by Joe Gutierrez (@phantomshred)
Washington D.C.'s BRNDA excel at concocting jerky boisterous post-punk like the B-52s and Talking Heads, calling to mind contemporary bands like Omni and Parquet Courts. Yet their identity and technique is all their own, an amalgam of Dave Lesser and Leah Gage’s humor, passions, and perspectives. Last year’s Do You Like Salt? takes a magnifying glass to consumerism, careerism, food systems, entertainment, and animals, blending it all up and radiating mystifying turns of phrase over frantic, angular collages of noise and melody. Lesser and Gage have been around since the band’s inception, the latter emerging as the group’s second singer and songwriter over the last few years. Nick Stavely and Mark McInerney arrived later, morphing from live show fill-ins to permanent fixtures. With a solid lineup and a sacred practice shack, the band hopes to release new music in 2022.
Last fall I met up with BRNDA at Victoria Bar ahead of their show at Greenfield, Massachusetts venue 10 Forward. For a band who has so many lyrics about food, it was fitting that one of the bar’s regulars interrupted our interview to invite us to their annual chili cookoff the next day. The band passionately professed their enthusiasm for chili, but politely declined the invitation as they had to be off to the next stop on their tour the following morning. Throughout our conversation we discussed BRNDA’s history as a group, their relationship with D.C., and the albums they treasure most.
Post-Trash: So how’d you all meet and decide to start a band?
Leah Gage: I met Dave, we’re the more original members of the band-
Mark McInerney: Principals!
LG: [laughs] Yeah, that’s the word you used. Principals. We met, actually, working in downtown DC. We both worked in the same office building and he overheard me say to another coworker that I was playing keyboard in a band. And he was like, “oh, hey I overheard this and I’m starting a band, do you wanna join my band?” And I was like, “yeah, okay,” and he showed me some lyrics, and I thought, wow, these are really cool lyrics. So we started the band, and it was Dave’s brother at the time, and he didn’t really stay.
Post-Trash: About ten years ago?
LG: Almost. May. It’ll be May 2022.
Dave Lesser: We’ve had stable lineups for long stretches of time. The current lineup, no one’s new to the scene. Mark has been touring with us and filling in since like 2014, I think. And now maybe less principal than me, like the vice principal-
MM: Full member, but yeah, we all write together. That’s the biggest difference between my role now versus years past, is I would sub. But we rehearse together and we write.
DL: Yeah, we’re creating together. And Nick has been a part of the band for at least three or four years, like subbing in, but now also-
LG: First starting as a sub, but-
DL: Yeah, we always, we let ‘em sub first, but-
LG: But we lived together in D.C. at a house venue called Bathtub Republic-
DL: Rest in peace.
LG: It’s dead, but it was alive and well for a while.
Nick Stavely: So yeah, that was how I met Leah, and heard BRNDA practice all the time, and it sunk into my head.
LG: He’d come down and he’d learned the song while he was upstairs. It was fun.
DL: And he played with us and recorded bass with us on the current album. So Nick’s on there.
NS: On like a third of it.
LG: Yeah, we had two bass players on the record, the most recent.
DL: And Mark, how did we meet? We met you through another music person in the scene at a burger joint.
MM: That was in a time of BRNDA where we were both just kind of getting out there and we met and thankfully got along well and we became stronger.
Post-Trash: What’s the music scene like in D.C. right now and how has it changed since you started the band?
LG: Good question. When we started, one of the cool things I thought at the time was that a lot of young bands got their start playing in Ethiopian restaurants. Because there’s a ton of Ethiopian restaurants in D.C., and a lot of them were on this drag just off of U Street, which is kinda a main drag, and they would, after dinner time or whatever, open their spaces up. And there were several of them on 9th street that would do it. And then everything gentrified over there, and now that doesn’t happen anymore. And then it was house venues for a little while. But that seems to have fallen by the wayside. Since 2018 or so.
NS: Almost the full last year of Bathtub we were one of the main things, and during that time watched many other spots close, you know?
