Self-Expression as a Lifeline: A TOTIEK Interview with Another Sky

Catrin Vincent and Max Doohan talk Another Sky's process, upcoming music, and gender identity

Welcome to my Substack! I’m Joshua Copperman, also known as Hannah Jocelyn, also known as Fell From The Tree, also known as that Pitchfork writer who loves the National but only when not writing about them. I’m calling this The Only Times I’ve Ever Known as a reference to Billy Joel’s “Summer Highland Falls” - the full line is “they say that these are not the best of times, but they’re the only times I’ve ever known.” And I’m trying to make the best of these times. Follow me for interviews, reviews, and other antics.

The second song on Another Sky’s debut album I Slept on the Floor, “Fell in Love With The City”, is the second song they ever wrote together. It’s hard to tell that by listening, and even harder to tell that the singer, Catrin Vincent, isn’t as fond of it. There were loftier topics than love to write about - for drummer Max Doohan, more complicated, IDM-inspired rhythms to play. There’s nothing wrong with love songs, but as you’ll see in this interview, there’s a lot more on the band’s minds. Another Sky isn’t the only contemporary band tackling issues like climate change and toxic masculinity, but the command of dynamics and the self-restraint sets them apart.

That said, calling them restrained at all disregards the sheer amount of ambition on the album. They succeed at anthemic pop on “Let Us Be Broken,” frantic post-rock on “Brave Face,” and close-mic’d acoustic guitar drama on “Avalanche,” but despite the lengthy recording process at eight studios, the record sounds cohesive. The members (rounded out by Naomi Le Dune and guitarist Jack Gilbert) each have distinct personalities and influences, and that comes across in the music — the press bio actually understates how refreshing it is to hear four people playing together, as opposed to one unit. Floor sounds great, too, with Coldplay collaborator Rik Simpson and Daughter producer Joylon Thomas contributing mixes that further heighten the intensity of the performances. Their back catalogue is just as strong; a personal favorite is “Chillers,” especially for the very British line delivery of “Black Card at Nando’s.” (There’s more, too: during our interview, they inadvertently announced an upcoming EP entitled Music For Winter, Vol. 1, due in January.) As I speak with the band members, they’re holed up in their studio — a former cannabis farm — crafting new material.

A lot of interviews focus on on the lyrical themes, but I wanted to go both more technical and more personal. It says something about the band and the things we had in common that I let my guard down a bit, sharing my own experiences with songwriting and identity between questions to initiate a more honest dialogue. My colleague Joshua Minsoo Kim’s intensely intimate conversation with musician Wendy Eisenberg inspired me to dig a bit deeper.

But maybe I went too deep. It was probably a bad idea to kick off an interview about struggling with self-image by bringing up an old acting profile. Yet that’s exactly how my conversation with Max and Catrin began…

This interview has been edited for length and clarity,

“Fell In Love With The City” was one of your first songs, right? I found an early demo online when you went by Nocturne.

Max: We just wrote it all together in a room and we never spoke about what we were going to try and do as a band, or even what our influences were. We just got together and played that song and then kind of burst out laughing when we finished. Because we just couldn't believe it was like that. It just happened so naturally. That song was kind of the beginning of the band in a lot of ways.

How do you feel about revisiting those early songs?

Max: I think there's still part of yourself which exists from that time. Like you're not a totally different person. So it's more about trying to reconnect with where your head was at when you first wrote it. You know, with songs like “Fell in Love” that were a song for like five years before the finished version and we recorded it for maybe three or four different times in different studios. I think we managed to reconnect enough with the original thread that we had, but also update it to a point where it feels relevant to us now.

Catrin: With the first album it was over such a long period of time that by the time we released it, it's weird as a musician. You feel differently about songs you're supposed to be emotionally connected to when they're released. I just couldn't see what our debut album was by the time we released it.

