Q: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how your childhood impacted your musical direction?
A: We’re just a small musical collective from the Dallas area that does our own combination of gangster rap, nu metal, punk rock, and now folk music apparently. In terms of childhood, we all grew up in normal suburban families with normal lives for the most part. Good schools, good homes, good jobs, all of that. There was plenty of ugly around, but it was very low-grade. It’s not like now where the ever-lingering effects of economic crashes, pandemics, and recreational outrage was always around. If there was, we didn’t see it until we all went off to college and saw that there was some actual ugliness out. When you’re broke and trying to survive drowning in student loan debt and the lack of jobs, it gets ugly and that’s when you see it. Our parents did a good job with us and worked in jobs teaching or at the grocery store that weren’t as impacted when things fell apart. In a way, we guess having a positive background inspires a lot of the music because, even though we’re called Born Pessimist, we were very much raised optimists. We might play angry music, but we try to work in some positivity in that because, yes, we can rant about hypocrisy and prejudice and all of that, but you also have to have a point. It’s like the metaphor of the starving person on an island full of food. We can be angry, but it needs to have purpose.
Q: Can you describe the musical style of Born Pessimist in three words?
A: Three words? Pretty angsty noise. We make pretty music, It’s full of angst. Some might call it noise. We could do one word too: aluminum. Why aluminum? Because it’s malleable. It’s metal you can wrap. Or, in our case, metal that you rap. Or rap that we made metal. That’s what we’re calling our next album too. Always be branding.
Q: How do you stay connected with your fans, and what role do they play in shaping your musical journey?
A: The way we connect is through releases. We occasionally put stuff on Instagram and, up until recently, we’ve been putting out music every other week on all of the big platforms. It just got hard to do trying to write and record from scratch. Other than that, we know that we are starting to get more people sharing our music with their friends because the listeners and the streams keep growing. We probably should make a more concerted effort to be public and be out there, but we also know that requires a lot of time, effort, and energy to keep up with it all. However, if you look at a lot of the bands that are popular now in the alternative and rock scene like President or Sleep Token or, back in the day, Ghost and Slipknot, there wasn’t this huge media presence other than just the music and performances. We still think it’s weird that we know who Papa is in Ghost, but we love his interviews. As for the fans, we have no idea what role they play. We know they listen. Especially in Brazil and in the UK. We would love to get more US listeners, but we also think every culture and country has their own quirks and habits that we’ll figure out eventually. We’re sure we could do a survey or a focus group or find some sort of marketing agency that could make us popular for a few minutes, but we’re rather have a genuine group of people that want to see as opposed to just be a cool logo someone buys at H&M and not know why they bought it. How many people buy a Rolling Stones because it looks cool versus they actually like the music? We’re actually making merch now and got some hoodies made. Shout out to Jessica and Cory for being our first mail order for a hoodie.
Q: You have just released your new album, ‘This Sunless Space’. Is there a story behind it?
A: In a nutshell, it was about being frustrated with ourselves and the process of music production. We’ll preface this part with this disclaimer: we work full-time jobs and this music thing is the side project and passion aspect of our lives that give us an escape. It is not about money or fame or any of it. It’s fun. If it wasn’t fun, we wouldn’t do it. With that being said, it is the world’s most expensive hobby. That’s why we do as much of it by ourselves as we can because, every time you add another iron in the fire, someone wants money or credit or eight ounces of your blood or whatever else you already can’t afford to give away. For example, let’s say you’re a rapper and purchase an exclusive license from a producer for a beat for a thousand dollars and the publishing gets split 50/50. That makes sense. You’re writing something over it, but it is very much their song and their identity as well. Okay, now you have to go record somewhere. That’s an hourly rate. Well, someone has to run the computer. That’s a fee and maybe a percentage. Someone has to be an engineer. Fee and possible percentage. Someone has to produce. Fee and possible percentage. Someone has to mix and master. Fee and possible percentage. It’s easy to go in the hole and never see anything coming back out of it because that original fifty percent that you have to give got chopped up even more. Well, the reality is you can work with amazing people that can help you make amazing art, but you can only make something out of nothing so many times before you look in your wallet and go, “Hmm, maybe I oughta try this out by myself and see what happens.” That’s basically what happened. We kept trying to make something impossible happen artistically and throwing money at a problem that was clearly us and, honestly, we had to find a way to make it fun again. Plus, it would be a disservice to great music producers like Deville and Blackfire Production, who we have gotten a lot of great material from, if we put bad lyrics and bad vocals over it. Thus, we ended up just taking a break and asking ourselves what happens if we don’t do the gangster rap death metal for a minute and try the acoustic guitar approach? We ended up writing something cool and then we were able to go back to the other stuff and it got so much better and now we’re happy again. Now, we’re excited to go back to finish Endangered Species and start on Aluminum.