LG: I think I attribute that to D.C. growing into its own as a music scene more. We had bands that made it come out of D.C. again, which we hadn’t maybe had for a little while, like Priests and all these punk bands coming out, like Flasher. So I think that a lot of bands—people that might’ve run house venues previously—were too busy working on their own bands and going on tour. Which running a house venue and being on tour, it doesn’t really work. So yeah, I think that’s partly why, I dunno.
MM: You gotta ask a seventeen year old.
LG: Well, and that too. I don’t know a 17 year old.
DL: We debate whether or not—okay, maybe we lived through a golden age of house shows and being able to reach a very wide audience, but maybe now we’re just older and there is that scene and we aren’t tapped into it, and it is happening, but it’s just with bands and people and house venues that we’ve never heard of. So it might be there, but we’re just too old to know about it anymore [laughs].
MM: But it was a pretty special time.
NS: We’d go to a show like every week.
Post-Trash: Who are some of your favorite bands currently making music in D.C.?
LG: I love this hip hop artist Sir E.U. There’s a lot of really interesting hip hop, actually, happening right now in D.C. There’s this other group called Model Home and they put out like 12 records last year. They’re very conceptual, whatever, just very prolific, really interesting younger guys doing this stuff. Who else?
Nick: Tooth Choir.
DL: Well my favorite band of all time, who folded during the pandemic, are called—and they’re probably my favorite band ever, not just D.C.—Puff Pieces, and they have reformed somewhat. And they just had a show, but I was out of town so I couldn’t catch it. What’s the name?
LG: Sensor Ghost.
DL: So I haven’t seen them yet. I don’t know if they’re gonna be my new favorite band, but I have high hopes that when I see Sensor Ghost, that they might be-
NS: It’s most of your old favorite band.
DL: It’s most of it, yeah. But I love whenever Foul Swoops plays a live show, although I don’t even know if they’re a band anymore. That’s been hard, getting back into playing shows. It’s been hard to know who's survived the pandemic, who’s still going. But we’re trying to figure it out.
MM: I haven’t been paying attention. I have no idea what’s going on. My life is very narrowly focused. Just ‘cause there haven’t been shows, you know. I always used to be the person, like I’ll go out by myself and just see what’s happening and sometimes it sucks and sometimes it’s awesome. I look forward to doing that again, but it’s been awhile.
DL: We played with Tosser recently. They’re a great band. I don’t think we’re spilling the beans, they’re working on a new album. Can’t wait to see what they come up with.
LG: They’re one of those bands that released a record right before the pandemic and were probably gonna tour it, but then nothing happened. A lot of people had that.
NS: I’m currently closer to Mark, you know. Without these shows I’m cued into happening all the time, or so constantly, it’s tricky to get out and make time and know where to go. And I’m focusing on other stuff, but then I’m also just playing music, and that’s been like-
MM: Yeah, this band has been busy, so not a lot of time for evening leisure.
NS: I haven’t gone to a show that I wasn’t playing in awhile, which is maybe douchey to say, but true.
LG: No, that’s what happens when you play a lot of shows. You don’t expect other bands to always come out ‘cause you’re like, it’s okay, ya gotta stay in some nights.
Post-Trash: In what way has living in D.C. informed your music: your songwriting, your composition, performance?
NS: All of it.
LG: I think, being part of this punk history, if you start making music that doesn’t really feel like pop, and doesn’t really, you know—we get lumped in with punk, and I don’t know if we fit, we’re not like Minor Threat or Fugazi, or Priests, you know? We’re not necessarily that, but we get lumped in there, and I feel comfortable there, and I feel proud to be part of that tradition because it is really important in D.C. And so you do feel some of that, and I think feeling a little bit of that weight probably has influenced us. But how is the question to ask...
MM: I think of D.C. as, I dunno, I love it. I’ve been there for a very long time, but it’s also incredibly frustrating. I’m sure everybody has a love/hate with their hometown, but on its face and in general, most people are doing the straight and narrow there. They go there to—people are generally younger—they come in from out of town, they’re ambitious, they know what steps they need to take to achieve X goal and stuff. So as a songwriter and as an artist, knowing you are surrounded by that, I think for the songs I write, the angst comes through in that, kinda just like ugh, a little bit of frustration or disgust, but also awareness that’s like, well, I originally moved here because of that stuff, too.
