The Songwriter Speaks: Twen on “Automation"
Nashville rock group Twen is the brainchild of singer Jane Fitzsimmons and guitarist Ian Jones, and features Merideth Hanscom on bass guitar, Asher Horton on guitar and Luke Fedorko on drums. The band released their self-produced, second full-length album “One Stop Shop” on July 23. Look At My Records! reporter Bennett Kelly saw the band perform in Montclair, NJ on July 26, and caught up with Jane and Ian over the phone in Nashville to hear the band’s history and break down the album’s fourth track, “Automation.”
Jane Fitzsimmons:
Ian and I met in Boston when we were both in different musical projects. Ian went to Berklee; I did not go to any sort of musical school or training. And we both kind of ended up in the same band. I actually ended up kicking him out of my band. Then his band broke up, and my band broke up, and we decided to form one together.
We started writing in a house in Boston, and some roommates literally heard it through the floor and wanted to join in, cause we really needed a rhythm section. So we got our bassist and our first drummer in Boston, and they moved with us to Nashville.
In Boston, you kind of feel like an old hag by the age of 23 because it's such a college town in a way, even though it's a big city. The neighborhood we were in, Alston, is basement-show dominated, a lot of college kids. And that's a really awesome vibe but when you're just growing out of it, it feels weird. And Boston is kind of like a cap music-industry-wise because it's hard, it's expensive, it's almost as expensive as New York. But you don't have all of the music business there so it's kind of like, what's the point.
We moved to Nashville with our first iteration and we just started DIY touring really quickly from there. We played everything and anything when we arrived. Ian booked all of our tours, I made all the merch, we were just going for it without any recorded music but a live EP. We just wanted to tour, we didn't care how.
That kind of made us buzzy in Nashville. It's obviously very Americana and country-dominated, but there's some cool freaky stuff going on. There weren't a lot of bands that sounded like us. So then a bunch of business people were, I don't know, intrigued and a producer got involved, probably too early. We got our lawyer, and then this management stuff, and then Frenchkiss got interested and we kind of just got in a whirlwind of industry things and probably wouldn't have repeated the decisions that we made at the time.
And we also made the mistake the first time as a band of thinking it was a democracy, when it most certainly wasn’t. It was mostly the creative project of me and Ian. And that can really, if the roles aren't defined, the boundaries aren't made, then things get really wishy-washy and the roles are confusing.
On “Automation,” I don't remember exactly what year it was, but it's probably a voice memo from like 2018 or something. It was called “There Is a Place.” The way I write, because I don't play an instrument, I don't start by writing a song as maybe a songwriter would or by sitting at the piano. I just have melodies and sometimes phrases that go with the melodies. I record them constantly so I’ll have like hundreds in my phone. Sometimes certain motifs or a certain song will come back again, and that's how I know it can be pretty good.
This one came back a couple times with that verse melody, “There is a place I could tell you what you want, that's just a habit, of mine…” That whole thing was floating around without any rhythmic, I didn't know what to put under it, I didn't know what could fit with something like that. It's a very, almost a funk-based melody. So I didn't know how we were gonna fit it in our music, which is more rock or psych or whatever.
But when I showed it to Ian, he kind of marinated on it, and then he started writing with it on bass. Because it's more of that funk melody structure and rhythm, it made sense to start on the bass.
And then for the bridge it was the opposite. Ian wrote the bridge and then I reacted to that. And that was fun, cause it felt like a very, I don't know, almost British cadence style, punk way of singing that I hadn't really been doing before. But that's just what came out naturally when I heard what he did for the bridge.
Ian Jones:
When she had the verse melody, usually I write on guitar but for this one I wrote on the bass. And the way it came out in the end is how I improvised it the first time.
I tried to rewrite that bass line over and over again to try and make it better, because I thought it was too quirky, too cartoony. Because it’s like uber melodic. And I just wasn't sure that I liked it. But over time, we kept massaging it, massaging it, massaging it, and we decided it was good. And then the guitar and bass are just doubling each other.
I did this thing where I set up a loop with a kick and a snare, and then I wrote the whole bridge section over that. And I was just trying to be like a Chili Pepper or something, a Chili Pepper riff. And then Jane wrote over that, so we flip flopped on the verse and the chorus, where she wrote the verse and then I wrote under her. And then for the bridge I wrote the chords and the progression and she sang on top of it.
Production-wise, we did it all ourselves in the sense that there was no budget. We didn't go into a studio, we didn't hire a producer to help write the songs for us. Jane and I did like 90% of it, and then a couple of friends were nice enough to engineer and kind of just help us get it together. You know, to fill in the gaps of knowledge that we didn't have ourselves, like microphones and pieces of gear and stuff. So it was done very much in house between us and our friends. Actually, it was not even a home studio, it was just a bedroom.
