Julia Shapiro lives in Seattle and performs in the bands Chastity Belt, Childbirth and Who Is She. Chastity Belt put out their third record in June 2017 called I Used To Spend So Much Time Alone on the label Hardly Art. Some of her other interests include watching reality TV, taking long walks, petting dogs, and gossiping.
Julia Shapiro is a Seattle-based artist who performs solo, and with the bands Chastity Belt and Who Is She?; Max Keyes fronts the Washington-based band Spiral XP. Spiral XP’s latest record, I Wish I Was a Rat, was just release on Danger Collective, so to celebrate, the two friends hopped on a Zoom call to catch up about it.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Julia Shapiro: So tell me about the writing process. You wrote all the songs yourself, except for “Window Room,” which Lena [Farr-Morrissey] helped out with.
Max Keyes: Yeah, that one I wrote the guitar parts and structure and everything, and then I had a vocal melody that I demoed out in Logic and sent to her. Then she came up with something way better.
Julia: Cool. How did you demo it out in Logic? Did raise the pitch on your voice?
Max: No, I just tried to sing it falsetto, and it was really bad. [Laughs.] It was a song where I was like, “I want this to be in a range that I can’t sing.” Lena had just joined the band, and I kind of tentatively approached her and was like, “How do you feel about this?” And she blew it away.
Julia: I love that song.
Max: Me too.
Julia: So, Logic — do you use it for building up the songs, as kind of a tool for songwriting?
Max: I definitely write all the songs first just as a riff or a guitar part. I feel like in order for me to conceptualize the whole song, I need to have that recorded, and then build on it from there.
Julia: That’s the same way that I [do it]. If I’m writing a solo song, I would just start with a guitar part and then add to it.
Max: Yeah. I always save vocals for very last. A lot of the vocals, I didn’t demo them out until a week before we recorded, even though I wrote the song, like, a year before. It’s always very last minute for me.
Julia: I like to demo vocals just because I want to hear how the other parts are interplaying with them. I think that some songs lend themselves to lyrics easier than others. It depends on the melody, but I feel like some melodies are just to me like, “Oh, this melody is a little cheesy, so the lyrics can’t also be cheesy.” But then other songs, I could sing anything and it sounds cool, so I don’t worry as much about that.
Max: We haven’t gotten to that point yet, of “anything that I sing sounds cool.” [Laughs.] I feel like most of the time, writing a song for me is coming up with lyrics that don’t sound dumb.
Julia: Yeah, it’s definitely a challenge most of the time. Especially at this point, I just feel like I end up singing about the same stuff. Just like, “Here’s another introspective song.”
Max: How do you approach writing lyrics?
Julia: Sometimes it happens just stream-of-conscious style. Like, I’ll just be playing the song and kind of singing random words, because I’m trying out different melodies, and then sometimes those words will stick or I’ll be like, “Oh!” It’s kind of cool — it’s like some subconscious thing. And if I end up singing kind of a cool line randomly, then I’ll go from there, and kind of riff off of that.
Max: Yeah, that’s exactly how I do it too. I’ll just sing random words until I’m like, “What sounds good with this melody?” I’ll just sing random stuff until the syllables sound cool with the melody, then I build from there.
Julia: Totally. I feel like certain words are easier to sing than others, too.
Max: I feel like it is weird, subconscious — I always end up kind of singing about the same stuff, even though I’m just trying to sing random things. Like, it always kind of ends up being the same type of song.
Julia: Yeah, for sure. I feel like there’s occasionally a song where I’m like, “Oh, I know what the song is going to be about.” Or maybe I’ll have something saved in my Notes app, like a fun little idea or just a drunken thought or something, and I come back to it like, “That’s a good line for a song.” But, god, it’s hard to remember because I really haven’t written a song in a while. [Laughs.]
Max: What’s going on?
Julia: Oh, I don’t know. I mean, I wrote a song back in January. That was probably the last time I wrote a song. But I think what it is is if I’m not actively practicing with other people, I feel like I am less motivated to write stuff. It feels more inspiring to be playing music with other people. Plus, I’ve been busy doing other things, like school and work. I’ll come back to it. I’m sure I’ll write another song one day.
Max: Well, we should jam sometime.
Julia: Yeah, that would be fun. It’s really just a lot of scheduling being in a band. Do you agree?
Max: Oh, definitely. I was going to say, I feel like 70% of being a band is just admin work.
Julia: Definitely. Just emailing so much… They don’t tell you that.
Max: I know, it kind of sucks. Like, I love being in a band, but I love the 30% of being in a band.
Julia: It definitely sucks a lot of the fun out of it. I mean, we even have a manager and I still feel like I do a lot of admin.
Max: Yeah. I was like, “We gotta hire a full time admin person.”
Julia: I bet you could get an intern.
Max: That’d be sick. Any young kid who wants to work for us, hit me up.
Julia: What other questions do I have for you… OK, “I Wish I Was A Rat” — where did you get the name from, and do you wish that you were a rat?
