fantasy of a broken heart and @ Debate the “Best Song of All Time”

Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz are the Brooklyn-based band fantasy of a broken heart; Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak are the Baltimore-based band @. fantasy’s debut record, Feats of Engineering, will be out tomorrow, so to celebrate, the four hopped on a video call to catch up about it and more. 
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Bailey Wollowitz: How have the gigs been?

Victoria Rose: They’ve been good. They’ve been varied. The tour was really cool. [@ toured with Jessica Pratt this summer.] It’s really nice to support a larger artist because you just kind of follow them on a pre-set route. But the best thing about it was, we had this band of four people — us two, Nino, and Nina Ryser — and then we brought in our friend Andy Loebs to play bass, which was super amazing. Everyone in the band is so technically skilled but has such a distinct style of music making on their own, so it was really interesting to watch that synergy happen.

Bailey: I honestly would just open forever. If it was up to me, I would never try to do a headline tour. 

Victoria: Totally.

Bailey: Headlining sucks. You have to get there two to three hours earlier than the opening band does. We’ve done some bus chaser tours, where there’s enough money for the crew and the band to be on different buses, and the crew just leaves right after the gig to wake up in the next city. That’s a whole next level of arduousness that we don’t even experience. And touring is already so arduous.

Victoria: Definitely. I think that when you are headlining at that level — what we observed with Jessica Pratt is that there’s a team around the musicians helping with gear, helping with merch, driving. Which then means you have to pay so many more people to keep things running, which can get really expensive. And obviously as a headliner you get paid more, so it probably works out decently. But the production of it seems so much more involved than being an opener, getting in your car every day and just sound checking and then not breaking down any of your gear because you’re going on first.

Bailey: It’s really amazing. I mean, we always say, when you start out you’re doing 10 jobs in your band. You’re making the music and playing live and driving and managing yourself and dealing with all the money and booking the shows and et cetera, et cetera. And then as things start going well and there’s money around to afford it, you realize that’s 10 different people’s full time jobs. Driving is a crazy job —  you just sleep all day in a bus and then drive for hours overnight while they sleep. Do y’all like being in the car for a long time? Do you enjoy the feeling that you’re out on the road?

Stone Filipczak: Not really. There are times where I’m fine with it; I like a road trip. But I feel like when it comes to touring and doing that for weeks at a time, I wouldn’t say that I like it.

Victoria: I don’t love it either. It’s kind of like a timeless place. And especially when you’re with a bunch of people, there are these moments where you’re having a lot of fun and talking, and then there’s those weird silent moments where you can tell everyone’s kind of over it. So it fluctuates. But I don’t love physically being cramped in the car and only seeing highways. I think that can be kind of difficult. But I do have fun sometimes. I do enjoy listening to music and talking with bandmates, who are hopefully also my friends.

Bailey: I feel like we definitely used to have some very brutish escapism about it when we were younger and started touring at least a couple of months out of the year. Not in that I was having a great time always, but the actual being stuck in the car in the middle of nowhere thing was very appealing to me, because you’re not at home with your restaurant job and your fucking roommates that you need time away from. And then of course all the above said is true about whatever happens between you and your band… It gets liminal at a certain point, obviously. But I feel like being in the van has some kind of School of Rock quality, where I feel really dumb that I am probably still leaning on it as a getting-away-from-things sort of mindset.

Victoria: Oh, totally. Do you tour a lot?

Bailey: We’ve been home for two-ish weeks right now, and that’s the longest we’ve been home consecutively since the end of January.

Victoria: Oh, my god. That’s really intense. That’s so different from our experience of touring. 

Al Nardo: Was this the longest tour that y’all have done? 

Victoria: No.

Stone: Our Europe tour was a little longer. We both have full time jobs. 

Victoria: Yeah. But I think we also just don’t really feel drawn to doing a stretch of tour longer than maybe a little over two weeks in general. 

