The New MILLY Record Reminds Jeff Martin (Idaho) of His First Time Hearing Nevermind

Jeff Martin fronts the seminal slowcore band Idaho, from LA; Brendan Dyer fronts the also-LA-based band MILLY. MILLY’s latest record, Your Own Becoming, is out this Friday on Dangerbird, so to celebrate, the two met up to talk recording, songwriting, and more. 
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Jeff Martin: So, I finally listened to the whole record of yours, and I have some questions. Did you record it in a big studio?

Brendan Dyer: Um, yes and no. 

Jeff: It was different places?

Brendan: Yeah, two different places. We tracked everything live as a three piece at EastWest [in LA].

Jeff: That’s awesome. That has a history, that place.

Brendan: Yeah. We were totally convinced by the dude who produced our record [Sonny DiPerri] to do it there, because he works out of it. We did it in Room 2, and Room 2 was the Rick Rubin room — he did lot of those Red Hot Chili Peppers records there.

Jeff: Oh, really? With the record, I thought the structure was really cool — that the songs went on this little journey. They almost have a kind of shape to them… I mean, I have to admit, a lot of Idaho stuff tends to be very A-B-A-B-C. “There’s the part, and there’s the other part.” They don’t switch up very much. I end up creating that illusion later with overdubs and Pro Tools. But it really feels like you guys worked out the structure of the songs.

Brendan: Oh, we did it, like, a hundred times from the top. And a lot of it was just talking about the songs as a group. But it’s funny you say that, though, because I feel like with Idaho, there are songs I could think of that do this thing that I have never done, but that I think is cool — a song like “Fuel” does it, and “Across the Sky” — where the verses are kind of faster, and then it goes into this sort of half time thing. You know what I mean? 

Jeff: Yeah, yeah. 

Brendan: That doesn’t feel too A-B-A-B.

Jeff: That’s true. I’ve always liked to go into half tempo. Then there was a thing where tempo really became fluid and you played around it a lot. John Berry, who I started the band with, wasn’t really a drummer, but we both played the drums on that record. We got the guy from the Swans, Vinnie Signorelli, to come and play on some songs, so we had some real good drums, but—

Brendan: I didn’t even know that. That’s cool.

Jeff: Yeah, John loved the Swans.

Brendan: I was gonna say, I remember you telling me this years ago, but I think you had said it was funny that you were getting put into this slowcore, Red House Painters, Low thing. It seemed like you were more into goth music, right?

Jeff: Yeah, and it was kind of an accident. It’s just the combo of John’s influence, and then me wanting to make it a little bit more cool, classically — to give it this mood, to give it this gravitas, like it’s happening in a cathedral or something. But there was that goth thing. And then even the Cocteau Twins — we met Robin Guthrie, at the Troubadour, weirdly enough, and he was going to produce the second record.

Brendan: No way!

Jeff: And he had his little tongue ring, and he loved Year After Year. It didn’t work out, just logistically. But there was that weird little goth streak in Idaho. We went to play in London, and all these kids came and they looked like they were coming to see The Cure or something.

Brendan: Yeah. I was going to say, because you could have easily, I feel like at that point, fit into the whole 4AD thing.

Jeff: Yeah, I see that. Then after I stopped working with John, it kind of goes away. So it was John — just the way you felt when John was in the room, there was this heaviness, and you wanted to do this Wagnerian, big, powerful thing. I still have a little bit of that going on, the sort of deeper voice. But, the drum thing — there is a thing where it sounds like you’re slowing down, but you’re not, and it’s that you’re late on the snare, but then you catch back up, and it’s this kind of falling-apart drum. 

Your record is exciting because it really has an energy to it. It reminds me a little bit of when I first heard and heard Nevermind. It has this urgency and this immediate kind of satisfying flavor to it. 

Brendan: It’s funny you say that, because that album was a huge touchstone for this album. Not from a songwriting standpoint at all, but from a work ethic standpoint. We kept referencing how Nevermind was like a band in a room — a three-piece just like we were when we were tracking it — and you could tell that they played those songs a million times, combed over them. We really were trying to trim the fat on every song on this album. So yeah, that was definitely like a North Star in a weird way. 

Jeff: I definitely got that vibe. And I was getting weird references, like I was listening to “Living Days Again,” and I don’t know why I got a Red House Painters thing. Did you like them a lot?

Brendan: Yeah, they’re one of my favorite bands. [Laughs.]

