Pelican's Trevor DeBrauw on Metal, Touring Realities, and The Challenges of Being a Music Publicist

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Let's get down to it: I've known Trevor DeBrauw in two capacities for quite some time. I've been in contact with him for forever through his role as a music publicist at Biz3, and I've also been a regular listener of his band Pelican, who first came onto my radar way back when with The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw back in 2005. That record just got reissued by Thrill Jockey, and the band also did a recent cover of post-hardcore legends Karate for Numero (you can check that out below)—which makes for the perfect intro into our conversation about being metal, not being metal, and much more.

Fire in Our Throats was the first time I'd heard about Pelican at the time, and I think that was the same for others too. Tell me about your memories of that time.
One of the things that really stands out to me is that we didn't anticipate how successful the record would be—which was fairly moderate in scale. But our ambitions were so scaled back from what it actually became that it caught us all off guard. In 2005, we were all 27, which in terms of indie rock age is typically when people are trying to figure out the day job situation—and it was the opposite situation for us. We were finally catching some sort of momentum after 10 years of DIY venues and basements.

Pelican was also our first band that got attention outside of the Chicago area. Laurent and I were in a grindcore band called Tusk prior to Pelican, which was initially a side project to Tusk. We did a West Coast tour where we played five living rooms on the way to California [Laughs]. In terms of things like having a label that was willing to put money into recording us, getting a booking agent—it was all foreign to us before Pelican.

Australasia was also a fairly moderate success that extended beyond what we anticipated. When we played Knitting Factory in New York off that record, there were 100 people there to see the biggest fucking show imaginable. So when Fire in Our Thoats came out, it was this whole next level that none of us could have ever anticipated. Being in the Alternative Press, the New York Times—it was all well outside our expectations.

The record itself was written in a very modest way, because we didn't anticipate any of that stuff happening. Laurent and I were sharing an apartment, playing acoustic guitar together every night and piecing the songs together before bringing them into the space. The ambition was a lot bigger than Australasia, but it wasn't a career thing. When Pelican started, it was an homage to a very specific set of influences, and halfway through writing Australasia we started catching on to what we could bring through our own varied perspectives—and Fire in Our Throats was the culmination of that journey.

You mentioned the Times piece. The framing of that piece, how it situated you guys in metal, was interesting. Metal is a genre in which the fans are very passionate about the rules of it all. What was your perception of how the band was categorized?
We all came up in the Chicago DIY punk and hardcore scene, playing shows at Fireside Bowl and various all-ages spaces around town. The music that we were consuming up to that point had been largely punk and hardcore. It was the scene we existed in. From our perspective, even though we were cribbing from some metal influences, the internal perspective of the band was that we were of the hardcore scene.

When we started attracting a more metal fanbase, it was all fun and good, and what was interesting about the band was that, locally, the first thing we noticed after never attracting more than 50 people at hardcore shows is that we started pulling much bigger crowds from all these different scenes. We were playing music that existed at a cross-section of multiple genres, so no one could really claim it.

But because of the label association and some of the more overt influences, people started to think of the band as a metal band. That Times piece—"Metal Gets an MFA"—where they're talking about this subsection of metal that's getting increasingly influential...we're all just sitting around in our apartment with acoustic guitars, writing what we thought was our take on the '90s emo and hardcore scene. It took me a long time to wrap my head around us being a metal band. Now, I consider us metal, but there was definitely a period where we were getting called out for being "hipster metal" and "poseurs." And, yeah! [Laughs] We were not trying to be a metal band.

For that album in particular, we had a big support tour opening for Opeth, who had just put out Blackwater Park, their huge breakthrough album. That was an eye-opening experience, because metal tours feel really different from what we're used to. They were very private, shut-off, and particular about getting the things they needed. It was good professional experience in terms of understanding how to mount a bigger tour, but at the same time, we felt pretty alienated, and their fans felt pretty good about alienating us too. [Laughs] We weren't trying to be a metal band, we were just trying to do our own thing, and if people were put off by that, I get where they were coming from, because metal is tribalistic.

You grew up listening to metal to some extent, right?
I discovered Metallica in eighth grade, and I got really into Napalm Death purely because the album cover and band name seemed so wild. I bought Harmony Corruption unheard, and I loved it. But I didn't go to any of those shows. I had an uncle who's actually in Elkhorn, and he taught me the ropes about all of these bands—but that was never my thing. I loved all those bands and was into them, but I self-identified as punk because those were the records that meant the most to me, and the shows I was going to at the time.

I'm always interested in talking to people from Chicago about Chicago. I feel like there's always something interesting going on musically in Chicago. What makes Chicago music scenes what they are?
Like ourselves, there's a lack of ambition to be a big band. There's more of an impetus to woodshed and create your own thing. There's so many different scenes and sub-scenes here, and people traveling freely between those scenes and soaking up influences. That's why you see so many bands developing their own thing, which generates this wealth of time and influences to develop different ideas.

Everybody's really supportive here, too. As soon as we started playing Empty Bottle, we became friends with Rob and Brian from 90 Day Men, and Noah from Milemarker. All these people immediately embraced what we were doing and became supporters of each others' music. Whatever cool and interesting thing you're doing, there's going to be people who come out and support it, and that kind of encouragement fosters a tremendous amount of creative energy here.