Al: That’s so valid. I feel like wherever you personally stand aside, the best thing about tour is that the longer you tour, the tighter the band gets. And that feels like the biggest accomplishment. Every time we hit the road, even if it’s the same project, you’re able to push it a little further. Which I feel like must have been nice for y’all to do this run with the prog band that you put together. Is that the most that you’ve done that version of the project?

Stone: Yeah, that’s the only time we’ve ever done it. That’s the biggest our band has ever been. Or, we had done one five piece in the past, but that’s the largest and most rocking we’ve ever sounded live.

Bailey: I really wish I was able to see it. 

Al: I was so happy when we played with you in June and you said that you had put a prog band together. That was very exciting to hear. Did that feel like a natural progression after the last release you made? Or, how did that decision come about?

Stone: It wasn’t a decision, really. It just happened. 

Victoria: Yeah. Well, I think a lot of the songs have kind of strange structure to them already, and then adapting them to a five piece band with some members that are pretty heavy prog fans, it did just sort of happen that way. It wasn’t super intentional.

Stone: Our live band is like, we don’t really tell people what to play all that much and all the players can basically write parts if they want, or play what’s on the record if they want. And so with the prog band, like Victoria said, it just came out of having shredders who were down to not just learn really hard parts that are evident on the record, but also write new parts that are kind of in a more dad rock, prog rock type of style. 

Bailey: I think it speaks to the intention of doing music, to allow the flux and flow of it. We only have a couple songs out and the record comes out in September, and you know how it is — you listen to your shit that was done two years ago and you’re like, I would have done that different. And I think in order to get over that thing [about how] recordings have a permanence to them, there’s an intense gratification that songs continue to exist in that structure [of live performance]. And it honestly feels like something that’s missing from music’s transition into a lot of bands running tracks — which I think is amazing and has sprung sort of its own culture. There’s a different sensibility to karaoke style people, and that performance is so sick. I remember seeing LUCY back in the day do that shit, and I was like, “This is so fucking bonkers.” I wouldn’t have the chutzpah to do it. But I feel like now, that thing has been around long enough that it’s blending back in with the true band format. 

We talk about that a lot as a band. I feel like we’ve been trying to find the balance between live band members versus recorded stuff, just because — as you relate, surely — so much of the music is just truly made all chopped up. There’s a feeling that if the music exists in the box, the box has to be allowed on stage. But at the same time, going back to the first sentiment, I think the one thing about the tracks that does freak me out is they’re going to be the same every time, and that’s not what people who perform music are. Because we all hit a bad note every 30 seconds or whatever. But I appreciate that it’s sort of nebulous at this point as people continue to figure it out. When y’all play with the five piece band, are you still running your iPad?

Stone: No, it’s all analog. I agree with what you’re saying. I think that an element that’s there, in addition to the box and the instruments, is the song. And I think it’s a really, really critical element for people relating to music, whether it’s on a track done karaoke style or done with analog instruments. If there’s a song in there, I think that’s usually going to determine if people can connect with it. So I feel like with @, we’re just trying to write songs that can be played in any genre, or with a track or without a track, or whatever. I think ideally, it could be played by someone else on an acoustic guitar, and it would still feel like a good musical idea. And that’s what I feel like we’re bringing to the world, those ideas, and then maybe trying to execute them well when we tour. But mostly the original concept is what has value.

Al: I feel like we talk about it a lot that, and sometimes this can trip you up, but any song can really be anything. You can arrange a song to be in any way. So then it’s really nice, I think, to be in a collaborative project, to have someone to bounce the ideas off of, because you could just keep arranging and rearranging and rewriting a song forever and ever.

Bailey: What do you think is the greatest song of all time? Or one of them?

Stone: One of them that comes to mind is “Yesterday.” I think that’s a perfect song. 

Bailey: Yeah. We were talking about “Hey Ya” the other day.

Stone: [Laughs.] That’s great.

Bailey: I feel like part of the criteria for a great song is universality. Everybody has to agree, which has some sort of implication of eliminating several genres of music which are considered too niche for the populace or whatever. So I don’t know — is the best song of all time an accessible pop song? That might not be true.