After “Fell in Love with the City” I straight up stopped writing love lyrics and love songs. Cause I just didn't want to anymore. I'd done it to death as kind of a solo artist when I was 18. So for someone to say, “‘Fell In Love’ is one of your best songs” that really made my head spin because I had to enter that sort of 18 year olds’ mind. Like everything's really melodramatic, Oh, I'm falling in love with the city instead of you. And I think completely differently about love now.

I was going to ask about that - you write about all these vulnerable topics and yet, as you implied on Instagram recently, love is too much.

Catrin: I think it's something you have when you're younger and then as you get older and you amass all these experiences of other people, you almost become even more vulnerable and [yet] even more kind of closed off - I don't know how to describe it properly, but I know the Instagram posts you're talking about and I just haven't written about it for years. And then one day I was suddenly writing and... [that post] is a funny one.

What’s different about this new record from the first album?

Catrin: Lyrically, it's a bit more sure of itself. It's a bit more playful and it's a bit more... sarky and then musically it's a bit more up beat, but in the best way, it's still sort of taking note of the world and what's going on. I think in lockdown we just needed happy music. I can't write sad lyrics when I feel sad. I have to write sad music when I'm looking back and I've stepped away from it. So when we were all in lockdown, we were feeling so disorientated, but I think the music came out -

Max: like a rainbow. (Laughter) I think we're also just a bit more confident and we've really delved into the songwriting process a bit deeper the first album, because we were playing live so much, that was such a major factor. And how we would kind of build our dynamics. So it was all about making an impact live. So with this EP actually, but also the second album that we're working on because we hadn't been playing live there haven't been considerations. Like we're more thinking about how we can hone the songcraft and just make things the purest they can be.

Catrin: We’re actually in the process of making a winter EP, so we're going to be releasing more music around January and I'm not sure if we’re meant to tell you that, but I've just told you.

Max: It’s called Music For Winter, Vol. 1. It's been a really nice project in, in lockdown just to, to come in here. Obviously our tour got moved to next year, so we found ourselves with a big block of time and just decided to knuckle down and work on some new songs.

The subject matter of the first record is so vast and intense. Will the new record have a similar scope?

Catrin: I think I'm trying to be more honest. It's funny, when we released the first album, I was really scared. I was finding press really difficult. I didn't think about how intense the subjects were. And then obviously you're doing interviews all day every day. I found it really difficult to kind of talk about that constantly. So with these, luckily a lot of the second album was written before that happened and they feel more kind of sparse. They feel like they’re just narrating day-to-day life. There's one song, it's one of my favorites, where we ended up in LA and you know how musicians always like, “write differently in LA.” It’s just this really funny song about how much of an English loser I was there. We were having this really weird experience where were were being told we were “too uncool,” and this song was just me sort of saying “yeah, I’m really uncool, and everything’s going to shit, but I’m going to have the best day ever.”

What I really like about this second album is, a lot of Max's electronic production is ending up on there. “Forget Yourself” was kind of this demo that was originally done from Max. And then we never really revisited that sound world, especially in our debut album, but some of the songs, I don't know what you'd call it... they're kind of like house music, but done by Another Sky.

Max:. When Catrin sings on one of these little drum machine loops I'll have, or Jack writes a guitar part that kind of just twists it and evokes something like that's really exciting, you know, the way the journey that song goes on when everybody adds their parts and then suddenly it starts evoking real emotion, it's my favorite part of the whole process. Seeing something like that come together.

Catrin: It's so much better than any one of us just writing music by ourselves. I think collaboration is key. Especially with the second album, it feels like we've really come into our own world.

For every interview this year, there’s always this question like what are you up to during lockdown? And then for you, it's a lot.

Catrin: We've got the fear of God in us. (Laughter.) I think that's why we don't stop. Like I was so aware when, when we were doing the interviews for the debut album, Jack kept saying to them, like we've written our second album and we're writing more music. And I suddenly became really aware that loads of musicians haven't been able to write at all. I think we only could write because we could send each other ideas.

Max: You could have two opposite reactions. You could either just need to write and write like crazy, like we have or just not be able to write at all. It feels like that's the way the musicians I've spoken to have been going through it. You're clinging to your self-expression like a lifeline, and we're lucky we can record ideas and send them back and forth. And the studio has been just totally invaluable to working on the new stuff.

