Over the weekend, some of the Oh Comely team - along with friends from Little White Lies and Boat Magazine - loaded up the boot of a car with independent magazines and headed down to End of the Road festival. Nestled in the library area of the woods of Larmer Tree Gardens, we invited festival goers to sit down and read a magazine that they maybe hadn't heard of and listen to talks and readings. Here are some photos of what went on.
Manchester four-piece PINS wasn’t Faith Vern's first attempt at starting a band, but it was the one that stuck. Tiring of feeling like the token girl in all-male ventures with little or no creative authority, she purposely sought out female musicians to start pop-punk band PINS. That was back in 2012. When I call her up on an August evening three years later, the band have recently returned from touring the US with their second record Wild Nights, the tidier follow-up to the unkempt promise of their debut album Girls Like Us. It turns out the band never identified with the post-punk label in the first place and now want to build a more pop-oriented sound.
Catching Faith before an all-night rehearsal with what she casually terms "a new project", we talk about her DIY approach to music and the cathartic nature of singing.
What have you been up to today?
I’m getting ready for band practice. I’m heading out after this and will do that all night. Me and the guitarist from PINS started it and we’ve invited some other musicians down. It’s a new project. We don’t have a name or anything yet, but it's nice to play in a different way and use my voice and guitar in a way that might not be suited to PINS.
What was the reason behind starting something new?
I don’t ever want to be bored with anything. If you feel like doing something you should just do it and whether it works out or not doesn’t really matter.
Wild Nights is more pop-influenced than your debut. Will you continue in that direction?
It’s something we did on purpose. I didn’t feel particularly comfortable with the post-punk label we got stuck with after the last album. We wanted to make something more poppy, but in regards to what’s next I’m still not sure. I would like to do something more experimental, with more sounds, more instruments, more depth. But it still needs to have a good hook and be a pop song at the core of it.
How do you think your songwriting has evolved since you started out with PINS?
I hope it’s better! Particularly with the lyrics, because that’s a tough one. I feel happier with the second album than I did with the first one.
Is songwriting an emotional outlet for you?
Sometimes writing lyrics can be a cathartic thing, but usually it’s difficult and I sit there scribbling and reworking texts a million times. The performance is more emotional for me. If a song is about something or someone and it isn’t pleasant, then it gives me the chance to express myself and shout at the audience as opposed to shouting at the person.
You’ve become a singer with PINS. What has that journey been like?
At first it was embarrassing singing in front of people, especially because I don’t feel like I have a particular talent for it. I didn’t know what I was doing - it was like being new to an instrument. But I kept going and now I feel like I’m getting somewhere.
I don’t think you should have to train to be a singer to sing, though. You should be able to pick up an instrument and just try to play it, like you did. It gives the music a sense of freedom.
I agree. It means there are no rules in place. As a trained singer I think you’re more likely to feel bound by the rules, but if you have no experience, anything goes! I did music for my GCSEs and got a C. I wasn’t even good at it. It was so boring, I couldn't be bothered listening. We were reading books about music instead of actually doing it.
And now you’re off to band practice. Do you usually do all-night rehearsals, like you are tonight?
When we’ve been touring there has been little time for PINS practices and by now we know the songs inside out anyway, so it has been a while. But with this new band we need to get stuck into it. We’ve got a bag of booze and our guitars and we’re rehearsing at The Bunker, which is this cool place in Salford. We’ll see where the night takes us.
It sounds more like fun than work!
It is! It’s the best way.
PINS September tour dates:
17th of September - The Portland Arms, Cambridge 18th of September - Deaf Institute, Manchester 19th of September - Sneaky Petes, Edinburgh 22nd of September - Hare & Hounds, Birmingham 23rd of September - Oslo, London
You’ve just groggily crawled out of your tent, found the nearest cup of tea and bacon buttie and you’re short of something to do. The bands haven’t started yet and your friends are yet to surface. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a magazine to sit and read quietly? If you’re attending End of the Road this year, you’ll be able to do just that.