Jeff: Yeah, it’s some weird thing you do with your voice.

Brendan: Dude, I might have ripped it from a song. That’s the thing.

Jeff: [Laughs.] I don’t think so. Did [Sonny] mix it through a mixer, or did he do it in the box?

Brendan: Well, we used the big board at EastWest to track through, but he mixed the album at his own home studio. 

Jeff: I was just wondering because I mixed my last record kind of in the box — I stemmed out all the channels and went through a summing box, because my old producer swears that the computer crushes things down. But I’m trying to embrace a lot of the newer ways of doing things, because I’m such a holdover of the old days with the tape deck…

Brendan: We tracked to Pro Tools at EastWest, but the difference between the RAWs from when we were at EastWest to when it was finished — he didn’t do too much to the album, because we were trying to make it a raw rock album… This was the album where I feel like I let go. We started writing it on New Year’s Day of 2023. The three of us went in and were like, “We’re going to start to write the record, and it’s a band record. Everyone’s writing their own parts.” And obviously we could make suggestions and stuff like that. But everything before then was really all over the place in terms of, I would play bass and guitar on songs, and some stuff I’d play fucking everything. It’s cool to have that, but I was really gravitating towards, “We’ve arrived. We all know how to play our instruments well, let’s just encourage each other to do the best job that we can do.”

Jeff: Yeah, I can hear that. There’s a cohesion to it, and it really has that sort of synergistic [feeling] when everybody’s holding their part down. I hope to do that with the next [Idaho record], because Robby [Fronzo] as a fan reached out to me during COVID and just kind of offered to help. Lapse is the where we experimented and discovered and how he can be part of the Idaho thing, and now he very much has the four string guitars. He played me a thing today in “Fuel” tuning that’s just gorgeous, and it’s a fricking great song. Idaho really does need that, where I work with another guitar player, and now 20 years later, I think I have it again. 

So when you tracked, you played it just the way I’m hearing it? Those were straight through takes?

Brendan: Yeah, straight through like that. 

Jeff: Lots of takes, or you guys pretty much nailed it?

Brendan: Some songs we nailed in, like, three tries. We did do it to a click — just the drummer had the click going, and that’s how we rehearsed it too.

Jeff: I’m not so against clicks. I thought they are kind of the devil, but half of the songs on Lapse are done to a click. Because without them they just didn’t… I don’t know, we’re used to hearing pop rock be consistent. And you get good at playing around it — there’s a lot of room to swing around it.

Brendan: Yeah. And honestly, we assigned that to the drummer. When we were writing the songs and then rehearsing them before recording, he was the only one who had the click in his ears. So we would just rely on him. We just let him lead most of it. 

Jeff: That’s good. It means you’re really listening to him.

Brendan: There’s songs where he’ll, at parts, disregard the click when there’s slowdowns, and then come back and meet the click.

Jeff: Really? 

Brendan: He was doing a lot of shit like that. I mean, I think I’m a decent drummer, but I couldn’t do something like that. 

Jeff: Yeah. It’s funny how we can get away with drums not being real drummers sometimes, but a good drummer is worth their weight in gold… But it’s funny, when I first heard you guys, I heard a bit of the band Failure. I’m not hearing it so much anymore.

Brendan: I mean, they’re an influential band for us. 

Jeff: I hear them a lot more in you than I hear Idaho. 

Brendan: Although it’s funny, Idaho was definitely an influence on this record — even though some of it, I feel like, was like if Idaho went in a Failure direction.

Jeff: [Laughs.] I’ve always wanted to be heavier, but I don’t really have it in me. And the four string guitars just don’t have those deep strings, so you’ve got to be a little bit more playful. The first time, though, [listening to] this record, there were some guitar parts that resonated with me — I’m not going to say that this is the Idaho [influence], but I was like, Oh, man, I wish I wrote that harmony. So something resonated with me where it felt like something that I wish I had done. 

Brendan: That’s cool to hear.

Jeff: Yeah. And that big room is so evident in the record. It’s so great to record in a large space.

Brendan: Yeah. There’s a reverb chamber there — we went into it and recorded handclaps inside of it. But we would bounce everything to it. We don’t use reverb that much, but when you do hear it— 

Jeff: Oh, I thought it was a spring reverb on the guitar.

Brendan: It’s the chamber.

Jeff: It’s so much better than a digital reverb. It’s so real. It sounds vintage, in a way.