DL: I never thought of it that way. For me, personally, I don’t know if D.C. has had any impact on the musicality of the songs that I write because all the music I like is basically from 1981. But lyrically and content-wise, maybe my lyrics are a reaction to certain things that I’ve seen going on in D.C. My least favorite thing in the world is hypocrisy, and I think D.C., probably, just as much as any place, is rife with it. And at least in my lyrics a lot of what I’m trying to do is point out hypocrisies and ways in which we think we might know things, but we really don’t know things, and ways in which you can view your own beliefs in another way, reevaluate yourself, reevaluate your own tenets. So, maybe, like [Mark] said, it’s been a reaction to this idea that you’ve arrived, you’re gonna work your way up the ladder and achieve power, and that’s just not what I—I mean maybe that is why I came to D.C.—but that’s not what I’ve ended up wanting. This is not a well-formulated response, but maybe the climate of D.C. has influenced the lyrics and the content much more than I thought it has, and I have to think about it more.
NS: From the outside I feel like BRNDA has always attempted to buck convention and predictability. That sounds very lame to say, but you know, it’s a lot of short songs, it’s like music for people that kinda listen to too much music. There’s some things that are a little musically humorous within the stuff and I feel like that could be coming from that kind of reaction to the straight-and-narrow that’s always around, or the supposed the ladders of predictability and achievement and etcetera, so-
LG: I don’t think that’s D.C., I think that’s everything [laughs]
DL: I did move to D.C. to change the world though, in a sense. I joined a nonprofit whose mission I fully believed in. I was a dishwasher in Pittsburgh, I was strung out and I wasn’t going anywhere, and this job in D.C. completely changed my life. Again, maybe it’s not D.C. per se, but maybe every country needs that center that sucks everything in. And that’s what D.C. is. And while that makes it a black hole of nothingness, it does mean that, if you’re able to sorta stay on the outskirts you can position yourself as a foil to it and say, well, I’m not that and I’m not gonna get sucked in, too.
Post-Trash: Do you write with a perceived audience in mind? Do you consciously think about who is going to hear BRNDA when you’re writing?
DL: I guess I do, yeah. And again, I do wanna think about how being in D.C. has impacted us as a band. I really do think with my lyrics—I don’t write all the lyrics in the band and we all write all the music together—but at least with my lyrics that I write, I do think I am directing them at someone who thinks they are a good person. And there are a lot of people in D.C. who think they’re good people, and they all came to D.C. to save the world. And I mean, there is a local population that is indigenous that’s lived there, but a lot of people in our circle that have come there are outsiders, and they came to do something, whether it was for a nonprofit or to work for a congressperson or to become a congressperson, or whatever. But I think a lot of people who think they’re good people, sometimes—I don’t wanna say that I wanna knock them off their high horse—but we’re all people, and you could be behaving in ways, you could be doing things or holding beliefs that, maybe they aren’t perfect, maybe you need to reevaluate things or to not think that you’re living the perfect life. So, yeah, I think my lyrics and the content of the songs are aimed at those kinds of people. We’re all sinners, I guess, or something. I’m not a Christian or anything like that, but yeah, we’re all here together in the muck, so let’s not pretend that anyone’s above that. Yeah, that’s what it is for me.
LG: [laughs] Uplifting. Uplifting BRNDA!
DL: It could be!
LG: No, I agree. I do think it is uplifting, I think BRNDA’s version of it is definitely uplifting.
DL: Well, I mean, I’ve heard the album—Do You Like Salt? has been out a couple months now—and I’ve read different reviews of it, people talking about songs, and a lot of people say like, “Oh, that song ‘Year of the Hot Dog By Burger Gang’, I don’t know what’s going on there, those lyrics are insane,” but I feel like if someone actually wanted to take the time—and I’m not saying I take the time to do this to every song—the lyrics kinda spell out a certain worldview, and it’s there for the taking if someone wanted to really dig into it and figure out what it’s all about. The lyrics aren’t just like total non sequiturs from outer space. They follow a pattern and I am trying to say something with it, but it doesn’t just have to end with like, you think you’re a good person, but you’re not. It’s like, okay, well maybe we’re all not good, but we’re good and we’re not good at the same time-
LG: And that makes us all good, or whatever, or nothing. It doesn’t matter.
