Hovvdy on Double Albums, Career-Building, Parents, and Coldplay

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Big fan of Hovvdy's Charlie Martin and Will Taylor, who have steadily built a career as indie-pop-slash indie rock powerhouses over the last decade. Their latest record, a self-titled double-album dealio that came out last week, might be their best yet, and you still get the feeling that when it comes to the peak of their talents they're just getting started. I hopped on a call with Will and Charlie last month to talk about it, as well as a few other things.

Tell me about embracing the double album as a framework for this record.
Will: We were really excited about not trimming. We usually bring in about 20 songs for each album, and because there's two songwriters, it's less daunting to do so. We also wanted to make each song compact and punchy. I think we were ready to have a double album and let go of the typical framework of fitting everything onto one record. We just let everything that felt good stay—and there were some songs that we skipped. Maybe those will find the light of day sometime. But we were excited to try some new stuff, and doing a double album was part of that.

Charlie: I think that more music is better if you're a fan of the band in general. But you do have to toe the line. This record comes in around 55 minutes or so, so I like to think it's a one-listen experience—but, these days, you never know.

When the Clientele put out a double album last year, I asked Alasdair how he felt about double albums, and he said he doesn't like them in general. Do you guys have any double albums you're partial to in particular?
Charlie: A lot of the great Wilco records. I don't know if they were advertised as double albums, but they definitely are. Being There is like pretty long—I think that's a proper double album. 

It is!
Charlie: What about you, Will?
Will: The first one that comes to my head is the Alison Krauss and Union Station live album. My parents were really into that.

As Charlie mentioned, it's harder to wrangle someone's attention span for an hour or whatever—and I think that's true for myself. But I certainly can't wait for albums from the bands I love, and if it happens to be a double, I'm all about it. Even though it takes a little bit longer, it's also more rewarding to find the special moments—and it's interesting, because those moments that you find special, sometimes your friends can miss those. It's fun to share the moments that stick out to you, and I feel like that's less common with a more compact album, where it's kind of all out there. Whereas [with a double album] you gotta do some digging— and I think that's a fun experiment, you know?

Tell me about your distinctive songwriting styles as far as how you see them.
Charlie: The similarities probably outweigh the differences. It's probably true that me and Will could be on opposite sides of the world and write five songs each with zero communication and send them off to get mixed, and that it would sound just like a Hovvdy record. There's a natural glue, but I think we have different styles as well. I tend to write more on piano. Sometimes, my melodic style is different than Will's—maybe a little more pointed, whereas Will's really fun and expressive. He can do more vocal runs, whereas my voice and songs melody-wise tend to be more structured and rigid.

Will: A lot of Charlie's melodies potentially start as piano lines—you're playing chords with the left hand and the melody with the right hand. A lot of times, those melodies that Charlie plays on the piano end up being the song, and I think that's really cool. I don't necessarily have that skill set. I'm not able to use both hands on the piano like that. So we do have different approaches. My approach can sometimes be a little bit more loose and unpredictable. Charlie seems to have the structure, mood, emotion, and melody more dialed in.

It's all living inside one house, which is what makes his songs pack a punch without feeling overwhelming. It's nice, because we do balance each other. My songs tend to be a little bit less dense. So you get new feelings and emotions in your ears that get woken up throughout the album—which is part of what makes our band unique.

Refresh the record here—how long have you known each other?
Charlie: We met at SXSW in 2014. I was playing drums in a band that played a house show that Will helped set up. We crossed paths a couple times over the course of that year and pretty quickly started talking about making music together. We started the band in 2015.

Tell me about the intricacies of your working relationship as musicians.
Will: Our personalities do well together. There are obviously times where being two people in a partnership making decisions is challenging—I don't know if challenging is the right word, but passionate, maybe. There were less moments like that around this album, to be honest, which has been nice. But in the past we've definitely had to choose our moments. But our personalities fit together. Charlie, as an internal processor, has a lot of clarity and confidence in his ideas and is excited to listen.

I bounce around a little bit more—my ideas fly everywhere. Sometimes it's really helpful to have those, because we take them and run with them, and it's also helpful to have Charlie's groundedness. We also have a manager who really helps keep our wheels on and makes sure our day-to-day tasks stay done. Without that, it would be more challenging to make sure everything is still moving. As far as when we're together and on tour, when we're making records, we fit into our roles nicely. They're pretty similar, just with some personality differences in there.

Charlie: In the context of working on music, there's a general unspoken agreement that, if it's a Will song, he's steering that ship—and if it's one of my songs, I'm steering the ship. We both have a lot of respect for each other in that dynamic and and are able to pivot between leading something and serving the other. It's also really nice to have people push against that dynamic and encourage us to be more collaborative—to let go and give up control a little more. With this record, there was a lot more risk-taking and collaboration.

You guys have a pretty identifiable sound to me, but it's evolved as well. Tell me about how it's evolved to your ears.
Charlie: The most noticeable change for me is confidence. Our tastes change subtly over time. In the early days, we both were less confident and more interested in slowcore, bedroom-buried vocals, cryptic lyricism—the type of shit that you show your mom and she's like, "What is this? I can't understand what you're saying. Now, we're more drawn towards vivid storytelling and clarity in the songwriting—and, obviously, the vocals being on top of the mix versus being buried.

Will: The first few years, we experimented a lot more with vibe—finding music that makes you feel something just by how it sounds. We've tried to hold on to that skill set, but with expanded clarity in the songwriting and being more direct with words where we're not wasting them, we're marrying all the things that we were doing in the beginning of our band with the things that we're striving for now.

