Paul Chastain Talks Synthesizers, Songwriting, and The Small Square’s ‘Ours & Others’ (INTERVIEW)

The Small Square, a duo made up of Paul Chastain (Velvet Crush, Matthew Sweet) and John Richardson (Tommy Keene, Gin Blossoms, Badfinger) remastered and rereleased their first self-titled album with expanded tracks over the summer and on Halloween, launched their second full album, Ours & Others. Both were recorded in large part at John Richardson’s Drum Farm Studio in Wisconsin and have arrived via Richardson’s Farm to Label Records. While Chastain now lives in Japan, he and Richardson work together and remotely on tracks and with this second collection, have really cemented a sense of identity for the project. Their work is bound to be appealing to lovers of Power Pop, but there’s also a sense of texture in haunting layers that combine with powerful Rock underpinnings that make for a unique listening experience.

You can catch a glimpse of Drum Far Studio in The Small Square’s video for the track “Twenty-Third” and that video also captures the groundedness of the collaboration between Chastain and Richardson. Both are bringing decades of experience in writing, recording, and performing music to the table, but they are also pursuing entirely their own creative instincts for this very personal project that often draws in friends and colleagues such as R. Walt Vincent, Adam Ollendorff, Cory Wong, and many more. I spoke with Paul Chastain shortly after he arrived back in the USA from a Velvet Crush tour of Spain but before he made the longer journey home to Japan to hear from him about recording at Drum Farm, his take on synthesizers, and how as a songwriter, he decides whether a song idea should be pursued or discarded. 

Hannah Means-Shannon: I saw that in your video for “Twenty-Third” there is footage of Drum Farm Studios, home to Farm To Label Records and where you recorded your Small Square albums. 

Paul Chastain: I cobbled that video together myself. There is a photographer from Eau Claire, Chet Snyder, and we asked him to come out and shoot some stills. While he was there, we asked if he could shoot some video on his camera. We set up and ran through the song a few times in various formats. It was always my intention to try to make something out of it, and last summer I did that. I sort of like how it turned out. It has a good vibe to it. I’m a DIY-that’s for sure. But yes, that is the inside and outside of the studio, and some footage of the grounds there. We did a couple takes with the drums there, with Jon playing drums, and the piano. I hadn’t thought that far in advance about whether that song would be a single. 

I think it’s a really sweet video and I’m glad that you captured that. You’ve definitely been building up your video editing! 

The guinea pig was the video for “Tilt” from the first record, and that was the first one that I had done. My obsessions with overlays and green screen come out. We have the obsessions, and then we work through them. Someone recently asked me about the use of synthesizers on the record and I said, “Well, I got these synthesizer plug-ins and analog simulators, and I just sat there with headphones on.” This was new to me, not anything like I had back in the day. I became obsessed with trying to make something happen with that, and that’s what went on “N. Main Blues” song. 

Oh, yes, that song has a very dream-like atmosphere and a lot of that is the synthesizer effects. You really changed the tone with that.

I also like to use keyboards, not as my main instrument, but once we get a song going and it just needs something. Sometimes a piano or Wurlitzer, or a Rhodes is what it needs. I love those instruments. Those keyboard sounds bring color or change one part. I look to keyboards to help the recording in that way. I like to keep things guitar-based, but add those elements in later. They aren’t necessarily integral, but the fact that they are there on the recording helps it get to the emotional place that you want it to be.

Absolutely. The atmosphere is changed by it. I feel like it almost thickens the atmosphere and lifts it at the same time.

Definitely, particularly when you have an organic-sounding track and then you put an electronic instrument in there. It can do really good things or really bad things, but I think it’s really cool to add that in. I think a lot of modern bands seem to use ’80s and 90s synthesizers these days.

There’s a rediscovery going on, I think, as people are building up what they can have and create in their home studios.

I remember when you couldn’t do this, so to me it’s pretty amazing, but now you can have any of the instruments that existed already, or you can have these new ones that are hybrid. A lot of times on records now I hear 80s synthesizers and I’m not so nostalgic about them that I love them. I remember at the time, I didn’t love those sounds so much. I thought they overtook the whole industry at one point. They were on so many recordings. I think people who are younger than me feel more nostalgic about it.

That’s interesting to me. I’ve always wondered how musicians feel about nostalgia that’s embraced by younger generations. Some of the songs that used those elements must have been fairly light-weight and just partaking of the synthesizer trend to be marketable.

That happened then, and also still happens. People think, “Now, we’ve got to use a drum machine because that’s what people want.” Some of the stuff wasn’t necessarily bad, but that stuff doesn’t really date well to me. Those sounds were ubiquitous at the time, though. It’s like the way people use Autotune and Melodyne to make vocals sound like their keyboard. Sometimes they just want the Autotune effect. They tune the vocals up so hard that they sound like machines and then put beat detector on the drums. 

It seems largely unnecessary, but people will say that they need to do it. Why? Because the music police are going to shut it down? It’s the stupidest logic, but it’s stuff that’s perpetuated in the music industry. It’s like saying, “Everyone has to use drum machines now!” Well, actually, they aren’t going to have to. It’s a weird logic. People are just too afraid that others won’t like their work.

I’ve observed some of this. Maybe it’s preying upon creative peoples’ insecurity. If they are told by someone, “You don’t have the thing?” Then, they immediately think, “Oh my god, I don’t have the thing!” 

