Cali Bellow and Diners Go For a Walk

Leah B. Levinson is an LA-based artist who performs as Cali Bellow, and with the band Agriculture; Blue Broderick is an also-LA-based artist who performs as Diners, and whose latest record, DOMINO, came out last year. The new Cali Bellow record, Ciao Bella, just came out last month on Fiadh Productions, so to celebrate, the two friends went on a walk around their neighborhood and caught up about it all. 
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Leah B. Levinson: We’re walking around the neighborhood of North Pasadena, near both of our homes, more or less. 

Blue Broderick: [Laughs.] Should we zero in any closer?

Leah: [Laughs.] I think this is the interview where we dox each other. 

Blue: Well, if anybody’s gonna dox you, it should be me. And if anybody’s going to dox me, it should be you. 

Leah: I think that sounds right. So now that the stakes of the interview are set, how are you?

Blue: I’m good. I just got the COVID booster, so I kind of feel like shit. But I feel good being on this walk right now. How are you feeling? What did you do today? 

Leah: I’m good. I’ve had a really good, productive day. I have started organizing my life with a new app that my friend showed me. The way it organizes to-do lists and stuff, I’m really vibing with. I got a lot done today, thanks to the new, refreshed mentality this app is providing.

Blue: Well, that’s very exciting that you’re getting your life together with an app. I mean, the reader doesn’t know this, but we just hung out — you just got back from a tour, and you were telling me that coming back, you’re getting kind of tour blues. 

Leah: My life was a mess the last time we saw each other, on Friday. It’s now Monday, and my life has turned around completely. 

Blue: All thanks to this app.

Leah: Yeah. 

Blue: So you got back from your tour with a different project, but now you’re home, and it kind of feels like you’re back in Cali Bellow territory. Being back home and being alone and with your music stuff, do you feel inspired to make more music, or are you pretty tired? 

Leah: I actually had a big writing burst during tour. I think tour is weird because you’re always busy, but you’re always kind of in downtime and limbo. And I basically just found, given that mental space, I was getting a lot of ideas for lyrics. I just was writing anything down, and started feeling a bit of a creative energy towards Cali Bellow stuff, but also figuring out some lyrics that I’d been struggling with for Agriculture stuff, and also fantasizing about other future projects. I think this is constantly how my creativity works — a lot of ideas at any given time, and eventually I have to edit them. But really, since finishing the Cali Bellow album, it’s only the past month or so that I’ve started to think about what a next Cali Bellow album would look like and whether I might want to start working on that. 

Blue: Do you write songs just for the sake of having a new song, or do you feel like you write songs with the intention of having an album? 

Leah: I think I write songs just because I write songs, and then I record with the intention of an album. So the recording and the textures that are going to be on the album and the format and the techniques I’m using are all album-specific and part of that vision, and I’m usually pulling from material I’ve just written in my daily life.

Blue: Do you demo? 

Leah: No. 

Blue: Wow.

Leah: I mean, [I do] voice memos. But especially on this album, a lot of it was written and arranged within my DAW, and even just within the MIDI piano roll. So some of the writing was like, having a vocal melody or a thing I might have come up with playing guitar, and then developing it within the recording itself. But never really having a first draft that’s a demo and then working off of that. 

Blue: That’s interesting. Are there any songs that you wrote for the new album where you never touched a real instrument? 

Leah: Oh, all of it. 

Blue: No, I know that you recorded it all that way, but even written—

Leah: Oh, well, at one point that was a constraint I placed on myself, that I wasn’t going to use any real instruments on the album — which really meant guitar or bass. So it’s all MIDI and sample-based and synth-based. Usually I will touch a guitar or a keyboard just to work something out. I guess there’s one, “(I Can’t Wait to Be) Rendered,” which is more of a breakcore drum and bass thing — I don’t know if I touched an instrument to to make that. “LFG​!​!​!​! (i just died)” — I don’t know if I touched an instrument for that. That came out of playing around in Logic and wanting to do something that sounded like Rancid. I think I just worked out the chords following a bassline that I was writing in Logic, and I think it mostly came together within Logic.

To turn to you and your creative process: you’re currently working on a new album. Can I say that? 

Blue: You can say that. 

Leah: And you’re working with a friend on the album.

Blue: Yes, I’m working with my friend Zach Burba from the band Iji. 

