by Patrick Pilch (@pratprilch)
As one might guess, 2020 did not go as planned for Mamalarky. The Atlanta by Austin/LA quartet spent months on the road with acts like Cherry Glazer, Faye Webster, White Denim and more, gearing up before a would-have-been busy year of touring with the release of their self-titled debut. The band’s Fire Talk full length is a whirring fusion of hook-laden garage rock and glowing psychedelia, balancing Austin’s gyrating psych roots and LA’s noise-coated pop overtones. Mamalarky may have not played their new album to a live audience with pandemic restrictions in place, but the once-upon-a-time road dogs have made due with this whole livestream situation. With three members relocated to Georgia, Mamalarky have adopted a new creative quarters, an open space for sustained musical bouts between Livvy Bennett (guitar/vocals), Noor Khan (bass/vocals) and Michael Hunter (keys). We caught up with Mamalarkey in their fresh dental dwellings about their creative process, missing tour, being friends with your bandmates and Leonard Cohen’s “touring curtains.”
photo: Sara Catherine
Post-Trash: You all just moved to Atlanta, is that right?
All: Yes.
PT: You’re there now?
All: Yes.
PT: I heard it’s a 1900s dentist office?
Noor Khan: Oh my god, yes. That’s what we think. That’s what our landlord told us.
Livvy Bennett: I’ve been hearing about people finding teeth in the walls of old dentist offices in Georgia, specifically. I did.
Michael Hunter: Was it from Ghost Dimension?
LB: No, I feel like I heard it from a podcast. I’m trying to find dentist stuff in here. I went up in our attic last week and was looking through a box of handwritten notes from the 1920s. It’s all Sunday school stuff.
NK: I’m not going to rule out the teeth thing though, because recently I was mounting something in my room. I’d hammer in the nail and I’d hear things crumbling down. Could be drywall, but it could be teeth. We don’t know.
LB: People used to put razor blades in a slot in their bathrooms.
NK: To dispose of them?
LB: Yea, back in the olden times. People remodel their houses and find hundreds of old razorblades.
PT: That’s crazy.
LB: It’s unnerving. We don’t know what’s in these walls.
NK: I don’t want to think about that.
LB: I like to think about what has happened in this house. What’s the best day in this house? There’s probably so many memories. A family grew up here.
MH: Generations, probably.
LB: Yea, our landlord made it sound like generations grew up here. So that’s really interesting.
PT: Multi-generational dentistry.
LB: Apparently they preformed dentistry in this house, in our jam room.
PT: I feel old-timey doctors and dentists were always like, “Well, we’re just going to have to take it out.”
NK: Science was so untrustworthy in the sense that they were believing everything people before them thought. I’d always think about this in biology classes when scientists would disprove things previous scientists thought. I’m sure medicine and dentistry was the same thing. You never know what they were doing in these dentist and doctors offices.
MH: They had ether. Lots of ether.
PT: Definitely casually handing out a lot more dangerous and now illegal drugs. Which, I wonder, in the future, if people will wonder why we gave out so much Xanax now.
NK: Probably, yea.
PT: Did dog goggles recently show up at your house?
LB: What!? Where did you see this information?
PT: Social media.
LB: [laughs] I forget I share these things. Someone has continually been shipping me things. It’s all random. I don’t know who it is. They sent me a bunch of different colored lanyard things. It’s addressed to me, sent from Amazon. I don’t have an Amazon account. I don’t know what that’s about. I hope whoever is sending the packages is not aware of this. I hope it’s all just a fluke.
NK: You haven’t gotten anything here, right?
LB: No, but every so often my old roommate in LA will be like, “you just got this.” We didn’t find a use for the dog goggles.
PT: Ok, to switch gears - Noor and Livvy, you met via Tinder. And Livvy, you’ve been playing music with Dylan since your band geek days in middle school?
LB: Yes. I’ve known Dylan since I was eleven. We were in percussion together, really dorking out for a long time. It wasn’t until after we graduated that we started actually playing music together. Michael also went to our high school. I’ve known Dylan since middle school and I’ve known Michael since high school. We were just playing a lot of the same shows with similarly amateur high school stuff.
