This Love Is Fucking Right

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?

Yeah, I lived in Portland from 1998 to 2005. I went to school at
Reed College. I actually interned at [Stranger sister
publication] The Mercury.

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 being seduced by their professors and
fucking 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 just
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—the
Aislers 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, the Thermals emerged sort of right before I left.

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 Aislers Set and
early Thermals shows.

Speaking of the Aislers 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, but 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. And this
was a really big deal to us, because we grew up admiring Slumberland,
which is just one of the great American indie labels.

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

My friend 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 Smashing Pumpkins. I don’t know, like, if someone else played
with this pedal 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.

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 feel like the songs from the
album are kind of about 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.

With “Everything with You,” 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.

There was this Deerhunter interview where he said you write songs
for your 17-year-old self, which I thought was interesting. 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. We were all kind of nerdy kids who hung out at diners and talked
about bands that we liked all night; 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.

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 to 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.