A quick thing before we move on - is “I am still here, still happening” a Radiohead reference?

Catrin: No! Is it a Radiohead lyric?

I thought of “I’m not here, this isn’t happening” from “How To Disappear Completely.”

Catrin: That's really interesting to me because I think a lot of my lyric writing is really subconscious. There seems to be a lot of, since I've learned this word recently - synchronicity and I think that always happens in my lyrics. So I bet it is a Radiohead reference and I just didn't know yet.

That's genuinely surprising that it isn't! To me that line ties into this whole struggle you’ve mentioned of being perceived and mostly playing in the dark in early gigs, not wanting to be seen. There is all this talk about how ‘I didn’t know that [this person] was the one singing’. I’m wondering how that specific kind of attention affects your own self-perception.

Catrin: I think I was younger and I was maybe more feminine, people didn't say that to me. People [might] have thought it was offensive, but it never was offensive to me. The way my voice sounds was never intentional. A lot of the lyrics are inspired by books and literature, and I thought of this before we did this interview, but there's a book called The Power by Naomi Alderman, and I've referenced it a lot in interviews because there's this one line that when I read it, you know, when you just, you read something and you have a bit of an epiphany: "Gender is a shell. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn't. What is a woman? Whatever a man isn’t. Tap on it and it's hollow. Look under the shells: it's not there."

And as soon as I read that, this kind of confusion had a place, almost. These ideas of ourselves don't have to be boxed in or caged, and I feel like there's a lot of trauma from trying to cram people into these ideas. I’ve definitely felt it - my whole life, I’ve felt... weird.

(Laughter)

I've felt like I'm pretending in some ways - one of the real physical things that I was told when I got to Uni is that I was damaging my vocal chords, because I was speaking and singing in a higher register than where my voice naturally sits. And that was really fascinating to me that I had all this kind of physical tension because I was trying to - sorry, this is going really off on a tangent -

No, keep going!

Subconsciously, I noticed that when I spoke how I was supposed to, I got a better response from people and things have rapidly changed over the years. It's definitely not that way anymore, but when I was a young’un - I guess we're still young, why not? - but when I was a teen, I was being told how to be, so I'm just really appreciative that I can feel acceptance towards myself. And I don't know what that means for now, I'm sort of still questioning a lot of things, but I'm just happy that I no longer have to really kind of pretend to be a woman.

It must be hard in the UK - so many people in the public eye are against anything but a traditional, bi-modal gender and sex system.

Catrin: It’s funny because as soon as I started knowing people who identified as nonbinary, I found it really exciting that people felt like they could be more free with that. And then seeing the backlash, even in my life, even people I really trusted would say like, “Oh, what's this?” And I'd be like, “no, this is really cool.” Why would anyone ever be against people being open and happy and free? It’s a case of freedom for me.

A lot of people are finding out these things about themselves in lockdown, because you don't really have to be anything for anyone if you're just in one place - you're not being perceived at all.

Catrin: That’s so interesting. I still don't know how to talk about it personally for me, but I guess I never felt — I don't feel like I'm fully a woman, but I definitely don't feel like I'm a man. So it's really useful to have to see this space kind of being occupied now. And it is exciting for me. Part of the reason I put “they” in my profile [at the time of writing] was to support this kind of movement away from gendering people straight away. To support this idea that you don't know someone based on gender.

I’d love to see more of that representation happen in music - there’s Sam Smith who uses they/them, and then there’s Tomberlin and recent TOTIEK interview Boy Jr, who use she/they. It’s becoming more accepted, but even phrases like ‘women hear different frequencies’ might sound different - what are your thoughts on that one in particular?

I was thinking about the whole “women hearing different frequencies” thing the other day. When I started really learning about kind of feminism and women in audio, one of the things that was said a lot, and I remember saying myself was, well, maybe everything would sound different if women mixed it because apparently we hear different frequencies. I've been watching Jack and Max like a hawk with mixing, and I've been really getting into it. And I just had this sudden thought the other day, I don't think I'm hearing different frequencies.

