Home Is Where on Missing Florida, American Music, and the Virtues of Goofing Off

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.

Home Is Where grabbed my attention immediately with the stellar 2021 EP I Became Birds, and since then the Palm Coast-hailing band have subverted expectations in a really thrilling and fascinating manner. To wit: I was two-thirds into their raw and grandiose latest album Hunting Season before I realized that it'd been forever since an emo-leaning record had me saying out loud, "Huh, this reminds me of Titus Andronicus' The Monitor!" I mentioned this to vocalist Bea McDonald during our conversation last month and she admitted that Titus was never really a thing for her, but across the chassis of our hour-long conversation she really stretched out about her perspectives regarding the past and present of popular music in a way that I found fascinating and thought-provoking. Check it out:

Both you and guitarist Tilley Kormony left Florida in recent years. Talk to me about this period of geographical transience.
I came out as a trans woman in in 2020 and moved out of Florida in 2021 because I saw the writing on the window and got pretty paranoid. It was right after the pandemic, right before the election and insurrection. The vibes were off. There was something in the air. I felt something sinister, but I didn't really want to move—but there was just so much legislation and so much crazy talk happening that me and my girlfriend just abruptly decided it might be time to get out of here, because we just didn't know what was what was around the bend.

We moved to New York, which is not too culturally foreign. I'm the only one in my family born in the South, so I'd go up to New York pretty often. I was pretty familiar with the culture and mindset from visiting, and I knew I wasn't gonna like it too much, but I thought I'd give it a shot and see what we could make of it. I just couldn't hack it. I'm not built for a city environment. Then we moved out to Long Island out near Suffolk county, and I really didn't vibe with it there. I felt there was more of a danger there. There's just transphobia everywhere, is what I came to realize. There wasn't anywhere that felt safer than the next place, other than when I didn't leave my home.

So I had a little bit of a mental breakdown and didn't leave my house in Long Island for about four months, other than to go to work when I had a job. Then my mental health got to a point where I couldn't work at that job anymore, so I lived off my savings and wrote as much as I could to escape these feelings and bad thoughts. Then, finally, I said to my girlfriend, "If we stay here any longer, I don't think I'm gonna make it. There's just something about this environment that is not conducive to me having a healthy brain."

She has family here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, so we moved down here about a year ago and it's a lot nicer. I still have the goal to one day go back to Florida, because that's my home and I genuinely long for it. I want to get home as soon as i can, but right now I'm in a much better place than I was a year ago.

Is there anything you specifically miss about Florida?
Well, Larry, I miss just about everything. I miss the weather, especially. I'm not used to seasons, and in Florida it feels like no time passes because it's just endless summer, other than a few cold days in February. It's fairly consistent. I miss the big skies—there's no mountains, very few hills, so you get a real taste of the sky. The sky in Florida is different than anywhere else. The only other place I can compare it to is Texas. There's just something about Florida and Texas sunsets that hit different than anywhere else.

I miss the vegetation in Florida—how green it is. I miss the beaches. I miss the ocean. I took the ocean for granted. I didn't realize how connected I was to it until it was far away. I miss the familiarity, too. I miss having roots in a place. Everywhere I go, I feel like an alien. But in Florida, I have some sort of memory or connection to it. I even miss the assholes in Florida.

You talked about going through periods of time where you didn't leave the house. I'm curious to hear you talk about that sense of isolation and if it seeped into the creative process of this record in general.
It wasn't a decision that was made. I was just paranoid and scared. I don't know, my thought processes weren't really logical—but I was stricken with fear for a while, for a lot of different reasons. A lot of it's personal—an environment, the socio-political factor that's constantly always hanging over your head. Something just snapped, and that was how I dealt with it. Because I was home for months on end, all I did to distract myself so I wouldn't get lost in the corners of my own mind was writing music and obsessively consuming art for inspiration.

For this record, I had a pretty set routine. I'd wake up, have my coffee, watch a little TV or listen to some records, obsessively clean my house head-to-toe. When that was done, I'd go down into my basement, pick up a guitar—and I don't know how to play guitar at all—and I'd write these words and figure out a vocal melody for them. Once I figured out something that I liked, I'd call up Tilley and we'd FaceTime. She flew in a few times to see me and hang out and try to write stuff.