MH: Yea, around Austin.
LB: After that I moved to LA and I was playing a lot of shows by myself. It was actually kind of cool. I don’t like playing solo shows but the community there was really receptive and nice. It was a really good time. Michael played synth bass for us for two or three years. And we said, “whoever is going to play bass with us has to be able to hang with us. They have to be sweet, they have to be funny.” Literally a checklist in our heads. We met up with Noor and we were like, “yea, we’re going to be jamming for a while.” We had a show the next month.
NK: I think we met in September and the first show we played was in November. We met and I was out of town for two weeks. When I came back we just practiced constantly. We tried harmonies. I had never sung and played an instrument before. I’d never played in a band before.
LB: I got crazy goosebumps singing harmonies with Noor for the first time. I had never had that experience, either, singing something I had written with two voices. And it clicked really quickly. I perceived flack from being on Tinder to look for a bassist. That’s kind of shitty. People are out there looking for love and I was just like, “if you play bass, hit me up.” Kind of specific, but I heard from a lot of people.
PT: And that first show you played in November together was, to quote your press kit, “at a memorial in a wristwatch factory that was next to an in use half pipe.” I understand the second half of that sentence but can you tell me about the first?
LB: Someone passed away, we didn’t know this pulling up to the show. It was in this warehouse where they assemble and store watches. This brand, I believe, has a tight connection with the skate community.
NK: It was in Pomona. Someone involved in the skate scene, I believe their partner passed away. It was a celebration/memorial service held for her.
LB: It was so packed. Everyone really showed up. It was a touching show. People were so happy. It was cool, they had pictures up of them. They had a massive half pipe. Is that what it’s called, Noor? She is the skater of the band.
NK: I’m not that good at skating. But yes, there was a halfpipe right next to the stage. I had to turn my back to not get distracted, this is my first show with this band.
LB: There were skateboards flying toward the stage at certain points that night. It could have been so bad. We could have really gotten clocked but it didn’t happen. And it was a really good show.
PT: Have there been any other unique or fun places you’ve played at since?
LB: We got to play at Meow Wolf with Jerry Paper. That was so cool because when you’re performing, they let you access the whole exhibit with no one else in there.
PT: Is it a museum?
NK: It’s not a museum, in the traditional sense.
LB: It’s like an interactive land. Like, you could open up a refrigerator and you’d be taken into a space ship. It’s really cool. Cooler than any haunted house.
PT: Is it in a building?
LB: Yea, it’s in a really big building. The whole crowd of people that came were truly freaky people. That was cool.
NK: Any other ones?
LB: We’ve definitely played some extremely strange shows before. Have you ever heard of the co-ops in Austin? It’s a string of venues in peoples houses. There’s a party every year called Food Orgy. Everyone wears togas. People are literally having orgies. They’d have wine through the longest tube. I’m not a drinker so I don’t know what it’s called.
NK: Beer bong.
LB: Yes, a beer bong. So a massive beer bong being funneled down multiple stories. People had fruit soaked in alcohol and they’d be feeding it to each other. That was a pretty memorable show. We also got eggs thrown at us from a frat house situation behind us. They were like, “You suck!” That was the most heckling I’ve gotten in my life. Someone in the crowd got pelted with an egg and they got a black eye.
PT: Did they hard boil the eggs or something?
MH: They were throwing them from the fourth story of the building.
PT: Dudes rock.
[laughs]
PT: I know you all work in the industry and play in other bands. Livvy I know you play with Cherry Glazzer and Noor I know you tour managed for Faye Webster. My girlfriend loves Faye Webster and I told her I was interviewing you. She says hello.
NK: Yea! I also played triangle on those tours!
PT: Did you? Wow she’s going to be excited about that.
LB: We’re all kind of industry nerds. Now is the weirdest time to be tour heads. Oh my gosh, I’m getting our cat. Here she is. [shows cat]
PT: Aw, hello. What’s her name?
