One Song at a Time: A Conversation with Mike Hogan of Tape Slam

“Faded City” is the debut single from Tape Slam. Written during the pandemic, it’s a song about looking back with mixed feelings at youth, lost innocence, and a disappearing landscape filled with promise and mystery and terrible beauty. The song has a bit of a “Walk on the Wild Side” thing groove, but with some Texas twang courtesy of guest vocalist Jessa Lussier, a.k.a. Lady Wail. Rounding out the lineup are the Rock Philosopher himself, Dave Crimaldi, on drums, and the multitalented Killian Smith on bass, Moog, and clarinet. Curious to learn more, I got in touch with the motivating force behind the project, Mike Hogan.

What does the name Tape Slam mean to you?

It has a very specific meaning, actually. Back in the early aughts, I had an apartment in Astoria, Queens, and I would have parties where everyone had to bring a stack of CD’s and we would make a “competitive mixtape.” We called these parties “tape slams.” We’d go around the room and each person would play one track. Then, at the end of each round, we’d all vote one person OUT of the next round. Eventually, there would be a showdown between two people. It was three parts fun and at least two parts psychological torture, but it was a great way to discover cool music. When I was searching for a name for this band or project or whatever, I remembered those parties and decided to borrow the name, not least because it’s a combination of two one-syllable words that wasn’t already taken by a half dozen other people on Spotify. But I also like the connotations: of old cassettes, of coming together in person to listen to music, and of mixing a bunch of different musical influences that are all really good.

What’s your musical background?

I’ve been obsessed with music for as long as I can remember. The launch of MTV, when I was 6 years old, was a pivotal event in my childhood. When I was in elementary school, I learned clarinet and then saxophone, and I acted in musicals and sang in bands through college. I started teaching myself guitar at age 19 and played rhythm guitar in a band led by my brother called The Tokeleys in my early/mid-20s, but it was only during the pandemic that I feel like I finally broke through and achieved what I like to call “minimal adequacy” up and down the fretboard.

You wrote the song “Faded City” during the pandemic. How did that context inform the song?

Well, it’s a song about nostalgia, and I felt very nostalgic back then for my old life in NYC and even my not-so-old life in NYC. My wife found out she was pregnant basically the week everything shut down, and we decamped to our house in Eastern Long Island. Suddenly, this very hectic social and professional existence I had been leading in the city was over. Oddly, I found that I was glad that it was over. But I had a lot of time to reflect on the past and try to figure out what, if anything, it all added up to.

The song has a “Walk on the Wild Side” feel. Where does Lou Reed fit into your personal pantheon of recording artists?

Almost at the top. Right below Bob Dylan, although in many ways I can relate to Lou more. Lou was an ornery Tristate Area guy, and he romanticized New York City in a way that I don’t think Dylan ever really did, at least not after the early 60s. Lou loved good old fashioned rock-n-roll, but he also loved fucking with people and making weird crazy sounds and shining a light on incredibly dark subjects. I think I have a similar appreciation for pop catchiness, on one hand, and weird shit on the other. 

You recorded the song in Denton, Texas. What drew you to that city?

So during the pandemic, as I got more comfortable playing guitar, I started writing songs and recording them on my laptop using Garageband. Eventually I got up the nerve to send them to a few people, and one of them was an old high school friend named Dave Crimaldi. We had played in a band together in high school—I sang, he played drums—and we reconnected over Facebook. When I sent Dave the stuff I was working on, he was encouraging but also had real feedback for me. Basically, he took the music seriously, and that was a game-changer for me. I was having a hard time finding musicians to play with in my area, and he told me I should come to Denton where you can’t throw a rock without hitting a musician, basically. Most importantly, he’s a drummer, and we all know how impossible it is to find a good drummer. So I visited last April and we played a show as a threesome with an amazing musician named Killian Smith on bass, then I came back in October and we recorded an EP with more great musicians, and now I’m returning to play with Dave, Killian, a guitarist named Joey Cerda, and a singer named Jessa Lussier, who performs as Lady Wail.