I do have to get back into the music for a second, I feel like I’m leaving out Max entirely!

Max: Don’t worry about it!

I saw that you were working in Logic, did you mix the album in Logic as well?

Max; : Some of it was mixed in Logic and some of it was mixed in Pro Tools. We produce in Logic, but we usually try and finish the project in Pro Tools. So right now we're just stemming the Winter EP into Pro Tools, We're going to mix that this weekend.

And that's something that like the whole band is involved in now? I know that it was just you and Jack for the first record that were credited on mixes.

Max: We're all going to be here. Hopefully it's going to be a really open, collaborative mix.

Are you working with Rik Simpson and Joylon Thomas again?

Max: For this Winter EP, we're mixing it ourselves just because there's not much of a budget, but I think it's always handy to have someone else on a mix. Sometimes you can't mix your own music because you're too close to it.

Catrin: I think for album two, we'll probably, I don't know who we haven't even spoken about it, but there'll be someone else who will mix it, I think.

Max: Or they’ll mix it with us.

Catrin: Yeah, maybe, unless we still need [suddenly singing] all the control in the woorld. (Laughter)

Is that one of the new lyrics?

Catrin: I'll write it down, that would be a good lyric actually! No, I was just gonna say it's production started out heavily, you [Max] and Jack, but I'd say over the years, me and Naomi have gotten more involved and it's become way more collaborative.

Catrin, you played like 20 instruments on the album and Max you programmed a lot as well, according to the Discogs credits.

Catrin: Max plays like 30 instruments. If I play 20 he's like... every instrument.

And then it says Jack's credited with ukulele?

Max: The main riff from “The Cracks” is actually ukulele!

Catrin: I’ll show you! (brings out the ukulele) I got it for Christmas, and Jack always plays it. Sam Fender said that ukuleles weren't cool. Around that time we were releasing “The Cracks” and we just sort of all looked at each other.

I didn't even get into voice training and drum training. I feel like I should probably ask about that.

Max: I learned drums by playing with my dad, like jamming along to Radio 1. That's how I first started drumming. And then when I was eight, I started a band and I've just been playing in bands ever since. I've always been really, really interested in dance music and programmed drums. There's a few drummers that I've always looked up to like Mitch Mitchell, Keith Moon drummers that are really playful with time. I think that's what a live drummer can bring to the table. Then on the other side of the coin, I really love impossible to play polyrhythms that you can program on a drum beat and then how to work those out in a live setting. Like that's a really interesting challenge. And I think the combination of that kind of jazzy freeness with that, like extremely metronomic sequenced drumming, that's kind of where I'm, where I've been coming from.

Catrin, for you?

Growing up, I sang in choirs and I feel like I have got something interesting to say about the whole classical versus pop. Growing up, classical was the only way, but I couldn't read music and I didn't really go down this classical route, but I felt like, just because of where I was, my chord choices on the piano would always be quite classical. And I grew up listening to a lot of classical music. So even though I wasn't a classical musician, everything I do kind of ends up in that classical world. And recently I've decided I've started learning to read music for a job and I've decided - maybe even though that it was something I was outcast from as a kid, maybe something I could visit later on in life a bit like the guy from Radiohead, the guitarist -

Jonny Greenwood!

Yeah, not that I’m comparable to him in any way. (Laughs)

You’re always compared to different bands, though! I even said something like “they could be the next Everything Everything and the next Florence + The Machine” in a tweet before deleting.

Catrin: I get why we’re compared to those two bands. And it's funny because we get compared to Radiohead and Everything Everything. And while we're huge fans of Radiohead's, it's funny. We never set out to kind of sound like either. And, I always think even if you sound a little bit like someone else, all that means is that there's, you're giving yourself context. I always think if you can remind someone of something they love, that can only be a good thing.

Next issue, in two weeks: another Imploders episode on indie-rising-star-turned-Music-Twitter-punchline-turned-successful-industry-songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr.