Almost a month ago to the day, the acoustic folk duo Mapache released their best album so far. Swinging Stars is a spectacularly mesmerizing display of psychedelic folk lined with poetic songwriting and weeping acoustics. The duo of Clay Finch and Sam Blasucci have been creating otherworldly folk since they formed Mapache back in 2016, releasing albums at a prolific rate and tweaking their style to get better with every outing. They evoke the warmth of their California roots and have crafted a unique lane that allows their limitless creativity to flourish with Swinging Stars being their latest and greatest. Despite their frequent release rate, Finch and Blasucci work meticulously on their albums with every small detail being examined and fanned into an uncontrollable flame of folk tropes spun into space-aged balladry.
Pulling from their life experiences and varying musical tastes, Mapache was able to make one of the best albums of the year. Glide spoke with Clay Finch to discuss Swinging Stars, its recording process, and the term “Cosmic Folk”. Check out our full conversation below:
Swinging Stars has been out for a few weeks now, what sort of emotions does releasing a record stir up for you?
It’s super exciting and satisfying. In our world of music, it takes a long time to get records out. We recorded this album almost two years ago which is common unless you’re with a really big label, it takes a while to get everything coordinated on an indie level. There aren’t that many record plants either to press up the album, they’re all in Eastern Europe. All of a sudden they decided to repress 10 million copies of Sounds of Silence and then your album gets pushed back. When it finally comes out it’s really exciting, these songs are your babies and you’re stoked to get them out in the world. By the time it’s actually out you can go “Oh shit that song?” because you’ve been working on new stuff. It’s always a good feeling to have them out in the world.
You guys changed your typical studio environment for a more secluded one for this album, do you feel this affected the final product?
The environment was just a little more focused. We all slept at the studio together and it was in the Bay Area where none of us lived as opposed to a home studio where we could all come and go, it was a bit looser. It was cool to be in a more focused environment where for a couple hundred hours we all had one goal. It’s hard to say how that affects the sound of the record but the process was different.
Were you listening to/watching other art while recording or was it that focused?
It’s nothing that intense, that might be cool to do a full immersion like that but we’re always listening to a lot of music. Speaking for myself, we were in Stinson Beach and we’re huge deadheads and they recorded a ton of seminal records up there. Driving around in the morning, I would put on a lot of Grateful Dead because that music feels so attached to that environment. We all listen to a lot of different music though so yeah we were listening to stuff throughout the process.
The term “Cosmic Folk” gets attached to Mapache a lot, how do you feel about that label?
I try not to get too hung up on genre classification. It’s what people need to do to explain music to each other. It always makes artists/musicians uncomfortable when people ask “What is your band like?” and no one wants to say “Oh we sound like this band mixed with that band”. You have to use some tools to describe your music and I guess the “cosmic” part comes from Gram Parsons’s Cosmic American Music, that’s what he was calling his fusion of music. That sound has always had a big influence on us, it comes from the psychedelic, laid-back California sound that is a part of our lives. Folk music is just acoustic or electric music that relies on traditions. I don’t know if I would tell someone I play in a “Cosmic Folk” band but I suppose it’s a fitting description. No one likes to label their stuff too much but you have to.
What were those early Mapache recording sessions like that guided you to this sound? Have you worked with other artists along the way that helped influence it at all?
I guess that’s just the music we were into and writing and wanted to create together from the beginning. Stuff like The Birds, Gram Parsons, David Crosby, and the Grateful Dead, was music we really loved and that world of music was most similar to what we were writing. Beachwood Sparks took us under their wings and they’re a part of this Los Angeles music lineage that people describe as Cosmic American music, that kind of jangly, country rock sound. They introduced us to a lot of people and helped us make our first recordings. It’s hard to say really, we all listen to so different music outside of that cosmic Americana style. We like reggae and soul, Sam is a huge Prince fan, and classical music and jazz too. We just write what comes to us.
What was it like sequencing Swinging Stars? How important are tracklists and artwork to you and when do these conversations start to pick up in your recording process?
The sequencing and art came after, it’s sort of a different phase. When we’re in the studio the only goal is to record and we have a list of songs we want to do. We try to get everything sounding as good as possible then we go home, the next step is sequencing and art. It’s definitely important to us and we take a lot into sequencing and building a listening experience. We love albums where sequencing is an important part of it, it’s something we also try to create for the listener.
