Pullstring Interview
Q: Can you talk about your musical history?
Q: Can you talk about your musical history?
- PS: Fueled by chicken wings, hummus, and Red Thunder, the members of Pullstring came together to crank out the Greatest Threads EP in about 20 hours over a single January weekend in Saint Paul, MN. Toke funded and gathered up musicians to pursue a project that had potential - some of us had never met until that fateful weekend in January. As the tracks came together, it became clear that Pullstring was meant to be.
- Q: What is your creative process like?
- Toke: Every song is different - some are born from guitar riffs and others from chord progressions. For Greatest Threads EP, the music of all the songs were written by myself while Alex and/or JHo added lyrics to the music and T and Conno added a solid rhythm backing. It’ll be interesting to see how the process evolves moving forward.FT: The main musical process so far in Pullstring has been spit balling ideas and arranging them into listenable songs. For me personally… I get baked, listen to my badass playlist (of Neil Young, Oasis, Tom Petty, etc.), and casually jam their songs until something of my own comes along.
- JHo: I don’t know a single thing about writing music - It’s all vibes from me. I’ll have random lyrics or whatever float into my head and after months of compiling those together, it somehow becomes a song.
- Conno: I wouldn’t say I got creative with Greatest Threads EP, as the music was already written by the time I joined the band. I just added my thiccness and got spicy where I felt I needed to.
- Magnet: Toke, Alex or JHo will send me some tunes they’re working on and over the course of a few hours, I try to conceptualize some type of drum part that complements the music well and there to give the listener a rich, enjoyable, developing experience throughout the tune.
- Toke: Musically, I wanted to write a variety of songs inspired by artists that I love. Lyrically, T and I did try to write some lyrics back in the demo phase but were vetoed by the singers - to be fair, they wrote some amazing content!
- FT: Lyrically, I don’t pay too much attention to what my songs’ messages are about until after it’s written. I focus more on how the lyrics make me feel rather than what they explicitly say. For example, the lyrics to “Sunday Afternoon” is basically my first draft of lyrics because it portrays the initial emotion I felt listening to the music. “Haunted” is about a leftover burrito.
- JHo: “BOP” is about pizza if you can dig beneath those wack lyrics whereas “Isolated” is all over the place thematically. Don’t ask me bro - all I do is write lyrics.
- Magnet: I had the strongest hand in creating “Haunted” and “Way She Goes.” “Way She Goes” was just meant to be a hard-hitting interlude where I had a chance to rip some notes and shred around or something like that. “Haunted” was intended to be a contrast of dark and light that I ultimately conceived as an outlet to get over some stuff I was dealing with so those vibes are in there.
Q: What is your recording process like?
- PS: Our current process of songwriting is that one of us will bring a demo to the band to work on. If everyone is feeling it, we will begin adding each of our own elements to the song whether it be lyrics, riffs, arrangements or weird noises. Once we have compiled enough usable tracks, we ship it off to post-production wizards – our standard go-to folks are Zach Gonet for mixing and Macky Mikunda for mastering.
- PS: We are currently in the midst of recording new music for a new project. In fact, our newest single “Twenty Something” was released on August 12th. Whatever our next project will be, it will likely come out in late 2022. Be sure to follow updates and our adventures on our social media channels!
- PS: We have been playing shows since March 2022 around Minnesota and Wisconsin. Our most exciting show so far was opening for We Are Scientists at the 7th St Entry back in June! We have a couple of shows in Minneapolis in September and even more shows in the works coming soon.
- Pullstring is just getting started – we love all kinds of genres throughout music so don’t expect every single record to sound exactly the same. We simply don’t want to rewrite “Sunday Afternoon” over and over plus our live show is constantly improving and getting bigger with every single performance. We hope to pull your strings at show near you soon!