Charly Bliss on Guitars, SSRIs, Writing Songs Over Zoom, and Guac Being Extra

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OK! Brief story here: I've known Eva Hendricks, frontwoman for NYC's very own Charly Bliss, for a minute now and in a highly specific fashion. I used to live in East Williamsburg (hey, wait, where are you going?) and would go to the nearby coffee shop The West every morning, sometimes a few times in a day; Eva was a barista there and after enough time started calling me "Large hot large iced," because I'd order a large iced coffee for me and a large hot coffee for my wife. One time, I came in shortly after receiving a press email for Charly Bliss' great 2017 debut Guppy and I told her, "I just received a press release about your band!" To which she immediately replied, "Sorry."

She had nothing to be sorry for, and clearly the success the band's found since has proved that...they've got a new record out, Forever, that's bigger-sounding and more expansive than ever before. It has a sharp, tangy sound to it that's very appealing, and when we weren't catching up about all the goings-on at The West that have taken place since (don't worry, I'm not subjecting you all to that fat-chewing) her and brother-slash-bandmate-in-arms Sam Hendricks unspooled plenty of fascinating conversational threads about how Forever came together, weathering the cray-zay last five years of being alive, and much more. Check it out:

The last time we talked was for Vulture shortly before Young Enough came out, and it feels like an entire lifetime has passed since. Walk me through what's been going on for you guys in that period of time.
Eva:We feel the same way. It's hard to wrap your head around. We first started working on this album in 2019. Sam's wife was pregnant with their first child, and we were on our big tour for Young Enough.

Sam: We were in L.A., and we started sharing songs. That felt like the first real moment.

Eva: The second batch [of songs I shared] included "How Do You Do It" and "Last First Kiss." I'm so happy they endured that. It's kind of like a kiss of death when a song gets written pretty early on of the album cycle—because even if it's good, you've got to live with it just long enough that you're like, "Oh, I'm so sick of that song, I guess it's not good."

Sam: My daughter was born a month before lockdown. We were hearing about COVID, but I didn't think it was gonna be a big thing. I was still allowed to be in the hospital, thankfully.Then, everything just went insane.

Eva: I met this guy in Australia when we were on tour the previous summer. We'd been doing long distance, and because I knew that Sam wouldn't be able to tour for a little bit, I was like, "I'll go to Australia for six weeks, we'll write the whole album, then I'll come back and we'll start touring again. I left for Australia on March 3, 2020, and while I was at LAX, about to leave, I remember saying to my partner, "I don't know, is this gonna be a big deal?" He was like, "No, no, no," but by the time I landed, everything shut down. There was a moment where it was like, "The last flights are leaving—either you're gonna leave now, or you're gonna stay indefinitely." At the time, indefinitely to me meant, like, June, so I was like, "Oh, this will be over." So I didn't realize like how big of a choice I was making. I ended up being there for a year and a half, and now I'm basically an Australian citizen.

Sam: We wrote most of the record over Zoom.

Eva: And it was actually so positive. If someone had asked me what that would look like for us, I probably would've been like, "That would be a disaster." But I think it was weirdly exactly what we needed—having space. All of us were going through a lot in our personal lives. Instead of feeling like it was work, the band returned to being like a respite for all of us, and a really positive creative outlet, for the first time in a while. We were on tour for nine or ten months out of the year in 2019. We were all really tired and were due to re-evaluate our relationship to the band, and this obviously forced that.

Tell me more about that shift in terms of the band feeling more like work. Obviously, Young Enough represented a pretty substantial leap in terms of the band's profile.
Sam: Don't get me wrong—we recognize that we are so fortunate to have made it to the point that we have. But even with Young Enough, it was still really hard to make money off of anything in the band. A lot of the burnout came from doing some tours that felt like We made it, and then doing ones that were like, "What is the purpose of this? I think we just need to do this."Those are the ones that become tough—where we've already been out for X number of months and we're like, "Where is this going?"

Eva: So much of where we were at that moment is a lot of what we were wrestling with on this record: How do you evaluate where you are in the music industry? 20 years ago, it would be very easy to say you've made it or haven't made it. I don't think it's so easy [now]. It's funny, because even before you asked that question, I was just thinking that the burnout, for me, was from the pressure we felt making Young Enough. We were trying to push ourselves really hard, hoping it was going to be this huge record for us and change things—whatever that means. And it did, in a lot of ways, but because we were still struggling so much financially, it was very confusing to evaluate where we stood.

