Wishy and Drop Nineteens Ask Each Other Fresh Questions

Greg Ackell is a vocalist and guitarist for the pioneering shoegaze band Drop Nineteens; Nina Pitchkites is a vocalist and guitarist for the Indianapolis-based band Wishy. Wishy’s debut record, Triple Seven, just came out last week via Winspear, so to celebrate, the two got on a Zoom call (right after Nina finished up a guitar lesson) to catch up about it.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Greg Ackell: I never was interested in learning other people’s songs, and so the second that I was good enough [at playing guitar] — which isn’t that good, but it was good enough to write something on my own — that’s kind of where it stopped. I think the only way you really get better is if you really want to learn a guitar solo or Van Halen or something. But how’d the lesson go? 

Nina Pitchkites: It was good. It’s funny you say that because that’s always exactly the way I felt. I started taking guitar lessons when I was 12 and did it ‘til I was 15, but I barely practiced and I feel like my teacher didn’t go over the fundamentals, like the diatonic chords or anything. I didn’t learn that until just recently in the last few months. 

Greg: Well, if this interview is good for anything, it’s that I get to look up “diatonic chords” afterwards. So, thank you.

Nina: I feel a lot better about that now, because I was feeling stupid. I was like, Oh, my god, I can’t believe I don’t know this.

Greg: You have a record coming out, and I don’t, so I’ll try to lead this a little bit. I listened to “Love On The Outside.” That’s on the new one, right?

Nina: Correct.

Greg: It’s amazing. I read a piece today from Cam Lindsay that you did, and I’m aware of him because I just did interview with him. One of the things that I’ve realized after coming back after so long — for my band, there was a lot of interest in talking to us mainly because of that long interim, so I did a lot of interviews over this past year for Hard Light. As you’re embarking on doing these for your new album, do you find this happens where, you get asked a lot of the same questions? I try to make an effort to answer them differently, but it’s hard to. I’m wondering if you experience that, and how you handle trying to basically saying the same thing in different ways. 

Nina: I was actually just talking about this with my guitar teacher, because I was talking about how I was doing this and I was like, “I’m just hoping this person doesn’t ask the same questions that we always get.” [Laughs.] But to answer your question, people always ask, “How does being from Indiana inspire your music?” And I’m just like, “It doesn’t?” It’s a little bit of a loaded question.

Greg: Just say, “It inspires it more than Iowa.”

Nina: There you go. I mean, I’m not losing sleep over getting the same questions, but I’m kind of the same way, where I try to answer it differently, but also I just try to come from a place of being honest and not putting on a different tone or voice. Because I think something that can be easy to do is put on your professional pants when you’re doing these interviews and try to be very well spoken. I sometimes have fun with the questions, or subtly kind of make fun of the question — or not make fun of the question. But it’s a little monotonous getting asked the same questions over again. But also, I come from a place of just being grateful that I’m even having these interviews. 

Greg: Right. So speaking of journalism, the way I learned about your band was there was a Flood piece when our new album came out, and it was about some younger bands that were — “influenced” is maybe too strong a word, but that had things to say about Drop Nineteens. It was a really interesting piece for a number of reasons; I’m keenly unaware of what people think about us most the time. But most importantly, it was a way for me to learn about some new bands, and that’s how I learned about your band. So I did want to thank you for doing that, because It’s very flattering what you and Kevin [Krauter] had to say in that piece.

Tell me a little bit about the new album. I listened, and a lot of it reminds me of, in the best of ways, My Bloody Valentine’s album Ecstasy and Wine — which, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that one, but it proceeds Isn’t Anything, and I think it is the beginning of them starting to not being as derivative as they were when they first started out. It’s where they first developed that exchange of vocals, and this is something that my band does and something that your band does. Are you aware of that album at all?

Nina: I’m not actually, but I totally get that there’s that transition that happens from their earlier music into their later stuff.

Greg: I was hearing a lot of that on the new album. I hope I’m not coming across as a critic of your music, because this is another thing I realized recently is that when the reviews are good — which recently we’ve been lucky they’ve been pretty good, but we definitely went through a period between Delaware and this new one where we did a second record that didn’t get such great reviews. But what I realized about reviews is that for me, when the critic is saying something good about it, I usually disagree with what they think is good about the record. And conversely, when it’s a bad review, they’re always totally correct about what’s bad about it. I don’t know if that says more about me than it does about the critics… But what is your experience reading reviews? And how do you handle that?

