I notice you have a Portland area code, were you living out here
before New York?

Oh yeah, 503. I lived in Portland for seven years, from 1998 to
2005. I went to school in Portland at Reed College, and I stuck around,
probably too long, after I graduated. But It was great. I actually
interned at [Stranger sister publication] The Mercury. I love the
Northwest a lot, and I’m really excited because I haven’t gotten a
chance to go back since I moved. It’ll be fun for me to see some old
friends, see how it’s changed how it’s stayed the same and all
that.

Based on a couple of songs on the album, “Young Adult Friction” and
“The Tenure Itch,” I was going to ask where it was you went to school
that everybody was fucking their professors in the libraries, but maybe
Reed makes some sense.

For better or for worse, that’s where I went to school. I grew up on
the East Coast, but getting to go out to Portland was really
eye-opening. There was a strong indie-pop community out there and great
bands, and I got exposed to a lot of stuff I don’t think I would have
at that age had I not been in that part of the country. It’s musically
or at least geographically isolated, and it’s hard for bands to tour
out of that area. But bands from Seattle or Olympia or Portland or
Vancouver tour pretty extensively up the coast right there. I got to
see so many cool shows, and especially, because I wasn’t 21 yet, I’d go
to a lot of house shows and parties and stuff like that. It kind of
opened my eyes, so much music I’d never seen and getting to experience
it firsthand—the Aisler’s Set down in San Francisco, the Gossip
and the Need would play in Portland all the time, Dear Nora was one of
my favorite bands there, the Exploding Hearts were a big band in
Portland at the time, the Hunches and the Thermals emerged sort of
right before I left. It seems like a lot was going on at the time. I
mean, there always is, it’s not like anything changed.

I think we’re playing with the Thermals at the Capitol Hill Block
Party, so that’s going to be cool. The Gossip would play in Portland
every other week, and they were really a fun band to see. It’s a cool
part of the country with a distinct music community, and almost more
bands in Portland than people who lived there. And Seattle was probably
the same way, like a really fruitful, culturally rich part of the
country.

Portland seems like kind of a sister city to Glasgow in terms of
indie pop. Like, Belle & Sebastian had a song named after the
city.

Oh, Hefner actually had one, too. I saw Belle & Sebastian on
9/11 in Portland. That’s my Belle & Sebastian story. But yeah,
Hefner, the British indie-pop band, had a song called “The Heart of
Portland, Oregon.” I think Magic Marker Records was based in Portland,
and that was a pretty good indie-pop label. There were definitely a lot
of cool house shows—bands like the Lucksmiths from Australia,
everything from Mates of State to the Aisler’s Set and early Thermals
shows.

Speaking of the Aisler’s Set, how did you guys wind up on
Slumberland?

Oh, geez. I don’t know—very good luck? I was ordering records
from Slumberland mail order at the time, and I must have mentioned, not
in a “check out my band” kind of way, that I had some demos. And I
guess I passed them along to Mike [Schulman, Slumberland owner] when I
was placing an order at one point. It wasn’t like cold-calling. We were
writing back and forth about this Black Tambourine reissue 10-inch that
I was ordering, because my bandmate Peggy [Wang, keyboardist] was a big
Black Tambourine fan, and I got into them through her. So, Mike found
out we had a band, and he wanted us to open for a Slumberland band
called the Lodger when they were coming over to New York, and he was
going to be at the show. I don’t know if he was just intoxicated at the
show or what, but he was really psyched on our performance.

This was a really big deal to us, because we grew up admiring
Slumberland, which is just one of the great American indie labels. It’s
remained consistent and in business for a long time.

Obviously, a lot of the bands on the label are influential to our
music: Rocketship, the Aisler’s Set, Black Tambourine, Velocity Girl.
We thought if we could put out a 7-inch someday on Slumberland, that
would be pretty much a dream come true. I don’t want to say we’re not
ambitious, ’cause sometimes that’s overly self-effacing, but to us the
idea of just putting out a single on Slumberland would have been like
we’d done something important with our lives. So the fact that he
really wanted to do an album was great. He wasn’t overly pushy;
whenever we were ready, he was down. It took us a while to get to a
point where we could record and make it the way we wanted to, and we
didn’t try to rush it too much. We wanted to make something we were
proud of. It was fun knowing that when the time came, we would have the
outlet we were excited about.