Together with STACK, we’ve hand-picked a selection of wonderful independent magazines to bring together a reading room, nestled in the woods on the festival grounds. There’ll also be a couple of talks a day from members of the Oh Comely team as well as folk from LWLies, Boat Magazine and Boneshaker. If you’re into your food and drink we’ll have Hot Rum Cow and Root and Bone to whet your appetite, while Sidetracked inspires your sense of adventure. Ernest Journal explores and informs, fascinated with the craft of the outdoors and HUCK wades into the depths of radical culture. Or if you just fancy doing some colouring in, Anorak have your back.
We’ll also be running a story swap - write a story and get another in return - and there’ll be a secrets box to feed those little things you hold dear and wouldn’t dare tell a soul.
So come and find us, read a little, chat some and tell us a story; we can’t wait to meet you.
Creedence Clearwater Revival's Proud Mary, with the famous lines "Big wheels keep on turnin' / Proud Mary keep on burnin'", was patched together from a string of riffs and lines John Fogerty had noted down during his time in The National Guard. When Solomon Burke recorded his soulful version of the song, these same riffs and lines took on a whole other meaning of African-American liberation on board a ship destined for the deep South. Proud Mary never made it onto our playlist for the Wheels Issue, but its story of motion and change is nevertheless alive within the climbing bass lines of Novella's ethereal Land: Gone, Lianne La Havas' Unstoppable and Lizzy Mercier Descloux's wonderfully strange Jim on the Move.
Listen to while on a bike, bus or train, or treading the sturdy soles of your feet, rolling out of a crowded city and into an unknown town.
As a child, Natalie Mering filled her guitar with pencils in a frustrated attempt to try to change her instrument and progress beyond her two-chord repertoire. It hardly comes as a surprise, then, that the first songs she ever played were of her own making.
As Weyes Blood, the American indie musician builds a foggy psych-folk dream that contemplates the experimental elements of those days. Her previous album The Innocents, released in 2014, was based on her deep brooding voice and traditional instruments set against electronics, tape effects and melodic delays culminating in a modern yet timeless piece of work. Her new artistic endeavour, a dreamy four-song EP coming out in October, reflects Natalie’s desire to evolve as a musician, taking a step-forward into self-production while keeping Weyes Blood’s signature ethereal quality.
Natalie took the time to speak to me on a sunny Monday morning in Rockaway Beach before her daily ocean dip. Here, she talks transcendence, mermaids and letting go of expectations.
What are your plans for the day?
I’m going to the bank – it should be fun! And then I’m going to the beach. I’ll take a dip into the ocean. I do that every day, which is very nice.
I’ve seen quite a few pictures of you looking like a mermaid, sitting on a rock by the ocean or just floating. Are mermaids particularly representative to you?
Yes! Swimming is one of my favourite things in the whole world. I always live somewhere near water, which is why I just had a lot more opportunities to take pictures around water. It’s like a purifier. There’s a spiritual cooling that happens when you jump into water; your body relaxes immediately and blood pumps in all areas it wasn’t in before. But mystically, yeah, I’d like to be a mermaid. I like the concept of mermaids as singing sirens leading people to the rocks.
I feel nature plays a big part in your music – especially on your album The Innocents. Do you agree?
Definitely. The biosphere, the whole planet, the organisms, the seasons... Winters are insane. They’re like the darkest period of time. I grew up in Southern California so all the East Coast winters that I had have been tremendously hard for me to cope with. It’s the most desolate feeling in the world.
What feeling do you get out of making music?
Every feeling you can possibly imagine. I try to focus on timeless feelings or feelings that kind of give you a sense of transcending time or being unlocked from the materialisms of the world, not being trapped inside your body. The concept of transcendence is important to me.
How did you get into making music?
I started making music as a little kid. My father was a musician and we had guitars around the house. I started taking piano lessons when I was six years old and then playing guitar and immediately writing songs. I was really into Nirvana and the grunge movement of the 90s. I had a little tape recorder, a tape deck, and I would record little novelty radio programs, like a talk show radio, and I’d play a song on the guitar. Right from the beginning there was kind of that pushing forward element and I was just like: “I’m going to learn new songs”. I would start by writing my own song and it wasn’t until later that I learned other people’s songs to get a wider palette musically.
When you think of how you started making music at such a young age, how does it feel to be a professional musician now, as an adult?