Early 2023 is when I first started writing the record, and then we recorded it about a year ago. There was a year and a half of writing and figuring stuff out. A lot of stuff got cut. We even had to cut one song from the studio that we recorded because it just didn't fit, which we'd never done before. But I was just inspired. I was feeling a lot of different things. I was longing to be somewhere else and had a bunch of unhappy thoughts, I guess. I used the music as a conduit for that.

I don't really know how much of the isolation was inspiring to the record, other than that it gave me time to to work on it. It's strange now—like I'm comparing children—but it feels like Hunting Season takes place outside of the world, but it's very personal. Whereas The Whaler takes place in the brain, but is very in the outside world. They're just the inverse of each other. I was just longing to go back to Florida—to feel, see, and taste all the familiar things that will react to my senses, and trying to figure out how to capture Florida in a song.

How was the pandemic for you? Just talking about being isolated and not leaving your house for a period of time, it's really hard for me not to think about that.
It was fine. I was in Florida at the time. I was already kind of burnt out. Home Is Where had not taken off at all—we were just a local band, we weren't even really affiliated with any kind of scene. We didn't consider ourselves a DIY band because we weren't involved with DIY or even thought about it. We were just trying to write really good records and play the songs.

So when the pandemic hit, I think we were all a little burnt out from playing so many shows with, like, 22 people—if you're lucky—in attendance. We were traveling around and making no money. I mean, we weren't in it for the money at all, but it's hard to get from Palm Coast to Tampa to play shows with not a lot of money. So we were looking for the break the we had.

I don't remember the time too too well—I was pretty stoned through most of it. I wasn't welcoming it, but I was open to just having a little bit of rest, because I'd also been working a job since I was 13 years old and the pandemic happened when I was 24 or 25. I'm 29 right now. So I could've used the rest. I do remember being very paranoid about the virus. It finally gave me an opportunity to reflect on myself, and then I came out as as trans, which was something I was always kind of struggling with. It was always on my mind, but I just didn't have the guts to face it up until then.

I did okay. I spent a lot of time with my girlfriend. I listened to a lot of music and read, caught up on a bunch of films I'd been meaning to see. Once it calmed down a little bit, we recorded I Became Birds, and that was very fun. After a while, I did start to miss my friends and going out, but I'm naturally a homebody. It doesn't take a lot for me to not leave the house. Even still, I'm trying to get better at it, because I don't want to fall into old habits.

I don't want to say I'm antisocial, but I'm not very social. I don't really talk to too many people often. I have my girlfriend, which is nice—she's my best friend too, so I always have company, but I never feel too lonely or anything like that. I just keep to myself. I was an only child that grew up on a dirt road with no other kids on it, so I don't know what lonely is. Alone is the default—it makes more sense to me than with a crowd of people.

I will say, since the pandemic, I don't do crowds very well. I get very overwhelmed at grocery stores or concerts—even at my own shows, sometimes. When people come up to me, I appreciate all the nice things and the company and stuff, it does take a second for my brain to rewire and get into a social mode.

I'd love to hear you talk more about how this record came together sonically. You and Tilley wrote a lot long-distance, and then you just laid the record to tape in the studio over the course of three days, which is a funny juxtaposition to me.
I'm always writing. I'm constantly trying to work on something or hone it out. I got really inspired thinking about when we were on tour with Glass Beach in 2021. We were out in the desert and we didn't have any music released. [Home Is Where drummer Josiah Gardella's] other band, The Ned, was going on tour, and he asked me if I wanted to join him with Home Is Where as the opener. We had many shows with no literally no one in the audience other than the bartender, and no released music—but it was fun. We were just kids, hitting the road and rocking out.

But then we did our proper tour where people showed up, and it was like, "Well, this is why you do it." While we were on the road, we were all in the van together, and we made a pretty decent effort to not just be on our phones or have our earbuds in. We always try to have a playlist we've made together that's thousands
of songs—we just put that on shuffle, everybody adds to it, and when a song comes on it'll spark up a conversation. A lot of what made us perk up the most in the van was country music.