Max: I feel like that was kind of similar to what we were talking about, with just subconscious, “what sounds good?” It was really hard to come up with an album title. It’s always hard for me. Our previous two EPs are just statements, like Drop Me In and It’s Been a While. I feel like those were just things people said, and I was like, “Let’s just make that the album title.” This one, I wasn’t struck by anything anyone had said, so I was like, “Fuck, what are we gonna do?” [Laughs.] I was thinking statements, and then that just popped into my head. But I feel like that also comes from a subconscious place… I don’t know, I feel like on the album, there’s a lot of trying to shrink away from things. So I feel like that kind of follows that theme.
Julia: Of shrinking into a rat.
Max: Yeah, just trying to be small and anonymous sometimes. I don’t always feel that way, but I feel like when things are kind of crazy…
Julia: I feel that. It’s like, “Can I just take a week off from life?” It’s crazy that we’re just expected to just live out in the world with no break. [Laughs.]
Max: That is definitely bizarre, and it can be overwhelming sometimes. So I guess it’s kind of like that escapism in a way. I was thinking that for, like, three months, and finally I whispered it to Jordan [Mang] and he was like, “I like it.” Then I spent a month before I told anyone else, and then I brought it up at a band meeting and Lena was like, “Yeah, let’s do that.”
Julia: Little whispers.
Max: Yeah. It’s kind of embarrassing to put forward titles.
Julia: Yeah, any kind of title is embarrassing — unless you go with a joke title, which is what I end up doing a lot of the time. Were there any albums that you were listening to as you were writing this album, or recording or mixing it, that influenced you?
Max: I wrote the songs three years ago now, so I feel like from the time that I first started writing the songs to when we actually finished the record, my influences changed a lot over time. Just as far as the vibe of the record, we wanted something that had a similar aesthetic as Isn’t Anything by My Bloody Valentine — which is a lot of pop songs that just sound kind of fucked up.
Julia: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I can see that. There’s a lot of songs that are kind of shoegaze-y, heavy songs that I’m like, “This actually is a pop song.” Like, it has that pop hook, and it’s just the way that it was produced that makes it sound cool. I think you could make a song like that sound really bad if you recorded it differently.
Max: I think that’s what makes My Bloody Valentine so amazing to me. Shoegaze is obviously huge right now, but a lot of it I just don’t really connect with. But I think what makes them so good is they, first and foremost, just write a pop song that’s pretty simple, but is still just a good pop song.
Julia: They’ve got the hooks.
Max: Yeah, they’ve got the hooks, and then they make it sound really interesting and good.
Julia: I think sometimes people rely too heavily on the effects, but if your song sounds good on an acoustic guitar, you know you’ve got a good song.
Max: I definitely write — well, because I live in an apartment, mainly — I write all my songs just unplugged, and then figure out the vibe of it after.
Julia: Same. Oh, another question I have is: I heard that you moved into the Singles building. The apartment building from that movie.
Max: Yeah, rock history. I’m in the apartment that Bridget Fonda lived in.
Julia: Woah. How did you figure that out?
Max: I just watched the movie. She sticks her head out of the window. I think the interior is not the same — her apartment is not filmed here — but she sticks her head out of the window at one point, and it’s my apartment. Have you seen the movie?
Julia: Not in years, but maybe I should give it a rewatch.
Max: It’s definitely pretty bad, but it’s mostly filmed here, so it’s fun to just see across the street. And then at the very end of the movie, they zoom out and they show the whole neighborhood, which is kind of cool.
Julia: Is it still pretty recognizable?
Max: Definitely a lot of stuff has changed, but it’s still pretty recognizable. This building has not changed at all. It’s dilapidated right now, so they haven’t updated it since the movie probably. But the building is pretty funny — pretty much every day, there’s rock tourists who are dropped off in this black van and take pictures of the building.
Julia: Oh, wow. And they just leave them there?
Max: They just drop them off for, like, two minutes and they’ll take pictures and someone will be talking about how it was in the movie. And most people won’t know what they’re talking about, but they’re still taking pictures anyway.
Julia: That’s funny. I wonder if they also visit the Kurt Cobain bench.
Max: Oh, probably.
Julia: I should look into that. I wanna go on the rock tour.
Max: I would go too, for sure.
Julia: Yeah, you could just get a ride home. OK, what else can we talk about?
Max: What are you listening to lately?
Julia: You know what’s crazy is I haven’t really been listening to music. I mean, I really love your new record. It’s amazing. Not that many songs really have been hitting me lately, but “Window Room” really got me.
Max: Nice.
Julia: I also love how “Sinner” kind of sounds like blink-182.
Max: [Laughs.] That’s awesome.
Julia: I swear to god, the verses — if it were recorded differently, it could be a blink-182 song. I think that’s sick.
Max: I haven’t listened to blink-182 in a long time, but I did have that one song stuck in my head today, just because I was working and I was like, “Work sucks.” But no, it definitely wasn’t intentionally influenced by blink-182. But that’s cool.
Julia: Maybe I’m the only one who gets that vibe, but I’ve always thought it, so I just wanted to share. [Laughs.] And I’m a blink head. Well, any any last words?
Max: I don’t think so. This was fun. Thanks for doing this.
Julia: Of course. We’ll jam sometime.
(Photo Credit: left, Kirby Lochner; right, Eleanor Petry)