On some level, I love that. I do think it's very funny and humbling. The first time we ever got Best New Track on Pitchfork, that night we played to, like, one person. You have to have a sense of humor to be in this world, and we really try to maintain that. But there's something very confusing about, am I succeeding, or am I failing on a profound level?

Sam: I feel like maybe like one percent of bands make it to the point we make it. We're super fortunate.But the gap between like the one percent and, like, the point-one percent is so insanely massive that it's really hard to evaluate success. And, again, like we're so thankful. We have amazing fans, and I mever imagined this. I remember begging people to come to New York City shows—our hometown—just so we could meet the 50-ticket limit.

Eva: Each person has to buy two drinks.

Sam: Dump them out if you want. Who cares?

Obviously, being an indie rock band now is quite different from how it was in the 2010s. I'm curious to hear you guys talk more about how the forced downtime of the pandemic caused you guys to reckon with how the industry moves.
Eva: I think I'm still kind of wrestling with that a little bit. To me, there was a degree to which I was aware that we were losing momentum—but it was like, "Don't look at it. Don't think about it.As long as I don't acknowledge it, it's not happening." Because in the moments I really did feel it, I was like, "Wait, fuck, is our career over?" Did we just take way too long? Have we been completely felled by this experience?

"Here Comes the Darkness" is one of the very few moments where I allowed myself to go there and be like, "Oh my God, is this over?" And that thought occurred to me—but, at the same time, we were writing what was so clearly our best music we'd ever written. So as much as it was taking a long time, and it was really brutal waiting as long as it did—and there's so many things that made it take as long as it did, whatever — there was also always this feeling of hope that was keeping it going. Like, even if our career was over—which I refused to believe it is—but if it is over, I will stop at nothing to make sure these songs. That was the thing we all felt. We were like, "We've never written a song as good as 'Calling You Out' or 'Back There Now.'" People must hear these songs, and whatever it will take to make that happen, we will make that happen. But that's as close as we got to letting ourselves feel that.

On the flip side of that, I would also say making music in the 2010s is very different than making music now. Music shifted a lot in a way that was actually to our advantage. In 2019, it was such a huge deal of, "I thought they were a garage rock band. Now they're making pop music—what the hell?" Yes, there are still those people that exist in our YouTube comments—but, overwhelmingly, I don't think our core fans are confused by that. I just don't think music is working in that way anymore. There's too many artists and bands who are playing in many different genres, and no one sees any reason why that should be an issue. So, in some ways, it was to our advantage.

I saw you guys retweet a tweet that was like, "Nobody realizes that most of the sounds on the new record are actually guitars." Tell me more about constructing the sound of this record.
Sam: At the start of the pandemic, I wanted to level up my production and songwriting game. So I just went crazy on YouTube, learning as much as I possibly could. The cool thing about the record is that, before we started tracking any of the songs with Jake Luppen and Caleb Wright, we'd import the demos that sounded pretty damn good for demos. We'd import the MIDI, because I recorded everything in MIDI and altered the synth sounds that we had. From there, we built on all of it with a ton of guitar stuff.

[Guitarist Spencer Fox] is amazing at finding unique tones and ways to take this synth part and make it a guitar part. Jake is also amazing at doing the same thing. There was so much experimentation with guitars, but having that launch point with the demos was really huge. It gave us such a good skeleton for what we already knew the songs wanted to sound like, which opened things up.

Eva: We had a really clear game plan going in—"This, there, needs to be a moment," "That feels like this"—which gave us a ton of room and time to experiment until we could create those textures in really interesting ways. Other times, we've gone in and just been like, "Oh, there'll be something happening on the synth here," and then you're locked into what that sounds like.

Sam: It was also the exact opposite way we recorded anything else—which usually started as a band in a room practicing, and then the struggle was, "How do we make this a recording?" This was the complete opposite. I was alone in the bedroom, she was alone in Australia. We didn't have instruments to play with, just a synth and keyboard. So all the stuff that we usually put in last was what we had first, and then it was like, "How do we make this our band?" That was a really cool and refreshing way to do things.

Not every band is able to make records over Zoom. It does seem like working remotely during the pandemic tested some inter-band relationships at large. Tell me about settling into the relationship all of you have as a band, especially since you've been together for a while now.
Eva: That was a big realization I had while making this record. The band is the longest relationship I've ever had in my life. We've been doing this for so long—Sam was just saying this morning, it's like you're always working on one big group project together.

Sam: It was hard to do that for one assignment, let alone 10 years plus.

