Eric Kohlenstein interview
Q: Can you talk a little bit about your writing process? You play all the instruments yourself on The EP For Other People's Birthdays. Is there one which you use to write more than others?
A: I usually start to write on guitar with a riff, or a chord progression, and then I flesh it all out in my head and try out all the parts separately. Sometimes if I’m unsure of something I record one part on my phone and then play over it with another instrument just to see if it works. So far, that has worked out for me because some parts may have melodic lines that don’t fit exactly with what’s going on, but it works enough to make whatever is happening at that moment sound more complex than the kind of Blink-182, Oasis and Sara Bareilles re-writes that kids my age tend to come up with. I usually write the lyrics and melody last. But I don’t want the way I write to become formulaic. The first thing I wrote for “Edges” was the baseline. Recently I’ve been messing around with alternate tunings and I even wrote a song on piano, which I can’t play to save my life. So sometimes it takes some screwing around to figure out what works. Also, I recognized the tendency for projects like mine to be really self-indulgent (“Let’s have five guitars and two basses and a cello and a full Baptist choir!”) so I consciously limited myself to five instrumental tracks and vocals.
Q: How do discover the palette of sounds you wanted to use on the EP?
A: I recorded this EP with only four guitar pedals, an overdrive, chorus, analog delay and octave, but since then as I’ve made money (certainly not from the EP, of course) I've accumulated more. But for this EP I really tried to work with what I had. The most talented musicians out there aren’t only technically proficient on their instruments but are willing to experiment with every resource they have available. My resources were (and still are) pretty limited, but sometimes it just take a long while of hunching over your pedalboard to find the right sound. And recently, I’ve tried to develop these songs even more by using the pedals I just recently got. I tried playing “Lake Michigan” over a fuzzy drone; I tried the solo at the end of “The Jester” more abrasively and with a ton of modulated reverb, fun stuff like that. And with the songs I’m working on now, I’m using what I have not only to expand the range of sounds and create more ambience in the songs themselves but to tie the songs together and work at making a collection of songs more cohesive. It’s a work in progress.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about your lyrics. Some of the songs seem like they could be personal stories but also quite ambiguous.
A: I like vague lyrics because they don’t give too much away. Not that I want to be that guy who writes songs “for the people” because I really am writing for myself, but if other people can latch onto a lyric that catches their ears and use it to find some personal meaning in it, that’s great! Music, to me, is a shared experience. All of the songs come from my own personal experience but I want to write from parts of my brain that I haven’t even quite figured out yet; that’s when I think a song is most personal, because nobody stops trying to figure themselves out. People are too complex to box themselves into thinking “This is who I am, this is what I believe, and these people are who I associate with.” I’m young, so this is especially true for the people I’m around every day. “Standing Is Hard” is like that, I think. I wrote that song trying to reconcile stereotypical teenage paranoia with the hopes that everything I do is worth doing and the music I make is worth making, in relation to one person, specifically. That song helped me sort things out in a way that only I can ever really know, because the only way I could articulate it is in those lyrics. It’s a snapshot of where I was mentally at that point in time, but those words could mean something else to someone else or even my future self. In that way I guess my lyrics aren’t as much “vague” as “fluid,” because I will never stop asking questions and challenging myself to try to understand more which I like because I don’t ever want to feel like the creative process ever stops dead.
Q: Were there an specific inspirations aside from musical?
A: I was just inspired by the people around me. The whole “Other People’s Birthdays” thing is kind of tongue-in-cheek, because I was really just writing to try to explore what I mean to these people and what they mean to me. For example, I wrote “Lake Michigan” when about a month or two after I had quit swimming, which I had done competitively for 11 years. The sport was such a huge commitment and I wanted to focus on other things, especially music. It’s been a year since I quit, and I don’t really miss the sport itself, but what really made me question my decision to quit was the fact that I had so many friends from from all over the state that I would essentially be leaving behind. When I was writing the song, I focused on the few days after my last meet in Indianapolis. The day after the meet I went up to Chicago with my dad, and it was my first time in Chicago, and I was visiting colleges, so to me Chicago kind of represents the start of my “new life” where I pressed the reset button on my priorities. When junior year started, I started to find myself listless and without motivation because the heavily regimented aspect of my life had disappeared, along with most of my social interaction. So I wrote this song as kind of a love letter to the part of myself that I left behind and the people who made it so hard to leave that part of me behind. Other experiences that inspire me are a little more mundane, but the idea of being inspired by other people holds true.
Q: Do you have any plans for forming a band to perform these songs live?
A: Vaguely yes, specifically no. I definitely want to get a band together. It’s hard because I don’t want to have to enlist people who are much older than me, but at the same time I want the band to be tight and filled with people who really know what they’re doing. If I commit to a gig then I guess I would force myself to find people… I work best when I’m against the clock! I especially want to start performing just because it makes this project seem less like the work of a melodramatic teenager who writes sad songs and more of a legitimate EP made by a person who is legitimately trying to make his way into the business. The music industry is so performance-focused at this point that being just a recording artist isn’t really enough anymore. Also, I’m a live music junkie and it’s always been a dream of mine to have people react to what I do like I react to what my favorite musicians do.
Q: Four songs are just a taste of your music. When can we expect more?
A: I have many more songs lined up, ready to be recorded. So far I’ve gone back to the studio for one more song, that I plan to release as one of five, although that’s leaving a lot out. And I have lots of scraps and sketches of songs written. School obviously makes it harder to get things done quickly, but I’m going to try to have it ready to go before I graduate.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about your writing process? You play all the instruments yourself on The EP For Other People's Birthdays. Is there one which you use to write more than others?
