Enter the mind of Mild High Club’s Alex Brettin and you find it overflowing with a deeply philosophical connection to creating music in its rawest form. Their latest release Skiptracing is a dreamy and richly introspective album that explores matters of both the heart and mind and draws from jazz, blues, and funk influences with nods to french cafe music that are bound together with swirling and drawn out moody guitar lines. Maybe it is this unique combination of genres that makes Mild High Club feel like you’re putting on a perfume that makes you nostalgic for a past lover or for a season that’s gone by.
With a soundscape akin to that of Mac DeMarco and Ariel Pink, Brettin’s candy sweet yet complex writing style are distinct and memorable; with a psychedelic varnish that gently trickles through the new album, there is a realization of self and growth through experience that draws you in both musically and lyrically, as velvety melodic lines from the guitar emerge as twinkles of light on a hazy audio landscape in songs like “Tesselation.” Other notable numbers like “Homage” and the heart wrenchingly, taffeta adorned 80’s esq track “Cary Me Back,” shower the listener in a multi-color flurry of sound snowflakes that create a frosty paradise with cascading rhythms catapulting you into Brettin’s darkly enchanting and contemplative world.
It’s been quite a year for you guys with this latest tour being the most expansive.
Yeah this is one of the longest stretches we’ve done so far. So yeah we will see how we’ll hold up.
How has your life changed in the last year, with this latest album and in general? Sounds like things have really taken off.
I think it’s changed in the sense that I don’t really feel like I’ve spent too much time in LA this year. I’ve spent more time on the road and I’m sort of adopting this transient kind of thing where I’m waking up somewhere different every night which has been the biggest change. It’s been really exciting.
Has the traveling been good? Have you missed home here and there?
Yeah I mean right now we’re sort of like floating around. We have our Chinatown main base but I think that yeah it’s been pretty eye opening to be in a different place so frequently.
Where are some of your favorite places you have traveled to so far?
I really liked Vienna, Prague, Copenhagen, London, and Tijuana. Stateside I really liked the Bay and Asheville, NC was really awesome. There are so many cool places to visit.
So you’re originally from the Midwest- how has living in LA shaped and changed your life and influenced your songwriting process?
I came here a few years back not really knowing what I was doing. I kind of had an idea but I didn’t really know. The time that I’ve been here I’ve been dealing with that “what am I doing with my life” sort of thing. I can, like most people hold a minimum wage job but something I feel like I can really do is make music. Living in LA I was really curious about the people who came before me, not only in music, but in books, films and paintings- sort of just trying to understand this new landscape. Especially coming from somewhere else I think a lot of people and a lot of artists end up here that aren’t from here.
I think my songwriting went towards more of a meta sort of commentary on songs about songs or something like that. The depth of the landscape is something I grew up without and being able to see a vast array of the city working in itself puts into perspective how small of a contribution I’m making, and I don’t know, it humbles me and it kind of forces me to really push myself. I think it’s harder to maintain an affordable lifestyle in LA then maybe Chicago.
It’s been a pretty busy and exciting year for you with the release of Skiptracing- how was the writing process similar or different from the last album?
The writing process changed and I had a little bit more of an idea of what it meant to make a record. Eleven is the number I’ve been choosing for how many songs- the first time around I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was pretty naive and pretty stubborn. I had some moments of clarity, and moments of understanding but I think I kind of burnt myself out. The latest record had a longer writing process. Instead of going song by song I made a long form piece that was divided up into song sections.Both records had conceptual elements. With the first one I was a little angsty about the internet and that whole thing and being like the last generation to know the world without ever living without a cell phone in your face. And then this new one is more of some sort of weird acceptance for me. Accepting a post modern, pop and rock or how many ever decades it’s been since recording history started. I think it’s easy to make parallels to rock and stuff like that, but if you look deeper into it, there’s music from a lot of eras, not just the 1970’s or the 60’s. I think it’s more compositional in a sense.
Listening to Skiptracing you can hear a variety of influences that go through jazz and funk and even some nods to bossa nova amongst other things.
Yeah, well if you look at pop music today and the lack of complexity in it, you can tell we have leaned harder and harder on technology to create something that is more wow-ing versus unlocking a poetic, mathematically and geometrically inclined composition and sound. When it comes to mainstream music there are some pop artists holding the torch that are starting to bring jazz harmonies to the forefront. That’s why I think people are listening to us, because they are starting to hear these harmonies more- sounds that are romantic, not necessarily nostalgic but emotive. They make us feel more than just a very one-chord, two-chord kind of banger. I think there is a new level of music appreciation that is hopefully on the rise here. Not just people listening to it, but people picking it apart and trying to understand what the hell it means and why it is making them feel so much. Rather than “I need something to do my hair to” or like “I need a soundtrack to my life.”
Musicians that are listening to your music are probably hearing it differently than the general audience but it sounds like your vision for the music you create is trying in some way to bridge that gap.
Yeah there is a level of education that it takes- when it comes to rock n’ roll music it seems like there is a lot of over saturation that is occurring. It is time for that shit to like stop being a trend. I hope it stops being a trend soon because it’s taking over the radio airwaves and it’s turning rock n’ roll into a hallmark commercial.
Mild High Club has a unique sound that runs at a different speed than what’s coming out of Los Angeles. It seems like this trend of calling everything “good” is taking on toll on what people should actually be listening to.
I can’t make music that people just “consume”. I think that’s why there’s polar responses to our music- there’s been different responses to the first record and the second record. The first one is pretty simplistic and there’s a few moments of “weird” and I think it reached more people initially. The second one is not really easy listening. It’s a challenge to listen to, but once you unlock a lot of the hyperbole and the musical text painting and the analytical shit, and are able to connect the color of the chord to the word that you’re saying, than that would be more rewarding than the first one in terms of getting people to really connect to it and giving it a real listen for like 30 minutes.
Do you feel like you’re energized by what your audience is feeding back to you? Is there a certain way you’d like people to feel after hearing this album?
There’s not one specific way, nothing really like that. If anything I would wish that they would not just throw it on like some background sound or whatever, but actually take the time to listen to it. Music is just the same as any other activity- it’s like football or fucking riding a bike. We can only do one thing at a time- there’s just so much you miss if you don’t really give yourself the time. Some people are not really into music in that sense, and maybe I’m the only one that will like it in five years. The point is that I couldn’t really avoid making it the way I did. I didn’t really try to do anything other than imitate the music that has been playing in my life and playing in my head.
I think when you dumb music down, and you make it in a way that people can connect to it and feel it, more people can wrap their head around it rather than really thinking critically about it. Some people just aren’t into that way of analyzing it- everybody has a different way of taking music in.
With this latest album it seems to be rebellious against this concept of simplicity-it extends its boundaries to encompass so many different kinds of sounds that you wouldn’t think went together.
I was a little nervous about this album to be honest- I kind of knew that when I dove into this album. We will see what happens in the coming months and see how people respond to it. I’m curious. Most if not all of the songs on this record are all pretty personal, but very cryptic in a way. It does help me sort of exercise some of my demons. It’s kind of like a diary I guess.
Photos by Sam Shea & Emily Quirk
