Chapel Hill, North Carolina-based band The Old Ceremony are celebrating 20 years as a band this year, and also releasing their seventh album on October 17th, via Yep Roc, titled Earthbound. They also have several celebratory shows in the works, both in North Carolina, and elsewhere on the East Coast.
The Old Ceremony’s songwriter is Django Haskins (the Big Star Third Revue, Au Pair), and the band includes vibes/organist Mark Simonsen, bassist Shane Hartman, violinist Gabriel Pelli, and drummer Nate Stalfa. For many of the band members, the past few years have been a time of big change as they became parents as well as navigating the usual global chaos. Themes of change and adaptation, as well as a degree of clear-eyed retrospection, pop up on Earthbound, a collection that also drew on an era of experimentation in terms of sound. The title even has an inflection that suggests “groundedness” which seems fitting for a band that has survived through a second decade by continuing to make music for the joy of doing so.
I spoke with Django Haskins about the 20th anniversary of The Old Ceremony, the fertile climate of songwriting for this album, and why he still appreciates a band selecting and curating songs in an album format.
I hear that you had a lot of songwriting to choose from for this album. Was that a difficult process? Did it involve the other band members weighing in?
During the pandemic, I was doing songwriting every week by video. You had to have a song every week. So I had some experimental things, and basically everything you can imagine. When we started picking back up with regular rehearsals, I would just have this big stack of lyrics that I’d printed out. I’d just pull out a song and say, “Okay, let’s try this!” We had a long period of just trying out different stuff and seeing what clicked, and what had potential for this band to play. There was no pressure because there were always more songs, so we were free to play with them, and see which ones felt the most natural, and see which ones everyone was most excited about, too, because this was the first time that the band was hearing any of these songs. It became pretty obvious which ones we enjoyed, and we started playing them in our live shows, which would give us feedback. We had it down to about 13. We actually recorded a couple of extra ones in the studio, too. It’s out on vinyl, so there’s a hard stop if you want it to sound good, so that was one reason that we ended up cutting it down to 11.
A lot of people are having to take that into consideration now concerning vinyl.
One of the wonderful things, and also one of the real pitfalls of our age, is that you can be like Mac DeMarco and put out 800 songs at once, and I’m not sure that’s the best thing. [Laughs] Even if The Beatles came out with 800 new songs, I’m not sure I would listen to that! I just don’t have time. I want them to pick, and then I’ll listen. There’s a benefit to having to choose, and having a limit, that actually encourages better records. This was a consideration in the old days, too. Thriller has 8 songs on it. That’s something that vinyl is doing for us again, that is giving us limits again, and within that, forcing us to make choices. It’s not a Golden Corral, all-you-can-eat release.
I’ve thought about and noticed a lot of this. Every time there’s an anniversary of a Beatles album, there’s a new version with a million outtakes. There are people who will go through every one, of course, and there will be times when I do that, too, but it’s not my day-to-day. I don’t think human beings are really made for 800 song albums.
We’re not. And someone’s going to have to curate it, saying, “Listen to these songs.” Why shouldn’t that be the artist? Doesn’t the artist know which songs they’d most like people to listen to. I think the framing is an important part of the process.
I think there’s an underlying assumption that when an artist puts songs out, there’s an intention behind that group of songs. That creates part of the relationship with the audience, who can assume, “Oh, this is a group of songs that really mean something to this band.” And I also look at sequencing.
Me too! I agree. Vinyl is also bringing artwork back to the mix, having this big, beautiful object. That was a big thing for me, growing up, and looking at these records. Not having that is a loss.
Since you bring that up, would you like to talk about the cover art for this album? I think it’s really interesting and has a certain feeling to it.
We really wanted to find a local artist, and find a piece by them to use. I went searching through tons of portfolios by local artists. I really loved this particular painting. We narrowed it down to a few pieces that were very different from each other. But this one had a kind of humor to it, or a brightness to it, not just in terms of colors. When we’d look at it, we’d kind of smile. There’s life in it that I think is fun. It’s weird. It’s like Folk art noir, where there’s these shadows of people in the back, and you’re not sure what’s going on. What is this bear doing? But it’s approachable and has saturated colors. Our drummer expressed this idea about it, that a theme of our lives is that we’re in a period of coming out of hibernation due to the pandemic, but also in terms of parenting. Three of us have kids, and by coincidence, the slow period between the last record and this one coincides with us having kids. Coming back out of that and getting more active again, making a record again, and going on the road again, the bear is a nice way of thinking about that.
I can definitely see how that fits. The shapes in the painting are also really clear and bright, as you mentioned, while seeming surreal, which is a nice combination.
There’s a story there.
