Interview: Andrew Paley of The Static Age

First of all, thank you for your time. How have you been?

Andrew: I’ve been mostly good, thanks! Been traveling a bit and now back in Chicago working on a few things to round out the summer. No complaints.

Congratulations on your solo acoustic release! Can you share more details about the material with our readers?

Andrew: Sure yeah. My latest release was a live EP recorded at the online edition of the Moonrunners Festival that happened back in the doldrums of the pandemic. It’s got three songs on it – one is a version of a song from my previous album, Scattered Light, another is a previously unreleased song, and the third is a cover of a Days N Daze song. A couple weeks before that I also released a new version of a previously released song, “Sequels 2.0” which is quite a bit less acoustic but also one I’m excited about having out there while working towards the new album.

What was the recording process like? Have you recorded it at home or in a professional studio?

Andrew: For the online festival, I just live streamed the set from my home studio – it was just vocals and guitar, and I was tracking it as it happened. Just about as “straight to tape” as it gets. For the single before that, it was also recorded in my own space, though through a bit of a longer process.

What led you to cover a Days N Daze song, and what does that particular song mean to you personally?

Andrew: Well, Days N Daze and I first crossed paths when they actually covered a song of mine, “Caroline,” for a comp associated with The Fest. Then we ended up releasing a split 7” of our two versions and I played a few shows with them when they swung through the midwest. The initial idea to cover one of their songs was sparked sometime during those shows when I got the chorus hook to “My Darling Dopamine” stuck in my head, and it occurred to me it’d be fun to kind of high five them back with a cover. Plus, it’s a really great song – and I loved putting a slightly different spin on it.

Can you tell us about the themes and messages you explore in the other songs on your EP?

Andrew: So, I’m actually between two EPs right now – the live one that just came out, and a second one that will be out later this year. For the upcoming one, the songs pull from a few different places, but I think a core theme generally is about working through states of chaos. Sometimes it’s a personal kind of chaos – one song is about being many timezones away from home in some amount of disrepair – and other times it’s a more collective or social kind of chaos…it’s hard to not lose sleep over the state of the world, and that shows up in various ways.

Where do you draw inspiration from when crafting your lyrics and music for your solo work?

Andrew: It tends to be a sort of inspiration that’s more immediate than when writing with others – there’s a closer connection between whatever’s happening in my head and whatever’s falling out of it when it’s just me in a room trying to capture something. Sometimes it works better than others – there are certainly hundreds of half-done demos from the past handful of years – but whatever falls into place tends to feel like it resonates more with me after the fact. All that said, I don’t really actively seek inspiration so much as have a sense of when I might have something to write, and then I just sorta lean into whatever shows up.

Switching gears to The Static Age, can you share any exciting details about the new material you’re working on? Any surprises or departures from your previous sound?

Andrew: I think the singles we’ve released over the past year – “Traffic Dreams” and “Depths” – do a good job of capturing where we’re headed. I think the new songs are still very much us overall, but I think we’re willing to be a little less reserved now than we might have been in the past, and I’m as excited about these new songs as I’ve ever been.

What inspired the lyrics on the upcoming Static Age record? Are there any particular themes or experiences you wanted to explore?

Andrew: Well, as I said, I tend to avoid sitting down to write with a particular idea of where I’ll end up in mind – I usually don’t like much of what I come up with when I sit down with that kind of intention. That said, I think the last five years or so has given me plenty of fodder, on both personal and political/social fronts, so it’s not hard to feel that coming through the songs when I pick up a thread and run with it.

How does the songwriting and recording process differ between your solo career and your work with The Static Age?

Andrew: Generally speaking, the solo work is more immediate. I write and record most everything on my own, and there’s a much shorter gap between writing something and realizing it on record – and sometimes no gap at all. With The Static Age, it’s a much more collaborative process and it can take much longer – ideas grow into songs in a practice space and sometimes don’t make their way to a recording for years of being batted around and reconfigured in practice and live settings. “Depths” for instance started out with a totally different chorus on tours in 2016/2017 and then got partially re-written when I was finally recording it last year.