Post-Trash: Yeah, more of asking a question than giving an answer.
DL: Yeah, yeah. But there’s definitely meaning behind all of those songs, even the ones that sound completely asinine.
LG: [laughs] That’s a word someone used in a review yesterday.
DL: It’s okay. I like that word. It’s a good word.
Post-Trash: When you started BRNDA, did you approach it more conceptually or philosophically, and then move into a direction that was more based on your gut and direct collaboration? Or was it the opposite?
DL: I think it’s the opposite. If you listen to the first album, all the stuff that we still write about and sing about is still on there. It’s animals and what we do with them, and social norms, and how terrible it is to know each other [laughter]-
LG: And to be around-
DL: To be around people and know them and love them. So it’s all there, but I think that was much more just AUGH, that’s what I had to get off of my chest. ‘Cause I wrote all those lyrics pretty much, and again, as Leah was saying, I wrote a lot of songs just in my room. And I had never been in a band before, it was just something I felt like I had to do. But I think as we went on, it got less structured in the way that songs were formed, but conceptually I personally knew what I wanted more. So it was like saying, yeah, I like the direction that jam was going because it fit the mold that I want it to go in. So even though it was born out of chaos, I knew how to mold the chaos, if that makes sense. And I think my lyrics—I speak for myself—I’ve been homing in on what it is that I wanna say with my lyrics. And that’s probably why a ton of things on Do You Like Salt? are about food, because I want people to think more about what they eat. I think it has, in a sense, moved from more gut feel to conceptual, I wanna make that thing. That’s my answer.
LG: I think that’s totally true. It’s interesting, because while Dave, I think, has taken more of a step back and been less of a writer, now I feel like my voice has probably grown in the band, and I’m out front sometimes. And that’s new and scary. And because we wrote and recorded a lot of these songs before the pandemic, we weren’t performing them, and so now we’ve had to figure out how we’re performing these songs we wrote that maybe I sang lead on, or Torry, who’s no longer in the band, sang lead on. It's been challenging and fun in a new way to have to take ownership more. Maybe 7 years ago I’d say, well, this is Dave’s band, but now I don’t feel that way. It’s my band, too. I dunno if I would’ve said Dave’s band, I don’t think I would’ve said that, but maybe I would’ve said Dave’s songs.
DL: I want it to be everyone’s band.
LG: I know you do, and I think that I do, too.
MM: Dave would be happy to see a BRNDA show take place without him on the stage.
LG: He would! He would!
DL: I would love it. I would love it if I could just be like George Martin in the back, “Go Beatles, go!”
Post-Trash: Can each of you share one album that has changed your perception of the possibilities of music and influenced your own practice?
DL: Fun House. The Stooges. I didn’t know that you could just be like, BAM, like that’s rock ‘n’ roll. BOOM. I dunno, that sounded really stupid, I sound like Emeril Lagasse. Stooges, Fun House. That’s my go-to album when I think about what I want playing at my funeral. It’s just simple and perfect and direct and catchy. Yeah. I dunno what he’s singing about, but I don’t even care. And sometimes, maybe, that’s how people think about BRNDA. In fact, they do. They’re like, “Hot Dog song, I dunno what he’s singing about.” And if they don’t care, I’m fine, fine, they don’t care, but if they like it... Stooges. Fun House.
LG: Well, the one that’s coming to the front of my mind is The Black Album by Jay Z, because I love that every single song is done by a different producer, or somebody else kinda controlling the song. Every song is different, but it fits. And that sorta influences BRNDA, I think. I don’t know if it’s necessarily relevant to BRNDA, but it’s something that I’m really interested in doing one day. That’s mine.
NS: The album that’s coming to mind is Going Places by Yellow Swans, which is like an ambient/noise album thing. I dunno, it’s just staticy and warm, and I just like it. And it’s cool seeing songs be like, “yeah, it’s my music, I don’t need to write a song for you in the way you think of it.” Even if we’re not doing that, it’s a nice sentiment and I also just really enjoy that record.