Nina: Honestly, not to sound like a diva, but I don’t really read many reviews. I can’t even really remember what negative things people have had to say about us, because at the end of the day… I don’t want to say it’s not important to me, because it is to get constructive criticism. But also I’m like, This is my music. I didn’t make it for critics. I am a person that very much accepts constructive criticism, but I think the criticism we have gotten has been very production oriented, and I don’t really have much to do with that. I mean, a little bit here and there but…

Greg: Right, you’re not on the hook for that stuff. So in other words, if they don’t zoom in on something you feel responsible for specifically, you feel like you get away with it. That’s interesting.

Nina: I think some people have said, I’m sure, “You guys sound derivative.” Or I think there’s some YouTube comments being like, “This song sounds like My Bloody Valentine, I’d much rather just go listen to My Bloody Valentine”

Greg: Hey, fair enough. [Laughs.] 

Nina: I was flattered, personally, because that was never my goal. It’s never our goal to sound like another band. Whose goal is that? I mean, I’m sure it’s someone’s goal. But I just take it with a grain of salt. I kind of laugh it off. Most criticism is just silly jabs that are very surface level. 

Greg: I think that in my own experience, when we first started sounding like things that I could say it’s being derivative — that was actually the first moment where I felt like, This is getting good, actually. Because it was up to a level of stuff that I had heard out there. When you start sounding like someone could say you’re being derivative of something, by some measure, it’s a good starting point. Certainly in this genre that we’re in, everything is bouncing off of each other.

But at the end of the day, my voice sounds like it sounds, and the way Steve [Zimmerman] plays bass is the way Steve plays bass. You can try to sound like something, but ultimately whether you’re trying or not, you’re gonna sound like yourself. You can be inspired by things and it can lead you places, but whether you like it or not, you’re gonna sound like yourself. Let’s put it this way: I can’t sing like Brett Daniel from Spoon, orr Lou Barlow. Those are the voices that I covet, but it doesn’t matter. I can’t sound like them if I want to. So the fact that you sound like yourself, it’s a freeing thing because then you’re like, “Well, that’s what I can do then, and I’ve really got no business sounding like anything else anyway.” It’s the thing that will get you somewhere and make you at least conscripted to what it is you do sound like, and working with that and trying to do something interesting with that. That’s how I look at being compared to things. But I get this a lot, because in our genre — my band, I suppose, is considered early shoegaze, just based on clearly our age and how long ago we started. Does that make you modern shoegaze? 

Nina: When people call us shoegaze anymore, I almost feel like we’re not. We have elements for sure, but like you said, all art is derivative; all music to me is derivative of something. A lot of people call us shoegaze, but I feel like we’re more power pop, to be honest.

Greg: Yeah, I don’t mean to pigeon hole or place that moniker on you. I feel like my band similarly is an outlier in shoegaze. We’ve been described as such. There’s aspects of us that are very not like that genre, and I actually don’t listen to a lot of it. But It’ll be on my epitaph — “shoegaze” is gonna be on that fucking thing whether I like it or not.

Nina: [Laughs.] Right

Greg: So I’ve learned to not fight it myself. But I hear what you’re saying. 

Nina: It’s just such a umbrella term now. Kevin would agree with me — there’s so much that a lot of music heads are calling shoegaze now.

Greg: It’s infected everything. Or informed everything in a way, which is maybe a good thing. Because I mean, there’s something we like about woozy guitars, and melodies and understatedness. There’s good aspects to it. And then there’s tropes that you don’t want to fall into, [like] being too precious. But in all music, you can fall into being pretentious, I suppose.

Tell me a little bit about the dynamic between you and Kevin. I ask because clearly my band, there’s a dynamic between myself and Paula [Kelley]. In our case, I write all the lyrics and the melodies and Paula is, in the best of ways, an extension of a side of me; she’s very gracious in that way, that I get to write on both sides of my brain, and she fills that other side and indelibly offers her own quality to things, and her own contribution. But what is the dynamic between you and Kevin? How do you sort that stuff out?

