by Giliann Karon (@lethalrejection)
There’s no band quite like Snowing. From 2009 to 2011 they soared from sticky Lehigh Valley basements to usher in a prolific emo-rivival movement. Frontman John Galm transformed visceral ramblings about suburban stagnation, alcoholism, and his late father into roaring sing-alongs. The group garnered a cult following whose impact has long outlasted their ephemeral career.
Aside from some miscellaneous reunion shows and a few dates last spring with Bear v. Shark, Galm has largely turned his focus towards other projects and solo work. River of Blood, which he released this past May on longtime label Count Your Lucky Stars, marks his first solo release since 2014’s Sky of No Stars. He ventures far beyond his renowned starting point of hollering math rock, leaning into experimental folk textures. Now weary from carrying the scene on his back, Galm reckons with the present, which doesn’t necessarily resemble how he imagined it would turn out.
John Galm by William H. Travis
GILIANN KARON: Reunion and anniversary tours are all the rage, especially within punk and emo. Besides the Snowing reunion, Marietta is playing a string of shows, Turnover is celebrating 10 years of Peripheral Vision, and Joyce Manor just recently toured to commemorate Never Hungover Again.
What's your take on nostalgia as a marketing tool and what impact do you think it has on future generations of emo and punk music?
JOHN GALM: It's a double-edged sword. Years ago, I was excited when the first wave of bands were reuniting, not just in emo, but also bands like Pavement and Guided By Voices. And even in the emo realm, like when Mineral got back together, that was exciting for me as a fan because I never got to see those bands.
Celebrating records feels like a bad precedent. It’s like, “Hey, we're artists and we are going to continue making art, but you are not gonna like that as much, so we're gonna have to do a tour to cash in on the things that you do like, because we have to make money.”
It’s a weird, sad, capitalistic, reality we live in. No judgment to the folks that do it. I think it makes sense. People want to see certain things from the artists they like, almost in a dancing bear fashion. That's unfortunately the reality we live in. I'm sure all Barry [of Joyce Manor] wants to do is play songs from 40 oz. to Fresno, but people stopped coming.
I understand reunions also as someone who has been actively doing reunion stuff. We were stupid in our twenties. Now we're in our thirties and we're all friends. We hang out a lot and we get to do things we missed out on because we were in a band all through our twenties.
We did the shows and had so much fun, oodles of fun that wouldn't have existed if we weren’t like, “yeah, we should play shows again.” It's a nuanced thing. I don't know what it means for future generations.
GK: I’ve seen LCD Soundsystem twice since he started his never-ending reunion tour. It’s great that people who weren’t privy to his glory days can see him, but is that taking attention away from emerging bands? Who’s to say?
JG: There is that element too, but I do also think there will always be room for up-and-coming bands. There are bands from our parents’ generation like Foreigner and REO Speedwagon who still get on stage and play the hits. There are obviously still bands that don’t do that, but I think it has a lot of the same DNA.
New bands will always be around. There'll always be young people who wanna search for the next new thing, who don't wanna listen to shitty old people.
GK: Congrats on River of Blood. What a great album! What was the most challenging song to write?
JG: They were all pretty challenging their own way. There were hard personal truths in a couple of the songs that I've squirreled away inside my brain for so long. “Into the Fire” grapples with my alcoholism, so it was difficult to be upfront about how it’s affecting my life.
The honest answer would be “Summer After Work.” I took like 9,000 passes at that song before I finally got the structure right. And even when I was signed to record it, I kept getting the lyrics wrong. There's a kick in my brain where it doesn't want to remember the lines of that song, even when I play it now, I don't know what it is.
GK: I like asking that question to see how artists interpret the word “challenging.” It’s open-ended on purpose, where it can mean confronting difficult themes or memories, or that you had to write and record it a bunch of times.
JG: It's both because this reality is setting in where approaching old age at 40 – I'm 38. I’ve come to the conclusion that I'm always gonna make records, but what it looks like in my day-to-day life has changed, where suddenly I don't know if I'm ever gonna have this opportunity to spend most of my time touring.
I have a day job now because I don't make money off music. That's something that I never thought would be a long-term thing for me.
You have to sit down and think, “oh, life is just not gonna end up the way you wanted it to.” It's kind of scary and hard to look at.
GK: How have the economics of touring and recording shifted over the course of your career?