Brendan: It’s funny, because you’re just in some shitty room — it’s literally like a box. But it’s the same one that they used on Pet Sounds. 

Jeff: Oh, my gosh!

Brendan: So we thought it was kind of holy.

Jeff: Do you like the Beach Boys?

Brendan: Yeah, big time. I mean, it doesn’t influence or inform me at all, but I can very much say I love that band.

Jeff: Yeah, me too. I was late coming to them, but wow, when he was at his peak, that stuff is from another world. It’s weird. At the surface, it seems kind of straight and traditional, but there’s this underlying demon there. 

Brendan: It’s kind of psychotic, yeah. 

Jeff: Something that I noticed, too, is you’re very good at — your voice, you don’t push it into distortion ever. And your music is so tough, you’d think that you’d growl a little bit. It’s got a force behind it, but it’s very clean. Have you tried to sing out more?

Brendan: I just think I’m too chill for it or something. 

Jeff: [Laughs.] Yeah, it might be. I have a nervous kind of angsty energy, and so sometimes I really want to belt, even though it might not work that well.

Brendan: Pavement’s one of my all time favorite bands — he definitely yells occasionally, but I feel like for the most part, it’s very lower register.

Jeff: He doesn’t have a distortion though when he yells. It’s kind of like a white guy yelling.

Brendan: Which is what it would sound like if I did it. I could never get that push. But one of the things that Sonny was really instrumental in was all the vocals on the album, he really coached me through those, and I really leaned into different characters in a way. I’m using that term lightly, but… Autolux, their vocals were really inspiring across the album. If you listen, it’s very controlled and hushed, but they also know how to infuse a hushed vocal with attitude. Which I think is kind of similar to what you’re saying, where I’m never breaking out the push in the vocal, but it’s still kind of able to push with the heavy shit.

Jeff: You can do it just with a subtle twist. I finally took vocal lessons, like, 13 years ago before a tour in ‘08, and it was weird.

Brendan: I’ve thought about doing that.

Jeff: It’s really good. All the experts will say — and it doesn’t mean anything with rock music, because most of my favorite singers aren’t good singers — but if you’re singing louder than a speaking voice, then you’re hurting your voice.

Brendan: Right.

Jeff: So that’s good. You’re lucky, because you’re not going to hurt your voice. I did a lot of screaming, weirdly enough, in the ‘90s, and I actually noticed that — it’s either age or there’s a constriction I have from what I did, but I don’t have quite the same openness as I did. 

Brendan: I have a question. Well, it’s not as much a question as maybe just a comment, but I feel like when I listen to Idaho, new or old, there’s a desolate feeling to it. An example of that would be the song “Sweep.” When I listen to that song — and I listen to your music a lot at work, and I’ll have these noise canceling headphones in, and it really does pull me somewhere else. You have a lot of ties to the desert — I know you recorded there — do you feel like that sort of open, vast space is influential on Idaho? I feel like it’s the perfect music to, like, stare at a sunset or just really observe everything around you and let it speak for itself. It’s really thoughtful.

Jeff: Yeah. I mean, I’m using it as a way to expand my consciousness into more of a place where I’m not Jeff Martin anymore. I’m bringing in a feeling and a scene and a space. It’s often a large space; it’s not so much about a relationship or this or that. Or even if it is, I definitely do think about the place that I’m seeing when putting myself in that moment in that song. So there’s an expansiveness that I’m trying to capture in a way. I mean, it’s hard to describe…

Brendan: Well, that’s a good word, expansive. That’s how I feel when I listen to it. Because when I’m writing a song sometimes, or even just playing my guitar, I feel like I’m mentally somewhere else completely. If I’m really freeing myself, allowing myself to just play, these images come into my head — I’m thinking of my hometown that I grew up in, or I’m thinking about a lot of different things.

Jeff: There’s a lot of — I don’t like the word “magic,” but there’s a form of alchemy where you’re weaving together these different elements to make them much bigger than the sum of their parts. And sometimes it really works. But it’s hard to describe that place where you go when it’s working, and you sit and you let the song come in. It’s very hard to pin down what’s happening. But you get into this flow and the vibrations all kind of work together and you come up with this sculpture, this sonic thing that just works. And often it can be transportive. 

Brendan: I think that’s the right way to put it.

(Photo Credit: left, Gilbert Trejo; right, Matthew Reamer)