How did you meet everyone involved in the project?

I met everybody first through Dave and then through Killian. Their generosity has been stupefying, truly.

What everyone bring to the song?

On the original demo, I used a MIDI keyboard to create a background drone behind the acoustic chords. Killian brilliantly reimagined that on a Moog, one of his vast assortment of acoustic synthesizers, as those swelling waves of sound that give the song so much texture. Jessa’s vocals give the song an ethereal quality that I love, and it was incredible to watch her work. Long after I thought there couldn’t possibly be room for another harmony, she’d be like, “I think I have another one.” And she did! It was Killian’s idea to have her sing the “ah’s” over the rising chords at the end. As he put it, “I want her to keep singing, because she’s so good that it just sucks anytime she stops.” Dave’s drums serve the song beautifully, but I also have to give Dave credit for the track even existing. This was always his favorite of the demos I sent him, and when I started to question aspects of it, he just kept reassuring me: “You’ve captured something here. This is gonna make people feel something.” I also should shout out Alex Hastings at Mockingbird Sound Recording Studios, who recorded and mixed the whole EP and also plays guitar on some of the other tracks that will be out later in the year.

Do you have plans to play live?

Yeah, we’re doing this Noise Market show in Denton this coming weekend, and then it’s my fervent hope that I can get at least some of these folks to the Tristate Area this summer or fall for a series of shows in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Jersey, and maybe the East End where I live.

How about a follow-up to “Faded City”?

Yeah, there are six songs in all—five recorded at Mockingbird and one I did at home but asked Alex to mix. This is the first “single,” and I’m still figuring out the rest of the release plan. I kind of like the idea of dropping at least one or two more tracks before releasing the whole EP. It’s so hard to get people to give new, unproven music a chance, and I feel like I have a better chance if I ask them to listen to one song at a time.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions!

Thank you so much for your interest! It really means a lot.

We Get Bored Pretty Easily: A Conversation with Steve Karsch of Snap Infraction

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I’m a huge fan of Snap Infraction. Last time we chatted was in November of 2022, and we talked about a wide range of topics, including their love of the Beatles, the strategy of slow-dripping an album, and the history of the band. Turns out they’ve been busy since then, having released two singles in anticipation of their album Eephus, which was released on May 3rd. Curious to learn more, I dropped guitarist Steve Karsch a line…

Last time we talked, the strategy was to “slow-drip” an album, releasing two songs at a time with the intention of bundling them all together into a single album once all the tracks were released. This time around, you’re taking a more traditional route by releasing a couple of singles and then the full album. What was behind this decision?

You just reminded me that we never DID end up putting all those tracks on an album. Hah! I guess we should do that. Maybe sometime next year!

Anyway, the thinking behind doing things in a more “traditional album” fashion this time around was kind of two-fold. First, we are all fans of the album as a musical entity. And I don’t mean concept albums or whatever.  Just a collection of songs that were written and recorded in roughly the same time period.  A time capsule of sorts. Not every song has to be single material. Albums are supposed to flow, so, yeah, of course you hope there’s a “hit” or two, but the rest of the tracks are there for a reason, too.  They’re not just filler.  When I look at an album like “Synchronicity” by The Police; it’s an incredible album, right?  Lots of hits. But “Mother” and “Murder By Numbers” and “Miss Gradenko” are great, as well. If The Police were to just put out the singles, those songs might never have been heard. But as part of that album, they’re a perfect fit.

The second reason was because I think it’s important to have a different approach to each “band project.”  We get bored pretty easily. So, we did the EP thing (twice), we did a year of singles, and now we did an album. The next project is Snap Infraction: The Movie (kidding).

Did thinking of the project as a fully-formed album change your approach to songwriting?

It definitely did. When we did those singles in 2021 it was basically an experiment in writing to a deadline. Some of those songs had been in a partially-written state for a while and just needed finishing, but more than half of them were like “OK, *that* song’s done, now I need to write/record/mix two more in two months.”

