With his new identity as a parent came a crucial shift in how he approached music. Gone were the months in a cramped tour van and late nights rehearsing with his band in a windowless warehouse space. In its place were amorphous, suburban afternoons playing whimsical songs to two young children, while writing music for himself after their bedtime.
But in this time away from the life of a touring artist, Berman discovered an unvarnished, broken folk rock sound — a marked departure from his previous work. Most people haven't even heard of it! I went there from to and I studied Ancient Religion. I would say I spent more time doing things like booking shows and playing music. I did my work and everything, but I think what was really exciting about being in Portland at that time was this immersion and this incredible DIY music world that I had never really experienced growing up in suburban Pennsylvania.
Why did you decide to move to NYC after you graduated? I really liked Portland but it was hard to stay there because once I was done with school there wasn't really much there happening for me.
I was working a call center recharging people's calling cards and pre-paid cell phones at weird hours of the night.
New York was a chance to try something new. I was writing some songs on my own and the guy that sat next to me at work, Alex, liked the same music that I did. He was our original bassist. He came over and I played him my songs, I burnt a CDR of drum beats, so our original drummer was my mom's old Discman, then we upgraded to an iPod Nano. The original idea was just to write songs and play music.
I loved playing music and I was excited to meet people in New York that were excited to play with me, it didn't really matter that we were all mostly musically amateur. I would set up parties in warehouses with bands I liked so that we could open for them.
People seemed excited and happy to come see us play even though we weren't that good. I was in my late twenties and a lot of bands start out a lot younger than that. People would be like "oh, you're in this new band, so you're teenagers" and I had to be like "actually, no, I'm I've been able to buy beer at the store for a very long time and I shave.
Where does the name come from? It was a short story written by this guy I knew in Portland named Charles Steen. He was a figure that was always around, friends with everyone, sort of a real local character. He wrote children's stories and was a funny and lovable guy around Portland. This short story that he wrote called "The Pains of Being Pure at Heart" I wrote a song after in my original band in Portland, but the guy that I was in a band with didn't like the name so I put it on the back burner.
What was the story about? It was a children's story that basically said "the important things in life are being with your friends when you're young and not prioritizing advancement in the world that's at odds with what is right. There are more ways in life to be "successful" by certain standards but to me, playing music with people I care about and being able to travel is the one thing that has made me really happy with life.
What are some bands that inspire you? You could probably ask me this question everyday and I would answer differently. As time passes you can't just keep going to the same thing over and over again for inspiration, so I think the things that inspire the music now are less of literal interpretation like "I want to sound like that band" and more "I want to express the things I feel through sound.
Do you find a lot of inspiration in literature? Yeah, but I want to be very clear that I'm not that smart and I'm not that well-read. Our first concerts were at parties we threw ourselves, or at DIY venues that were shut down before the DIY venues that opened to replace them were shut down. After all, we could buy them beer. They liked beer. And there were other practical considerations for using a CD player in lieu of a drummer. We did eventually get to play in the UK, where we performed at some venues that mostly no longer exist, slept on floors and in the occasional bathtub, and were gifted an old Atari by Rocker from The Flatmates, which we then got signed by the cofounder of Sarah Records, Clare Wadd in indie pop at least, you should meet your heroes!
I grew up in the suburbs with a nice mom who likes Leonard Cohen. Pains of Being Pure at Heart. Again, we were from the suburbs. But he said yes and then we had a really good drummer. Kurt was also really helpful while recording our first record. Things went on like that for a bit until we put out our first record in , and weird stuff started happening like ABC News showing up in our basement, people on indie-pop message boards accusing us of looking too good lol, but thanks!
We were just a bit clueless as to how that happened, why we were there, and how to go about playing in front of 5, people when we were used to playing in front of about But aside from the small fear of making total asses of ourselves, it was… cool. We had never been to Spain.
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