Earlier this year, Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn took a gamble. While promoting their Grammy-nominated album Free Love, they harnessed a burst of creativity in Los Angeles to write and record their next one, something that would be “more free and wild and strange” than anything they had done before. Those sessions would become Sylvan Esso’s latest album, the aptly titled No Rules Sandy. Then Meath and Sanborn did something equally chaotic and radical: They gave the record to the world as soon as they could, skipping the typical album-cycle promo campaign to release it spontaneously on their own label.
“Putting out the fourth record, particularly in the strange and alternative way that we did,” says Meath, “made me start thinking about how strange it is that when you put music out, it’s all just basically begging people to listen to it.” As she reflected on the less tangible aspects of the album-rollout process, she grew curious about how other musicians think about it: “The weird rhythm of an album cycle is fascinating because it’s different for every single musician.”
To satisfy that curiosity, Meath had a few musicians she knows — Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, Maggie Rogers, Katie Gavin of Muna, and Bartees Strange — join her for a series of individual conversations on the latest episode of Switched on Pop, during which they explored the complicated feelings associated with releasing a record. You can read thoughts from each of the artists below and listen to the full episode wherever you get podcasts.
Switched on Pop
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Amelia Meath, Sylvan Esso
Releasing an album is different for every artist. Everyone’s just truly free-jazzing it as we go along, or trying to figure out how to progress as an artist in an industry that wants to crush you. That is incredibly vulnerable and strange, even if you are successful. It’s also a very intimate thing — not just someone’s creative output but their reaction to their output being received. When you put a record out, you’re revealing your innermost thoughts and feelings and extending your hand to the world, saying, “Would you like to come with me?” Some people say yes, and some people don’t.
It is a very intense emotional experience that artists don’t actually talk about that much, because they’ve spent most of their record talking about their other emotional experiences. I always reach out to people I love about a week after their record release, and I’m like How are you feeling, buddy? Because it’s like a breakup feeling, in a lot of ways.
Jeff Tweedy, Wilco
I feel like each song is an effort to make a connection. A record, to me, is finding the songs that work together the best to enhance each other in a way that’s going to allow those circuits to be connected. There is an accuracy to the idea that music is so monumental in people’s lives and maybe the greatest consolation that we get to share with each other. A record isn’t just a record the first time you hear it; a record can represent a potential companion. You reached through time and space with technology and touched somebody’s fuckin’ shoulder, man. That’s real.
But there’s a sadness to it: It doesn’t just belong to you. The world is projecting onto it all of its own baggage, its own opinions, its own potential. Not like I need that reassurance or need good reviews or anything like that. It’s just like … I really feel like a little kid, like, Look what I’ve made. I get blindsided by it every time: this weird deflation that happens when a record goes out into the world. I never learn. I still get hurt.
Maggie Rogers
I can look up how many streams “Love You for a Long Time” has, but I can’t tell you how many of those streams were someone’s first dance at their wedding — which means something really different, something that can’t be measured. It’s a funny thing, putting out music, because you don’t get to choose your fans and you don’t get to choose what you’re known for. Like, “Want Want” is doing really well right now on radio, and I keep being like, No, not that one. There’s no nuance. I tell you who I am and then I only get to update that every two to three years. It feels like outgrowing your clothes.
There’s a mourning process to putting out records that is really not always acknowledged. My life had been so highly narrativized for profit that it lost all nuance in order to package it into something that people could easily understand. I didn’t even feel like my life was mine anymore — and that’s part of the game, but I don’t like the game.
Katie Gavin (from Muna)
I experience this thing every time I release something: It’s like I’m adding to a conversation, but once it’s out there, I realize what I had forgotten to say. What is annoying to me is the way that you have to put your album in a box — so that people can write about it in a digestible way, I guess. In terms of doing PR, I have definitely been of the belief that I would rather come up with what the box is than have somebody else come up with what the box is. (Like, if we say “queer joy,” the press is going to just repeat it.) I’ve been a songwriter since I was a small child, and it’s always been a healthy coping mechanism for me. This is the same as me as a kid making a drawing and then asking, “Do you like it?” That’s really sweet.
Bartees Strange
I read a lot of interviews because I’m very interested in how people talk about their records, and I don’t think I’ve hacked it. I have a lot of things that I had hunches about that have been affirmed through my interactions with people. For example, there’s a song on Farm to Table called “Hennessy.” To me, the song is about stereotypes and kind of saying, I know you see me a certain way, but really I want love. I want to be appreciated for my art and as a person. So many white people, Asian folks, Black folks, queer folks reach out to me about that song, and they’re like, “This song is how I feel.” I wrote that song as something very personal, but it’s beautiful to see how other people draw that song to their experiences. And I’m like, Is that just because you like my record, or is it because of what’s in my record?
In a year, when I think about this, I’ll probably think about it differently because I’ll learn a lot of new shit. And that’s kind of the most interesting thing about putting out records: Every time, it’s very different and you learn a little more, and it’s all interesting and cool.