Victoria: It’s hard to qualify as the best, but you can say that certain songs like that are really effective at having mass appeal and creating a collective feeling, in a way that a niche song or something structured with less hooks might not have that element. I think it has to be relatable and people need to be able to possibly sing it and remember a melody from it. 

Bailey: Do you have a best song of all time contender? 

Victoria: One of my favorite songs — I don’t know if it has mass appeal, or I don’t think everyone knows it in the same way as a Beatles song, but there’s this song by Imogen Heap called “A New Kind of Love.” So good. 

Al: Why is that your favorite song?

Victoria: I don’t know. It has this really nostalgic quality to it, just in the way that it sounds. It sounds like this weird time capsule, or like a lot of music that I would hear as a kid. It has this sort of early 2000s, electronic pop sound to it, but it’s really chill. And her hooks are just really beautiful and ethereal, but it’s not hard to sing. The verses are so meandering. I don’t know if it’s stream of consciousness, but it’s almost conversational in the way you can tell she’s sort of improvising the melody on it while saying this really emotional stuff. And then the hook is so repeatable. I find all that really beautiful. But yeah, it doesn’t have the same kind of historical context or impact as something “Yesterday.” It’s just a song that I think about and go back to a lot. 

Al: I feel like I, on a personal level, am more concerned with things that are my favorite than I am concerned with things that are the best. We’ve been working on some new material and it’s funny, as we’re putting out our first record, to think about it finally being perceived by people. But then thinking about what it means to follow that up — because I feel like there’s a lot of weight put on artists specifically around the second thing you do, like “sophomore slump.” I’m a big fan of the EP y’all put out [Are You There God? It’s Me, @] and I think it’s such a cool continuation and also departure from the first release that y’all put out [Mind Palace Music].

Stone: Thank you.

Al: Did that feel like a natural progression, or did it feel like you were taking risks with some of the leaps that you made?

Stone: Kind of both. I think we were aware that it was a risk. We were aware of a sophomore slump type of effect, and maybe that partially influenced wanting to just put out this EP that would break that ice a little bit and be really different. We knew the tracks didn’t sound anything like the album, so we knew people were going to have thoughts about that. And they did. There were some reviews that thought it was weird. But ultimately, I think the response has been super positive. And overall, I think it’s just served to make people who already liked us maybe like us more if they’re also fans of that music. And if they’re not, I feel like it’s fine. Some people probably only like the acoustic stuff, and that’s fine. So overall I feel like I feel like it’s worked out pretty well. And now I think we can just more or less release any genre that we want to, and it’ll feel to people like it hopefully makes a little bit of sense or feels like a continuation of the same universe. Again, I think it comes back to the song thing: I think as long as you’re writing songs, it doesn’t really matter what genre you’re rendering them in. And the most distinctive thing about that, I think, is probably our voices and the way that we use those together. So I think as long as that element is there, it can be produced however.

Bailey: Can I ask you a gear question about your voices? What are those things that you use on stage?

Victoria: Those are autotune pedals. 

Bailey: What are they?

Stone: TC-Helicon VoiceTone. Soundbox. They’re pretty cool. And you can get them on eBay for, like $150, $200, something like that.

Victoria: Yeah. They all they have a bunch of different tunings, too. You can have chromatic, but then you can have a bunch of different keys.

Bailey: Do you write with them?

Victoria: No. If we do autotune in a recording, it’s just going to be in the DAW probably. I would say most of the gear, if not all of it, that we would use in an electronic capacity on stage is used to either mimic something that we just do on the computer or to add a completely new element to the live set.

Bailey: This is not a question I have an answer to, but it just came to mind as we were talking about the backing track thing. Maybe I just have a bad memory and this answer is really obvious, but do y’all remember at what point the threshold crossed where autotune became just a normal element within every genre of music?