It’s about trying to balance two worlds. The goal is finding the way to be yourself and not who you thought you would be. I have a desire to make music and I hear it in my mind and I have to learn how to technically execute that on stage and on record, and also be free from expectations. I have friends in music that don’t have a label that supports them or make a lot of money - they’re doing it as a sacrifice out of their own heart and that’s a good place to be coming from. The music industry is not what you heard of as a kid with your CDs, jamming and dancing around your room – that kind of magic is untouchable. So when you’re deep into music industry stuff and want to be able to tour and survive from it as an adult, it’s really important to keep those worlds separate.
How do you do that?
By making music that people might never hear, just for yourself. Or by taking yourself less seriously for a second and trying to let go of any kind of expectation you might have had.
Your music project doesn’t go by your real name – it was named after Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood. Do you ever catch yourself thinking about the dissonance between yourself as an artist and as a person?
It’s something that occurs to everybody: the person and the artist can be a little different. I’m very silly and I like to make jokes, whereas my music is kind of serious. Part of the evolution of making music is trying to put yourself out there in the most honest, unadulterated way, so I’m trying not to have that kind of dissonance where “this is my music personality” and “this is my real personality”. It’s all supposed to be the same.
What is a modern folk song? The answer could be Killer, the first track on Samantha Crain’s new record Under Branch and Thorn and Tree. Interweaving stories the singer songwriter encountered in the camps of The Occupy Movement, the song carries a political message balancing wearily on an irregular drum beat. How do you deal with war, poverty and ecological meltdown? The road is steep, but Samantha climbs her highest pitch when she calls out “Keep marching!”
With her fourth album, the Oklahoma native wants to reconnect folk music and its political roots with the lives of ordinary people. Songs like Outside the Pale, Kathleen and Killer deals with class, feminism and racial oppression through the everyday stories of complex female characters. By way of empathy, understanding and intricate guitar-led melodies, social injustice is poetically brought to light.
While briefly in London, Samantha meets me for coffee on Hampstead Heath. Surrounded by trees and screaming children, her guitar case resting heavily against the wall instead of her back, we chat about the 99 percent, equality and channelling political frustrations through music.
What did music mean to you when you were growing up?
My dad had a big record collection and played guitar and my grandmother played boogie woogie piano. It was always around and I loved it. I was a loner, and still am in a lot of ways, and music played a big part in my alone time, trying to figure out how to interact with other people and understanding how they felt. I didn’t start playing music until I was 17, so I had a lot of time before that to soak it up. It was a big part of my life as I think it is for most.
What role did writing play?
I used to write poems and short stories from the time I was six or seven years old. In school they once gave us an assignment to write journal entries and I loved it so much that I was doing it on my own. I grew up in a small and boring town. It was very flat and rural and everyone had the same upbringing and ideas. Writing was my way of thinking about the world outside of where I was. I did that until I started writing songs. I found it much more effective to tell a story in three minutes.
How did Under Branch and Thorn and Tree become a political album?
The catalyst for the whole album and its themes was the first song I wrote, Elk City. It’s the story of a single, working class mother and how she has all the odds against her. You can’t completely feel sorry for her because she drinks a lot, but at the same time she has been abandoned and mistreated. It’s a multidimensional look at a woman, which I think is rare in music. Women are either manically happy or depressingly sad and that’s the whole extent of their emotional content, so I felt I had a real opportunity to take that idea and paint women as multidimensional people. To attack sexism you have to change the whole framework for how people think and one way to do that is to start injecting women as whole, equal people in music, movies and TV. Then I wrote Killer, inspired by the Occupy movement…
Were you part of Occupy?
I was actually on tour at the time and I was going from city to city and every time we went to a new city, we would go down to the Occupy park and hang out and talk to people and get an idea of why they were there. I was hearing different stories and most of the people I ended up talking to were women. Killer is universal and doesn’t use a lot of pronoun and could represent anybody involved in the movement or who agrees with it, but in my mind it’s from the perspective of a woman.
Are you intentionally using everyday stories to reach out to more people?