LB: This is our foster cat. Her name is Butler. We all came around into the touring world at the same time. Michael started touring with White Denim right after we recorded our EP. I was working in every pocket of music industry I could. I started touring March of 2019. It’s cool. It’s really nice to have that backlog of experience when you’re figuring things out as a new band.
NK: Touring is fun because you’re meeting all these people. If you make a friend on the road you can always hit them up again. The music industry is special. We’re all in it because we love it, you know? People are down to hook it up. It’s fun to be out and meeting people.
PT: Speaking of tour, Livvy you said “Schism Trek” explores what life looks like when you’re finding your way without the comfort of your friends beside you. When the band came back together to start playing again after touring, was there a recognizable difference?
LB: Oh yeah, there were lots of recognizable differences. I think it was strange to have been put in such a high gear touring band, as a band saying, “one day we’ll be able to tour.” Basically being handed that experience with a different group. More than anything I was like, “wow, I really miss my bandmates.” I really missed the little family that we have. I feel like when I’m touring with other bands I’m a hired gun. It’s really special to completely be yourself with people. And be like, “I gotta poo poo.” [laughs] I feel like if I’m touring with a band as a hired gun, I feel a little bit less likely to say “I gotta poo poo.” So that’s what that song’s about. [laughs]
MH: It was also last minute.
LB: I was writing a lot at one point. I was touring and going to Guitar Centers, or the European version of a Guitar Center. I’d be like, “I have a song idea and I don’t have a guitar on me. I’m just going to write this out before we play our show. “Schism Trek” was one of those songs.
PT: I know another one of your songs, “Fury,” came from a sound check?
LB: Yes. It’s still weird it happened that way. But when you’re touring you don’t get to play as much music as you want to. As in, you don’t get to sit with your instrument in a quiet room, think of something and explore that idea for hours.
MH: Really interesting stuff can come out of a sound check when you haven’t had a creative moment for weeks or months on end.
LB: Sometimes it’s a lot better to be like, “here this is.” I think more than anything is it makes you really thirsty to write music again.
PT: This is from another Tweet. You talked about the difference between sitting down and trying to make a good song, versus just being honest and writing a song. Could you talk more about that?
LB: That’s something we talk about every day. It’s a big epiphany for me. The first album, I don’t think I really had that fully realized. Halfway through I was kind of realizing. Especially now, in quarantine, we have so much time to be writing, demoing and just coming up with new material. We’ll have no ideas at all, like, “I’m in the mood to try to track a demo.” From there, we’ll just come up with something on the spot. That’s how most of the songs that I like these days are being born.
MH: We have so many songs that we demoed where we never played through the entire song until we were recording it. You end up with something that you might not have been what you’d playing if you tried to talk through it and come up with song structure.
LB: I’m an over-thinker, I can hear the energy of my gears turning like, “let me get the best performance possible out of this,” verses playing something and being like, “alright, here this is.” I want to play honestly and genuinely. I would encourage anyone to try that process and to let go of trying to write the best song ever, because that doesn’t exist. And you’ll have more fun if you’re like, “fuck it, here it goes.”
PT: You’ve been sitting on this record for a while. I know artists have mixed feelings, not necessarily bad ones, about their record finally coming out during this time. How does it feel for you?
LB: It’s definitely weird. The three of us, specifically, are tour heads. We’ve had the album in the back of our mind, throughout the whole process of touring, that that was going to happen this year. Obviously that’s very sad, but I don’t know. Humans are adaptable. I feel like we’re just rolling with it now. Doing live streams. It doesn’t feel that weird. More than anything it’s a very surreal time for the industry. I think we find ourselves speculating when and what and how things will happen in the future. I think we’re also making the time to celebrate, like, we made this album, it’s coming out and people are going to listen to it. I feel like I’m the kind of music nerd who just listens to bands’ albums in my room by myself. People can still do that.
NK: People are still doing that, which is what is really reassuring. No matter what’s going on, even though we’re putting this album out amidst Donald Trump is disputing the election results, people are still going to listen to music. People are still going to listen to the album. People are still craving new music. That’s never going to change.