Leah: You told me about when you were bringing songs to Zach, that Zach was encouraging you to write more directly about the topic of a song or the experience that the song is describing. I was curious how you would describe your prior songwriting in contrast to that and how you’re feeling about this new mode of writing.

Blue: Yeah. When I first started working with Zach on the new songs, Zach placed a lot of emphasis on taking the lyrics a few steps further than where they were. Sometimes that was talking more direct, and sometimes it was just being a little more illustrative — like if I was using a metaphor, to take it a little further. That was very fun feedback to get, even though it was a little hard for my ego to have somebody go through my lyrics. Because I’ve had bandmates go through my music and maybe add a cooler bassline or something that I didn’t think of, but I’ve never really had somebody go in on the lyrics with me. Not that Zach is necessarily helping me write the lyrics, but he’ll offer a suggestion if he has one.

I feel like it’s very difficult for me to talk directly. I don’t really know why anybody would want to know exactly what’s going on, but I also get that that is maybe intriguing to know what’s going on. I think a lot of the dumb rock music that I love just has such simple lyrics that, in my mind, I don’t ever really need to know what they’re talking about. Like, if I’m just listening to a Tom Petty song, most of the time it’s like, “This person could be talking about anything, or nothing.” 

Leah: And that’s kind of part of the appeal. There is some element you need of that in popular music, I think. 

Blue: Yeah, definitely. I think it goes really far. I think that used to be very important to me, just being so vague that anybody could pick it up and make their own thing out of it. But it would oftentimes turn into somebody telling me that they like my lyric, and then they’ll tell me what their interpretation of it was, and it was always way cooler than what I had in mind.

Leah: Which is part of the strength of that, that abstraction. 

Blue: Yeah, totally. Your lyrics are not necessarily like that at all. I feel like your lyrics feel very high concept. There’s a lot going on in your songs just musically, but also considering that your album is all MIDI, you have a lot of lyrics that, to me, it’s kind of like your computer meeting the natural world. And I think that’s such a cool contrast that you have, embracing both. 

Leah: Yeah. Part of the constraint I put on myself of only working with MIDI and not using real instruments is that I knew that there would be some sort of artifice and stiffness that I would have to overcome in the production. But also, I would have to figure out a way to make my voice meet that artificiality and make it blend together. So part of that is using a lot of vocal processing — changing my voice, putting it in different registers, using pitch correction to make it sound more digital and less human at times. But also, I think for me, lyric writing is never separate from the music writing, and often I’m writing lyrics based on how they sit with the music. So if there’s a lift in the music and it’s moving to a more major tonality, then you can land a joke there, or you can be pretty direct about it and have an uplifting lyric, or you can contrast it with something else. 

Part of what I wanted to explore on the album was… I mean, I was really inspired by fantasy imagery, medieval imagery, and also the logic that often accompanies that sort of thing. But I’m not really much of a storyteller, so I wasn’t coming up with a big story about a knight or something. So I think some of that integration of the natural world, and that contrast, comes from that. But I had to find a way of conjuring that imagery and that approach to mythology without trying to write a narrative in a prog rock way. I didn’t really want to do that — nor do I think I could do that — so I moved to abstraction, or almost more of a sampling sort of thing. And a way I embraced that was manipulating my voice, so it sounds like there’s a lot of different voices on the record and it’s coming from many different places and you never know the perspective of a given song, because it sounds like it could be a new character entering in dialogue. 

Blue: Totally. I was going to say, it definitely feels like there’s a lot of different characters on the album. 

Leah: Yeah, that was really inspired by The Muppets. [Laughs.] I really like that aspect of the Muppets universe, that you have all of this music which is cohesive, but it’s sung by all these different characters with zany voices. 

Blue: I guess in a way it is very theatrical. So that makes sense. But it’s not too theatrical, which is good. There’s a fine line between too much theatrics and just the right amount. 

Leah: Yeah. 

Blue: I feel like every single song almost has its own voice. 

Leah: I think a lot of that comes from that I’m a little afraid to let my work be one thing, and so I like to sit both in gray areas, but also very vibrant areas where I’m pulling from a lot of different influences, I guess because I’m just influenced by a lot of different things.

Blue: Do you feel like that’s what pushed you to make more music on the computer? I mean, you do have albums where it’s a band and there’s no vocal processing. Do you feel like working within the digital realm offers more options for you in that way?