And not just historically like, “Oh, this reminds me of when I was
young and the records I bought”—more like he was putting out
other contemporary stuff that we were psyched on. He put out the
Crystal Stilts’ album, which is a Brooklyn band that we really
love—in fact, we shared practice space with them for a while. He
had a singles series that released a record by a band called A Sunny
Day in Glasgow that I really like a lot. He was revving up to put out a
lot of contemporary bands that we were psyched on. So it wasn’t just a
nostalgia trip for us, it was like being part of the history of this
label was really cool, but also being part of something contemporary
felt really… it still felt like a meaningful vibe that a label was
putting out a definite aesthetic and sound. It was a really perfect
fit.

And beyond the back catalog or whatever, Mike is just one of the
tremendously good guys in independent music. He’s been in the business
for as long as there’s been a business, since the late ’80s. He’s a
wonderful, hard-working, good person, and he’s always so supportive of
us when we want to do things. He loves putting out vinyl and loves
putting out 7-inches—obviously he doesn’t make any money off of
putting out elaborate, colored 7-inch singles, he’s just one of the
genuine music lovers and record appreciators. I feel like we just
lucked out to find such a wonderful person to work with on all that
stuff.

The label went on sort of a hiatus for a minute, didn’t it?

It didn’t stop, but I think around the late 1990s it really slowed
down, or it wasn’t putting out as much stuff. In fact, the Lodger
release was the first release in a couple of years. I think he put out
something by the Saturday People, which was Archie Moore from Velocity
Girl and someone from Black Tambourine. The label had a peak of
releases in the early and mid ’90s period. [Mike] does work a full-time
job, and he just had a baby. Other things get in the way of putting out
records. As people get older, their priorities change. But it was
really wonderful to see him come back so strong, with not just our
release but the Crystal Stilts release. And that Cause Co-Motion!
release he did was great because they have a ton of 7-inches on labels
that just didn’t really exist or were really hard to find. They were
always like, not the elder statesmen of the DIY Brooklyn bands that are
gaining attention right now, but they were always a big deal—but
their records never were released in a way that anyone could actually
hear them that wasn’t living within a 12-block radius of them. He’s
also putting out a Dum Dum Girls single soon.

It seems like the label has come back coinciding with a surge of
appreciation for the style of music it’s always championed.

Yeah, everything’s kind of lined up in a really good way. I don’t
think it was calculating or cashing in or anything like that. Just by
accident it seemed like people started to appreciate the kind of thing
he’d been into for a really long time at the time he started reissuing
records and putting out new bands again. It was kind of cool from a
vindication standpoint for him, like people cared about what he’d been
working so hard on for so long.

I think technology has changed how people can appreciate it as well.
If people had the internet around in the mid 1990s, I think a lot of
those releases would have had a more classic status. At that time it
was all mail order, and the distribution was really limited to certain
record stores, and not all that stuff was really accessible. But I
think that the first Rocketship LP is just so good and it blends the
gauzy, dreamy, loopy qualities of a band like Stereolab with a very
concise pop sound—it’s hard for me to think that album isn’t a
classic album that’s held up in that pantheon when magazines put out
“20 Great Albums of 1990s” or whatever. That Rocketship album fits in,
or that Aisler’s Set album, The Last Match, is also just a really
classic album that is every bit as good as some of the Glasgow things
like Camera Obscura or the Belle & Sebastian of that same period or
slightly later.

It’s hard for me to think those records went unnoticed—I mean,
there’s people who really value that stuff, and it’s not like they’re
totally unknown or rare. Even now, with stuff like Black Tambourine,
everyone is discovering Black Tambourine in 2009, but I’m sure
[Slumberland] only sold about 50 Black Tambourine records in 1989. You
know, it’s like everything is taken for granted. People take for
granted that “Oh my god, this band is a total Black Tambourine
rip-off,” but the fact that anyone, even in 2009, calls something a
total Black Tambourine rip-off is amazing, being that probably only 57
people were hardcore Black Tambourine fans between 1989 and 2004. So
it’s cool that this music has gotten to the point where people think
it’s ubiquitous, because I don’t think it ever really was, and now that
people maybe overappreciate it, it’s cool that it’s gained a permanent
status as something that people can look back on as classic.

When did you get the band together?

I guess it was February of 2007, two and a half years ago. Peggy’s
birthday party was coming up, and we wanted to throw her a party. We
wanted to get bands that we really liked to play at the party, and two
of those bands were Titus Andronicus and the Manhattan Love Suicide.
And it was just like, if we learned some songs we could play at the
party, too, and we could open for bands we really like. It was kind of
sneaky, I guess. So we had like five songs at that time, and we only
had a drum machine, but we played at the party. It was actually really
fun, and all our friends were there, and it felt really life-affirming
and positive. It was a really fun first musical experience to have.
Eventually we added a live drummer, about six months in.