How often do you listen back to an album you made after you consider it finished?
We play on the road a lot so all of the songs, even before they’re recorded, we’re playing them on the road. So the songs are always with us although some of them do slip through the cracks. There’s the instrumental track, “Home Among the Swinging Stars”, that has a flute on it and, at the moment, doesn’t have a place in our live set. Hearing songs like that is almost like “Oh yeah I forgot about it”. Not that we actually forgot about it but it’s just not in the front of our view.
What has been your favorite track to perform from the album? What has gotten the biggest crowd reaction?
We’ve had sort of a unique experience being along this far in our career. We’ve been performing a couple of songs from Swinging Stars on the road for a while so people knew them and were singing along before the album was out which was pretty cool. Songs like “French Kiss” and “Encinal Canyon” are songs we’ve been playing for a couple of years now so eventually we started seeing people singing along at shows which was a huge trip. I don’t know if people were recording shows and putting them on YouTube or just going to a lot of shows, that seems a little crazy, but that was a really cool experience, so those two songs have been extra special.
How did you guys decide to call the album Swinging Stars and what sort of emotions does the title evoke for you?
“Home Among The Swinging Stars” is a collection of poems by Jaime de Angulo, that was the name of that instrumental track on the album since we wrote it. When we were trying to come up with a name for an album we thought about stuff like “What’s the story of the album” or “Is there a track that encompasses the whole thing”, we were going around and around. It felt right to not use the entire title of that song because they’re not our words. Shortening it to Swinging Stars made it a little different and opened it up more to interpretation. It was more fun that way, there is a bit more you can imagine I suppose.
When did you start playing guitar? Was there a certain song that sparked your interest in music as a whole?
I started playing around fourth or fifth grade. I couldn’t tell you one song or anything that I wanted to learn to play, it wasn’t anything super sophisticated. Something in the realm of Blink-182 or Sum41, something in the pop-punk realm that was popular amongst eleven-year-olds in Southern California. Writing came into the picture right away. It was something that was always fun to do and it seemed like if you had a guitar you write songs. They came along together.
What sort of music did you grow up listening to? Did your parents play music around the house at all?
The Grateful Dead and that kind of stuff, I had to find by myself. That stuff was a little weird for my folks, they love Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Joni Mitchell, and James Taylor, that real dead-on So-Cal mellow folk sound, and I think that comes through in Mapache. My dad loves Bob Marley, that was a big part of the music growing up. The biggest influence for me growing up was the Woodstock movie that I got for Christmas one year. That sent me on my own musical discovery journey, there was something about it that really sparked this sense of wonder. It was so romantic and that movie was so enchanting that I became obsessed with that whole world. I was lucky to have the internet to search away to my heart’s content about all the bands that played and find every record that all those bands made. That started me on my journey and that’s how I found the Dead and Jefferson Airplane and all that stuff.
Mapache has been pretty prolific throughout its career, what do you credit that work ethic to and what is your creative process like?
Personally, I’m not very disciplined with my writing or anything. We just love playing music together and writing songs is what we do. We’ve been lucky enough to link up with people who can record all of the stuff we write. There is sort of a sense of urgency that comes from feeling lucky like that, we have this opportunity to make records and we’ve gotten this far so it’s a “making hay while the sun shines” sort of thing. We’ve got these songs and people are enjoying them and we have resources to make records so we’re just trying to get after it while we can.
Was collaborating in a band like this always the vision or did you have to adjust your process?
Since I was a little kid, the idea of a band was always very cool to me. The group mentality and romance of a band, just a band of friends going out on the road as a unit, still resonates with me. I’d much rather see a band that has known each other for a long time as opposed to hired guns. I’m not throwing shade or anything but I just love seeing bands that you know are a unit, they have the same goal and have been dreaming together since they were young. There is something about that band concept that’s really cool to me.
Speaking of that band mentality, does Mapache have any rituals or habits you guys indulge in before recording?
Nothing super ritualistic. Recording up in that house together was cool because we got to eat together and cook together which I think is a really great way to get everyone connected. After we would record we would still play cards and have some beers or go on a hike together, that kind of stuff.
Is there anything you hope people take away from Swinging Stars?
There isn’t anything I have that would be the one message or takeaway from the album. I would just say, like any record that I love, I hope it can be a world for people to go to. If you put on the record, it’s because you want to go to this place and I hope they like that place and it brings them joy.
