by Taylor Ruckle (@taylorruckle)
Plenty of artists and engineers use the studio as an instrument. It’s less common for a band to use a converted concrete laboratory as a studio, as Sweeping Promises did on their 2020 debut album, Hunger For a Way Out. The space on Garden Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts almost acted as a third collaborator alongside core duo Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug (or a fourth, after featured drummer Spenser Gralla, who also tours with SP).
The cavernous reverb didn’t just lend an industrial backdrop to their songs of dislocation under capitalism–it shaped every sound, down to how long they could hold a guitar note or how many vocal parts they could layer at a time. It helped mold Sweeping Promises into one of the most boldly stylized post-punk bands of the current revival, but also one of the most grounded–or, pardon the pun, one of the most concrete in their sense of place.
Mondal and Schnug moved to Austin, Texas before the release of Hunger for a Way Out, taking their penchant for vigorous hooks and scrappy production with them even as they left Garden Street behind. They recorded their latest single “Pain Without a Touch” partly at Estuary Recording, a more traditional studio, and partly in the echoey bathroom of Schnug’s parents’ house a short distance away, where the duo rode out a stretch of the pandemic (though it wouldn’t be their last move of the COVID period).
A co-release from Feel It Records and the band’s new international distributor, Sub Pop, “Pain Without a Touch” is just one product of a year-long writing session they say yielded sixty or so songs in total. Following the release, the two spoke to Post-Trash about engineering their signature sound, embarking on the first Sweeping Promises tour, and joining Twitter as social media skeptics.
So how's your week?
Mondal: Pretty good, yeah! I don't know if you know this, but we recently moved to Lawrence, Kansas.
Lawrence, Kansas! Okay.
Mondal: Yes, it's fantastic. We love it here. The reason for the move is that we bought a house that has a studio attached to it, so we've been working on building some gobos and sound stuff for the studio, and getting [laughs] trepidatiously into woodworking–or wood not-working, but we're persevering in spite of the difficulties.
That's so cool--so there was studio space included with the house, but you're having to prepare it all yourselves?
Schnug: That's right.
Mondal: Yeah, so we're doing some sound preparation because it was initially--so, it looks like a dance studio. It's got these really beautiful tall ceilings and hardwood floors and just tons and tons of windows. The previous owners were fine artists and ceramists too. They had a kiln, actually, in the house, so we inherited something really beautiful and we're just trying to do it justice.
“On-brand” I guess is kind of a ghoulish phrase, but in terms of what Sweeping Promises is about–you know, because the impetus for Hunger for a Way Out was that you had inherited this concrete laboratory space. It's appropriate that you have this other space to inherit and work with.
Mondal: Indeed, yes. It's funny, when we were looking at houses, the minute we walked into the studio and started talking in it, we noticed how reverberant it was, and we thought, "This is just Garden Street, but better because we can live here." [laughs]
You've been out touring this Fall–I saw you at Comet Ping Pong. What has it been like being out on the road again for the first time since the pandemic?
Mondal: Well, for us, it wasn't being on the road again, it was just being on the road at all. We'd never toured before. I guess compared to the first leg, the Northeast and Midwest portion, the shows were a lot closer together. It was like consecutive nights, so that felt a little bit more seamless, but yeah, in the age of COVID, I think it's been relatively positive, in spite of it all.
Schnug: We exited full quarantine, so it was weird to be in [laughs] crowded spaces. I mean, we had been eating in restaurants and stuff, but it was weird to go to a show 'cause we actually hadn't really been.
Mondal: Maybe, like, one.
Schnug: Yeah, once before we started playing.
What was the most unexpected thing about it? Or was it like you thought it would be?
Mondal: I think for me the thing that surprised me the most, and pleased me the most, is that even though everyone was following the COVID guidelines, wearing masks and trying to stay as distant as possible in a small club space, the enthusiasm was there, if not more pronounced. The ability to play these rooms and have everybody singing along and dancing and just feeling that real and palpable sense of energy was really heartwarming.
Schnug: It never felt sketchy to us. We were lucky enough to get a booster shot before going. I think we were ready to go, you know? And almost every show, we heard a story from someone who was like, "My friend wanted to come, but they didn't." I do think it probably impacted attendance, but we didn't notice much because it was--it was fun.
I realize it's been a couple years now since the recording of Hunger for a Way Out, but since that record and the starting point of the band was so tied to a specific location and time, what is it like bringing it out and putting it all around different stages?