Somebody who doesn't get enough credit is Brian Peterson, the talent buyer at Fireside Bowl. He'd put local bands on every touring package that came through down, and the local bills he put together had less of a "trying to make everything fit" vibe. He had a lot of interest in creating overlaps between scenes—he'd book a straight-edge hardcore band with a ska band, and everyone would be there to experience it. That's missing from a lot of music now. There's a strong impetus to put packages together where all the bands are similar. When we go out on tour, we try consciously to bring a band on with us that's different so people are getting a more varied evening of music.

Tell me about what the future of Pelican looks like to you at this moment.
I don't really know where we stand in terms of the culture. [Laughs] We have a pretty strong base of listeners. When we put out these reissues, the vinyl pressings have been selling out, and there's consistent monthly streaming numbers—but I don't really hear people talking about our band outside of our feed. I was hoping these reissues would catch a new audience, but it's still mainly the heads in there—and our fanbase has been so supportive and so cool, so that's great.

Since the pandemic, we haven't done that many shows either. I spent a large portion of the five years pre-pandemic managing the band and playing the booking agent, and I had a strong interest in trying to turn us into a legacy act like Neurosis and Converge. There doesn't have to be a new album, you just go out on tour and the shows sell well. And I was trying to set that up while knowing that we can only do three or four weeks a year because we all have day jobs and kids. I think it was going well! Like anything pre-pandemic, my memory of that period is mushy at best, but by the time Nighttime Stories came out in 2019, the shows were, by my standards, very well-attended–400 people in New York, 150 in non-major markets. We were well on the way to achieving the goal I set out for this band, and I had more years of planning I wanted to implement—then, everything hit a wall.

The shows since we came back have not been correct barometers for where the band stands right now. We did a House of Vans thing, we did a beer festival. We did six dates in Europe, two of them were festivals and four were headline shows. Two of the headline shows were flops, two were huge successes. We're doing four shows in August, the ticket sales look good right now, so we'll see. I'm trying not to get too caught up in what our standing is, though. I just want to keep doing the work. This nostalgic period has also been interesting and fun, but we've started writing again too, and now I'm more excited about making new music and moving past this retrospective era.

Tell me more about the ups and downs of playing shows post-pandemic.
The first show back, which was at Sleeping Village in Chicago, an underplay for us, sold out. It was our first show with Laurent in over 10 years, and we'd never taken a break from the band before, so the rest of us had been off for two years. It was like getting back on a bicycle. I didn't know if I remembered how to do it, and then it just came back to me. The feeling of positivity that was radiating off of our fans...I don't know if I'll ever forget it, it was such an incredible experience. The fests we've played have been really great, too. We played this fest in rural Germany called Freak Valley Fest, which was an interesting one. It's a one-stage festival, and they had us go on at midnight, so after eight hours of music and people drinking all day, the headlining slot felt kind of cursed. But people hung in there! It was gratifying.

I'm always interested in talking to people who are doing several different things within the music industry, which everyone in the industry is usually always doing. Tell me about starting out as a publicist, and how it's been to balance your PR career and your music career.
Both careers are pretty parallel for me at this point. The way my PR journey started was back in 2006, when we'd been touring full-time for two years. We did one ill-fated tour across Canada where we made almost no money, and when we came back we were like, "OK! It's time to find some day jobs as a backup plan." I started working lights and the door at Empty Bottle, and I asked Kathryn at Biz3, who were doing our press, if they had work around the office I could do.

I was told they don't hire anybody unless they intern first, and the scope of what I was going into was lost on me. [Laughs] I was like, "I'm interested in knowing more about this part of things." Your music career is best served if you understand how most of these jobs work, because it's an ecosystem. So I interned there, and it turned into a thing where we'd go on tour, and I'd get back and intern because it was something to do. [Laughs]

When Kathryn's son was born and she had to take a few months off, I was given a job as a freelance publicist for the summer, and I did a fairly decent job. I went back to interning after that point, because Kathryn had a policy at that point of not hiring musicians because they go on tour and drop the ball, which is fair. When we decided not to tour full-time in 2009 anymore, I slid over to doing publicity full-time, and that became my career.

This is a unique and transitional time to be a music publicist. I'm interested in hearing you talk about what it's like to do this job right now. What are the challenges you and your colleagues are facing?
What's gotten frustrating about music publicity is that discovery has shifted almost entirely to socials and streaming. Music journalism is in a period where it's a little bit in the woods with figuring out what its role is in the realm of music discovery. There was a time, especially when I was getting into it, where discovery was being driven by music publications, and part of my role was finding out the stories behind these artists and bringing them to people.

To a large extent, that's a bit lost now. Now it's about trying to figure out headlines that will drive traffic through socials. There's good and bad parts to it, but ultimately I find myself chasing down correcftions because people have gone with a salacious angle that doesn't actually represent reality. [Laughs] That's frustrating. It's a transitional period, because people really crave those stories—it's maybe fewer people than it used to be—so we just need to figure out a way to balance all of this out and get out of this weird, funky period we're in. But I think we'll get there. There's still plenty of pepople working in the industry who are interested in telling these stories. It's just about getting all of it to cohere with this new era we're in.