So I remembered that, and towards the end of that tour we were somewhere in the desert and everybody in the band had showed me a bunch of different country music that they liked. I was like, "Have you guys ever heard of Gram Parsons or the Flying Burrito Brothers?" Everyone was kind of like, "I haven't given it a deep listen," so I put on The Gilded Palace of Sin and ran it through, and it was like a movie—it just felt unreal and magical.

It put a little seed in my head that this is maybe something that we should focus on—because the country and folk influence has always been there. It's just been buried because we were an emo band that was really interested in Bob Dylan and traditional American music—old time rock and roll, country, blues, that was always in there. Even on I Became Birds' "The Old Country," it's a country song without the pedal steel or honky-tonk.

I've always dreamed of leaning into that a little more, but I also really wanted to just scream and shout and writhe around and have a whole lot of distortion and feedback. I was really interested in the "wall of sound" idea that Phil Specter came up with and applying that to punk music. I was really interested in how Brian Wilson approached that. That was a big one for The Whaler: What if Brian Wilson made a punk record?

For The Whaler, "Daytona 500" was inspired by the feeling that I had in the desert, listening to the Flying Burrito Brothers—and then that song ended up becoming just about everybody's favorite song on The Whaler, if I'm not mistaken. A lot of us, at the very least, think that's a really special point in the record, because up until that point, everything's meshed together into this one giant seamless record, and "Daytona 500" is the breather from that because it's a traditional song—verse-chorus-verse-chorus-little outro. All of us really liked that structure, and once we were done with The Whaler I didn't want to make another record like that. I just wanted to write songs could survive on their own, individually.

I was really into Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour, and the artists whose songs I liked, I'd go check out their discography—Warren Smith, some rockabilly guy, Betty Carter, some bebop jazz crooner, all kinds of different stuff. I wanted to write songs that could fit, in theory, next to these classic standard American songs. I felt like a lot of modern music, emo or not, had lost that connection to somebody like Little Richard or Webb Pierce, and that's the stuff I cut my teeth on when I was getting into music. Even something like 100 gecs, you can trace it back to Charlie Patton or somebody from 100 years ago. I don't think we're too removed from it yet, but I think we're getting there, and that kind of worries me. People kind of stop listening to music [before] the '50s, and a lot of the '50s songs they know are, like, Christmas songs. I didn't want to lose that connection, because that's the music I've always gravitated towards.

What it came down to was that I wanted to write the great American song. I kept trying to communicate to the band, "I didn't want to go too cuckoo bananas on here." We've done the experimental thing, and this is an experiment on its own. Especially in emo, but in a lot of different genres, sometimes it seems like the thing is so experimental that it ceases to be whatever it is. "The emo record that's so experimental it ceases to be an emo record."

Especially in trans music, there's a stereotype with a lot of trans women that they end up making music like 100 gecs or Jane Remover—this very artificial, digitally distorted, ADD mess. I like that music, I think it has a time and a place, but I don't really relate to it, and I almost never reach to to put it on. I'm not really interested in that kind of stuff, because it just doesn't click with me. I feel like I sound like the youngest boomer sometimes when I talk out loud, but when I was a kid I remember being thrilled when I felt like I was listening to something dangerous—like the first time I listened to the Velvet Underground and Nico record. But with this stuff, the distortion doesn't feel the same. It just sounds like a computer to me, and that might just be me, because I know this stuff is really popular, and I don't think it's bad or anything. I just don't relate to it.

I don't see how the response to the confusion of today is to create even more confusion—fighting fire with fire. That just never made any kind of sense to me when it came to art. So I wanted this record to reflect the trans experience in an organic, living-and-breathing way.

I find your assertion about stereotypes regarding trans women making music to be really interesting.
It's strange. The only other trans person I can think about that makes even music even slightly similar to this would be later Laura Jane Grace records, and even those are way more punk-forward than they are singer-songwriter-forward, or whatever that means. I always made the joke that if there was a very poetic screamo band would it be "screamer-songwriter."

