by Emmanuel Castillo (@thebruiseonwe)
A lot of bands want your attention, but it’s rare a band knows what to do once they’ve got it. Perennial have been on a steady streak of high concept and high energy releases, each one adding new layers to the way the band approaches a song. They’ve followed up their most accomplished LP, 2024’s Art History, with a new EP, Perennial ‘65, which imagines the band in the shoes of their influences and takes a more overt pop leaning approach. To celebrate ten years as a band, they’ve released a deluxe edition of Art History compiling the entirety of the music from those sessions, including previously released EPs as well as a swaggering new single.
I got to speak to Perennial guitarist and vocalist Chad Jewett late last year on their writing and recording process, their visual aesthetic, and the way their influences have a tangible effect on the way they approach being a band.
Perennial by Omari Spears
Emmanuel Castillo: What was the ambition of the band when you first started?
Chad Jewett: It was pretty wide open, pretty expansive. We wanted to make records that we would be excited about making. The live show being really interesting and memorable and dynamic was definitely one of the very first things on our minds. Making a lot of records, touring a lot, and hoping that as many people as possible hear those records and see those shows. The two things that come to mind were really approaching the studio as creatively as possible, and then approaching the live space as energetically as possible and seeing how far we could push ourselves in both regards.
EC: Was there a particular band or act or genre or something where you were like, “this is ideally how I’d like this band to be,” that might have been the roots of the band, like a jumping off point?
CJ: Totally. In terms of artistic careers that I really admire, the Hives come to mind. They’ve been a band for like 30 years now, I’ve seen them live four or five times, and it’s incredible each time. They’re really methodical about their records. I just love the standard that they seem to hold themselves to in terms of making records, playing shows. So that’s sort of a general one where I’m like, “Wow, I hope Perennial is still going decades later.” And then in terms of other artists that we really looked up to, Stereolab comes to mind as another group where every record is perfect and you can tell that they’re always trying to find new ways of making Stereolab music. So those are two groups that jump out at me right away.
EC: Stereolab is a good reference point for this next EP. One of the things that sticks out to me is that the records are each their own thing, but it seems like they’re not created with the live show in mind, but adjusted with the live show in mind. I wondered if the record was the achievement for the band or is executing specific songs as you envisioned them every night the more important thing?
CJ: We’ll have the bones of each of the songs but from there they almost become two different entities. Certainly when we’re in the studio, we almost avoid the instinct of “Alright, we have guitar, organ, and drums, [those are our options].” We’ll do our best to make sure we’re not always having the verse be a guitar doing something. We’ll look for other instruments or subtract stuff or one verse is live drums and the other is programming. We really want the records to sort of be their own thing so that if people go to see us live, they’re seeing the live version of Perennial and when they get the record home, they get a second surprise. Hopefully both versions are interesting and rewarding enough that it feels like there’s a point to going to see us live and that we’re doing a version of each of these songs that just lives there in that live space. The other main way we approach it is having weeks to build something and see what we can replace…they’re both so important to us, both of those threads of what we do.
EC: When you’re executing these versions of the songs and giving someone a new flavor of the song, are you thinking about it as a unique version of the song? Like a version of the song that they can’t necessarily see even if they catch you at the next show?
CJ: Yeah, definitely. I do like the idea of there being two of these different brains or lenses through which you can experience what we do, depending on if you’re putting the record on or coming to see us live. I think it’s cool that there are multiple iterations. We definitely don’t let the fact of the three of us having to reproduce it live. We’re not being careful about how many overdubs or bringing in other instruments [in the studio]. It’s almost like both the in-studio version of Perennial and the live version of Perennial are the most exaggerated versions of both of those forums.
When we’re making the record—if you were to look at the Pro Tools breakdown of the tracks that go into this—folks might not expect there to be as many layers and different things that were sort of placed at the top of the structure of “riff-verse-chorus.” But live, it’s kind of fun to see how little of that stuff we need for the performance version to still make it work. We’re all huge Beatles fans in Perennial, and I remember reading about their very last tour — they’d just put out Rubber Soul and Revolver and they were playing almost nothing off of those records because they were so elaborate in the studio. But I always thought “I bet they could’ve figured out a way to play those songs.” I think there’s an interesting challenge there, not letting either thread of a band that tours and records get in the way of the other and letting them be exciting on their own.
EC: I was wondering about the role of the electric organ, because you guys do have bass on the records sometime, but it’s usually an additional element like a fuzz bass for texture as opposed to the bass moving the song along or helping with the harmony. I wanted to connect that to the way you play guitar — you avoid chords and it’s mostly single notes and open strings and stuff like that. Is that part of the minimalism of performance that you’re going for, as few elements to the song as possible but still very rhythmically forward?
