Music Makers

Three Music Thingz with Best Actress

Oh my gosh, it's another rendition of Three Music Thingz, the blogseries where I ask musicians for three thingz that are essential to their music-making.

Today we have Best Actress! The NYC-based band brings together Georgia Pettit of Our Lady of Sorrows, Ryan Jantz of no big, and songwriter Erin Harland; they specialize in what they call "attic music"—"short, delicate songs assembled quickly in our respective home studios." Best Actress have released their debut album, called I Know It Sounds Bad, on 2/13 (produced by Nate Mendelsohn aka Market) and if you like the spare intimacy of early Frankie Cosmos, the lets-get-right-to-the-point catchiness of Guided By Voices, and the....childlike wonder?? of Beat Happening, you will like this album.

Within the attic of the Best Actress songwriting realm are many treasures, like "Bardo," which is exuberant and just a tad disheveled, like your best friend who rolled out of bed to meet you for a breakfast date; "Slane," accented with charming woodwinds, tumbles from one tempo to another with the pace of a nice conversation. Many songs are quite short, which is good, because life is short.

Best Actress were kind enough to share their three music thingz with the blog...keep reading to learn what they are...

Ephemeral, in General

This is maybe a bit of a broad start, but if our band had a mantra, it might be “light and tight.” Because we all front our own separate bands/projects, Best Actress is a bit of a respite from any kind of pressure or heavy self-introspection. We present each other with little moments of disappearing beauty that we’ve captured here and there, and grab hold onto what organically feels sticky.

There’s a fairly large margin of error with lots of ephemeral things we have to handle very gently, or they cease to exist. It's a lot of unfinished voice memos, out-of-focus disposable camera images, and inspired song adds for whatever reason makes sense in the moment to playlists that are longer than they are curated. Hence, our record title, “I Know It Sounds Bad.”

George Saunders

Lincoln in the Bardo is a canonical text for our band; we have a song, “Bardo” that touches similar themes (attachment, confusion, the relationship between fear and desire) - but more than that, there’s a sentiment in his amazing book, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing,”* that is something like, a good story makes you want to read the next sentence.

Since we do a fair amount of through-composition (like our two-minute “Cold Hands”) we rely on this sentiment to remind us you don’t need traditional song structure so much as you just want to make something tight that the person wants to keep “reading”.

*Adrienne Lenker also recommends this book in her epic School of Song songwriting class.

Singing Songs That Aren't Ours

Covers are back guys and we’re so here for it. We once threw a pretty epic Oasis Cover party to celebrate the band’s tour (Sunday night Met Life lfg). (Don’t Look Back in Anger ruled.) We’re karaoke junkies with staples like Erin’s Don’t Rain on my Parade, Ryan’s That’s Amore, and Georgia’s How’s It Going to Be. We also get obsessed with certain artists or genres and learn to play very down-stream versions of songs we love on acoustic guitar. We also did three Folklore covers for a birthday party for Georgia’s bandmate, whose all-time favorite song besides every Metallica song is seven.