Mondal: It's definitely different just on a base level of, it existed in one room, and now it's existing in all these different rooms with all these different settings and people, and I think we tried to preserve as much as we could the nature of the songs. Of course, there aren't any synths in the live show just because neither of us has four hands, [laughs] so we kind of--I'm hesitant to say that we stripped it down because the songs are pretty faithful to the recordings, but there are some elements that aren't there that I feel like are spiritually enmeshed in the songs, like the synth parts. You can tell that there's something missing, but I feel like we more than make up for it in how we present them.
Schnug: The live show's more rockin', is what we heard often, which I think is true. Like, in the recording process first, it's--I was playing drums. You know, I didn't allow myself to play fills. There's no element where we ramp up to the next part of the song just because--well, we wanted that commitment to the space. [laughs] If you play too quickly, the reverb kind of overwhelms.
Mondal: Just subsumes the sound.
Schnug: We were really committed to the tail of notes, so we only played things one at a time. I think that level is not there as much in the live show.
I'm trying to think, maybe it's "An Appetite." There's a song where it just starts with the big, booming drum sound, and you can't reliably replicate that, I'm sure.
Mondal: Yeah, that is the thing. On the one hand, with Garden Street, we were just very aware of there being too much that we were generating, and so we had to pare it down. And then of course when you're a three-piece in a venue, a lot of times you can be overwhelmed by just how much space there is to take up, so we did little crafty things. For instance, our live drummer Spenser, who is just an incredible musician, he definitely brought a lot more to the drums to fill in what otherwise would have been taken up by secondary guitar overdub, or synth parts, or even--as opposed to previous projects where vocal harmonies were kind of the thing that we, and that I especially, really advocated for, with Sweeping Promises, there aren't as many. There are some call and response things here and there.
Schnug: There's one on the album.
Mondal: Well, I think there's "Cross Me Out," and then I think there are a couple others.
Schnug: We did not allow harmonies, or--
Mondal: Yeah, 'cause again, it just became too much in the space. Also, our tendency in the past was to try to overload and overlap as many ideas as we could because we thought, "That's what makes great songs, is just lots of parts." As we've gotten older--and I'm speaking personally anyway–stepping back and paring back has been a lesson.
Even live, there's this dialed-in quality to the sound. Things are processed so that they sound so distinct. Like, the guitars have such a scooped-out, almost strangled sound to them. How did you achieve that?
Schnug: I use intense filters on everything that we record, and I'm not a big fan--sorry, this is like, the technophilic aspect of the interview.
Go--yes, that's why I asked for this.
Mondal: [laughs]
Schnug: When you record in mono, guitars take up too much real estate, so I scoop really hard. It's funny, when you solo the guitars, they sound really bad, but they kind of have the right amount of real estate, to my ear anyway.
Mondal: It's all about layering. EQ is your best friend.
Schnug: Yeah, and I use something called a Knas Moisturizer, which is a spring reverb tank. I turn the reverb all the way down. It has a great filter attached to it, but sort of no resonance limiter, so you can get a distortion-type sound with the resonance feedbacking on itself. That's what that sound you're hearing is, and I used a practice bass amp to record the guitar because that also has a sort of scooped quality.
I just had to ask because that's the first thing that jumped out at me when I heard the record, is that quality of almost sounding like you had to break something to make it sound like that.
Schnug: Yeah, live we use terrible flangers to scoop and get the kind of out-of-phase sound. You just turn the regeneration down all the way so it doesn't have the jet plane thing. That's the secret, I guess. [laughs] There are two sound engineers in the band, so I think we are sorta--what's the word? Fastidious.
What about the bass, then?
Mondal: It's funny, we have essentially swapped amps because you're playing through a practice bass amp and I'm actually playing through Caufield's Carr Hammerhead guitar amp, which is a boutique amp company based in Austin--
Schnug: It's very nice.
Mondal: Yeah, I mean, he's been playing that amp for, like, 12, 13 years. Every band that we've ever played in live up till now, that's been your amp, so it developed in Garden Street where that was the--'cause I've never had a bass amp before. I've always shared other people's amps or gear or just gone DI. The songs developed out of just writing in the moment, so I would plug into his amp because it was the only one that was there, and we loved the way that it sounded. For recording, we just put on this Boss bass chorus pedal, but we got it at this really cool synth shop in Austin called Switched On, so they modded it, and it's really cool. And then sometimes flange and sometimes reverb, so that also through a very, like, treble-heavy guitar sound.