CJ: Yeah, definitely, You’re absolutely right about my approach to guitar. It’s mostly single string riffs. Sometimes some of our riffs are mostly one note if I can get away with it. In terms of playing single strings vs chords, a huge influence was the Blood Brothers. How Cody Votolato would approach playing guitar in this really heavy band, but a lot of the heavy parts, instead of power chords coming out of a Les Paul or some super thick, heavy sounding guitar, it’d be single string stuff coming out of a Stratocaster or a Telecaster — these thin sounds that are so unconventional and they grab you and make the part feel so angular and sinewy or whatever.
It’s this sort of surprising, interesting way to make heavy music. A lot of the 60s garage rock stuff is a big influence for us, like the Sonics. A lot of those bands typically wouldn’t use power chords, so it was a lot of cool single string stuff that basically sounded like punk because of how hard they played. It’s not like it had any of the stuff that makes heavy music nowadays, it was all just purely the energy they’d put into it cause there weren’t even distortion pedals yet. In terms of minimalism, especially with Art History, our goal is for the outline or framework of the song to be as minimal as possible so we have all this room to say “maybe an electric piano works here, let’s try a mellotron, or a backwards guitar part.” We could test out all these different ways of filling out what was still largely a blank page. And again, we try not to get too hung up on “Perennial is technically electric organ, guitar and drums.” If a fuzz bass sounds cooler than an organ, it’d be a fuzz bass or an analogue synth or something. We can worry about what the live version will be later. We always look for what sounds the coolest or most surprising.
EC: When y’all are writing the songs, are you starting from a rhythmic standpoint and filling in other instruments around that, or starting with a more complete part and finding something more that fits? Does it start from the rhythm or with a specific energy you want to capture, or is the writing more organic than that, whatever comes out?
CJ: I think it’s more often the former, where there’s a certain energy we want or we look at it like “Alright, we wanna have some sort of faster, more dynamic on songs on this more recent record,” where we were really focusing on emphasizing mod and soul and rhythm and blues and garage rock, so the textures of those sounds and the tempos and where the energy is — it really begins to expand that part of our sound. Before, we might write songs where I’d come up with a riff and we’d build it from there. Starting with Art History it was more “Chelsea will play this part on organ and I’ll get on the drums or get a tambourine and we’ll play around with that back and forth. As we were trying out new ways of being loud and energetic but bringing in more of the stuff that we’re passionate about as listeners, we began to experiment with how we were putting the songs together as a group.
EC: So the songwriting is a group effort then? Or it’s cobbled together in the studio? How complete are the songs when you guys are going in to record?
CJ: Pretty complete…structurally they’re done, I’ll usually know what I’m gonna play on the guitar and we’ll have the chords worked out. Usually the lyrics and melodies are just about there. What really gets figured out in the studio is more the second and third layers of stuff. Usually the songwriting style will begin with somebody either having a riff or someone saying “I really wanna do something like this, we haven’t tried this yet.” So it’s usually a goal for a specific sound or the classic “I was playing around on the organ and this sounded cool.”
EC: When do the lyrics come into the process? Are they labored over before you get to the studio, or are they more stream of conscious, riffing on the idea? Do you consider the lyrics as part of the collective song or does that exist to emphasize or clarify something that might not be obvious without the lyrics?
CJ: That’s interesting, yeah — oftentimes, Chelsea and I were talking about this the other day, we kind of write lyrics as like another riff or instrument. I guess I’d compare it most closely to bass lines in that I’m often writing to the drums more than anything. A lot of times, there are tons of parts where that’s the only instrument aside from the vocals. We’re often writing the words with rhythm in mind first. Oftentimes our stuff is…I don’t wanna say stream-of-consciousness, but we’re sort of playing around with phrases that might be cool, or free associating it first, and then the cool phrase will be the spark where we start thinking in terms of imagery or poetics. When we were writing the song “Uptight,” we had the lyric “My baby’s dressing for the weather,” and we just sort of loved the idea of that line and we sort of went from there — “Okay, ‘my baby is’ is a cool phrase to use as a fill in the blank and build it from there. I’m not even sure how that phrase came up, it just — I think we both like lines that have a certain imagistic quality or whatever that is. They’re very specific. Our lyrics don’t tend to be too abstract, they tend to be very basic images and objects and we go from there. So yeah, it’s usually “I like the rhythm of that phrase. I like how that phrase sits next to that guitar or drum part.”
