@ on Neil Young, Philadelphia, and the Pains of the Music Industry

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it, along with a Screen Memories column every one or two weeks where I write about stuff I watched lately.

Today's installment: @ (that's pronounced "at-sign") are undoubtedly one of the most interesting bands to emerge in recent years, on their new album Autosmile they are approaching Animal Collective-circa-Sung Tongs status both in actual sound and in the sense of "Wow, something really special seems to be going on here with this group." I got Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak on a call as summer was setting to talk about the record as well as their evolving career in general; longtime readers know that I frequently speak to my subjects about financial matters when it comes to being an artist, and when we came around to that topic during this interview I found Stone and Victoria's responses refreshingly candid and frank—and I think you will too! Check it out:

Talk to me about the progression of sound on this record compared to Mind Palace Music.
Victoria: It's a bit fuller, and we have fewer MIDI instruments on it. Maybe the songs are slightly more focused. We really try to write without any specific theme or sound in mind, other than just wanting to write good songs.

Stone: It's darker in tone, and that reflects how we were feeling while we were writing the songs.

How were you guys feeling while you were writing the songs?
Stone: Mostly drunk—and a little bit hungry.

Something that jumped out to me in the press materials was the notion that the two of you don't tell each other what you're writing about lyrically. Talk to me about keeping things close to the vest. The title track is also supposed to be a breakup song, right?
Victoria: Somewhat. It's a little bit broader than that. In regards to not telling each other what the songs are about, it's more so that the lyrical content of most of the songs aren't incredibly specific to any event or person. It's not like we're keeping any kind of secrets from each other. It's just not necessarily relevant to what we're trying to achieve in arranging the songs together.

Stone: I have a philosophy with songwriting where, if whatever you're writing about can apply to more than one scenario in your own life, it can apply to a listener's life as well. It's a good heuristic for writing songs that can transcend your own personal experiences and become useful to someone else in the songwriting tradition. That being said, there are certainly songs in the record that are about specific things—but we try to be a little bit general with it.

Who are some lyricists you guys admire?
Victoria: I've never really thought that about that. I'm sorry.

Stone: I mean, there's the obvious ones: Neil Young, Bob Dylan, the Beatles. Those are obviously very foundational to the sound that we make. I don't know. There's more modern ones. Elliott Smith, Alex G.

Stone, you mentioned Neil Young, who I hear in a lot of indie rock in general right now. Talk to me about his influence on the both of you.
Victoria: He's got these lyrics that can be incredibly potent, but also extremely simple and almost a little silly. It's very honest, earnest music, and that really resonates with people. He has a lot of music too, which is cool. It's quite an output of various qualities of music for someone so successful. It resonates with the way in which a lot of people were just uploading a bunch of music to Bandcamp or whatever a while back.

Stone: He's also been getting his flowers for a long time. Like Victoria says, he can be really simple, but very impactful. The types of influences that he has are similar to the influences we have—early rock'n'roll, folk—and then he mixes that with a harder edge and technological sensibility. It's all quite relatable.

The first time I listened to this record, something that immediately came to mind was early-2000s Animal Collective. Would you say they're an influence on you?
Stone: We're definitely Animal Collective fans. I mean, I'm from Baltimore, where they're local legends. They were pretty omnipresent in my teenage and young adult years, and a lot of the music that influenced them also influenced us.

When did the two of you move to Philly?
Victoria: I moved to Philly after eight years in Boston in the fall of 2020. Stone came here about two years ago.

Victoria, how was moving to a new city during COVID?
Victoria: It was easier because the whole world was equalized in that no one could go out. I wasn't seeing many of my friends in Boston at the time, and a lot of them had already left to go to New York or somewhere else. Honestly, because everything felt like it was in limbo and I wasn't really working any sort of productive job, I felt pretty unattached to anything that was happening. It was easy for me to pick up and go, especially since the rent in Boston has gotten so outrageous. Rolling up to Philadelphia after only having spent a total of four days there in the past felt a little crazy, but it was also exciting. I was able to move into a house with these three other people, one of whom was a friend of a friend through the internet. It was all very comfortable.

How would you guys describe yourself in terms of online presence now, compared to when you were younger?
Victoria: I'm addicted to my phone for sure. I'm more online and looking at more stuff. I'd say I'm probably posting about the same amount as I would have in the past. It's just Instagram now, and before that it was mostly Facebook. It's a little more intense now, because Instagram is something that's viewable by the public and not just by your network of friends and people. We both aren't the most comfortable with posting online and being online, but it is a reality of what we do.

Did you guys start working on this record before signing to 4AD?
Stone: Yes. Not a lot before, though. Some of the songs predate the signing, but not by a terribly long time.