Q: What is your favorite track from the album and why?
A: Right now, our favorite track is A Grain of Salt because it has a lot of layers and is the total opposite of the rest of the record. Honestly, it might be the best thing we have put out in a while. Not to say the rest of the album isn’t good, but it just stands out because there’s this very soft guitar that builds and builds as the song goes. It has a weird bridge that is in 7/8 time. It also doesn’t have a chorus, which makes it unique because we only have done that on one other song called Shame from our first EP, which is this sort of funky industrial track with screaming and rapping.
Q: Can you walk us through the creative process of producing the album, “This Sunless Space”?
A: We self-produced it entirely on Garageband with a Blue condenser microphone we got from Best Buy and played all the parts on a thirty-five year-old Yamaha acoustic and a newer Fender acoustic. Other than a tiny amount of reverb on the songs and some slight delay that we didn’t notice on the guitars for A Grain of Salt until we looked at the settings, there are no effects. All of the vocals were recorded in the bedroom closet in one full take from start to finish. Now, we did stack up some harmonies, but did sing them. We took some stomps and claps and threw those in for percussion as well. We were going to get a shaker egg, but the thing got so annoying that it got left off. That’s about it. Find a good tuning. Find the right chords. Write something cool over it. Boom. If you listen, there might be some bumps here and there, but that’s what you would expect if you saw us live. Besides, people do not want to go hear the record live because that defeats the purpose of seeing someone live. We like imperfection. Otherwise, we’d stay home and save the money even though the concert ticket is so underpriced these days according to that brilliant guy running that one company who we have opted not to name for legal reasons.
Q: What has been the most memorable concert or performance for Born Pessimist so far?
A: Mostly, we’ve done living room parties, backyards, open mics, stuff like that. Very early on in trying to figure out the sound for the band, we would do acoustic shows at coffee shop open mics just to test out whether something was good. It was more about the lyrics working than the music. You can fix music, but you can’t really make bad lyrics better without starting over. The original songs we were trying out weren’t good by any stretch of the imagination and the covers were probably just as bad. That’s based on the reactions of the four or five unamused people in the crowd there to listen to their boyfriends and girlfriends that also dragged them up there to hear their equally bad renditions of Coldplay and John Lennon. This one night, we’d actually forgot that we were going to go play and so we didn’t really plan out a set, but we had just bought a mini-megaphone and thought it would be fun to try out on stage, so we got to the end of the set and us and our friend, Thomas, sitting in on guitar that night decided that we were going to do that Lead Belly song Where’d You Sleep Last Night just like Nirvana did on MTV Unplugged. We get ready to get out the megaphone and it’s dead, so we call an audible and decide we’ll just scream the end of it like Cobain did. Well, we’re getting to the end of the song and there’s my friend who drove with us videoing, the two people working the counter that look disgusted with what we’re doing, and the couple of people who were playing that night that just wanted us to get off the stage. Now comes not just the scream, but the death growl all through to the end of the song. Wasn’t planned. It just happened. About that time, this really sweet conservative looking family walks in. Mom. Dad. Little kids. And they look at us. And we look at them. Now, they’re frozen in mid-step once they heard us start making just the worst humanly possible sound they probably ever heard and, as soon as we finished, they literally turned around and walked out. We were so embarrassed we didn’t even thank the people. We just got off stage, went home, and went to bed.
Q: Reflecting on your body of work, each song holding its unique significance, could you share a particular track that stands out to you personally? What makes that specific tune special, and why does it hold a place of pride in your musical journey?