Sometimes, I feel just too interested in music, so I don't know if I'm mistaking the forest for the trees, or however the expression goes. But for the first time in years—maybe decades—we actually have popular, good songwriters, like Karly Hartzman from Wednesday. MJ Lenderman, I think, is a great songwriter. Cameron Winter's new record is phenomenal. There's just something about that record that speaks to me pretty heavy. The band Bedbug, [Dylan Gamez Citron] is an incredible songwriter.

We're in a place where lyrics are good again, which was my biggest thing with Home Is Where. When we first started, lyrically, I wanted to make—not "elevated emo," because that sounds like an incredibly stupid task to give yourself. But I wanted to make emo records that were artful—not just like, "Here's some riffs, we're going to feel some things and say some generic slogans, and you're supposed to cry." Emo felt really manipulative and unrecognizable to me by the time Home Is Where started. I'm not going to name-drop anyone, but if you just Google "2016 emo," you'll get the vibe of how insane that was.

In 2010, everyone was like, "Rap is the new rock, rock is dead"—and there's probably some merit in all of that. I don't think rock is taking the place of rap and popularity anytime soon. But rock is more popular now and, I think it's because we have better songwriters, because for the last 15 years, it's been all about vibes. Rock and roll got Mac DeMarco-fied—and I like Mac DeMarco quite a bit!

No, I know exactly what you're talking about.
Yeah, it was just vibes—very airy, you put it on the background, no different than "lo-fi hip-hop to chill and study to." There was no substance in any of those lyrics. Like, I love Mac DeMarco, but they're just cute little love songs. There's not a lot of poetry or real lyrical intention in them. The only place that was really happening was in rap, and I ain't no rapper or anything like that, so I wasn't even going to begin to try to do something like that.

I tried to carve out my own thing in emo, and now that we've done that, you know, I'm getting older. My voice hurts. I don't want to scream as much anymore, and I'm calming down a little bit. I got a lot of the screaming and writhing around and noise and, and weird experimental stuff kind of out of my system, especially on the last record and tour. When you're screaming "Every Day Feels Like 9/11" every night for a month, it really makes you want to calm down—and I wanted to make a record to put on for someone to have an emotional connection to or get something out of. But I also wanted to write a record that could be on in the background while you were grilling with your friends.

I have a love-hate relationship with with the last record, to be honest. It's a really dark, scary record to me, and I don't want to ever make another record like that. I'm glad I made it, and I'm glad that it exists. But my whole thought process—even when we were done recording, having listened to it a few times to approve mixes and mastering—was that this isn't the kind of thing people are gonna put on for fun, or to have a good time. It's a record that I think people turn to when things get pretty dark, and I think music like that has its place, but I wanted to make a record that wasn't such a fucking downer the first time you listen to it.

Tell me about working with Jack Shirley again on this record. I talked to Jack for a Deafheaven story a while back, and I've talked to Jeff Rosenstock about working with him as well. He certainly gets results.
This time around, recording was much easier because we went into the studio with the idea of recording it live—as few overdubs as possible. I just wanted to hit "Record" and then, whatever happened, that was the take—maybe two, three takes tops. I don't think there's a lot of records being made like that right now. My favorite Bob Dylan records are recorded like that, where there's no metronome and it's just what you you get in the room. We play, and then we play it until it comes out good—or good enough—and that's it. And Jack's favorite thing in the world is to keep it essential and where it's supposed to be.

With The Whaler, I think it took him a second to figure out what the vision was for a lot of the things that we wanted to experiment with. For this one, we were like, "Jack, all we really need you to do is help us get the musicians and just hit 'Record' and tell us if it sucked or not." There wasn't too much gloss or after the fact. We wanted it to be rugged and raw, and he was all-in.

Jack is very serious. I think we broke him the first time, because we were constantly goofing around and acting silly. After a certain point, he joined in and understood what the dynamic was, and I think it loosened him up a little bit. I asked him, "What's it like recording with so-and-so, are they super serious?" He was like, "It's all pretty serious." The way he described it, it sounded like being in like an operating room, and I don't really do well in those environments. So we goofed off enough to where Jack felt comfy to goof off with us, and it was great.