Is there anything specific that you do gear-wise to get that sort of
classic indie-pop sound that you do, any pedals or what have you that
are absolutely essential?

My gut reaction is always to think that good equipment doesn’t make
good sound or good songs, and the focus should always be on whether the
songs are good or not, and not on whether you have really cool guitars
or cool gear. But the one thing I could say is that my friends did make
me a special pedal. It’s called “the painbow,” it’s rainbow-colored and
see-through, and it’s pretty cool. It’s basically just a Big Muff pedal
that he modified a little bit to sound more like the Smashing
Pumpkins.

I don’t know if someone else played with this pedal, if they would
discover the secret to life and the universe. But it makes my guitar
sound really fuzzy. I would say focusing on gear misses the point of
what we’re really interested in. We’re just trying to write really good
pop songs, that’s kind of what we’re into. There are some bands that
utilize equipment in really cool ways, like A Place to Bury Strangers,
they build all their own pedals and they push the boundaries of sound.
But for us, we’re more focused on songs.

Yeah, the flip side of that is that I don’t think I’ve ever had a A
Place to Bury Strangers song stuck in my head. They might get a great
sound, but I don’t know… I couldn’t hum you one of their melodies if
you paid me.

I’m not wealthy enough to pay you to hum melodies, but there are
different kinds of music, and there’s different stuff. I like a lot of
different stuff, and I don’t feel that what we do is the most important
thing ever. I really love other bands that sound different than us or
do different things. I’m psyched to play at the Capitol Hill Block
Party, on the same stage as Sonic Youth, who are basically gods, and
Gossip and the Thermals, who are both bands I’m really psyched on. It’s
really fun to be part of it.

It’s kind of a ridiculously good lineup this year.

Yeah. The fact that two and a half years ago we were playing at a
warehouse for a friend’s birthday party with a drum machine, and now
we’re sharing the stage with some of the most legendary bands of our
and previous generations—it’s pretty mind-blowing. I don’t want
to have that stoner moment where it’s like you stop and think about it,
maaan, but it is kind of unbelievable to me that this has happened to
us. We’re really psyched on it. It’s sort of that feeling like I can’t
believe this is our lives.

At this point, are you all doing the band full time?

Peggy and Alex [Naidus] still work. Their bosses are pretty cool
about giving them time off to tour. I lost my job in November, so I’m
focusing on the band full-time. We’re just trying to find a balance
where we can play as much music as we can without being homeless.
They’re still working as much as possible, and we’re just pretty
grateful that their situation allows them to take time off to travel.
It’s pretty rare. My old job was not so psyched when I would be like,
“Can I take the next three weeks off, and then can I take the next
month off, and can I take the two weeks after that?” And in a tough
economy, it’s not the best time to ask. They gave me infinite time off
as it turns out. They were like, “Why don’t you just take all the time
off you want and not come back to work?”

A couple of your songs have lyrics about being a teenager, teenage
years, what have you. Were these songs that you wrote a long time ago,
or is it just good songwriting sense to appeal to the youth?

I don’t know, I’m pretty immature. I have a messy room. I feel like
the songs from the album are kind of about growing up and the stuff
that happens to you when you’re growing up, but I also feel like that
process doesn’t really stop at 18 or something like that. The
experiences that shape you aren’t limited to a specific adolescent age
range, it’s a constant process of becoming the person that you are.
Sure, a lot of the experiences you have when you’re young are pretty
formative, whether it’s traumatizing or it just colors how you perceive
the world, those experiences are really vivid in your mind for most of
your life regardless of if you’re no longer the age that you were when
they happened to you.

With “Everything with You,” the lyrics are “strange teenager/waiting
for death at 19,” and the next verse it’s “strange teenager/you’ll
never know death at 19.” It’s not written from the perspective of being
19, it’s written from the perspective of being older and giving some
kind of insight or advice to someone younger. You think the world’s
going to end, and you think you’re going to die immediately, but life
goes on, there’s hope, there’s some reason to keep on going. A lot of
the songs that deal with teenage experiences are not always written
from a first person, in the present, “I’m a teenager.” It’s kind of
written from an older point of view, reflecting on it, or singing to a
younger self. They’re not intentionally adolescent or forced, they’re
kind of about experiences that go beyond the ages of 13 to 17.