Schnug: Our one blues driver pedal that's, like, on everything.
Mondal: Oh, yeah, sometimes we'll put it through the blues driver. So yeah, I have a little pedal chain for recording, but for live, it's just reverb and chorus through the guitar amp. And then my little mustang bass with flat-wound strings that haven't been changed in, like, over a decade. [laughs]
You recently put out this single–"Pain Without a Touch” feels almost like a parallel construction to "Hunger for a Way Out." It's this similar expression, but maybe a little more abstract. Can you tell me about what that means to you?
Mondal: Yeah, well, first of all, you were the one who came up with that phrase.
Schnug: Me? Oh, yeah.
Mondal: Yeah, you were just like, "These are the words that are in my head right now." And then I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna write some stuff around that." I was just thinking about...not specifically quarantine and the pandemic, but using that as a jumping-off point, feeling all sorts of forces at work that you can't pinpoint, but that are still causing you grief. Just the idea of having something that you are working towards or something that you desire, like, trying to accomplish that, achieve it, and not realizing why or what for, and then not ever having that desire culminate in anything. Feeling the constant slap of life that you can't--you know, you don't know what the hand is that's slapping you. [laughs]
Schnug: A lot of Lira's songs are about hustling and stuff, and so the lyrics--but I was like, “We need a catchier phrase.”
Mondal: “We need a catchier, pervier, dangerous phrase.” [laughs]
Schnug: We think a lot about ad copy and stuff, and we like to write with lines that somehow have a finished quality. We make little slogans and taglines for our songs, like, that's a way to write a chorus, or something. We did put out that song as a kind of echo to "Hunger for a Way Out" because--I don't know, our label people were like, "Y'all should release a song." It feels to us like we're working all the time, but I think to the outside world, it seems like maybe the trail is going cold or something, so we wanted to show that a bridge is being built from where we were and where we're going.
I didn't put two and two together about ad slogans before. One of the lyrics that was so striking to me on the first album was "You can't miss out on this, no." The way you deliver it has that feel to it.
Mondal: Oh, yeah, and there was definitely an element in writing that one where it was coming from a person basically telling me, you know, "This is it, or it's not." Like, "Are you gonna do this or not? Because if you go with me, then everything's gonna be great! This is an opportunity that you can't pass up."
Schnug: I think in previous projects, we came from a place of confessionalism, or very kind of interior songwriting, and now we straight-up talk about branding, and like, "Is this legible enough?" [laughs] "Does this line have a finished quality?"
Mondal: Also in previous projects, I think that I was very in my head about things having to go from A to B to C in a narrative way where you get the whole story, or the whole sense of whatever it is that I'm trying to communicate. With Sweeping Promises, it's been a useful exercise to be a little bit more--well, it's no less direct. In fact, I think it's even more direct because a lot of times, it's sort of like automatic writing while Caufield's working on a part. I just go with what I came up with, no questions asked, and it comes from a place of being in the moment and trying to put down what I'm feeling as I'm feeling it. But then a lot of times, I feel like we both try to use language that is a little more vibrant and…
Schnug: Outside of, like, the world of personal exposure. I also think a lot of your words sound like messages or taglines that are dislocated from capitalism, or something that you overheard, and they take on a sort of surreal or subversive quality, or a decontextualized quality. It's not coming from interior--
Mondal: A lot of times it's observational. Yeah. It's like observational interiority.
Caufield, you mentioned label people, and I know this single came out with Feel It, but also Sub Pop. How has the label journey gone, and how did that connection get made?
Mondal: Well, Sub Pop reached out to us within a week of Hunger for a Way Out being released.
No way.
Mondal: Yeah, so the general manager of the label, Chris Jacobs, who has now become a really dear friend, just said, you know, "We here at Sub Pop love this album, and we can't wait to see what y'all do next." It sort of grew organically from there to the point where they asked us, "Well, is there any way that we could team up with Feel It for any future releases?" And so initially to [Feel It owner Sam Richardson]'s chagrin, but now to his delight, we have struck up a territorial split.