The idea behind the album was to give a voice to people who usually don’t get to share their stories. The majority of those people are everyday working people who don’t have time to sit down and write a song, poem or book because they are working and trying to feed their families. With Elk City and Outside the Pale, I got a glimpse of such stories and felt that it was my responsibility to write it down to get their voices out. And it’s my life too. I wait tables to pay the bills when I go home. I grew up working class, my parents are working class and my friends are all paycheck to paycheck. It’s what I know.
Outside the Pale challenges racism, class and white privilege. How did it come about?
The phrase “outside the pale” or “beyond the pale” originally referred to a fence post and everybody who resided outside of that was considered unclean and immoral. It was basically a poverty line. Bringing that into modern day, it’s ironic how it translates. I find it really interesting how this small group of elite, rich, mainly white men can control what’s moral, right or correct for this giant group of the rest of the world who I feel are more passionate, giving and capable. Outside the Pale is the story of all those people in late night bars talking about The Man and not understanding how this Republic we were supposedly given to elect our own officials and govern ourselves turned into an oligarchy. The song is about those frustrations. It doesn’t deal a whole lot with the answers, because that’s something I and others are still trying to figure out. Sometimes it’s good just to get people on your side and involved in a conversation for a common interest.
What role do you think music plays in politics nowadays?
I think it’s making a comeback, especially in hip hop, but there was a long time when it wasn’t an issue at all. With this album I tried to paint pictures of lives affected by social injustice, because empathy is how people tend to change their minds or get involved. Rock, pop and folk are to a larger extent fed to a middle class population and it’s important to include politics in those types of music, because those are the audiences that have to become more aware of the situation. When music and art removes itself from people’s issues, it just becomes boring and bland... The humanity of music and art pops up when you get to the heart of people.
Samantha Crain’s album Under Branch and Thorn and Tree is out now.
Within the day of this playlist (rising with Sun by Cat Power and setting with Sun by Caribou) we are windswept, soaked through and flown high into the sky. Don’t let the forecasters fool you; weather is all about metaphors. Music, and the 'sparkles', 'storms' and 'trickles' of music journalism, is littered with references to the changing sky of our emotions and the strangely tangible effect of sound on our souls. There’s no misinterpreting the final curtain of rain in The Smiths’ Well I Wonder or Taken By Trees' gentle percussive sounds. Let yourself be swept away by the music of The Weather Issue. Or play it in the background, like a quiet rain in June.
Rae Morris began making music when she was seventeen to process her adolescence and coming of age, filtering new emotions through a whirlwind of pop. Her eerie vocals and piano-led melodies soon attracted people to her shows in her hometown of Blackpool and a year later she signed with Atlantic Records.
Musical growth has since played an important part in her personal development. Her string of promising EPs and collaborations with Fryars, Clean Bandit and Bombay Bicycle Club has now bled into the vivacious sound of Unguarded, her recently released debut album. It's an emotional, albeit carefully crafted, journey through love lost, found and longed for. Ahead of her summer tour, we talked to Rae about inherited passions and seizing inspiration from the swift turns of the world.
When did music become important for you?
When I understood what music meant to my dad, I also began to realise how much it meant to me. My grandfather Raymond was a musician and filled my dad's childhood with music. Our passion for music has been passed from generation to generation.
You were signed to a major label at a young age. How has this affected you?
I have grown into the more adult version of myself. I was always very grown up, but the pressure of being signed to a record label definitely helps speed up the process. The journey has been a most wonderful and inspiring one. There of course have been moments of insecurity, but while overcoming those doubtful feelings, I have found new comfort and confidence.
What drives you to create?
The world! And how big and quick it is. We don't have a lot of time and I have so many questions I want to ask. I want to make a mark, leave something behind and hope to make a small difference in some way. The people around me are also wonderful. I love my band. They make me laugh so much and are my constant companions. They inspire me to just be myself which is a great creative state to be in.
What is Unguarded about?
Unguarded became the story of me growing up and coming of age. It happened naturally. I started writing songs as a way of documenting new emotions and feelings and over time I realised that these songs, when they came together, formed a story.
What is the story behind Love Again?
Love Again was written right at the very end the album making process. Everything else was done, but I was still searching for the missing piece of the puzzle. Originally the “Looking too hard for something” lyric was about exactly that; looking too hard for this song!
Rae Morris is playing Field Day festival in Victoria Park on Saturday the 6th of June.
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