There was this Deerhunter interview where he said he writes songs
for his 17-year-old self. Which I thought was interesting, because we
always think about it in terms of we wanted to be the band that we
would have loved when we were 17, when music does mean everything to
you, and it’s a really idealistic time in your life. You discover who
you are by the music you listen to. We were all kind of nerdy kids who
hung out at diners and talked about bands that we like all night. The
bands we liked would really shape how we thought of ourselves as
people; the music and who you were were almost one and the same thing.
I think it’s important to hold on to the reason you loved the music so
much that it meant everything to you and to not ever lose sight of the
experiences. When you drive around with your friends listening to a
Sonic Youth tape all night, and that was what you did with your time,
and that was a perfectly fine thing to do.

Besides Sonic Youth, what were you listening to when you were a
teenager?

I listened to a lot of stuff that sounds weird and inconsistent now.
Me and my friends were really into local pop-punk bands. We’d go to a
lot of pop-punk shows. Some of my friends were more into hardcore, I
was never that into it. Also, there’d be like, obviously, Nirvana and
Sonic Youth, because Sonic Youth were punk, too, but in a different
way. I sort of started off with pop-punk bands, then moved to Sonic
Youth and through them discovered more of that classic period of
American indie rock, like Yo La Tengo and Pavement and Helium and bands
like that. Now they seem like classic American indie rock, like,
“That’s when indie rock was indie rock, man,” but those were just cool
bands, and I still love those bands. But there were also ’90s emo bands
that we’d be into, like Promise Ring, Braid, Mineral, my friends were
more into Sunny Day Real Estate. But it wasn’t like you could only like
one thing. It wasn’t like, “Oh, now I’m into indie rock, so I can’t
like emo.” And emo meant something different back then—but like
early Get Up Kids and all those Jade Tree bands, pop-punk bands like
Weston or whatever. I think it was a pretty healthy mix of stuff that
sounds cool now, like, “Yeah, we just listened to Sonic Youth all the
time,” but we also listened to pop punk and Promise Ring and other
stuff. It wasn’t like any of that stuff was more important to us than
any other. It’d be weird and revisionist of us to say we only liked
Sonic Youth. We were teenagers, we listened to normal suburban teenager
music.

You have a couple lyrics that seem like intentional nods to other
indie-pop bands. There’s a line about “crashing through,” which was the
title of a Beat Happening song, and one about “another sunny day,”
which was the name of a British band.

I feel bad about the “another sunny day” one, because I realized
after the fact that Belle & Sebastian did that, too. And not
everyone has to name-drop Another Sunny Day to get anorak cred. “Stay
Alive” originally was going to have a Velocity Girl reference in it,
but I couldn’t say “crazy town” in a song without cracking up, so that
one didn’t actually make it. “This Love Is Fucking Right” is kind of a
reference to a Field Mice song, “This Love Is Not Wrong”; it’s kind of
the flip side of the coin. The B-side to the 7-inch for “Young Adult
Friction” is called “Ramona,” and the first lyrics are like, “Nothing
to do, nothing to be done,” and that’s kind of a reference to that
Pastels song that’s like, [singing] “Simply nothing to be done.”

To me it’s fond and loving. Everyone tries to act like they’ve made
the most original music ever created, and I’m like, I love other bands,
and I’m not afraid to say it. I’ve always loved other bands, and I’d
like to be in a band like the kind of bands that I love. Sometimes it’s
fun to leave little love notes to the bands that have allowed you to
make the music that you do. It’s just fun to reference the music that
you love, when you’re making music—just a little bit, not to the
point of plagiarism, but leaving little clues for people.

Half the time it happens accidentally. It’s not like, “Oh I’m going
to be clever and make a reference to some obscure indie-pop 7-inch
B-side.” Half the time it’s a reference that I’ve heard a lot or some
lyric that I’ve heard a lot, and it’s the first words that come to my
mind when I describe something. We have a song, it’s not on the album,
called “The Pains of Being Pure at Heart,” and “we are too pure” is in
the lyrics, and people ask if that’s a reference to Too Pure records.
And I’m like, no, it wasn’t, but I like Too Pure records. So maybe
somehow that got stuck in my head, and it just came out in the song,
and I wasn’t super aware that it was happening. It becomes part of your
vocabulary, the language that you learn to speak, and when you express
yourself it’s sometimes what you use. I don’t think it’s a bad
thing.

On a similar note, the keyboard part on “Teenager in Love” I swear
is from some other old song, and I’ve been trying to place where I
think I recognize it from, but I’ve been unable to do so.