A lot of the songs have bits from the demos. We kind of used the demos as a template and then re-recorded stuff over it. There’s a lot of sound effects and shit in “HaHaHome” or “Automation” that were from the original demos. And they just sounded so good and we liked them so much that we just left them and didn't re-record ‘em.
All the picky little bits in the “Automation” intro were little loops that we made. A lot of shit happens by accident. I think everyone could relate to that, where sometimes your best shit happens by accident. And I just played this little thing on guitar and then the way that it got recorded, and the way that the audio region got cut off, it created that little chirp in the intro.
And then we grabbed that and spread it through the rest of the song, and it became this dancey, little quirky sound effect, you know? So rather than using someone else’s sample, we kind of just created our own samples.
Some of that was done up in New Hampshire when we were writing. We did that for a few months, but we kept moving around.
When we came back to Nashville, we did some in my friend’s bedroom with some buddies, my buddy Nate helped. We kind of ran all the songs by him and he said oh why don't you try this or why don't you try that, and he did some production stuff and lent me some gear. And then we moved to our other friend’s house, so it was just whatever was available at whatever given time. We just kept working it and working it over months, month after month after month. It's all I did for days, day after day.
The technology is amazing these days, you wouldn’t believe it. Jane’s call and response on the “Of Mine’s” in “Automation” was a mix job in production. I kind of panned it so that one line is in one ear and then when the “Of Mine!” comes in, we bounce it over to the other ear, so you're literally hearing a call and response between your left ear and your right ear.
It was really tricky to get “Automation” together live. It just wasn't feeling right for a long time. A lot of times when that happens you don't ever make it out. When you’re rehearsing and you just keep massaging it and you're trying to get it right and it just won't come, you say okay forget it, it doesn't work live, it's good on a record.
It is such kind of a swung, 16th… it's not straight, it's got this weird swung feel. So that can be hard to get everybody synced up really tight and on the same page. And it's kind of an intricate melodic line on the guitars and bass. So there’s a lot of factors that go into making that song sound tight, and it just took us a long time.
But luckily we kept taking it out. In fact the New Jersey show that you saw was our first time playing that live, because I don't think we played that in the spring. So yeah, it's kind of interesting, I don't know. I'm just glad that we stuck with it and eventually got it right, and now it feels good.
The song does straddle that line between corny or cheesy or cartoony, and really hip. I think if you were a really cool band from Brooklyn or something, then you'd think that that song was really cheesy because it doesn't sound like a lot of post-rock. There’s a lot of bands that have riffs that are kind of like that, that are popular right now but they're more post-rock-y, dissonant, and not melodic. But this one is diatonic, it's super melodic, and it's kind of whimsical.
I think pretty much anyone could listen to our album and get into it. I dont think it's that, it's not that niche, do you know what I mean? The melodies are catchy. There’s no weird time signatures, it's tangible music, you don't have to think too hard about it. A lot of rock music nowadays is based around making you think really hard about it. And that’s a characteristic I associate with something that's post-rock.
“Automation” might go over some peoples’ heads cause they might think it's not hip enough, it's not cool enough, you know? But that's the very reason why we decided to do it because we wanted to straddle that line between being lame and being cool. And we wanted to confuse people because if people were scratching their heads thinking what the fuck is this song, then that would be interesting.
Because you don't just want to write something that everyone goes oh that's really cool. Cause that's easy. You know it's easy to write a cool riff nowadays. But if you write something that people kind of can't make up their mind about, they're not sure whether they love it or hate it, that's a more interesting place to be I think. And that's definitely how I feel about “Automation.”
Automation
TWEN
There is a place I
Can tell you what you want
That's just a habit (Of Mine!)
Through time and space, Just
A picture of your needs
That's just a habit (Of Mine!)
What did I say? Sorry
Please excuse my B
That's just a habit (Of mine!)
[Chorus]
Just say no
Do what you want
Give it time
Next thing you know
That's what you dream for
Please, to pass the time
You gotta make it shine
Next thing you know
That's what you dream for
There is a place you
Can tell me what I want
That's just a thought in (Your mind!)
A floating face but
The one you choose to feed
That's just a thought in (Your mind!)
There is a place, sorry
Please excuse my B
That's just a habit (Of mine!)
[Chorus]
Clearly time for mother nature to go
Time to die (You're done)
But I'll be watchin' re-runs
Well with all this automation
Do I know I'm alive? (Have fun)
Could be a while 'til we code style
Well what a revelation
To know we were wild (And we are!)
What a revelation
[Chorus] x 2
Keep up with Twen by following them on Instagram and checking out their Bandcamp.