EC: It’s not that the lyrics are secondary, it’s that their function is musical first and meaning is second or third.
CJ: Definitely. We have songs where we’re going for very specific things, but even then, if there’s a song that’s like “I wanna get to the heart of this feeling, or there’s this thing I’m trying to work out…” by the time we’re done with it and doing the highly metaphorical style we tend to write in, a lot of the fingerprints of what our ideas were are probably just specific to us at this point. It just becomes poetry that [the listener] can figure out on their own, which is more interesting anyway.
EC: In that same vein, when y’all are delivering the lyrics, does that ever change from night to night? Is that similarly prone to growth or refinement?
CJ: I’ve never thought about it, but it certainly does happen. For instance, we’ve started playing “Mouthful of Bees” live and where it is in the setlist, I’ve done a bunch of singing [by that point] — so even though on the record it’s me singing the verse, live we have Chelsea do it just so I can get my wind back. So we’ll sort of modify and trade places. We play around with the phrases here and there just to keep things interesting. Every once in a while, a better lyric than the one we initially came up with will come to mind and we’ll swap that one in. We’re always open to playing with the form so it can be a surprise live.
EC: Is there anything from the first incarnation or first few releases where you tried some stuff and maybe it just didn’t fit what you envisioned as the “Perennial Sound”?
CJ: I sort of think of In the Midnight Hour as the first thing we put out that’s officially Perennial in terms of what we all really wanted it to be. We were finally figuring out how to do all the stuff we wanted to do, so everything up until that record was us just sort of figuring it out at length. That first full-length, I recorded almost all of that besides the drums. I was figuring out Pro Tools as we were making the record, so there’s stuff I like about it, but to me it’s an interesting document of us sort of putting the pieces together. One of the things that really excites me about our last couple of releases is I think we really figured out how Perennial can fit all the stuff we like and all the sounds we like to make. Those early records are sort of interesting experiments, real time demonstrations of us figuring it out. In the Midnight Hour on feels like the product of us.
EC: You’ve got a different drummer now; has this affected how you’re writing? Has it changed how it comes out live, how the old stuff gets played?
CJ: Yeah, in terms of what we’re writing now, we’re beginning to write for the next record. We’re still early in the process, so we haven’t started fleshing the stuff out as a full band. It’s all quick demos. In terms of the writing process, we’ll see. CJ, our new drummer, has an amazing ear and really wide ranging tastes, so I’m really looking forward to working on this stuff with their compositional chops. In terms of playing what we’ve already put out, one of the things when they joined the band we said was “there’s the structural stuff that we’re keeping, but past that, don’t feel beholden to playing the fills that Wil did. If Wil did a pick up into this one part going into the verse, feel free to try out whatever your version of that is.” It was sort of a cool thing that has made some of these songs interesting surprises for us too. Every once in a while, Wil will step in for us if there’s a scheduling thing. Wil stepped back really because we were getting to the point where we were playing 60 shows a year and it became hard for him to keep that pace with family stuff and all that. But he still plays with us too and they’re both absolutely brilliant drummers so it’s really fun for Chelsea and I to have these two stars behind the drumkit.
EC: There’s a lot about the way the band operates that reminds me of a lot of older working-class musicians and acts — keeping the output high but doing so because the collaboration was so important and it wasn’t left to just one person. I feel like that’s kind of a rare thing as time goes on just because it’s so hard to get people in a room to write songs together. Was that something that was important to the band to start with, that it be a collaborative way of writings songs, vs the model of “this is the songwriter of the band and these are the people that perform the songs live when they need to be performed.”?
CJ: Yeah, definitely. At this point we have songs that have either been entirely written or at least written in part by each of the core members. Our rule is “Whoever has a cool idea.” There’s no “I’m the songwriter, play my songs!” and it’s good because either Chelsea can bring something, or Wil or CJ would bring in something that I never would’ve thought of. Try as you might, you sort of have your go to stuff, the moves that you do. So Wil can say, here’s this guitar part, and I’d never have thought of putting a note there, but it works as Perennial. We’re always suggesting stuff for one another. It’s all really collaborative and we like to constantly throw ideas and see how we can add to the big art project that we’re pursuing.
EC: As far as the art project part of it, I find the visual aesthetic of the band really interesting. Is that more personal aesthetic or is it a conscious way of how to present the band? Or is it just for fun, something to give it an extra pop for you guys?