PT: I know the band has been doing a few virtual bills throughout COVID. What has been your favorite so far? And from an artist and industry-person perspective, what seems to be working?
LB: That’s a good question. We might have a little more insight on that in a few weeks. What did we do the Prince cover for?
MH: Fair Fight.
NK: It was benefiting Fair Fight.
LB: We did a Prince cover for a live stream benefiting Fair Fight. It was so cool. It was the first song Noor sang lead on which made it legendary, for all. It was really stacked, there are a lot of cool artists on there. Every live stream we do, we figure out more as to what we want to do with it. I feel like there’s so many things, in being a musician, like, “I became a musician because I like to play guitar. Not because I like to edit music videos or know how to make promo assets, or whatever.” But along the way, you learn those things, and they become part of the fun. What’s working for us is doing silly live streams that aren’t music related. Even talking to you, it’s like, “Wow I’m interacting to a human being. This is so fun. I love this.” That’s why people go to shows. I think we’re trying to provide a friend group for people stuck with family, or people who have been really isolated.
PT: Can you tell us more about the cover art from the “Hero” single and Leonard Cohen?
LB: I built a fake human out of dollar store outfits. I had the outfit, the head the hands. I had it all. I needed to fill the body with something and I had these curtains at my house. The landlord, who lived behind the house, came in one day and was like, “what is that?” I was like, “That is Hero. That is our friend.” He lived on our couch for months.
NK: Not the landlord, Hero.
LB: I filled him with the curtains from the back of the house, and my landlord was like, “those are Leonard Cohen’s touring curtains.” I didn’t get more information than that.
MH: Touring curtains.
LB: Maybe they were onstage, maybe they were in his van. They were big red curtains. Maybe they drew across and he stepped out and played. That’s a weird part of that cover I sometimes forget about.
PT: The record was passed through a few friends on the production front. You worked with Daniel McNeill, your roommate Joey Oaxaca for home recordings and you wrapped things up with Jim Vollentine. Can you talk about the influence of each producer?
LB: Joey probably recorded the most things because he lived with me. A lot of those songs were supposed to be demos and we built them out together. He’s a really good producer to work with if you want to have a lot of room to explore. That’s coming from someone who lived with him and I could work with him at any time. I feel that both of us were building our production knowledge and style together. I feel we coproduced things together really well. We would record in our living room and it was a cool time, for that reason. Coming home after work and hashing things out from them. Joey is also from Austin. Daniel McNeill was the engineer who recorded our first EP, and then “Fury” and “You Make Me Smile.” He had a good backlog of knowledge of what we wanted. He moved to LA as well, I think he was ready to experiment. Austin has that psych, roots rock kind of vibe. LA has that permeating pop influence, regardless of genre, plus a noisier, fuzzier rock sound than Austin. We were messing with both those things.
MH: He really captured each one of those, respectively, on “Fury” and “You Make Me Smile.”
LB: Jim came in and cleaned it all up and glued it all together. We recorded some things with him. We recorded with Ian Salazar, really talented guy. We recorded it at Radio Milk, which is White Denim’s home base for you, Michael. All the people we worked with were really cool about letting us explore things. I used to work at a recording studio and sometimes shit gets weird.
PT: Which one?
LB: It was called Orb Recording Studio in Austin. It’s a very pop centric studio. Big names would come by during SXSW and record there. I never have worked with both a producer and an engineer. It’s always been one person wearing both hats. We were able to share the producer role, and sometimes the engineering role. It was really fun and collaborative. We never sat down and were like, “yeah we’re recording an album.” It was like, “we’re recording music, it became an album.”
PT: Did any of those home recordings with Joey make it to the final mix?
LB: Yes, most of them. Most of the basic tracks are recorded in our living room. But “Sing Along” was entirely recorded at Michael’s old place.
NK: “Schism Trek” and “You Make Me Smile.” We did some at Studio 22.
LB: Froth and Sasami recorded new music there. It’s just a small, hot and tiny box.