MM: I’m thinking Thee Oh Sees’ Mutilator Defeated At Last. When I heard that, it’s just the guitar work on that, and how, and I love pop music and I love hardcore and punk, just seeing like, whoa, they nailed it as far as catchable, aggressive, but making you smile. John Dwyer’s guitarwork just always makes me pay attention. As a guitar player, it’s a clinic.
Post-Trash: What drew you all to your instruments and what’s your history with learning them?
MM: I had practice in junior high school band, like cello and trumpet, then didn’t do anything for awhile. And then I always would write poetry and short stories and stuff, and I was like, songs are kinda cool, so I should probably learn how to play guitar. It’s either guitar or piano, and guitar’s cheaper to get a piece of junk. So I always looked at it like this is a tool to make the song or whatever. It’s just the easiest go-to. I got into it enough to where I got to geek out and learn about guitars and how to make the sounds I want and all that, and now I can branch out and do other things like sing and play drums, try to improve drumming.
DL: I have to agree with Mark. The way that I came to play my first guitar is not related to why I still play it, but I think the reason that I eventually realized that I wanted to at least learn to play the guitar to the point where I was proficient enough to be taken as a real guitarist was that it was just a vessel, it was just a means to communicate something to someone. I went to school for creative writing, but I think I learned pretty quickly that I wasn’t the best long-form creative writer. But then I realized you could still do something with it, you could write lyrics, you can still try to tell people a story of some kind. So I think for me, this short-form, lyrics really spoke to me, and if you have the music behind it, maybe they’ll listen to you, maybe they’ll go along with it. Then you can still tell them something, you can still be a storyteller. It was a means to an end.
NS: Yeah, I played handbells in the church choir when I was in middle school and shit. That was kinda the first instrument. I’m maybe low key, not tone deaf, but I definitely have a way with technical ability and timing and rhythm. I feel like I should’ve played drums earlier, you know? Like that’s the more, I dunno, I kinda have a tactile interest in the instruments over trying to write music or melodies. I don’t approach it from the song or storyteller perspective. I got a guitar just as a teenager to have a thing to do. And like Dave said, the reason I got a guitar is not why I continue to play. And like Mark also, I really just got into gear for a minute, and really like old interesting instruments and weird stuff, and that kinda thing. It’s really just, it just sounds nice, not like approaching this medium to tell stories or do that, but trying to convey some emotions and just chill out and explore how things can sound making noises and that sorta stuff.
LG: I actually started playing the drum kit with BRNDA. I was never a kit player before. But I studied percussion a little bit. I went to music school. Drums were not my instrument actually. I played piano and liked drums—my father was a drummer. But then I was trying to play bass, so the story of Dave going, “oh, you play keyboard in a band, do you wanna play bass in this band?” “I don’t play bass.” “Oh, it doesn’t matter, you can come play bass.” And I stank, I just didn’t know how to do it, and I didn’t have any instinct, and one day [Dave] goes, “we have this drum kit, why don’t you just go over there and try it out, see if you like that.”
DL: Right. Because when you joined we had a drummer and a guitarist, but not a bassist. And then you joined and within a week my brother quit the band. So then we didn’t have a drummer and you stank so bad on bass, it was like, okay, well if you stink that bad, you know, what harm can you do on the drums? But it turned out you were a natural and really good. So then we had a guitarist, two guitarists and a drummer, and no bassist. And finally we found a bassist.
LG: Yeah, but I think we did the calculation and we thought, well, we need a drummer more. Drummer’s more important. Which, nowadays, I believe the drummer is the most important. And it’s not just ‘cause I’m a drummer. A drummer can completely change the song, just by how they play. You can change the vibe. People will hear two different songs.
DL: The unsung hero of all bands.
LG: Always. What’s that Charlie Watts story, where Mick Jagger’s like—everyone was throwing that around. I won’t tell it, it’s cliche. The drums are definitely my favorite. I studied voice for years. I was classically trained and classically trained at piano. I always loved punk music and rock music and hip hop music, but was always like, well, that’s not something I do. But in my twenties I did more of that and finally, I think—I wish I had found drums earlier, that’s what I wanna say. But I’m glad they found me at all.