Eva: It's complicated, it really is. I will say that we are extremely lucky as a band, because we have always been on tour with each other for months and then been like, "What are you guys doing tomorrow?" We'll hear a lot about other bands who say that, on their days off, no one sees each other—they all go off and do different things. Maybe that's healthier, but that's not what we do.

That said, what the time apart gave us...our relationships to each other hadn't evolved in any way for a very long time. It takes perspective and time apart to really be able to see the dynamics of anything—and when we're constantly together, of course annoyances pop up that are hard to deal with. "Me and this person always fight about this," "Me and that person are always at odds about this." We were afforded the opportunity to really meet again as adults instead of as teenagers. We also all were just going through so much, and figuring out so much about ourselves.

This is going to sound funny, but I genuinely believe that a huge part of how the album came together is that three of us are now on SSRIs and doing way better—getting the help that we weren't getting for so long. We're now able to have healthy conflict and be able to talk when things don't feel right, and I don't think we really had that yet.

Sam: Oh God, yeah. There was so much personal reflection that happened. Becoming a father of two, I used to be like, "Just keep the peace." I really hated conflict, but then I would bury stuff that I wouldn't realize.

Eva: We'd have a blow-up fight every year.

Sam: A horrible, horrible experience.

Eva: Crying, days long. [Laughs]

Sam: As a parent, you can't get away with that. As the primary songwriters and creative forces behind the band, our communication has leveled up times a hundred since we had time apart to mature personally. It's still a long way to go, but that was huge. As far as sharing demos over emails, I never realized how hard it is to show a new song in a physical space with three other people where they're reacting live. That is so much pressure.

Eva: Sam is my big brother in real life, and he's the big brother of the entire band, so we're all waiting to see what Sam's going to say. He cannot hide it. If you're showing him something, his most common response is, "So, it's really good...I'm sorry, which part do you see as the chorus?" [Laughs]

Sam: That's what everyone wants to hear. [Laughs]

Eva: He's trying to be so polite, and we're just all like, "Noooooooo!"

Sam: How many times do you hear a song where, at first, you're like, "I don't know," and then you listen to it a couple more times and you're like, "This is amazing!" Honestly, it took me a really long time to be able to show songs in the first place, because it's so vulnerable.

Eva: Was "Ruby" the first song you showed to us?

Sam: Probably, yeah. My heart was racing. It's a hard thing, and I think removing that pressure all around was really healthy. No matter what space we're in, I'd prefer to keep doing that. Let's send some emails—it's just better.

How do you guys feel about having gotten back on tour since things shut down?
Eva: I'm a bit of a mix. My fiancé makes fun of me, because before we tour I go on these long rants. "This is too scary, I'm not cut out for this, why do I put myself through this?" Then, after the first show, immediately I call him and I'm like, "I forgot a part of myself. This is what I really am." So I know that's coming.

Also, one of the greatest joys of making an album that we love so much is that we're gonna get to experience that album with people who really care about it. So much of a band's world exists online—and as much as that is wonderful, it's also very cold and hard to quantify. Being in a room with a bunch of people who really care about your band, singing along to the songs, you're like, "Okay, cool, I could put up with all the bad things about being in a band for the rest of my life, because this is so worth it."

I'm also nervous, of course. It's nerve-wracking and stressful—and, I'm also getting married two weeks after our last show. Sam and I are leaving for Australia the day after our last show in Philly, and flying to Australia with two kids under five years old. There's just so much going on in my brain at this point that I don't know how to like separate like what i what i'm most stressed about.

Will that be their first time on a plane, Sam?
Sam: It'll be their second time. Their first time was an hour long. We just had a really successful family trip to North Carolina, so I'm not actually worried. I'm honestly super excited about tour. That Young Enough tour was so special, even as it was hard and taxing. I'm gonna sleep through the night for the first time. [Laughs] Selfishly, I'm excited about that. It's a vacation, baby!

Eva: I remember five years ago, touring and getting sick and being like, "We cannot cancel a show. You do not cancel a show for getting sick." One thing I really loved seeing over the last couple years is the acknowledgement that touring is really hard on your body. Sometimes, you can't play every single show. Before, I feel like we were all pretending to be superhuman.

Sam: Everyone in the band had 103-degree fevers at one point—they were on IVs, and they played. I was like, "You guys are insane." They were so ill.

Eva: That was the expectation. You can't cancel. Even the conversation about mental health—every time I see someone canceling a tour because they're like, "Look, I'm just not in a good place right now, this is not the right thing for me," I'm like, "Yes!" The reaction from fans used to be, "I paid all this money, I've been looking forward to this," and now I feel like people are just like, "You're pretty overwhelmed, look after yourself."