Leah: Yeah, I think [it offers] more options and more challenges which need creative solutions. So there’s a wider palette to choose from, but also it pushes me out of habits. Like, if you play an instrument and you just sit down and mindlessly play, you have habits you’re gonna fall on.

Blue: Totally. 

Leah: I think for most songwriters, there’s sets of chords or ways they move that are a part of their habits and that become a part of their voice. And I think writing within a MIDI piano roll really breaks a lot of those habits. Like, I can think in terms of the habits, but the muscle memory isn’t going to take over.

It’s a similar thing with production. Actually, you were saying something about this — you’re working on a cover of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and you were telling me as you were mixing, you noticed you were leaning on distortion a lot. Which is an exact thing I’ve often had in my projects, distorting every track with an overdrive, and also having distortion on the master buss just to get it to gel together in a different way. With this album, a lot of it is distorted, but not in as much of a way as I’ve used that in the past as a go-to tool. And that was another challenge I set for myself: How can I mix without relying on that so much? 

Blue: It’s so funny how distortion and overdrive is kind of a cure for getting things to sound right, and have the emotional element. I don’t know why that is, and I don’t want to rely on it, but it’s kind of hard not to when it just makes everything sound perfect. 

Leah: Yeah. Maybe to pivot, I wanted to talk to you about the Beach Boys. A big influence for this album was the Beach Boys album Smiley Smile, which I think a lot of what we’re talking about is something I found in that album. 

Blue: Yeah. I have a memory of listening to Smiley Smile the day that you showed me your album. I think we listened to everything in full, and then we talked about Smiley Smile for, like, an hour. 

Leah: Yeah. Smiley Smile really changed things for me, just to start talking about distortion and using it as a source of cohesion. I think really from Pet Sounds and then carrying over into Smiley Smile, the distortion and the compression applied to the overall record has this way of abstracting what exactly is happening, and it creates this sort of fantasy world or this sound that isn’t really tethered to reality. Even though on Pet Sounds, it’s like an orchestra, more or less, and on Smiley Smile, it’s cut bits of tape that are different instruments playing at any given time. 

Blue: Yeah. We were talking about theatrics and characters, and I feel like it ties into Smiley Smile in a way. Because there’s a lot of times where it is just the group, where it sounds like it’s just them hanging out in a room, and then other times where there’s a lot of different kinds of voices on that record. It’s such a deranged album, and it kind of makes sense that your album is like that, because your music is kind of deranged. And I apologize for calling your music deranged, but some of it really is. 

Leah: [Laughs.] 

Blue: [Laughs.]. But it’s funny because you have such a vast music vocabulary. You range from Beach Boys, but then you’re also an encyclopedia for black metal, and other kinds of music that would be considered on the complete opposite side of the record store.

Leah: Yeah. I think a big part of where I’m coming from with the contrasting sounds on my record is that, to me, what I get out of the music I love isn’t all that different. So what I get of Smiley Smile is also a lot of what I get out of this album Blessed Are the Sick by Morbid Angel, who are an early death metal band. Blessed Are the Sick feels like it is this cartoon simulation of hell, and it has some MIDI tracks within it that are just pure synthesizer and sound kind of like dungeon synth or video game music, and it also has vocal processing that makes the voices sound a little bit unreal. But really, what pushes it into this cartoon thing is that it has these early drum triggers, so the drums don’t even sound real. And it sounds like, rather than trying to represent a reality of a band playing, it’s creating a whole separate audio space. So you’re not listening to a band play in front of you, you’re listening to the record itself. And I think that’s something I get out of Smiley Smile, and even Wild Honey, and these weird early lo-fi examples where it’s the Beach Boys, they’re a pop rock band, but the arrangements and the recordings are rarely full rock instrumentation. And then on top of that, what you’re mentioning about all of their different voices — it’s a rare instance of a band where you have, how many contributing songwriters and singers?

Blue: I mean, at that point, you have at least four, I think. 

Leah: Which is not typical at all. So you get this cartoonish representation of reality and this full cast of characters. Have you had anyone else sing leads on a Diners song? 

Blue: No, but I really don’t want to be the singer anymore. 

Leah: Really? 

Blue: I would love to find a new singer. I just want to write the songs. 

Leah: Why is that? 