With “eephus” my plan all along was to spend 2022 writing and fully-demo’ing all the songs before we even *thought* about going into the studio. All of the songs were written in that timeframe. Well, except for the riff on “Leave Without A Fight.” I had that as part of a different song a decade ago and Tony liked it so I *had* to use it. But, other than that, everything was written in 2022.

When I listen to those demos now and compare them with the finished album, there are some changes, but not a ton. 90%+ of the album is there, in place. I probably changed a couple of lyrics, but it’s all there. Obviously, the album sounds WORLDS better than the demos, but all the pieces are there. Maybe for the 20th anniversary “deluxe reissue” we’ll release the demos. On cassette! Ha!

That being said, when I was writing the songs I didn’t sit down and think “OK, track 3 of the album needs to be a reset song, a little slower” or anything formulaic like that. They pretty much just came out how they came out and then we put them in order and I think (hope) they flow well together.

For previous projects, I recall that you did what a lot of us in the indie music scene do: sending files back and forth and recording parts at home. This time around, I understand you went into a studio to record. What was behind that decision?

As I mentioned earlier, we just wanted to do something different. We have a low boredom threshold so we need to keep ourselves motivated by trying different things.  Not *drastically* different like “Oh, we’re gonna write and record a electronica-thrash metal album” but just things like “This time we’re going to release a single every 2 months” or “This time we’re going to do an album in a studio.” Truthfully, I just wanted to get out of my basement for once.

How did recording in a studio influence the songs?

It didn’t really influence me from a songwriting perspective. Although, one thing I tried to do was keep the arrangements pretty light and tight.  There’s not many (or any) songs where there’s, like, 10 guitars going at once.  There’s a lot of vocal harmonies, but instrumentation-wise we kept it pretty straightforward, and I think that’s because, since we did it in a studio, we were really happy with how the drums sounded so we didn’t have to throw a bunch of layers on top to try to cover up any deficiencies in the recordings.

It also forced us to be better planners. In our “singles” era, I would quickly demo a song with a rough arrangement, send it to the other guys for them to record their parts, they would send it back and I would finish writing the song *as* I was recording my parts.

This time, we had  everything worked out ahead of time. To the point where when it came time to cut vocals, we had written down what notes we needed to sing in the harmonies so there wouldn’t be any questions or time wasted trying to figure things out. 

Looking at the credits on two singles you’ve released so far, I see, they were recorded and engineered by Matt Weber at Gradwell House Studios. What did working with an engineer bring to the process?

I really can’t say enough good things about Matt and Gradwell House. Matt very clearly knows what he’s doing and is so easy to work with and is a super-quick worker. There was never a time where we were sitting around while the engineer figured something out, or fixed a faulty cable or whatever. Everything went super-smoothly and that’s largely due to how excellent Matt is. Even when I ended up tracking some things at home and would inevitably run into a problem, I would think “Where the hell is Matt when I need him?” Haha.  It is immensely freeing to have that level of trust in the people you work with, and we had never even met him until the day of the first session. Also, if you work with Matt, bring him Skittles!

It was the same with our mix engineer, Mike Ian at Eyeball Studios.  Tony and I have known Mike for an eternity, it seems. And he has the most amazing ear.  I swear he hears frequencies that 99.99% of humanity doesn’t hear. And he’s a virtuoso-type player on a ton of instruments.  We were totally psyched when he had some availability to mix our record because we just knew he would do an incredible job. And he did. Again, we trusted him totally. We never had any questions about the mix, maybe a few tiny notes here or there, but everything he did was awesome! And Tom Volpicelli at Mastering House has been mastering our stuff since we did the “Stiff Arm” EP and he did an incredible job per usual.

The lead single from the new album is called “Keeping Score,” and it’s actually about learning not to keep score. Why do you think people have a tendency to keep score—especially in relationships—and why might that be a problem?

The story behind that song, or at least the title of that song, goes back a long way. When my wife and I got married, we were all at the after-after party at the hotel and our friend took Tony’s video camera (this was before the advent of smartphones) and went around asking people at the bar, who weren’t even there for our wedding, advice for the newlyweds.  And this woman looked straight into the camera and said “Don’t keep score” which is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received. 