JG: Luckily for me, there was never a ton of money involved, and I never made any. I will say, the proliferation of home studios and home recording has been a godsend. It’s been great learning how to use those tools because I come up with so many songs that, if I had to find the money to record them professionally in a studio where you're paying several hundred dollars per day, I don't know if I'd ever get anything done,
More recently, I've been in band situations where we have a day or two in the studio and you have to nail your parts and then that's it. I come away from that disheartened by how my takes went, how I sound, etc.
On River of Blood, since I recorded 90% of it in my apartment, I could spend entire days just on guitar parts for one song. I could fuck around for like three hours and then just be like,” you know what? I'm gonna go get ice cream,” and I'd go get ice cream, come back, and do more.
GK: Do you think the pandemic had something to do with this shift? People had unlimited time, so they could teach themselves to record and fiddle with all the devices.
JG: 100%. Honestly, that's pretty much exactly when I got better at everything. I already had a bit of an introduction to GarageBand, but right before the pandemic, I decided to upgrade my home studio. I had just started working on that when everything shut down.
Obviously River of Blood was a couple years away from that, but the pandemic definitely gave me so much time to fuck around. By the time it came time to record River of Blood, I didn't want to record it myself. I did a session with a friend, and I felt that the results weren't what I wanted. I want to get this to where I wanted to be, and part of that was spending hundreds of hours fucking with it. And that’s what I did.
GK: What were the coolest instruments and techniques that you used when making River of Blood?
JG: A lot of it's just like fucking with different MIDI keyboards to find different atmospheric tones that I’d then hide behind the songs. I spent tons of time laying down in bed with headphones on, tweaking knobs on the computer, downloading some synth off some freeware site or getting a free trial of some websites’ synth patches and twiddling virtual knobs for hours on end.
By the end of it, I was like, “ I don't know what I just did, I have no idea how to replicate it, but isn’t this nice?” I love ambient music, so being able to add patches of that throughout the whole record, which is otherwise mostly a folk record, made it a lot of fun for me. Those were fun moments of experimentation.
I got a friend to record steel guitar, which is an incredible instrument. They did it at their house and sent it over to me. It was an incredible, revelatory moment to put it into my song and hear it back. I don't know many traditional country musicians living in eastern Pennsylvania, so suddenly having this classic country sound in one of my songs was just such a cool thing that I don't know if I ever thought would be a reality.
GK: Speaking of ambient music, did you see the Brian Eno documentary?
JG: I haven’t, but I want to. Last time I checked, it’s theaters only. I know the big thing is there's some sort of technology where parts of the movie adapt to show different footage with each showing. Brian is such a king.
I would love to see it. I haven't gotten around to it. I was bad at doing things when I lived in Philadelphia, like getting out of my apartment, which also made making River of Blood easier in some ways because I wasn’t doing anything else. But now where I live is much more suburban.
GK: Going back to River of Blood, what is that sound a minute into “Hokey Bridge”?
JG: I don't know. It's something I created somehow with synths. I don't remember how I made it, but I can pull up the files on my computer.
Obviously I know how to play the guitar parts and I know how to sing the songs, but these backing atmospheric things, like synth sounds, was a big experiment. I was focused on Mike Stoller finding whatever sound I was looking for, but not necessarily replicating it. Once I got the sound, my mind would go blank. Some people have encyclopedic knowledge of projects they've done and patches they use. I don't. Once I find the vibe or mood I'm looking for, that's as far as my brain wants to work with it.
Home studios are cool, but I admittedly don't know shit. When I talk to my friends who are actual audio engineers and they're talking about frequencies and stuff, none of that means anything to me. For me, it's strictly vibes. They can tell me to go in and cut the hertz out of this instrument. I can figure out how to do that, but I don't keep that information anywhere. My brain doesn’t save it.
GK: What do you hope your listeners take away from River of Blood?
JG: It sounds so corny, but I just hope they enjoy it. It means a lot to me on a lot of different levels. I've had people ask the thesis statement of River of Blood, and I don't have a clear answer.
My main dude on Earth up until recently was David Lynch, RIP. So much of his work evokes a feeling. If you try to explain it in words, it doesn't hold water, but you see an image and it pulls a feeling out of you, you know what that feeling is like.
This record does so much of that for me. I can’t sit down and present a thesis for the record, but when I listen to it, it evokes certain feelings from me that are so personal. All I want is for people to hear it and have some sort of experience.