A: Yes, so we have a song called Endangered Species that we put out on the Fourth of July this year that we had been working on since at least 2018. The only reason it took seven years to put out was because a lot of the things we know about now didn’t exist back then. We didn’t know you could call up or email producers and buy their beats or that Distrokid was an option to put out your music. We thought that you had to either do it yourself or get on a major label before all of those things happened. What makes that song special was the fact it came out of working late nights at my college’s library doing writing tutorials and assignment editing for students that needed last minute help and most of the time, no one would show up, so that meant plenty of time reading or listening to podcasts or music. Eventually, boredom turned into creativity and that was how the first proper Born Pessimist song came to be. It had no beat until a friend of mine showed us one that got used for years as a template to freestyle over at parties where we became the house band whenever we’d hang out. Then, we found this producer called Mixla. We licensed the track from and worked the lyrics out over it and put some weird public domain samples in it. So, that song is sort of a reminder of, “Hey, you started at nothing and you still have nothing, but you have a lot more than you realize and you need to appreciate where you are at because it can all go away very quickly and you need to be present in the moment you are in. We are an endangered species and we’ll stab everyone in the back if it gets us ahead in life. We need to be better and do better.”
Q: Exploring the diverse creative processes within the music industry is always fascinating. Could you provide insight into Born Pessimist’s unique approach to crafting music? From the initial spark of an idea to the finished song, how do you navigate the creative journey and bring its musical concepts to life?
A: It’s probably not that unique, but everything with Born Pessimist really starts with song titles. We spend a lot of time banking the titles up as we think of them and trying to find inspiration for good titles. Last time we checked, there are sixty-four we have waiting on us. The last one we have written down is called Pillowfort. Where did that come from? Who knows? What could it be? It could be a pop song. It could be some sludgy metal thing too. Once we have that title and some general idea of where it needs to go, then it moves to having a chorus. The chorus is the most important part. It might have been Aerosmith that said “don’t bore us, get to the chorus”, so having at least one catchy thing people can remember is just as important as having a good beat or riff. Then, it goes to what the point of the verses are. Are we telling a story? Are we just dropping knowledge and facts? Are we just going to scream and rant about everything and nothing? What are we doing? Once we figure that out, then we either have to sit down and write the song or go find a producer that has something that will work. Then, we go for a drive with the rough ideas and then that’s when the improvisation and the in-the-moment stuff turns into the essence of it all. After everything is done, we demo it out and then take it to the studio. The best one we’ve worked at is AIP Studios over in North Richland Hills, Texas.
Q: As we wrap up our conversation, looking ahead, what aspirations or dreams do you have for Born Pessimist, and what message would you like to share with your fans as they continue to accompany you on this musical journey?
A: The optimistic and unlikely goal is that we keep making music and grow the audience enough to where this becomes a full-time gig and we can quit our jobs and have enough money to live comfortably writing songs and touring and, when we’re not doing that, we’d just write books or score films or do like Chris Garza of Suicide Silence and start a podcast and talk to other musicians. Between him and Rick Beato, that’s the gold standard of musician-focused podcasting.You get an education and entertainment all in one. That’s the lofty goal. Honestly, right now, we’d just love to get a lot of people listening across the world and want to see us come to their town and play. That’d be really cool. Other than that, if our music helps get someone through the day, that’s the best thing we could hope to accomplish. It’s easy to say we write music for us, but we also write music for you, so we would love to know what people want to hear us do. In terms of a message, we know that life is hard and it only gets harder, but outlets like music give everyone the chance to take three minutes, find a place in their head to focus on something that isn’t their current struggle, and take a while to escape. If we can be that for someone, then it is our honor and pleasure. If we’re not that, keep searching or, better yet, make your own music. Use that struggle to make something great. Over time, we’ve lost a lot here at Born Pessimist. Careers. Friends. Money. All of it. It’s hard to start back at zero, but it gets a little easier every day. If people understand and are willing to wait, then they do and those are your ride-or-dies. If they don’t, you can’t be mad. You just have to survive and advance even if it hurts. That’s why we tell people to be honest with us. If we suck, then we suck, but tell us why. Same thing for if we’re good. Tell us why. Just find your thing that brings you joy and don’t let people take it from you.