Stone: I’ve thought about this too — where did it switch? Because it wasn’t very long ago that I feel like live autotune, or even tracks, were considered kind of cringe and not cool. And it really shifted. Maybe it was the pandemic? But I think it had started a little bit before that too. I think people were already doing cool karaoke sets kind of. But then I think for me and my personal taste, it was 100 gecs. They killed it with the autotune sound. But that was just me personally. I know people were doing it before that. I was doing it before — I have recordings that I felt like I was being really progressive using this kind of hard autotune effect from 2018, or some of them from before that. It felt really experimental at that time. Whereas now, it feels like something that everybody could do if they want.

Victoria: Wasn’t it T-Pain?

Bailey: Yeah. I think it was not only T-Pain, but it was specifically T-Pain going on Tiny Desk and singing with no autotune, where everyone was like, “Oh, the autotune is just a vibe thing.” I feel like that broke a lot of stigma about autotune as a crutch for pop stars that can’t actually sing or whatever. 

Stone: Totally. And then in reality, all the records have autotune on them. Like, every take of everything that you hear on a commercial record has been autotuned to some extent.

Bailey: Yeah, the fucking bass has Melodyne on it, probably. They tune that shit to be at prime advertisement frequency or whatever.

Victoria: Absolutely. But when it’s used as a stylistic tool instead of a corrective tool, where did that start, or when did that gain popularity? I think Stone’s right, the pandemic. Because everyone was holed up, and I felt like all these people that were used to performing live music with live sounds were sequestered in their rooms with roommates, so maybe you’re making music in your headphones and you have all this time on your hands to mess with programs. 

Al: Y’all were a pandemic project originally, right?

Victoria: Oh yeah.

Stone: Yeah. We very much followed that trajectory of, OK, we’re inside now so we’re making quiet music, and what is that going to sound like? And by the way, everything is fucking autotuned on the album. All the voices and woodwinds and stuff like that, I’m pretty sure there’s not a single one of them on there that doesn’t have autotune. So that’s one of the secrets of the @ flute sound — everything is played really poorly, and then it’s shifted into G, and it gives it this odd, distorted timbre. 

Al: So has your collaborative flow changed a lot since that era of COVID? How was the collaboration on the EP?

Victoria: That was pretty similar, because there was a lot of material that we both had previously recorded or written that we sent to each other digitally, even though at that point we were only two hours away from each other by car. Since then it’s changed somewhat. I think that element of the remote recording is still there, because it’s nice to feel private, but we have definitely arranged more in person because we now live a 20 minute walk from each other. What about you guys? How does the songwriting typically go?

Bailey: Usually it’s like, I’m on Logic all day, always just making some bullshit, and playing guitar too. We’ll sort of conceptualize something, and I feel like there’s a lot of stuff that just keeps recycling until it feels good. But I’ll normally sort of have the structure of the song, but maybe not all of it, and definitely not any of the lyrics. Then I’ll send it to Al, and then we’ll link up and write our guitar parts together, whatever the guitar harmony is going to be. And then we’ll demo it, and then I’ll sit with that again for a month or some shit. [Laughs.] You know, a lot of things going on at once. We have a lot of friends play on our tunes with varying frequency. Some songs, there’s five or six people playing on it, and other ones are just the two of us mostly. But it’ll kind of just exist on my laptop for a while, and we’ll meet up and work on it. I get really anal about getting all the clap samples to be exactly lined up with the drum kick the right way for hours by myself. And then the vocals usually come last. Maybe we’ll have been writing the lyrics while working on it, but we don’t record vocals normally until the instrumentals are pretty done.

Stone: Cool. That’s very interesting, you do the instrumentals first and then the lyrics at the end.

Bailey: Yeah, and the vibe will be there, maybe. And of course, every once in a while there’s a song — like we put out a song called “Ur Heart Stops.” We were living in LA at the time and most of the songs for the record had been written and demoed already, and that one was just like, I woke up and had the hook of the song in my head. We lived together, and I think we just went straight to the studio and figured out that whole song and it came together in an hour, lyrics and all. So there’s not a science to it. 

We recorded our record for the first time and thought it was going to be done, and then I sort of destroyed the session and muted half of it and rerecorded and rearranged a lot of it. But I think that was the only song on the album we didn’t go back and change any of the words or anything. Songs are funny that way. Because on the opposite threshold of, “a really good song can be arranged in any way,” sometimes you’ll spend weeks trying to make something that just doesn’t work, work. Because you can just continue to play it on a different MIDI patch forever — you know, “What if this was twice as fast? Or what if this was a key change?” And then you go, “Actually this riff just kind of sucks and we like it because we’re stupid.” [Laughs.] And I think all riffs are good, but maybe specifically we’re trying to insert something we think is really cool into a song where we just know in our hearts that we’re ruining the song a little bit.

Victoria: Yeah. You don’t want to let go of that one little part.

Bailey: Yeah. And it always feels really silly. 

Victoria: The way it works in @ for the most part is we’ll both come to the project with a song that’s fully written and then arrange around that collectively. But the process I have when I’m just writing a song still is a lot of the time piecing parts together that I think sound good, or sitting on a specific part for a month and then eventually I’ll uncover a different section, maybe a verse or some kind of chorus for it, and then maybe an intro and all these pieces. And then sometimes there’ll be a part that doesn’t work, but then will maybe go into a different song later on. When it comes to @, I’ve for the most part structured the whole thing that way already, so everything around the collaboration fits around the full song in my experience. I rarely ever use a DAW or any kind of arrangement as the songwriting element of it.

Al: Is there a clear split in your mind of what is gonna be your solo music versus what you bring to the table in @?

Victoria: No, not at all. And I think I’ve been holding on to the solo project for a long time as wanting it to be really separate. But I’m realizing now that the way that I write, if I’m really proud of a song and I think it can work for @, then I’d rather just give it to that project because I really like the collaborative element and having Stone arranging genius parts all over it. It just makes it so much bigger and better. But it took a long time to figure that out. Not to say that I feel like I’m going to stop making solo music, but it’s not at the forefront of my mind right now.

Stone: I feel the same way. I years ago was like, I don’t really want to have a solo project of songs that could be @, I’d rather just give those songs to @. And that’s pretty much what I’ve done. Although I still make some solo music that just is in a different universe and couldn’t really be @ songs. 

Bailey: Yeah. I mean, it’s ridiculous, but Fall Out Boy is the example that came into my mind: After Fall Out Boy broke up the first time in 2009 or whatever, they all went off and did their own thing. The two guys, the guitarist and the drummer, that were not the famous guys both went back and were playing in their hardcore bands just gigging for a couple of years. Then Patrick, the front guy, dropped his first solo record, and it was this total synth pop thing with a not just a very different sonic palette, but totally different songwriting mentality. I got curious and went back and was reading interviews about their process, and Pete Wentz, the bass player, writes all the lyrics. Which is always a cool vibe. My favorite band is Meshuggah, the Swedish metal band, and the drummer writes all the lyrics. That sort of thing has always fascinated me because I realized: I’m not digging this solo record, and it’s not because I’m not digging the music; it’s because I thought I had faith in him as a narrator, and I actually don’t, because now I’m hearing what he would actually write as a songwriter in terms of the tone of the lyrics, and it’s not my thing. 

I think something really cool about a band is realizing how that chemistry works. For me as a listener, especially as a younger kid, the Beatles were the coolest thing to me because you can read the liner notes of the White Album and see, “Oh, John didn’t even play on this one.” And then you’re listening to it and you’re picturing that vibe in the room — this is the song that Paul got up really early that morning and went to the studio and recorded by himself. Working with Al is like that; we’re in a songwriting partnership where if either of us were making music in complete isolation from each other, it would sound pretty different. But I have no doubt that any song either of us could write would also work if we brought it into the fold with each other. You know what I mean?

Victoria: Yeah, totally. Because you create a distinct environment within your two styles blending.

Bailey: Yeah. And if I was going to make a solo album, Al would probably end up being on every song anyways. 

Victoria: Well, thanks for talking to us. Thanks for coming with great questions. I didn’t know what to expect.

Al: We crushed it.

(Photo Credit: right, Jamie Espino)