As much as 4AD has always maintained a cultural currency, it's also a label that, in terms of its back catalog, had a very identifiable sound in the distant past. Do you guys have a relationship to that catalog in general?
Stone: I don't know. I don't really want to glaze the label too hard.

Victoria: It was exciting for us to get on a label that had the history it does. It felt out of the realm of possibility, at the time, that we'd get signed to somewhere like 4AD. There's a number of artists that I listened to a lot in my teens and early twenties that were on 4AD, and it made it feel cool that we were going to be on that label. Ultimately, you're just happy to be there.

More often than not these days, if I'm talking to somebody who's making interesting music, it's coming from Philadelphia. I've talked to a lot of Philadelphia artists about how the city fosters creativity in a certain way. Talk to me about your perspective there.
Stone: Having spent pretty much my whole life on the East Coast, Philly's the capital of the affordable East Coast. Obviously, New York is the cultural capital, many would say. But from the perspective of somebody who doesn't really understand how anyone affords New York, Philly has a lot more going for it in terms of accessibility and affordable rent—and it's also a large enough city to have enough people and infrastructure to foster different types of professionals, whether it's bookers, audio engineers, and bands. Those all exist in Philly in a way that I didn't really see them existing in Baltimore—not to say that Baltimore doesn't have people like that at all, but it's about 5% of the quantity that Philly has. Coming from Baltimore, I'm very impressed by how much infrastructure Philly has for music. There's plenty of people I know here that like make livings off of just throwing DIY shows. don't know a single person like that in Baltimore, Boston, or D.C. It's just a really unique place.

Do you guys do music full-time now?
Stone: Fuck no.

Victoria: We both have jobs full-time. I'm a beekeeper at a company that installs and maintains beehives on commercial and private properties, mostly around Philly.

Stone: I'm a software developer and I work on contract for a bunch of different clients. We have a bit of a cranky relationship with professional music people, and people that make salaries adjacent to us [in the music industry]. It's a bit of a cantankerous subject for us, because obviously we'd love to not have to work jobs. But the industry isn't set up for artists in that way—at least, not for artists at our level. It's a a point of frustration, and we get a little cranky about it from time to time.

I mean, that's something I talk to a lot of artists about for this newsletter in general—the financial realities of having to balance creativity with the fact that it's become harder than ever to make a living as a musician at all. I'd be very curious to hear you guys talk a little bit more about that.
Stone: Sure. Any particular facet of it?

Well, for example, this newsletter is not my full-time job. I've been working as a professional music writer for almost 20 years now, but I haven't been able to do it "full-time" for at least five or six years because the infrastructure just doesn't exist anymore. I'm often finishing one job and, theoretically, going home and doing the next job. That can be difficult.
Stone: It's a lot of work, and we're on a large indie label and surrounded by a team of industry people. For all of them, music is their full-time job—but for us, the people making the music, we have this whole other thing that we have to do all the time. It becomes really hard and stressful at times, because everyone else is making salaries off the music that we make except us. Hopefully that doesn't sound too much like I'm complaining or talking shit, but that's just the reality of what we experience.

Victoria: It's tough to find a balance between doing all of this stuff that we have to do to and everything else. Obviously, these are things that have to happen in order to get your music out there. I'm not necessarily resentful of the fact that we have to find ways to market. But [doing] that on top of a full-time job in order to live, it leaves very little room to sit down and actually write music.

A few years ago, I talked to Feeble Little Horse about this subject, and they were pretty frank about the fact that they don't expect longevity career-wise. Is that how you two feel as well?
Victoria: In the past. I mean, we've kind of upgraded in terms of working with a label, which was definitely something we never expected. My introduction to making and performing music was that everybody who's doing it is DIY—because they're not marketable, or the industry was gutted and there was no way to make any money.

Stone: We came up in this environment where nobody was expecting to make it a full-time job., and now we're surrounded by people for whom it is a full time job—but it's not artists, it's all industry people. That's where the frustration comes up, you know?

That's very reasonable—and, trust me, I think a lot of musicians feel that way. Stone, you've made music under the name ER Visit. When's the last time either of you went to the ER?
Stone: I broke my jaw over COVID. It was not great. I was scared.

Victoria: I have to knock on wood—biking at night without a helmet about nine years ago. I fell off my bike and split my head open, and I had to get some staples.

What's some movies you guys have watched lately that you like?
Stone: I watched the second Hunger Games movie last night and I actually thought it was awesome.

Victoria: I saw Obsession in theaters a couple months ago. I thought it was really innovative, interesting, and fun, and extremely scary. I recently went to the movies and saw The Invite, and I also thought that was really good in a different way. There was nonstop dialogue. It was extremely funny, but then it ends up being really emotional. I was surprised that I liked it as much. I wasn't sure if it was going to be a good movie.