When we talked for Vulture, we were on the subject of the financial realities of being in a band and making music for a living. Tell me about how that's been for you guys since.
Sam: We were not relying on the band for money. It was not realistic without touring or new music. We all got jobs doing various things, which was actually nice. I'd quit my bartending job back in 2017 and always thought, "I'm never gonna go back to this." There's no shame in it, obviously—I just felt like, "Oh man, I made it." Then, I went back to bartending over the pandemic, and it changed my mindset on everything. It doesn't mean our band is a failure because we have to do that—if anything, it provides us way more independence and actually makes being a band easier, because we don't have to rely on it for so much. But it's hard. We haven't been making much money off the band.

Eva: I have really complicated feelings about this. When I met my fiancé, we were talking about things that he loves, and his whole thing was, "I'll never make something that I love my job. I protect the things that i love and keep them as hobbies." At the time, I was like, "What's that like?" That would've never occurred to me. It makes your level of fulfillment really unclear—like, "I'm feeling really emotionally fulfilled by this, but I have no savings and and I'm $3,000 in debt."

I wouldn't be able to live off of the band solely, but I also feel like my enjoyment of being in the band is at an all-time high, so who knows. I don't know what to think.

I mean, those things might be connected, honestly!
Eva: But I also want to be clear that I still really believe that musicians should get paid for what they do. The hellscape that we're descending further and further into...streaming services don't pay artists very well, and there's really not a route to living off of or profiting off your music unless you're one of 10 artists that are the biggest artists in the world. I don't think that's pushing culture anywhere exciting or good. As much as there's ways I could emotionally justify it to myself, I also think it's really important to say that I do think that that is fucked.

You guys covered "Pretend to Be Nice" from the Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack. I've never seen the entire movie, because when I saw it in theaters the projector set on fire and they had to issue refunds.

Eva: I remember you mentioning that! The movie was so good that the projector exploded. [Laughs]

The movie's had this enduring cultural cache that's been a little unexpected. Tell me about your guys' relationship to it.
Eva: For me, it was my first experience seeing women play instruments and write songs. The second I saw it, I was like, "That's exactly what I want to do with the rest of my life." And those songs still hit! They're so good. It's been cool to see a lot of my favorite things from when I was a young girl get recycled through culture— things that were dismissed as very silly.

Sam: It's a perfect time capsule for what the perception of the music industry was at that time—you sign a big, mega record deal, you're huge and famous, and it's all controlled. I have a friend who was in the Lo Fidelity Allstars, and he was talking about how they were on the very last wave of that era. They signed this big record deal in 1999, and then the Napster thing happened, and everything went to shit—but that's what it was like. I wonder if that's still the perception of what it's like.

Eva: Sometimes, I think it is. I see people I haven't seen since high school who are, like, working in finance, and they're like, "You're famous!" Like, I can't afford to add guacamole to my burrito. [Laughs]

I feel like I'm saying a lot about how we haven't "made it," but there's a whole other part of making this record where it was like, "Yeah, we did make it, and I totally missed it." Even hearing you say that Young Enough got a lot of attention—I forgot! The last five years, time is just such a weird thing. Over the pandemic, I straight-up forgot we were in a band. There were moments where I was like, "Oh yeah, we did this." We have a Patreon with some of the best fans ever, and we did a few Zoom hangouts. The first one we did was the most one of the most special experiences, I remember crying a lot after that—I'm even getting choked up now. It was this unbelievable reminder that there are people who really care about our band—it was super invigorating.

Having realized that you've achieved success, even though it's not exactly what you thought it would look like, can be very rewarding in its own right. The constant self-pressure of expectation can be like a real drag, too—you just wear yourself down in the end.
Eva: So true. When we were evaluating what we wanted Forever to sound like, I remember being out with Spencer and being like, "How do we like put this into words?" What we were really hoping for was, there was something about making Guppy where it felt like no one was watching—and no one was watching. I hadn't even thought beyond, "Our parents and friends will hear this." The only people we were trying to please were each other. That was all that mattered. I really wanted to achieve something like that again on Forever—and, weirdly, we kind of got to experience that again, because it did feel a lot of time where no one was watching. "Did they break up? Where are they?" We were able to find that place of, "What what do you make if the only thing you care about is a very achievable and quantifiable thing? Do you feel like you're having fun? Do you feel like you're enjoying this? Is this the album that you dreamed we would make?" Yes, sure—and then we were done.