young friend is the project of Vancouver-based musician Drew Tarves; David Marinelli is a musician and producer based in LA. David produced the new young friend record New Entertainment — which will be out November 6 via Nettwerk. Ahead of the release, the longtime collaborators got on Zoom to catch up about the making of it, and much more.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Drew Tarves: [motorcycle sound effects and New Entertainment] are so, so different. The records are like polar opposite.
David Marinelli: Yeah. We didn't write any of the new one together.
Drew: Yeah, but motorcycle sound effects we wrote in entirely together. Also, that one took, like, two-and-a-half years to finish.
David: Because that was the first time either of us made an album.
Drew: Yeah. And this one — I mean, I spent a few months on it before you came in, but from when you started working on the record to the time the record was done, it was like a month.
David: Which is how you gotta do it. It's just so much better that way.
Drew: Yeah, I think so too. I mean, obviously, I think about making the last record very fondly. That was a great experience, all the time we spent at the cabin, and all the time I spent at your place in Pasadena sleeping on your floor. That was a lot of fun. And I don't think that we could have made this one if we hadn't done that one the way that we did it. But I agree: Write the songs, teach them to the band, go into a studio for two weeks and record the whole thing. That's the method.
David: I had never produced a full rock album before. I didn't know how to use Pro Tools, and there were engineers there that taught me how to do it, and it was so much more fun to do it like that than just from the ground up…
Drew: The difference, I think, is you'd never produced a record like that, but you'd done a record in a studio with a band before.
David: Not really.
Drew: Didn't you guys do the Favors record before that?
David: Yeah, but that album was made in such a different way, where we built the beds all together but then we replaced everything after. There were a lot more overdubs and stuff. Also, that album still involved quite a bit of laptop. This one involved basically no laptop. There was one laptop thing. But there could have not been!
Drew: There could have not been.
David: But I'm an honest man, and I did bust out the laptop for one tiny sound on this album.
Drew: You busted out Suno and rewrote the whole record.
David: [Laughs.] Yeah, we did use Suno for a lot of it. So much faster… But, yeah, we used almost no plugins.
Drew: Yeah, everything was pretty analog.
David: Because we recorded it in this studio that had so much crazy gear from the ‘50s and ‘60s. If you look at all of these sessions, it's all real sounds. I didn't really actually play, but I would just be in the room, and I had a mic hooked up to a delay unit and I would just kind of turn the delay up and down as the songs went on.
Drew: It is cool being in the room and seeing the thing that the plugins are emulating. Where you'd pull up a certain compressor plugin, you're like, “Oh, well, we actually have the real one that was made in 1964 or whatever.”
David: It was so sick. And we were just so meticulous because I feel like anything you did in the room would be 10 times easier than doing it on the computer later. So the album is super unaltered from the way it was actually performed.
Drew: The only overdubs were vocals mostly, and then some guitar parts.
David: Even then, most of the backing vocals were just Suno. We’d just have Suno fill it out.
Drew: Yeah, because that's easy.
David: It was so fast… We’re kidding!
Drew: [Laughs.] I hope that gets included… But this was good. I want to do the next one like this, too. I wanted to do it as real as we could and use as little laptop as possible. And [the rise of AI] was definitely a big reason why we did it the way we did. You know, did it in a studio and did it live and had real people playing real instruments on everything. There's nothing that's manufactured or digital.
David: It's interesting — it's so much more expensive to do it that way, actually.
Drew: It's so much more expensive.
David: We got a grant from the government to do it, and we wouldn't have been able to do it without that.
Drew: Shout out to the Canadian government.
David: Shout out to the Canadian government, for multiple reasons. Carney's speech at Davos was while we were making the album, and I remember being like, “God damn it. Fuck… I'm going to prompt Suno about this when I get home.”
Drew: “I'm gonna make an AI pop art thing about this.”
David: Have you noticed that whenever somebody has an AI song, they're always screaming the whole time?
Drew: [Laughs.] I haven't noticed that.
David: It's so awesome. I mean, think about it — [sings,] “WE ARE CHARLIE KIRK!!! WE CARRY THE FLAME!!!” They're only ever screaming. Maybe they've got some real shit to let out.
Drew: Can we get Suno to sponsor this interview? [Laughs.]
I feel like everybody did a really good job. And I think that the space was such a big part of that. Obviously, David, you were the sixth member of the band. You hadn't heard any of the songs and you just jumped right in and picked it up and started doing your thing. That was amazing. I feel like the other unspoken members of the band are [assistant engineers] Annie [Kennedy] and Colton [Williams]. They made it so much easier for us. I can't even imagine what it would have been like to make this record without them, and Jay [Younger, engineer] too.
David: It was fucking awesome. And that room is so gorgeous. You can really hear it on a lot of these songs.
Drew: What was your favorite meal that we ate when we made the record?
David: Oh, definitely that sushi place.
Drew: Toshi.
David: Toshi! I love the food in Vancouver, I love Vancouver. And, wait — we gotta talk about the selvedge.
Drew: Oh, yeah. Before we started this record, I had committed to wearing one pair of jeans. The boys all got kind of interested in it, and there is a store that's maybe a 10 minute walk from where we recorded the album where you can buy selvedge denim, and everybody went and got a pair. We must have given this store, like, $1,500 or something like that because everybody bought the jeans. But I don't really remember why that happened.
David: I think we needed a morale boost.
Drew: So we were like, “We need to go buy jeans.”
David: I thought that if everyone bought $300 jeans, it would make everyone feel better.
Drew: And how are yours looking?
David: Great.
Drew: You got some fades coming in?
David: I do.
Drew: I’m getting fades on my selvedge jeans while I ride my Surron bike.
David: Generating shit on Suno you wouldn't believe…
Drew: I have one more thing to say about the album. David, I think you did a really good job. I mean, I was really excited about the music before you were involved, but then you came in and it was so seamless. I feel like you just went into your corner, set up your shop, and got right in. There wasn't a whole lot of talking about it or questions. It was so easy and just so immediate.
David: Oh, that's so nice. I think that the way I was thinking about it is you're capturing something like you would with a camera. So instead of telling somebody exactly how to pose, it's more interesting to just take a picture of someone… It was so easy and so beautiful to just see what the boys were doing.
Drew: Good job, man.
David: And you wrote a beautiful album.
Drew: Thanks, dude.