Schnug: [laughs] Indeed! Well, Sam is a collaborative sort, but–yeah, I think we were really mindful about leaving the label that broke us, and Feel It's the best label ever. Our best experience ever. This is someone who works tirelessly and made connections for us, and we feel as if--
Mondal: The first champion.
Schnug: Yeah, was our first champion and furnished a career for us. So when we were thinking about making another album, it was not a question. It was like, "It's going to be on Feel It, of course." But things get complicated when you have the major label feeding frenzy, and it's like, "Oh, well, maybe there's a way to triangulate for the future too."
Mondal: Well, yeah, because at the time of recording, we had just left our--well, we were separated from our careers and our jobs, so we thought, "Is there a way to do this sustainably?" And perhaps maybe one of the ways that we do that is with a label with larger amounts of various resources.
Schnug: Yeah, but with Sam steering the ship in America, it will make for the very best possible release. We have full confidence, and then some.
There's a larger audience to be reached, but you don't want to leave anybody in the lurch.
Mondal: Yeah, and again, just can't stress enough just how much Sam's influence and impact on this project reaches it.
Schnug: We were talking about reaching into different ecosystems while at the same time maintaining the kind of grassroots network that Sam had tapped--
Mondal: Slash-has been part of for the past 10-plus years.
Schnug: And maintaining the spirit of that network while also finding new alleyways within it.
I found the record through Dan at Post-Trash, and then tried to find anything about the band, and there was a dearth of information at that point. Then I saw so many writers who I knew by reputation talking about the record as it was coming out--it seemed like word of mouth, but I couldn't find an origin point or a node for that, you know? There was something very cool in the way it was spreading.
Mondal: Which just pleases us to no end. I'm really, tremendously grateful for how people came to it because they genuinely saw or heard something in it that struck them, and it did grow from word of mouth. Sam is the type of person and runs the kind of label who cultivates that very cultish and enthusiastic and generous--
Schnug: And peer-to-peer.
Mondal: Yeah, person-to-person exchange.
Schnug: There was no promotional campaign. We're against those in spirit, really, but Sam would send vinyl to writers and contact people directly.
Mondal: And I think it's because folks know this is someone who--you know, it's a one-man operation. He's been doing this for, like, ten years, started in his own dorm. He has such a clear devotion and passion of what he's doing, so I think people catch onto that, and whenever he puts out a release, no matter what genre tag it is, they know that it comes with some sort of seal of approval. It's his vision and his dedication to his artists that he's putting forward, and it's not, like, promotional material. It's just like, "Hey, this is this thing that I'm really excited about. I can't wait to have my imprint on this thing. Check it out."
Schnug: The question occurred to us, how to scale that spirit up in a global sense. Or even, there was a question of, “Do we try to scale?”
Do you want to scale it, right. Does that take away from it in some way.
Schnug: Right, and I think we were like, "We want to try, but with a commitment to the original spirit." We were really lucky that Sub Pop was interested in that collaboration.
Mondal: The thing that also really warmed our hearts to them is the fact that they also appreciate Feel It and were so deferential. Like, "Whatever Sam wants, we want that. We just want to work with him as harmoniously as possible." That was just, like, "Okay, they're not trying to be proprietary about this. They see the importance of a collaborative spirit.”
Schnug: And we're excited. We've always felt like they want us to have the keys to the car, in a sense, which is like--I don't know, I think you have preconceptions about what a bigger indie label wants from you. But I think always the answer with Sub Pop was--
Mondal: Whatever we're doing.
Schnug: Yeah, like--[laughs]
Mondal: It seems to me that there's just a lot of trust and excitement on their end, which is contagious for us because that means, "Okay, we feel pretty supported.” We just feel an incredible sense of freedom too, from what the music sounds like to how we want it to look visually, because we've had the incredible opportunity to work with D.H. Strother and Aya Miyake, two graphic designers who have left kind of an indelible association to the music with their interpretation of it. They're just like, "Yeah, use the folks that you're interested in. Let's get them to do whatever it is that they want to do.”
You do have a Twitter now. I think you had an Instagram before, but the social media reach is expanding a little. What has that been like?
Mondal: More avenues to talk about snack foods and hot sauce.
I noticed the chips, yes.
Mondal: And that…that's about it. [laughs]
Schnug: We're bad at Twitter. I have never been on Twitter, neither of us have, but–this is going to be the most, like, Captain Obvious--we notice that there's a lot of music discourse on there. [laughs]
Oh my god, it's horrifying. It's never-ending.