Blue: I mean, for a lot of reasons. I think as time goes on, I just really feel the limitations of my voice, and I can’t really do the things that I want to write. So I feel like I’m always kind of compromising on my songs and my compositions, because I can’t do as interesting of things. And, you know, there’s also some gender stuff going on as well. Hearing my own voice makes me feel bad a lot of the time. But it feels so good to sing. I mean, I’m probably not gonna find a new singer for Diners, but I would love to write music for somebody else.

Leah: Yeah. I mean, I can talk around all these reasons why I use vocal processing, but at the heart of it, there’s some part of me that wants to abstract my voice, or shift it or use it in a different way, that does relate back to gender and how I feel hearing my own voice at times, or just how I feel about the limitations of my voice. 

Blue: Does that also come up with Agriculture? 

Leah: Yeah. I think screaming for me is a big way to get around that. Because there’s less gender reference within it and less distinction. But also, lately I’ve been having a lot of fun with doing death growls — which is a much more low, guttural thing — and moving from that to the higher black metal screech. I’m having a little bit of fun with that capacity of my voice, that I can reach a bit of a lower range and contrast that. 

Blue: I kind of do the same thing. I like to record my voice with Varispeed, which is not too different than what you’re doing with your voice on your record, where there’s a process of recording at a slower speed, and then when you return the speed to the default setting, it makes it sound like your voice is pitched up. It’s an old recording technique that everybody loves to use, but it’s fun if you use it more aggressively. 

Leah: Yeah. On the album, too, I will lower the performance of my voice, which kind of does a similar thing for me of putting it into a comfort zone. I don’t know if that’s just abstracting from the fact that it’s my voice, or sometimes I imagine I’m moving it to how I hear my own voice… It’s almost like overcorrecting for myself or something. 

Blue: Yeah, that is true — there are a lot of voices on your record that are not feminized. I’m sure some of it is just the fun of throwing it into something and having it spit out something different, where it’s like it’s not you anymore, it’s this other thing and it has a different meaning. 

Leah: Yeah. And it enables different writing perspectives.

Blue: Totally. Do you still think that you’ll incorporate your spoken word into your live performances? Last year I saw you play a solo set, and it was just you and your bass guitar, which was awesome — not an electric six-string guitar, but a fretless bass. 

Leah: [Laughs.] With flatwound strings 

Blue: [Laughs.] So cool. But in between your songs, you would read your poems. And Cali Bellow is a very lyrical project now, but do you feel like you’ll still incorporate spoken word into your sets? 

Leah: Possibly. It comes up in a lot of projects and albums. I mean, this album has a spoken word track, and the last Agriculture EP ended with a spoken word bit. Currently, the Cali Bellow live project is a band I put together, kind of reversing the challenge I gave myself for the record and trying to now play those songs in a good ol’ guitar band format. Within that set, I’m more interested in keeping the tunes flowing than stopping everything to do a little poem or something. But I wouldn’t put it past me to go back to the spoken word sections. I think with the bass guitar set, I was really interested in how little I could do while still maintaining intrigue.

Blue: But it’s also so bold for that reason. How has that challenge been, taking your compositions that were created in a completely different universe and trying to bring them into the rock band world? 

Leah: It’s pretty cool, because I find that they have to change a lot, to where I’m adding in whole new sections to the song, or really staying on different parts for longer, or the part that was a hype-up part of the song now comes down and gets more intimate. And it never really comes from, “It would be fun to do something different here.” We’ll learn the songs exactly as they are on the recording, at least in terms of song structure, and when we play them, it’s like, “Oh, when a band is playing that, it feels different than hearing synthesizers play it through speakers, and you need to stay on that for longer to make this key change work or to make that part land.” It’s just a different level of perception, I think, when you have a rock band playing. So it’s been really cool to edit with my bandmates and write new sections to these songs that had really solidified in my head.

Blue: That’s such a funny process, hearing your song played back to you for the first time, like a cartoon brought to life. You got a real Roger Rabbit on your hands. 

Leah: [Laughs.] Yeah, you see Roger Rabbit in the flesh and fur, and it’s horrifying and kind of unappealing. That’s how it happened when I brought my songs in to the band. And then we made it click in a way that is no longer horrifying and unappealing. So, come see us live!

(Photo Credit: left, Matt Erao; right, Rachel Lewis)