I think it’s human nature to keep score. We’re always keeping tabs on what others are doing and comparing and judging ourselves. I’m certainly guilty of it but that woman’s advice from years ago is etched in my brain. And I’m thankful for that, because it reminds me that I’m doing whatever I’m supposed to be doing at whatever pace I’m supposed to be doing it.

The second single, “Nothing Has Changed at All,” reminds me a bit of The Beatles. In particular, the “Do-do-dit-doo dit-doo doo-whoo” lines make me think of “Mother Nature’s Son.” Who are some other influences on the new album?

Ding ding ding!  Yeah, that’s *totally* Beatle-influenced.  It’s no secret that they are my favorite band in all time and space and they greatly influence my songwriting.  I try not to go too deep into Beatle-pastiche territory but that song certainly treads carefully (or not so carefully) in that area.  It was written not long after the “Get Back” documentary came out which kind of reminded me that this is supposed to be fun, you know? For all their quarrels and whatever, when they got down to playing, it was fun. Or it *looked* fun, at least. The “do-do-dit-doo” part was another instance where I’d be listening to their songs where they do that and I thought, “huh, not EVERYTHING has to have a lyric.” 

Anyway, as far as influences across the rest of the album: Tony was on a really big Cars kick so he said to me “you need to write more songs like The Cars.”  That’s where “Keeping Score” came from. He said that, and I had a little keyboard on the desk next to me and I just hit the first four notes, kind of randomly: G A B D and it just sort of grew out of that randomness. I seem to remember that one coming together pretty quickly, the drum intro and the bass bit and everything.  I tried to make the guitar part like something Elliot Easton would play. And we knew from day one that it would open that album. 

There’s all kinds of little influences scattered across the album, like early Fleetwood Mac, Joe Jackson, etc but really the biggest influences *were* bands like The Cars or The Beatles or The Police where every song on the album is strong. Even “You Tried To Get Away With It All”, which is not necessarily in our wheel-house stylistically…I like it for that very reason. Not every song needs to be hit material, but every track needs to be as good as we can make it. A no-skipper, if you will. Of course, that’s for the listener to decide.

I’m also curious about the title of the album. What does “eephus” signify, and does that idea tie the songs on the album together in any way?

That was kind of a last minute decision. We had another title for it, but our previous EP titles, “Chin Music” and “Stiff Arm”, are sports slang and the temporary title we had was not sports-based. Tony and I were talking about baseball during the last Phillies playoff run and we may have been talking about a pitcher who gave up a home run and I said “yeah, he threw up an eephus.”  It’s a nothing pitch. Like a big looping lob of a pitch.  It has nothing to do with the record or the songs but it’s a funny word and it has to do with sports, so that’s why we used it.

Are there any plans for the band to play live?

Our shows are few and far between but we *did* just play one at The Fire in Philly, which was a lot of fun, and I think we have a few lined up in the summer/fall in the Philly area as well. Stay tuned.

What comes next?

Good question. I’m always writing and I have some songs ready for whatever we do next, which we haven’t even really discussed yet…I vacillate between doing another full-length album vs doing more EPs vs just doing singles. I think once the album comes out I’ll start the process of going through my newer demos and seeing what we have to work with.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to me!

It’s always a pleasure, Marc!

All Moons Have Nicknames: An Interview with Magana

Magana – aka Jeni Magaña – creates haunted Alternative Pop. Having taken the long road from Bakersfield, CA to Berklee College, MA to Brooklyn, NY, her musical journey included a diverse array of experiences (such as commercial jingles and performing with Dropkick Murphys) before she arrived on Audio Antihero for her ‘Golden Tongue‘ debut. Since then she toured the world with Mitski (from Jimmy Kimmel to Glastonbury) and Lady Lamb, released music through labels in multiple continents, relocated to Los Angeles, and formed the acclaimed pop duo pen pin with Emily Moore.