MH: Yeah the ceilings are like, five or six feet tall.
LB: Very short. It feels like a mobile unit. A lot of it was recorded in our house. I’m assuming whatever comes next is going to be the same.
MH: Recorded in the dentist’s office.
LB: I burned myself on a tray of vegan chicken tenders before this interview.
PT: Oh, ow, sorry.
LB: And I covered it in honey at Noor’s advice.
PT: Yea? Is that a thing?
NK: Yea it really helps. Honey is antimicrobial. It acts as Neosporin but it’s also extremely moisturizing so it will prevent the burn from drying out. You know when you get a burn it will crust over? It heals two times faster if you put honey straight on it.
MH: Then you can lick it off.
LB: I’m going to.
PT: I’m going to try that.
NK: It really helps, every time I’ve gotten a burn.
LB: I just wanted to explain that because I keep doing this. [Livvy picks at burned elbow]
PT: Oh, I didn’t notice, haha. Ok. What were the most important nonmusical influences for this record?
MH: The Garden of Earthly Delights, do you know that painting?
PT: Oh yea, the Bosch painting. Hell yea.
MH: Yea, that’s always just a background influence.
LB: That painting reminds me a little of Jake Tobin’s art, which we used for the record.
MH: Yea, that’s true. They’re really going in a similar direction. That painting is always in the background somewhere.
LB: I feel like a sense of chaos and excitement is the first album for us. It was recorded at such an eventful time for all of us. A lot of it was between tours and super spur the moment recording experiences.
MH: Lots of travel probably plays a part.
PT: What is everybody’s favorite Deerhoof record?
LB: Friend Opportunity is mine. I think I’m the biggest Deerhoof head in this band.
MH: I think so.
LB: Greg, the drummer has a super condensed kit, but he’s one of the best performers I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve always wanted to have some way to collaborate with them. I feel like I probably emailed them in 2018 about being an opener.
PT: Keep pokin’ them. I think they’d be receptive to that.
LB: We’ll see when shows come back.
NK: Then we’ll be talking about them in every interview.
PT: Ok, so tour. Can you tell us about some of the jokey songs you’d come up with on tour? Do you have a favorite you can remember?
NK: There are so many hilarious ones. What are the most memorable ones?
LB: “Tonto, I Respect Your Vibe” is really good.
NK: We would just pass exits and be like, “haha, that’s a funny word.”
MH: “Lake Oswego.”
LB: “Lake Oswego” is really good.
NK: Apparently we’ve been saying that wrong. I heard someone pronounce it differently. There’s an exit in Washington called Lake Oswego. It’s literally a lake. But when we’d pass it we’d be like, “Lake Osweeegoooo.” There was another spot in Arizona and we passed by something called Tonto National Park. Me and Dylan, nonstop, were like, “Tonto I respect your vibe/Tonto do you want to get high?/Tonto. [laughs]
PT: I like that.
LB: There’s a lot more.
NK: We really like to sing “I Want to Dance with Somebody” and add four part harmonies to it.
LB: I think a lot of our singing moments are born from the need to stay awake. We feel weird and we’re so bored. I’m sure every band has some version of that.
NK: On the Faye Webster tour we were driving through the west coast. You know how the bugs get on the windshield and it gets really gross? We’d do this thing where we’d say, “What kind of bug?” And we’d go around the van and everyone would have to say a bug and you couldn’t repeat it.
PT: Nice.
NK: Like, “What kind of bug/a fly/What kind of bug?/A cicada/What kind of bug/grasshopper!” We’d do that for so long.
PT: Reminds me of “concentration, sixty four.”
NK: One time, and this was kind of dangerous because Dylan was driving, but we pulled up GarageBand on the iPhone and passed it around. But the car was moving and we’d be fucking up. We made a really bad song.
LB: Who has that?
NK: Dylan, definitely.
LB: I’m going to get a hold of that.
PT: Will there ever be a Mamalarky tour EP?
LB: If we tour again, fuck yea. Are you saying there’s demand? We’ll give you a maybe.