When things are going well, we turn to amp us up or to keep things real. When the going gets tough, though, music becomes a healing force, a source of calmness. Equal parts touching and uplifting, Mines Falls music seems custom-made for our times, supplying us with all the emotions we need to get through the day. Their new single Hey Mother is just that, a lucid ray of sunshine through the clouds, a song where classic songwriting meets modern production. We had a chat with California-based brothers Carson and Erik Lund to discuss life, art and cities.

Your sophomore self-titled album is a nice evolution from your debut, Nepenthe. How was the production process?

Carson: As with Nepenthe, we recorded our new album almost entirely at home in Los Angeles, though this time it’s a different residence in the Los Feliz neighborhood. As foreseen in our song My New House, our (now) old house has since been torn down and we were forced to relocate, but we’ve bolstered our home studio considerably. 

I started writing songs for this new record on piano right after we released Nepenthe, and, per usual, we spent months in the demoing stage, auditioning parts and experimenting with song structures. I sing gibberish to develop melodies and it’s not until later, when inspiration strikes, that I start writing lyrics. 

Erik: With Nepenthe, we consciously tried to make a record that explored sonic space through minimalism. During the production process we wound up breaking some of our own rules such as the unwritten “no drums” rule, but ultimately for the better, we hope. For the new record, we wanted to explore a more robust sonic palette and fill out the sound a bit more. One of the goals was to make it sound like a full band, even though we are only two people. So we approached it in a more layered multi-tracked way and went back to drums and guitar with more regularity. 

What are the inspirations and the influences behind the new record?

Carson: We seem, as a species, and more specifically as a country, to be approaching some kind of cosmic breaking point. Righteous anger is in the air. The Earth is dying due to the greed of unseen forces in power. Vulnerable people are being subjected to cruelty. And we’re all glued to our phones. There’s this constant feeling of responsibility, as people of relative privilege, to speak truth and carry the torch for those less fortunate, and yet it’s so easy to dip into ambient despair and inaction.  

When I was writing lyrics, forest fires were breaking out all around California while people I knew from youth were dying from heroin overdoses. We’re not cynical or gloomy people, but when I write lyrics I can’t help but entertain some of the thoughts percolating in the deeper recesses of my mind and memory. I’m concerned about friends drifting away. I’m concerned about the prospects of the younger generations. This album was a vehicle for sifting through all this mental detritus and hopefully finding some beacons of light. 

Erik: As for our sonic influences, we’re always listening to new stuff. We loved Low’s Double Negative and the ways in which it deconstructs simple song structures by burying them in fuzz and noise. Dntel is always a huge inspiration for our production style and drum programming. And lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of modern jazz like Portico Quartet, The Bad Plus, and trying to find creative ways to blend in natural instruments and raw performances.

You moved from New Hampshire to California? Do you think living in L.A. has influenced your art?

Carson: Los Angeles has definitely had an impact on the writing but not in the sense that we now make music inspired by the city, the sunny weather, and the cultural heritage here. If anything, the disparity between Los Angeles and where we grew up—in terms of climate, lifestyle, and topography—has activated our imaginations because there are so many things we are accustomed to that we don’t regularly experience anymore. Seasons, for example. We both love the fall and winter and miss them dearly, and our music, which some have described as chilly and dark, acts in part as an outlet for mentally escaping to different realities. We’re not consciously reacting against the popular trends in Los Angeles music but I think that’s something we naturally tend towards as an effort to reflect our east coast identity. 

In the larger sense, the state of California beyond LA has also been a huge inspiration. Our access to extraordinary natural landscapes—deserts, cliff sides, rolling valleys, the Sierra Nevada mountain range—has influenced us so much, and many of my lyrics draw from my experiences discovering these new and mysterious places.

How did you start making music? What were your early influences?

Carson: We were in bands throughout high school, at first apart and eventually together with Old Abram Brown. As kids, we discovered a lot of music through the now-defunct WFNX, a New England alternative station that turned us onto the indie rock coming out of New York in the early 2000s. Bands like The Strokes, Interpol, and The Walkmen were our early influences. Later on, magazines like Magnet and Under the Radar exposed us to more obscure artists that weren’t often played on the radio stations that broadcast to our suburban hometown, and from there we turned to the blogosphere and became pretty disillusioned with the mainstream channels for discovering music. 

Erik: Sigur Rós was a constant in our headphones throughout high school.

You completed a northeastern tour last winter. Was it hard to translate your intricate production to the stage?

Carson: The relatively sparse sonic environment of Nepenthe afforded us the opportunity to do live shows as just the two of us, with Erik multitasking on guitar, keyboard and drum pad while I played the piano and sang. Our new music has expanded in density and instrumentation, so we spent a while tinkering with how best to give it life on stage. Ultimately, we built a band with our two former bandmates Eric Bolton and Dylan Vukelich on guitar and bass, respectively, while Erik transitioned solely to drums and sample triggering. We altered parts here and there to make them more manageable and optimal for the live environment, which took a six-day marathon of rehearsing. The result was a fuller, more energetic live sound that we were thrilled to bring to those venues and cities, where we also have many friends. It definitely got us excited to tour more.  

What can we expect from Mines Falls in 2020?

Carson: If the Corona virus crisis settles down, hopefully, more touring. In the meantime, we’ll continue making visual accompaniments to our music. Through our quarantine period, we’ve been recording a bunch of covers and posting them to our social media channels, and that’s something that’s been stimulating for the imagination so we may continue in lieu of being able to tour. We’ll also be shooting live videos focused around our new music. Other than that, the writing never stops and we’re already demoing songs for a new record.

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