Charlie, you mentioned the notion of your mother not understanding your lyrics. How do your guys' parents feel about your music career?Charlie: I've been pretty lucky in a lot of ways. My mom is a piano teacher, so she's very supportive of the pursuit of music. I always told her and my dad—who's moreso out of the picture—that as long as we're seeing some subtle growth in success, I'm gonna try to keep it going. "If it plateaus or starts to get sad, I'll pivot." Luckily, that hasn't hasn't happened yet, but my mom's really supportive.

She can be critical. She's the type where, if she comes to a show and one of us is out of tune, after the show she'll be like, "Yeah, but you were out of tune." So that's kind of rough. A lot of my songs over the years have also dealt with dad issues. I know he listens to the records, but we don't really talk about it too much. I think he hears stuff and is like, "Huh, it seems like that's about me." But I don't know for sure.

Will: My mom's a huge music fan, but she's built her world to just follow certain types of music. Listening to Howdy, she's stepping outside of that a little bit, which she's done a great job at. With this album, she's all on board with it and is really impressed by the songwriting and the production.

My dad is a huge fan of us in an interesting way. I don't know how much of the music he listens to, but he'll just show up no matter what. He makes jokes about how he doesn't understand how people find out about the things we do, because we're only on Instagram. He's like, "I don't understand. You'll announce shows, no one hears about them, and then they'll sell out." That's kind of his running bit—that we keep our schedule from our fans. More than anything, my dad's impressed with the fact that we're a good live band and that I can play lead guitar a little bit. That's something that is the key to his heart.

Tell me about your growing fanbase. Seems like it's been pretty steady over the years in an impressive way.
Charlie: It's been a real slow burn, and it took some years for us to find peace with that and reframe it in our minds as, potentially, a good thing. I don't think we've been a band that's forced down people's throats, so I like to think that when people finally give us a chance, they have a lot of music to to dive into. That's exciting to us.

Every record we put out, we're like, "Alright, this is this is the one," and it usually lands and is exciting, and things continue to build—but hopefully this is actually the one, We'll see. I feel like we always redefine the standards, and what it means for an album to be "the one."

Will: Early on in our band, when we were opening for other artists who we loved a lot, that was a new world. Playing 500-cap sold-out shows was an insane thing to us, and over the years the goal posts shift. We were able to you have a successful tour around True Love, and we hit all those goals that we started out with. As time goes on, you shift and reflect on everything, and sometimes it's hard to have clarity on where everything is going. But then you step back and look at the big picture, and we're grateful to have whatever kind of career that you would call this.

Tell me about the financial aspect of Hovvdy. Are you guys doing this full time now?
Charlie: Yeah. Also, last year, me and Will signed on with a publisher as writers, so we're doing pop songwriting as well, which is something we've been interested in for for years and have dabbled in—but now it's more of a focus alongside Hovvdy.

Will: It certainly helps maintain the career aspect, where we don't have to have jobs. Up until a few years ago, we had other jobs. I still do things from time to time that aren't music. But it's sustained us now for a little bit, which is really special and another thing to be grateful for. The publishing aspect of our careers would probably not look like it does—or it may not have happened at all—without the band. That's something to celebrate for us. In the future, we're hoping to build it out—and the more you tour, the more stable you are financially, but the more you tour, the less stable you are emotionally. So we'll see how it all goes.

Charlie: I'd say we like are still taking it about six months at a time in terms of the the full-time musician thing.

Hovvdy's first few records came out on Double Double Whammy, which has become a notable label over the last decade when it comes to certain strains of indie-pop and indie rock. Tell me about releasing records through DDW.
Charlie: In the early days, me and Will both shared a goal to be embraced by that East Coast DIY scene—Double Double Whammy, Orchid Tapes, a big handful of labels that were putting out stuff that really inspired us. I don't know if we've ever confirmed this story or not, but I remember sending Mike Caridi Taster when we initially released it in 2016 and not getting a response. Then we ended up playing a show with Mike's band the Glow and Harmony Tividad from Girlpool, and we won him over there and they ended up re-releasing Taster. It was a huge deal for us. We were big fans, and it was a major benchmark for our success in the early days.

Will: We had a lot of people early on that were really helpful with getting our footing with the label and Mike. It meant a lot, and it still does. That was a really special time in rock music, and I still feel grateful for that time. We experienced a lot of growth, and we did it fondly.

I love your guys' cover of Coldplay's "Warning Sign." Unlike many music critics of a certain age, I really like Coldplay, so that's part of it—but also, as someone who doesn't really like A Rush of Blood to the Head all that much, it really re-contextualized the song for me sonically, which is exactly what you want a good cover to do. Tell me about your relationship with Coldplay's music, as well as what makes a good cover.
Charlie: For me, Coldplay definitely goes way, way back. I grew up playing piano and was technically classically trained until I was 12 or 13, and then I got more interested in what you would call jazz improv and pop-style piano playing. I want to say it was "Green Eyes" that I brought to my teacher to learn,I'm such a genuine fan of the band, and over the years I've revisited their stuff and am just more and more impressed with it.

I personally am not the biggest fan of covers. So much of what makes a song impactful is having that singular emotional center—the emotion of the song coming from like the source. Sometimes a cover doesn't have that earnest, genuine core at the center of it—but, at the same time, it's so fun to experiment with a new approach to a song that that you love.

Will: For me, covers are really fun. It's a challenge to reframe the song and say something new with it. There's also the fun of trying to pick the songs that would surprise someone, and trying to make them unique and not sound like the recordings. Creating your own narrative around the song is a fun exercise. It's also fun to not spend too much time on it, too. In a lot of ways, it's a freeing task for me because it feels like a little low-stakes—a reimagining, rather than offering your emotional stance for the very first time. Bringing your own music has its challenges in its own way, so I think the cover kind of uses a different side of your brain. It's a fun way to experiment and, honestly, be a little bit silly with somebody else's story.