I have a lot of different theories on that song. People say it kind
of sounds like David Bowie’s “Modern Love,” and other people say it
sounds like the Strokes’ “Someday,” which sounds like “Modern Love.” It
kind of has that same beat. Peggy would always say it reminds her of
“Dancing Queen” by Abba. I wish it sounded as good as “Dancing Queen”;
they’re more talented. But now that I think about it, it sounds like,
[singing] “Cherish the love we have”—that song, I don’t know who
it’s by. Luther Vandross? Some smooth jam. That might not even be the
keyboard part of the song. It definitely sounds kind of like a smooth
jam. If you do figure out what song I hideously ripped off, you can
tell me, and I won’t be bummed out. I’m curious. It sounds like
something. But the record went to press, no one sued us in the first
six months it’s been out, so I guess it’s like that Texas Is the Reason
song, “If it’s there when we get back, it’s ours.” So I guess it’s ours
now. That’s right, I did quote Texas Is the Reason while talking about
wussy indie pop—that’s kind of my life.

The cover of the record reminds me of the old Cometbus zines crossed
with the Smiths. What’s the album artwork?

Originally we were going to call the album “Romantic Friendship,”
but everyone we told that to rolled their eyes. When we say our band
name, a lot of people roll their eyes, but if we called our album
“Romantic Friendship,” peoples’ eyes would roll right out of their
head, there would probably be a medical danger. I feel the album is
kind of about when you have a really intense, romantic best friend, and
you have a sense of isolation together against the world. I feel like
the themes of the album—it can’t all be reduced to that—are
about this feeling of intense friendship. I think the song “Everything
with You” really embodies that. There are so many songs about true
love, but I feel like that song is about “true like.” I think that’s
really cool that you can have an intense, pure relationship that’s not
even, but might be, about sex, or it might not be—like, the lines
between really intense friendship and love are blurred. I just felt
like that image on the cover evoked those feelings to me, it felt so
much like these are two best friends hanging out with nothing to do,
and it just captured the moment and looked really cool. I’m a big Belle
& Sebastian fan, and it kind of reminded me of that, too. In fact,
when I was putting the font on the album, you know how every band has,
like, some small font in the upper-right-hand corner and maybe in all
lowercase letters? I was kind of looking at that for a while, and then
I went and looked at my Belle & Sebastian records, and they just
put their band name in huge font across the top, like, fuck it, that’s
the band name. And then I took the drag-and-drop tool and dragged it
across the cover, like, yeah, it shouldn’t be fuckin’ emo font in the
upper-right-hand corner, it should be big and proud.

And you know the band Comet Gain? Not to bring up Comet Gain when
you were asking about Cometbus, but on the Comet Gain album
Réalistes, that’s sort of how it was, just black and white and
really direct and really simple. And also I thought it might save
printing costs if we didn’t use too many colors. I’m really happy with
how it looks. I don’t feel regrets that we didn’t put, like, a blurry
picture of a squirrel on the cover or something, something more
alternative.

So, we’ve covered “alternative” and “emo” now. What are your
feelings about the term “twee”?

I think people get bummed out by this term way more in England than
they do in America. All the original indie-pop bands would literally
crap their pants if anyone called them twee, and I’m just not really
that afraid of it. I think I would describe our music as gay, but
sometimes people take that word the wrong way. As far as twee, it
doesn’t really bum me out, because when I listen to the record, there’s
a lot of noisy parts and songs about sex and fucked-up stuff, and I
don’t think people are going to hear a lot of songs about picnics and
bicycle rides on it. So you can call it twee, but I think it’s wussy,
but wussy in a different way. It’s hard to explain. I love that trick,
like with Nirvana, where you can sing about really fucked-up stuff if
it’s a catchy melody. It’s good to have a good balance between darkness
and poppiness.

Well, like the Vaselines were really great at balancing out the
cutesy with the rauncy.

I love the Vaselines! I was so sad that I haven’t gotten to see them
on any of these tours. Every time they come to New York, I’m not here.
This is my theory: Every band from Glasgow is pretty much awesome, but
I think the Vaselines have that perfect combination of not giving a
fuck but being awesome at the same time. I know it’s easy to
mythologize them, because Kurt Cobain was like, “This band rules.” And
I did a lot of stuff because Kurt Cobain told me to, so don’t get me
wrong—I wrote a song called “Kurt Cobain’s Cardigan” for Christ’s
sake, it’s okay—but they wrote these awesome songs where they
didn’t care but they still cared enough to make them good and catchy.
They’re kind of dirty and raunchy but also sweet and endearing, not
like they’re trying to shock you. They’re just a really great band. I
guess their stage banter now, they just tell gross jokes and talk about
perverted stuff between their songs. A friend told me that’s what Peggy
and I would be like in 20 years if we’re still playing music—that
wouldn’t be the worst way to go.