Your press materials say that Teeth was released on March 25^th to coincide with the Worm Moon’s peak illumination. What is the Worm Moon, and how does it relate to the music on Teeth? 

All full moons have nicknames. The worm moon is maybe named after the worms that make their way above ground once everything thaws out for spring. It’s a time of spring, rejuvenation, and growth. That’s what Teeth is about too! 

Your music falls into some interesting categories, including Witchy Rock, Acid Folk, and Krautrock. What does each of these categories mean to you, and how do they complement each other? I’m particularly curious about how Krautrock fits into the equation. 

What they all have in common is the experimental element. It’s cosmic and sort of mystical more than psychedelic. It’s still an indie pop record, but that doesn’t really describe the experience of the music. We were looking for something that would help someone understand what the record sounds like and these seemed like more helpful terms. 

I read that Teeth grew out of your meditations and synth experiments. Can you talk about that a little bit—and how the two may have informed each other?

Teeth was a meeting of synth experiments without lyrics and songs that needed fresh instrumentation. I was putting wild soundscapey synths on everything at the time. Everything was sort of this wall of sound that I had to sort through and tease out what needed to stay and go. A sort of sonic sculpting. 

You’ve spent the last few years as the road bassist for Mitski. How has that experience informed your approach to making music? 

Inspiration is waiting to be found in every source. It’s easy to get inspiration from the super-talented people that I’m on stage with every night. But it’s more than that, also. I went to an art museum with a few of my bandmates and got inspiration from that as well. I take some solo walks and get inspiration from that. 

You also work with Emily Moore as part of the pen pin pop duo. How is working in a duo different from working on your own material as a solo artist? 

Working with Emily is more like having a conversation with someone. My solo material is more like journaling. With Emily, there’s a sort of loose organization to our creative process. One of us comes up with an idea, and then the other person flushes it out a little more. We pass ideas back and forth, which morphs the original idea into the final product. My solo work doesn’t have those checks and balances. I feel a bit more like a mad scientist that eventually emerges from the isolation of my lab in order to see if my discovery is actually new.

How is Teeth different from some of your earlier work?

The approach is the main divider between “Teeth” and my previous catalog. “Golden Tongue” was about writing songs on guitar, and then arranging everything around those lines. “Morning Person” was a development on that theme. I wrote songs on guitar and then had a band help me arrange a more fleshed out arrangement. Teeth abandoned those ideas. Songs were written on a bass riff, or a synth line. I played most of the instruments and arranged everything myself. Because of that approach, the sound on this record is more like a left turn than moving another step forward in a straight line. You can still see that it’s part of the same path, but there’s just a bend in the trail that is a little unexpected. 

Along similar lines, how do you see yourself as having grown as an artist from one project to the next over the past few years?

A really clear example of growth is the instrumentation. I have used each record as a chance to learn more about something. The first record was electric guitar. The second was band arrangements and woodwind lines. This one is synth, string arrangements and drum arrangements. It’s easier for me to learn something when I have a goal to apply the knowledge. 

You recorded the album during lockdown in the pandemic, but it just came out on March 25^th. What’s it like for you to listen back to it now that some time has passed since you recorded the music?

It’s actually really nice! There are definitely a couple things that I would change if it were now, but mostly it’s such a different time and I’ve had so much space from it that I’m able to listen to it as if a stranger made it. Without the associations I had with the process of making it or putting it out, it turns out I like it a lot! In some ways, a stranger did make it. I was a different person in 2020 than I am now. 

Teeth is being released through Audio Antihero Records and your own Colored Pencils imprint. How does the relationship between the two work? Who does what?

Let me be totally clear, Jamie does most of the work and they deserve all of the credit. They did everything from press and outreach to keeping me organized and helping me sort out my name that was misspelled on Tidal. Also, they offer me moral support constantly. 

What are you working on now?

I’m working on some more instrumentals that will supplement my “Dreams” EP to make it a more immersive album experience. 

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions! 

My pleasure!