Right! “Oh my god, you’re right, I don’t have the thing!” [Laughs] But all those things have uses. They are all just tools. They can be used to affect the song in a good way that can still sound organic, but it just gets pushed too far. The synthesizers of the 70s, which I thought were cool, got pushed into the situation in the 80s, where they ruled the whole song or the whole album. It ends up sounding really hollow. There’s nothing organic about it at that point, so it went too far. But they are all just tools. Of course, it’s all subjective. That’s my take on it.

So you did originally have some enthusiasm for synths, you just dealt with overkill?

I was cutting my teeth in my first bands, and I was in more of a New Wave Pop band in the 80s and I wasn’t against synthesizers, it was just already starting to get outrageous. 

Do you find it’s helpful to step back from trends in order to create original work?

These days, wondering if I will write a hit song, or if a record label will like a song, is gone from my way of thinking. It’s more like asking: Do I like it? For the people who like this kind of music, what will they think of it? I like to be wide open to instruments and sounds if I can be. I would use an ’80s synthesizer if I thought the sound was cool. 

As a side note, when you released a new edition of the first Small Square album over the summer, I noticed that you had included some bonus tracks. How did you pick those? 

I was looking for stuff that I had. When we decided to reissue the album on John’s label, he suggested that we should have some extra songs. They weren’t really songs that had been up for the record. One of them is a really old demo that I made a long time ago, probably from Velvet Crush days, or from around the time of our hiatus, around the year 2000. It had been floating around and I didn’t want to redo it, but I’ve always liked it for itself. So I dragged that out.

The other one was a song that we started working on in the studio just after the first record was out, and it was from a new batch of songs. We had started on the song, but I didn’t have all the music together. We just left it. I didn’t have any good ideas for it at the time and got frustrated by it. But later, Jeffrey [Underhill] from Velvet Crush was in the area, and he came by the studio, so we made him play on the song! He plays guitar on there. 

Then, the song sat around a little longer, since I kept trying to finish it, but couldn’t. One of my daughters sang background vocals on it more recently. Every year or two I’d go back to it. Last summer, I actually was working on it in Champaign, Illinois, and I went to see my friend Caleb Means from the band New Ruins, who has a new record out called Innocent Postcard. He has a studio. I asked him to track some vocals for me. I did it and liked the recording. So the song was done, but not mixed. Since it had originally happened just after the first album, and I liked the fact that it was a Rock song, I used it.

There are songs laying around like that where I just lose them for a while. I can’t go any farther down the road, so I put it away for a while. But it drives me crazy, so I come back to it eventually. It takes a lot for me to really trash a song.

I was going to ask you about that because the most surprising thing about this story to me is that you didn’t get so frustrated that you destroyed the song beyond all recovery and moved on. I’d be angry.

I do get really frustrated! But I think I must be so dumb that after six or eight months, I think, “I’m going to listen to it now!” I always think I’m going to have some epiphany or moment, but it doesn’t usually work like that. Sometimes I’ll have a little something more to add to it, and it’ll move the song along. If I really can’t work on a song anymore, I think I know it. I hope so. But if there’s enough of a core to a song that I still really like, I’ll keep going. If the thing that I like about a song is so small, then maybe not. That little thing might be cool but the song is not happening. That’s the collateral damage of what happens when you’re making songs.

A lot of times when I go to John’s studio and we start working on songs, that allows me to think of them and see them in a different way. I like the way that freshens it for me. Then I might be able to see what to do with a song. 

That was the best explanation that I’ve heard about how to decide whether to keep working on a song. Essentially, it’s about the proportion of it that you really connect to. If the core of it still connects to you, you keep going. But if it’s too small an element of connection, you shouldn’t spare your time and energy. 

I’ve had to come up with something because I need a rule. There’s nothing wrong with leaving something unfinished, but you have to realize when you’re digging a hole deeper. If I don’t get an idea within the first few minutes of hearing a song again after not listening to it for a few months, then I shouldn’t then listen to it for six hours! But if something strikes you, that’s great. It’s so of the moment.

Another candidate for that bonus track was a kind of “seed”, one idea for a song or a section of a song. I’d completely forgotten about it, but I found it and noticed that the date was around the same time as that second song, right after the first album. It seemed obvious that I could make a thing out of it, but it didn’t seem like that at the time. Now it sounded new to me, which was a good thing. It had sat there for four years before I worked on it. Sometimes that happens. I think when people are trying to write songs that have been doing it for a while, it’s very easy to destroy an idea before you have something. So sometimes it’s good to put it aside for a while.

You might think a song sounds like another song, so you don’t record it. But you have to at least some little recording and let it be birthed in that way.

So walking away can be important? You need time away?

Yes, but you need to get it down in some form first. If you kill it in the idea stage, you’re never going to finish anything. It has to come out before you can decide if it’s something that you want to work on or not. You have to at least give it that space.

Do you intentionally block out judgmental thoughts at an early stage of song development?

I try to. I have a little thing on my phone that looks like a cassette recorder, that’s actually a voice memo. I just go and pick up a guitar and press the button on the recorder. Then I play whatever I thought of and don’t do anything else. If I’m feeling negative about it, or I’m not in the mood to do it, I still record it. Then you can move on. The next day, or the next week, you can listen to it again. It’s hard to decide for sure about it right at that first moment, at least for me.