Schnug: It seems like kind of a funny place to be for the woeful meta-commentary of music journalists or ex-music journalists, and we've been sort of enjoying that.
Mondal: Yeah, I love music Twitter.
Schnug: The rest of Twitter, I gotta say, seems quite poisonous, and I think we're glad to be social media Luddites, but this is changing. We had a big talk about, you know, "Is it bad?" I think our answer had been "yes," but we're kind of trying to...
Mondal: Be more open-minded about why we immediately had a knee-jerk reaction of why it was bad.
Schnug: Yeah, we definitely don't like the culture of sincerity and authenticity and performative vulnerability. That'll never be us.
Mondal: But also, while we appreciate shitposting, we aren't shitposters.
Schnug: Yeah, not trolls either.
Mondal: So we're just trying to figure out our avenue.
Schnug: There's gotta be some sort of way. We'd be really interested to see some avant-garde uses. We also got a TikTok.
Really? I didn't know that. I'm not on TikTok. This is where my line is, and it's purely generational.
Schnug: We've never made a post because we don't know how, but we were interested in the new quote-unquote punk subcultures emerging on TikTok, which are sort of--the usage of dislocated punk signifiers. I think some people told us, "Y'all have something to do with this," and we're trying to chart that out. Like, "Does this band have some stake in that kind of youth culture?" 'Cause we're definitely interested in engaging with younger people. I think that I'm immediately disqualifying the band from this discourse--
Mondal: I know, because on the one hand, in the back of my mind, I'm like, "Oh my god, is it even gauche to refer to people by their generational tags?" But on the other hand, I definitely feel an affinity towards the, I guess, millennial designation that I more or less fall into. We came up in the age of Facebook, MySpace, Instagram--
Schnug: Social hustling.
Mondal: tumblr, all that stuff, so why is Snapchat or TikTok any different? I guess for me also, and I don't know if this rings true for you, but in the back of my mind is the feeling of, like, slouching towards irrelevance of even being in a "guitar band." Especially how I guess platforms more and more are skewing towards electronic music--like, primarily electronic and more beat-oriented, or just start-to-finish made on Ableton.
Schnug: Which we listen to a lot. We like the new configurations of pop and its microgenres being made in new media.
Mondal: I guess the thing that I was going to say is, it feels unfair to limit a younger generation's interests as, like, "They only listen to electronic music," or like, "Because we play in a punk band with guitars, then we're automatically disqualified." I don't know why I feel like it's novel for a 15-year-old to like us.
Schnug: If you think about–classic punk is more importable to the logic of TikTok than many genres. Like, short songs, short structures, words that have a mimetic quality, like you could act them out really easily in a dance or something. Really clear and implosive genre signifiers. When the album came out, we were likened to, like, Molchat Doma and the kind of late-capital melancholy that was sort of vogueish, apparently, on TikTok? I don't know if that's true at all. I'm aware that maybe there's leftist groups that listen to doomer music, I think is maybe what it's called? I don't know if we have some stake in that or not, but it's interesting to think about those affective subcultures, like, "This music is, like, sad rebellion” or something, and that can be transmitted really legibly.
Mondal: It's also interesting to have tags associated to your music, whereas before, in the age of just self-identifying as a goth or a punk, you only had whatever media you were consuming in a physical format–CDs, books, zines, comics, whatever–and then whatever you were wearing. Now, I feel like the fluidity of being tagged as something, and also the rigidity as well–it's a two-sided coin of, you can assume whatever new genre tag you feel at the moment, but at the same time, there are infinite little policing groups, like, "This is not that! This is this!"
Schnug: Or that mood is the new genre. Like, it's not punk music. It's music that generates that type of dance.
More of a playlist mindset.
Schnug: Totally. I think we find that kind of freeing, but also--well, yeah, problematic. But yeah, I think that Lira and I were like, "Why do we feel such a knee-jerk reaction against being on media in general? Why do we hate the internet?"
Mondal: “If we're all about branding, then we should embrace it!” [laughs]
Schnug: I think it's something we're still working through, and I think the result of that is us not really using our Twitter, but we hope to maybe have more facility with these things in the future.
Let me personally welcome you to music Twitter, and I hope to see you around there more.