A: I usually start to write on guitar with a riff, or a chord progression, and then I flesh it all out in my head and try out all the parts separately. Sometimes if I’m unsure of something I record one part on my phone and then play over it with another instrument just to see if it works. So far, that has worked out for me because some parts may have melodic lines that don’t fit exactly with what’s going on, but it works enough to make whatever is happening at that moment sound more complex than the kind of Blink-182, Oasis and Sara Bareilles re-writes that kids my age tend to come up with. I usually write the lyrics and melody last. But I don’t want the way I write to become formulaic. The first thing I wrote for “Edges” was the baseline. Recently I’ve been messing around with alternate tunings and I even wrote a song on piano, which I can’t play to save my life. So sometimes it takes some screwing around to figure out what works. Also, I recognized the tendency for projects like mine to be really self-indulgent (“Let’s have five guitars and two basses and a cello and a full Baptist choir!”) so I consciously limited myself to five instrumental tracks and vocals.
Q: How do discover the palette of sounds you wanted to use on the EP?
A: I recorded this EP with only four guitar pedals, an overdrive, chorus, analog delay and octave, but since then as I’ve made money (certainly not from the EP, of course) I've accumulated more. But for this EP I really tried to work with what I had. The most talented musicians out there aren’t only technically proficient on their instruments but are willing to experiment with every resource they have available. My resources were (and still are) pretty limited, but sometimes it just take a long while of hunching over your pedalboard to find the right sound. And recently, I’ve tried to develop these songs even more by using the pedals I just recently got. I tried playing “Lake Michigan” over a fuzzy drone; I tried the solo at the end of “The Jester” more abrasively and with a ton of modulated reverb, fun stuff like that. And with the songs I’m working on now, I’m using what I have not only to expand the range of sounds and create more ambience in the songs themselves but to tie the songs together and work at making a collection of songs more cohesive. It’s a work in progress.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about your lyrics. Some of the songs seem like they could be personal stories but also quite ambiguous.
A: I like vague lyrics because they don’t give too much away. Not that I want to be that guy who writes songs “for the people” because I really am writing for myself, but if other people can latch onto a lyric that catches their ears and use it to find some personal meaning in it, that’s great! Music, to me, is a shared experience. All of the songs come from my own personal experience but I want to write from parts of my brain that I haven’t even quite figured out yet; that’s when I think a song is most personal, because nobody stops trying to figure themselves out. People are too complex to box themselves into thinking “This is who I am, this is what I believe, and these people are who I associate with.” I’m young, so this is especially true for the people I’m around every day. “Standing Is Hard” is like that, I think. I wrote that song trying to reconcile stereotypical teenage paranoia with the hopes that everything I do is worth doing and the music I make is worth making, in relation to one person, specifically. That song helped me sort things out in a way that only I can ever really know, because the only way I could articulate it is in those lyrics. It’s a snapshot of where I was mentally at that point in time, but those words could mean something else to someone else or even my future self. In that way I guess my lyrics aren’t as much “vague” as “fluid,” because I will never stop asking questions and challenging myself to try to understand more which I like because I don’t ever want to feel like the creative process ever stops dead.
Q: Were there an specific inspirations aside from musical?
A: I was just inspired by the people around me. The whole “Other People’s Birthdays” thing is kind of tongue-in-cheek, because I was really just writing to try to explore what I mean to these people and what they mean to me. For example, I wrote “Lake Michigan” when about a month or two after I had quit swimming, which I had done competitively for 11 years. The sport was such a huge commitment and I wanted to focus on other things, especially music. It’s been a year since I quit, and I don’t really miss the sport itself, but what really made me question my decision to quit was the fact that I had so many friends from from all over the state that I would essentially be leaving behind. When I was writing the song, I focused on the few days after my last meet in Indianapolis. The day after the meet I went up to Chicago with my dad, and it was my first time in Chicago, and I was visiting colleges, so to me Chicago kind of represents the start of my “new life” where I pressed the reset button on my priorities. When junior year started, I started to find myself listless and without motivation because the heavily regimented aspect of my life had disappeared, along with most of my social interaction. So I wrote this song as kind of a love letter to the part of myself that I left behind and the people who made it so hard to leave that part of me behind. Other experiences that inspire me are a little more mundane, but the idea of being inspired by other people holds true.
Q: Do you have any plans for forming a band to perform these songs live?
A: Vaguely yes, specifically no. I definitely want to get a band together. It’s hard because I don’t want to have to enlist people who are much older than me, but at the same time I want the band to be tight and filled with people who really know what they’re doing. If I commit to a gig then I guess I would force myself to find people… I work best when I’m against the clock! I especially want to start performing just because it makes this project seem less like the work of a melodramatic teenager who writes sad songs and more of a legitimate EP made by a person who is legitimately trying to make his way into the business. The music industry is so performance-focused at this point that being just a recording artist isn’t really enough anymore. Also, I’m a live music junkie and it’s always been a dream of mine to have people react to what I do like I react to what my favorite musicians do.
Q: Four songs are just a taste of your music. When can we expect more?
A: I have many more songs lined up, ready to be recorded. So far I’ve gone back to the studio for one more song, that I plan to release as one of five, although that’s leaving a lot out. And I have lots of scraps and sketches of songs written. School obviously makes it harder to get things done quickly, but I’m going to try to have it ready to go before I graduate.