Is "Down The Line" about a friendship?



It's a lot about myself, I guess. It's about me facing depression head on. I was trying to work on music and I was feeling so fucking low. Just like, in the dirt. I couldn't get anything to happen. My creativity was completely zapped. I was kind of breaking down. I hadn't really been sleeping. I started working on this song, and I really liked how it was feeling. I put lyrics down. I did the whole song really fast. It was one of the only songs on the record that I did in one or two sittings. I realized if I just kind of faced how I was feeling, I could use it to my advantage. I could let it out.

Have you always struggled with depressive feelings?

It was always one of those things that I would never really talk about. I would be embarrassed in a way. It was like, Why do I feel that way? It's not like things are necessarily going wrong. I think everyone feels it to a certain extent — obviously some people a lot more than others. I definitely go through harder patches. I do a lot of meditation, and try to relax in my own ways. Making music is the biggest thing, though. If I'm not writing songs or playing shows, it's easier for me to fall into that hole.

What’s it like making music that's not explicitly political-sounding in a very politically fraught period in history?

Before I got into music that was political I was listening to nu metal and stuff, because I was angry and I was young and I just wanted something to feel pissed off to. I transitioned immediately from that to ’80s punk, which is probably the most politically-charged music of all time. I think even more so than ’60s protest music; it's more explicit and angry and detailed. That was a huge inspiration for me because it was like, This music is angry, but it's also saying something. It's getting people amped up to make the world a better place.

I definitely have struggled with how to incorporate these ideas into my own music. I think a lot of the [underlying political] stuff on Somersault comes out of where I’m from, and knowing that a lot of people I grew up around [in North Carolina] voted for Trump. It's hard to not get emotional when that's the place you have to call home. If I'm writing a record that's just based on how I feel about things, that's definitely a big part of what I'm feeling right now. I should talk about it, but in my own way. I was still finishing up a few songs right after the election happened. And it was just so fresh — to not write about it would have been insane. Like, This is all I can think about, how can I not write about this?

There’s some big, baroque-sounding songs on the record. How did the string arrangements come together?

We wrote the string parts ourselves, in one session. It was completely insane and I can't believe we actually did that. We spent 17 hours writing the sheet music. None of us had written it before, and we had a very, very basic knowledge of sheet music. We only had a few hours to sleep before we went to the studio, and I couldn't really sleep be cause I kept thinking, Okay, I'm going to go into the studio, show these professional musicians this sheet music and they are gonna have no fucking idea what this is supposed to be. It's gonna be a mess. But then they started warming up, and they started playing the parts. I was like, Holy fuck, that's what I wrote. It was a very emotional moment for all of us. We were all just, like, in tears.