I hadn’t thought of the hibernation theme, but it’s a contrast, and I was also thinking of a sense of alienation due to the title track. It’s a bear surrounded by suburbia. Since you mentioned doing Zoom songwriting, did that format and turnover lend itself to trying new things musically? Did it shakes things loose for you?
Definitely. If you’re going to write a song every week, you’re doing to try different things. I wrote some songs on piano and guitar, but sometimes I’d put on a loop and I’d go over to the drums, and play drums and sing. [Laughs] There was all kinds of stuff, anything, honestly. Going back to my childhood Beatles upbringing, they had to fill 12 hours on a stage in Hamburg, so it’s not a question of, “What are we going to play?” They are going to play everything. By doing everything, you’re composting your imagination. Even if half of those songs are unsuccessful, these ideas are still going to get chopped up and reformed.
Now, I haven’t written a song in a year! I’ve been busy with this record, but I’ve also been teaching myself tenor sax, which is my total obsession. But these songs definitely got a lot more experimental, and if it didn’t work, there’d be another one next week!
There’s a big variety among these songs that you did choose, too. When you were picking them, was the idea that they might be fun to play live part of the deal?
Yes, and I think there were some that felt fun to play right off the bat, and others that we thought were more like a puzzle that we were really going to have to work to figure out. We’ve always had the blessing and curse of being pretty eclectic from song to song. We are incapable of making a record that sounds the same all the way through. But we chose the best songs of the lot, and when we were thinking of playing order and sequence, we started thinking about themes. I don’t like to start with a concept, but looking back, there often are a couple of overarching themes, and that tends to point us towards the title.
Is it ever a good idea to set yourself a theme for an album? It seems like you’re then forcing yourself to do homework or something.
The one I can think of that might be the exception to that rule is 69 Love Songs, The Magnetic Fields’ record. Some of it does feel like he’s fulfilling an assignment, but some of it is brilliant.
Well, you set yourself an assignment to write songs every week, so some degree of having an intention is important. People do make concept albums, but it seems like respecting whatever the song is asking for might help.
That’s the level at which we like to work. We look at a song and say, “What does this need?” The flipside of the whole vinyl discussion is that people seem to interact with songs one at a time, which is almost back to the golden age of singles, where you’re really thinking about just this one song and how it’s working.
Each of these songs definitely has its own life in that way. How big a deal is for you all to be thinking about the fact that The Old Ceremony has been around 20 years, and that you’re releasing this album at this point?
I think it is important. I think that we were going to make the record that we were going to make, but it had been an unusually long time since the last record, 9 years. I put out four solo records in the meantime, so it wasn’t totally a fallow time, and we were still playing gigs. But I think that we were starting to get re-energized as a band, and having a round number like this is pretty unusual for a band that has only reached regional success commercially.
I think there is something pretty special about having been together for this long. It means that we are committed for the right reasons. We want the music to get as wide a distribution as possible, and we want people to enjoy it, but at the same time, we’re grown ups and our ambitions are different than what they were originally. We have goals, but there is a real groundedness in life right now, like in the title Earthbound.
One of the singles from the album is “Too Big To Fail” and it seems important, because it speaks to some of these changes we’ve been talking about in life, and the passage of time. It’s a relationship song, but it does talk about things that change.
Absolutely! You are correct!
And the music life comes into that narrative, a little bit, and how it changes.
When I wrote it, that song is one that definitely made me think, “Okay, I’m going to be playing this for a while.” It came about in a way that worked its way in before I had the total picture of what I was writing, so it allowed me to bypass the parts of my brain that might keep me from writing it. I love it when this happens. It is a relationship song, but it could just as well be a song about a band, in some ways. I think it’s a song, essentially, about committing to something long-term, and what it means, and what that looks like.
I’m always happy when I hear songs that are not about falling in love, or breaking up, but about the life that happens in relationships. If you’re someone who’s incessantly falling in love and breaking up, granted that’s possible, but it doesn’t seem like the healthiest thing.
I think I was that person a lot in my 20s, which helped me write all those songs. [Laughs] But I agree. There’s a huge amount of material out there that’s not that.
One thing that’s cool about the song is that the speaker is taking responsibility for themselves, and admitting fault, or at least shared fault.
That’s something I learned in marriage!
It’s always good in a relationship to be able to say that. It goes a long way. That must be true in a band, too. Too much ego is probably the cause of a lot of band breakups.
I think that’s true. It is hard to do that. Early on, our band relations were a little more tumultuous, though not compared to Oasis. Now, it’s much smoother, because I think we understand more. We’ve all learned some of that on our own, are bringing it to the band. We have a pretty thoughtful group of people, and that helps a lot. If you’re only in it for the music and the joy of making it, then it should be a pleasant experience, as much as possible.