Nina: Kevin is like a wizard when it comes to demos. He’s just always cranking stuff out, always making demos on his phone or on his computer and GarageBand. But everything he writes, it’s like, “Wow, this is the best song I’ve ever heard.” Whereas for me, it takes me a lot longer to craft a song. So it typically starts with sending me a demo or a voice memo, and him being like, “Hey, do you want to write lyrics and a melody over this? I can’t think of lyrics.” And vice versa. I’ve had a few songs where I’ll send him demos of me playing guitar and I’ll put a drum track and vocals, and then he’ll zhuzh it up and be like, “Maybe do this lyric instead of this lyric.” It hasn’t always been that collaborative. He started this band in 2021 after he had written a bunch of songs during the pandemic, and they were just demos and he taught me all the guitar parts, and then slowly over time, I started bringing my stuff to the table. And just now in the last six months, we’ve started fully collaborating on one song together, whereas it used to be he wrote a song, I wrote a song. But now we’re more putting our heads together, which is great. It’s been a long time coming. But yeah, we both do both things.

Greg: You guys are hitting the road soon, right?

Nina: Yeah, at the end of October we’re going to Europe. 

Greg: Oh, my god, incredible. Doing Europe — my band in the early ‘90s, we kind of hit there first. England and Europe is where we made our bones. And when we came back to the US, people knew us pretty much because we were on a show called 120 Minutes on MTV. But the wave started in England and Europe for us. Is your first time going?

Nina: Yeah. 

Greg: Wow. You should be proud of that. 

Nina: Yeah, I’m extremely excited.

Greg: I was very young going over there — I was 19, I think. But what was cool about it was, I was like, Oh, fuck, I got over here on my own. It wasn’t a family trip or something. To be over there because it’s something you did is something to take some pride in. So you should give yourself a pat on the back.

Nina: Thank you. I’m excited to go to all these places I’ve never been to. I’m excited for Germany. 

Greg:  Germany is cool. I remember a really good show — I think it was with PJ Harvey in Berlin or Hamburg. It was a sold out show, and strangely at that time, she was new, so it wasn’t like us opening for her. It was considered a triple bill, and there was kind of a rotation that would go around as we toured. That night, we were on earlier, but what’s cool about Germany was that the entire capacity audience waits outside for them to open the doors. All 2000 of those kids rushed in, and we were on in five minutes and it was just totally a full place. I also remember in Germany someone yelling out to us from the audience, “‘Kick The Tragedy’!” That’s a song of ours, and we never used to play that song live and so we weren’t going to play it. But one thing I realized on stage that night was that I thought of that title in pitch blackness in bed some night; hearing this across the world being shouted back to me by a stranger, after it was such a solitary thing thinking of it — it was a moving experience. You must experience that, kids in the front singing your lyrics. It’s kind of a surreal thing, no?

Nina: Yeah. I mean, again, I’m from Indiana; I never thought anyone would listen to anything I make. I had a solo project, which I still kind of have, that I used to play around in Bloomington, where I went to college. No one would be there, and I was never expecting anyone to know my lyrics or my music. And now there’s been times where people are singing along, and it is very surreal. But I also wish I could be more proud of myself when that happens, because sometimes it just washes over me for some reason. I want to be more appreciative.

Greg: Yeah.

Nina: But it is surreal. Maybe it washes over me because it’s surreal.

Greg: It washes over you because it’s shoegaze.

Nina: [Laughs.] Good one.

Greg: [Laughs.] I’m teasing. But I might have a bit of wisdom here: My band went away for very long time, and I was very comfortable with that. I wasn’t missing it at all; 30 years went by and I was very content with what we had done. And by the way, we didn’t become the Rolling Stones. I mean, we had some measure of success, but certainly not…

Nina: Superstar status.

Greg: Quite the contrary. But I did feel very proud all those years, and that was one of the reasons I was so content with leaving it where it was. What I’m trying to get at is, it might be the kind of thing — this giving yourself credit — that happens later in life, when you put it down. It can be something you can look back on and be proud of, perhaps

Nina: Absolutely. I’m trying to enjoy these moments too, because I know that these are going to be the good old days.

Greg: This has been really great. It’s a pleasure meeting you, and I can’t wait to see you guys out there. When are you playing in New York?

Nina: We are playing in New York on November 20 at Baby’s.

Greg: I’m there.