Do you have any favorite venues or cities that you particularly enjoy playing with The Static Age or for your solo performances?

Andrew: Oh lots. I always love coming back to Germany in general – there are easily a dozen cities I could mention that I can’t wait to get back to, and it’s sort of our home away from home. But so much of Europe overall has been a blast for us every time we’ve been, whether it’s London, Brussels, Copenhagen, Prague, Budapest, Novi Sad, Ternopil or anywhere in between. On the homefront, we’ve had a blast playing the occasional show at Liar’s Club here in Chicago in between tours too.

What are some of the challenges and rewards of working on your solo acoustic EP versus collaborating with bandmates in The Static Age?

Andrew: Well, as I mentioned, the immediacy of the solo recording process is a benefit, but that comes with tradeoffs – if it’s just you in a room with “unlimited” time, when do you stop? When are you done? I have gone down many nights worth of rabbitholes chasing sounds or takes or ideas or feelings – tweaking things until I think they’re just right only to decide the next morning that last-night-me had no idea what they were doing. So yeah, you can create endlessly, but you have to know when to stop, and it’s almost never easy. On the other hand, collaborating with a band takes more time upfront and requires you to constrain and polish your ideas more, but it also means there are multiple people involved who can be sounding boards and you bounce ideas off each other. Some things move slower, but others are faster/easier. Sometimes an idea I could spend hours on solo to see if it worked would last about five minutes in a band setting – for better and sometimes worse, maybe, as more ideas do get lost along the way.

Are there any specific influences or musical styles that you draw inspiration from when creating music for The Static Age?

Andrew: Oh, it’s a pile. I think early on I had specific ideas about styles or sonic palettes or whatever that I wanted to go after – The Psychedelic Furs, The Chameleons UK, The Clash, New Order, Peter Gabriel, and so on. As things evolved, I think I just got to a place where some new song either sounded like The Static Age or it didn’t – like I kind of just knew it when I came across it in the writing process. And there’s more than one style that fits that idea for me, so I think the band’s work has gotten more varied over the years. That said, not everything I write fits it, and that’s actually partially why I started doing more solo stuff – I was writing some songs that just weren’t that sound, and I wanted to do something with them. 

How do you balance your solo endeavors and commitment to The Static Age?

Andrew: It’s not always easy – I wish I had about twice as many hours, but so it goes. At least the work itself is easy enough to tell apart – sometimes there are new songs that are The Static Age songs, and sometimes there are new songs that are something else. The nice thing about the solo project is it can evolve in kind of unconstrained ways, so I can follow that thread wherever it takes me.

Are there any particular dynamics or chemistry within The Static Age that distinguish it from your solo career and make it a unique experience for you as an artist?

Andrew: Sure. Adam and I have known each other since high school and we’ve been all over the place together in this band – he’s basically like a brother to me, and there are many amazing things and sometimes a few difficult things about relationships between brothers. But that relationship has helped fuel the band. And Joe, our longtime drummer, has become core to that dynamic over the past decade too – he’s as much a part of the chemistry as Adam and I are. And having multiple peoples’ energy and style and taste combine into whatever we do together is by its nature different from me in a room with my cat at 4am Friday.

Finally, do you have any upcoming shows or tour plans?

Andrew: Yeah, on both fronts. The Static Age is playing a few shows in October in and around Chicago with our friends in Dead on a Sunday. Ross, the singer of that band, and I have collaborated together on songs with his other project, StayLoose. And I’ll also do one of those dates as a solo show. Beyond that, there are plans coming together for some European dates in Spring/Summer of next year.

That’s it. Thank you so much for your time. Anything you would like to say to our readers?

Andrew: Thanks for your time as well – and the same to anyone reading. If you’re so inclined, you can go check out new songs from the two halves of my music life on whatever streaming service you choose, and I hope to see you at a show somewhere out there. Thanks!

Source: thoughtswordsaction.com