CJ: It’s absolutely something we want something to be part of the idea of Perennial, for anyone who finds the band. We always wear matching shirts when we’re on stage or doing stuff as Perennial. I just love that idea — Devo is a great example. I feel like so many of my favorite bands didn’t just operate as bands but operated as ideas or worlds you could enter. The Clash come to mind, where they were so obsessed about every record they made when they were the classic four line up is terrific. With each album, they’d have a different style of outfit that they’d wear and you could tell that was all thought out and related to the themes of the record. The art had a certain look to it.
Now when I think of the Clash, I get to think of this much larger sort of thing, this world that they created that is “The Clash.” So many of the bands that I’m really enamored with do that kind of thing. We formed Perennial in our late 20s and said “Okay, this is gonna be the band for us from here on out, it has to do all of these things for us to be happy with it.” And the art thing is part of that. Stereolab has a specific aesthetic that they seem to always have and is always cool to see. Or The Jam. There are a lot of acts where you can tell they really cared about the look of things. They really cared about having a specific style and designs for following that through from record to record. Belle and Sebastian, all those album covers rhyme visually. Whatever it is, I love art that you can endlessly study and find all these pieces that all seem to add up to a whole.
EC: Is there an element of the visual aesthetic of the band where you intend for it to set you apart? Like an album cover might be a candid photo as opposed to something more specific and labored over. Is there an element where the visual aesthetic is important and not just marketing but something to actually take away from the final art product?
CJ: The example that you cite, I think it’s so true. It’s been that way for a while. Oftentimes that aesthetic matches the spirit of the content that the artist is going for, if it’s nostalgic or highly personal or whatever. With what we’re doing, I like the art to have this combined quality where it looks all of a piece. Like “Perennial sat down and made that art, I can tell right away.” Which means we’re pretty deliberate about font use and stuff like that. There’s also sort of a retro future vibe, mid century pop art style that we really like. I think that has some connections to what we’re doing. With the Art History cover, we loved this idea of Chelsea in this very stylish, composed pose right next to these three 60 watt amps that are putting out the loudest sound you can imagine. That combination of things, of something very stylish but loud and over the top—I do love the idea of what happens when we’re listening to a record and we look at an album cover, how those things interact and communicate. There’s a world we’re trying to get folks to be a part of whenever we’re thinking about the art.
EC: That’s part of what’s so striking about the band, you’ve got a lot of questions before you even hit play on the music. It feels very out of time instead of throwback-y or old, but it doesn’t feel “known” even though it’s familiar. I wondered if that was something that interfaced with the music at all, in that the format of a rock band — bass, guitar, organ in this case, and drums — is something that often gets called a “limitation” instead of just how things happen to be? Did you wanna represent the format of a rock band and the instruments you happen to be using to make music as an intentional element?
CJ: Yeah, I think that’s an excellent reading of what we’re doing. One of the things that we’re doing is learning from the stuff that we like, the stuff we listen to most. CJ and Chelsea are a bit more contemporary in their listening habits and I’m sort of always listening to Stax and Motown and 60s mod stuff. That’s where my heart is as a listener. I get the sense that there aren’t a ton of bands that are drawing from those particular sounds. Maybe there are and we just don’t know, which is totally possible. But one thing that’s sort of really fun for us is that a lot of what we’re pulling from is from 50 or 60 years ago, but live it’s presented as fast and loud as possible. I’m stacking up two guitar amps, Chelsea is playing through a big bass amp, CJ is a loud and dynamic drummer. What we’re doing might be considered past trends, but we’re doing it as vividly and compelling as possible so that it’s right there in the moment with as much energy and emphasis as we can muster.
EC: I wanted to ask about the album as the main way of interacting with the band — it seems like something is always being written or recorded, at least going your socials — is there any tension between wanting the record to represent the band and not letting it be the end-all-be-all?
CJ: Yeah, I certainly think that when we’re finishing up a record, one thing we focus on is once this is done and pressed and out there in mp3 form, we can make new versions of this stuff, which we’ve done, but that’s the record. So generally when we’re finishing up we spend so much time listening and asking if there’s anything we wanna change, because we’d rather take a long time and consider those things than to have regrets later. So there’s definitely a thought that this record’s gonna be around. Hopefully folks are still listening to it for years and years. Ultimately, the thing that lasts and that people can have in their collections is the record. They are really important to us and we do really approach them as these projects we wanna put our absolute all into.
I hope that people come to see us live because I think what we do live is interesting and unique enough that I wanna show it off. Listening to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band when I was 13 years old, that was the thing I romanticized; being in the studio, experimenting, and the album being a document of that. That is the thing that’s driving us as we’re working on each of those records.
Perrenial ‘65 is out now.