Mondal: Thank you! I guess the thing that just popped into my mind is, "On Sweeping Promises Twitter, am I talking as Lira who loves chips, or am I talking as Lira, one of the faces of Sweeping Promises?" And that already makes my mind go, like, "bleh!” I don't know who to be!
As I was scrolling, it took me a moment to figure out who was tweeting. I was reading a bunch of tweets assuming it was Lira, and I stopped and I was like, "What if it isn't? Wait a minute, who actually is this?"
Mondal: [laughs] That's something we lean into.
Schnug: Listen, we don't know how to use the tools. We come from a very basic place with music. It's the Xerox machine for us, okay? [laughs]
Mondal: We're trying to grow.
Schnug: I think ideally we would use the Twitter as a Xerox machine, if that's even possible. Maybe that's not even an apt conversion.
Mondal: We just need Will [Henriksen] and Travis [Hagan] to do the Blau Blau thing again.
What was that?
Schnug: One of our bands had kind of a performance art social media.
Mondal: There was this…I guess you could call it a legendary-slash-apocryphal–
Schnug: Legendary to us.
Mondal: Yeah, legendary to, like, the four people that were in that band--Facebook post that either Travis or Will, I forget who it was, but they just wrote "Blau Blau Blau Blau Blau Blau" for, like, a full four inches of wall space. That was a whole post. And then of course Facebook automatically generated "See More / See Translation," [laughs] so then we created a limited-edition hand-screen-printed shirt. I think there were only a few of them, like, five or so in existence right now somewhere in the greater Boston area.
Schnug: We ran a lot of ads too.
Mondal: [laughs] We did. Lots of sponsored posts.
That's one of my favorite Facebook bits, is to make a nonsensical post, and then pay to promote it so that people have to look at it. What band was that, by the way?
Mondal: Blau Blau.
Schnug: [in unison] Blau Blau. Which--yeah. [all laugh]
You know what? That one's on me.
Schnug: Have you read The Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang?
I have not.
Schnug: It's so good. The thesis is that internet advertising is basically an over-inflated industry, and as the thing that anchors and finances creative content in general, it's analogous to the 2008 housing bubble. And one day we'll all figure out that the algorithms don't generate the value that they say they're generating, and all creative content will crash.
As you said that, I got this deep feeling in the pit of my stomach that every word you were saying was true, you know?
Mondal: Yeah, we're living it right now.
I'll have to read that and get more into it, but thank you for the recommendation. I wanted to ask you, is "Pain Without a Touch" from the next record, or is it a complete standalone?
Mondal: It's a standalone. We're working on the next record.
Schnug: The new record will have a different kind of sonic vibe. It'll be closer to the first record, I think.
You mean a different vibe from the single, then?
Schnug: It'll be a little mistier.
Mistier.
Schnug: I don't know how to put it. [laughs] That's how the songs are turning out so far.
Mondal: Yeah, the thing about "Pain Without a Touch" that did strike me after we recorded it was, "You know, this seems a lot more polished than Hunger for a Way Out, the album." I think some folks had said that, and I was just thinking, "Is that good or bad?" Should we want more polished? What does it even mean to be more polished?
Schnug: The new record will feature our low-equipment ways, and it'll be raw and direct, but I think it will also have the--I don't know how to put it. The spatial quality of the first.
Have you started assembling, or are you waiting for the new studio to be ready?
Mondal: We've started.
Schnug: It won't be long.
I'm very excited. That's great to hear.
Mondal: We're really excited too. I keep thinking about how we have the gift of this space just right around the corner, and I'm just so extremely grateful. I think 2022 is gonna be a pretty good year for Sweeping Promises, or an eventful one.
Schnug: Yeah, we're just gonna try to record as much as we can.
One question I like to ask when I talk to people who are in close creative partnerships is, for each of you, what’s your favorite thing about the other as an artist?
Mondal: There are so many things I love about Caufield, and I think it's just his inquisitiveness, his natural talent to do basically everything. He's always changing and learning and growing and adapting to wherever we are and is always so open, and is just a really intense listener–a deep and focused listener. I think it's his focus that I cherish the most.
Schnug: Lira has amazing talent and raw musicianship. That's not the thing that I value the most. I think it's more the songwriting intuition. I've seen it happen hundreds of times where she kind of conjures something out of nothing and can change the direction of the wind in, like, a minute. I see her as the person who catalyzes everything we do, and my job is to just engage with that. [laughs] I feel like I have the privileged role.