Q&A: Sinking is Acceptance: Babehoven Talks Creative Process, Influences and New EP ‘Sunk’
COMMITTED TO ALWAYS BEING THEMSELVES IN CREATING AND PLAYING MUSIC — Maya Bon, and Ryan Albert, the duo behind Babehoven, are ready to continue growing. Bon and Albert began playing music when they were young, and since then it has become a life-changing way of existing in the world for both of them.
Their new EP, Sunk, explores the theme of accepting sinking rather than viewing the experience as defeat. Making a new project has been a learning curve for the duo. Exploring themes of dissociation, climate change, and ever-changing relationships, this newest project is a slice of Bon’s self come to life through the amazing recording process of Albert as he began to trust himself more than in past projects.
Read below about Bon and Albert’s relationship to music, singing to the sunset in the backyard for the “Fugazi” music video, and the making of their newest EP.
LUNA: How long have you been creating music? What does it mean for you?
BON: I have been creating music since I was a preverbal person. I have always been singing and writing little songs; it’s kind of how I learned how to talk. I just — to an annoying degree — have always been singing.
ALBERT: Still is always singing (laughs).
BON: I try to tone it down, but I do sing a lot. When I was five I began piano lessons, where I started to write songs more formally as they became song songs with music accompaniment. When I was 11, I taught myself the guitar and started taking bass lessons, so I always had instruments to back myself up. What it means to me — gosh, I weirdly feel emotional already. I feel that in large part, songwriting in particular and the ability to write about my experiences and my life and my pain is to make something sound as dramatic as possible, but I mean it in a literal way; why I’m alive and want to be here. I feel defined by songwriting in a way that feels uniquely mine, but I know it is also a human experience. What music means to me is [that] it makes me who I am and makes me want to be who I am.
ALBERT: I started playing music I think in fifth grade, when I learned I could actually play instruments; when music wasn’t just something to listen to. It was like, Ooh, I can get a guitar,” and I actually did bass lessons first. It changed my life. Just in general, music is how I define myself; it’s my first love.
LUNA: Who are your biggest musical inspirations?
BON: I feel a bit prepared, because we had just written a response to this in another interview. Something that feels a little bit narcissistic but is also just true for me when it comes to songwriting is that I actually try extremely hard to not have external inspirations when it comes to singing. When it comes to how I write, I try to just turn off my brain as a cognitive process and just record whatever comes out of my mouth as I’m singing in my voice memos. Then I’ll go back and write down what I liked.
So there’s that portion of things as a songwriting process; though I might enjoy people’s songwriting and I find it inspiring and I’m sure in some subconscious way it influences what comes out of my mouth, I do feel [I need to hold] true to the fact that I actually write as blankly, distractedly, and not consciously as possible. That’s my own writing process, but in terms of sonic inspiration and song sculpting inspiration, I’m gonna hand it off to Ryan who is more in that realm of things.
ALBERT: For this EP that’s coming out, Sunk, a huge inspiration was Elliott Smith. One inspiration that hasn’t gotten the most credit yet for this record is The Cure, with Robert Smith’s orchestration of his songs, [such as] synth parts and thinking about it as a landscape. So many of The Cure’s songs have [what] you could think about like foreground and background. A lot of the synth parts that are new to the Babehoven realm; we were directly thinking of The Cure and how they have atmosphere in their songs. That's something that this new record has more of. It started on Nastavi, Calliope, except we became more comfortable with thinking about The Cure on Sunk.
Oh and Gillian Welch — we’re kind of talking about two opposite things: the orchestration of The Cure, but then Gillian Welch’s minimalist acoustic guitar and voice, maybe a lead thing. On the Sunk album the song “Creature” very much starts like a Gillian Welch song and the ending very much ends like a Cure song. There’s three different string parts; they’re kind of childish string parts like one I’m thinking of in particular. The way that they work together, we’re hoping they make a powerful emotional statement. So that song has both of those counterpoints within it.
LUNA: Describe the story Sunk tells in three words.
ALBERT: Sunk, it’s okay.
BON: Sinking is acceptance.
LUNA: I read your description about the meaning behind this album’s title — you shared the idea of sinking being a form of self-care rather than defeat. This is a really cool idea — can you talk about it a bit more, and specifically about how the songs relate to the title?
BON: My general take on Sunk as an album title and the imagery of our dog Woody with the rainbow and Ryan holding him up, his facial expression — it’s kind of about the oxymoron of pleasure and defeat. To make a very long story short, I had to give up on some very integral relationships in my life during the onset of the pandemic, and it eventually dawned on me after seeing the album cover that I had taken as a photo [what] I had reached: a new plane of existence having accepted the end of these life-shattering experiences.
I mean, literally having spent my entire childhood into my teenage years entering my early twenties and then my mid twenties, I had felt like I was always treading water trying to maintain these relationships in my life that were unmendable and just constantly causing me extreme agony. I realized once I had basically ejected myself, the first year of that was the first time in my life that I was not treading water; I was just healing and accepting what had become of my life. The culmination of that experience — or at least one culmination of that experience — was realizing that in this endgame that I’ve found myself in, I’ve found a really beautiful land — like a sunk land — with a community of deeply beautiful and important people to me and my beautiful partner and my dog. I’m living in this place that feels so right for me and reformatting what sinking means.
There’s also this metaphor: the oceans are rising, coastal cities are sinking, and we are living in the end of capitalism. We are living out late capitalism as young people, and what does that look like? How do we deal with existential dread on a daily level? One thing that inspired me is my housemate and friend Annie who I wrote about in “Annie’s Shoes.” She has dreams about the apocalypse that aren’t bad. Like okay, the end is coming. For example: we have fifty-five days until we’re all gonna die, so how do we make these last fifty-five days the best days ever? Kind of reshifting, like, “Oh my god, this is so beautiful — it’s all ending and this is what we have left.” I feel like that is true, like apart from legislating, which is complicated, because who has access to becoming a lawyer? Who has access to these pro-bono social rights and social justice work? Apart from taking that route, there’s almost nothing we can do as individuals to make any kind of impact on these huge large standing issues we’re all facing — [that’s] how I feel. So how do I just live my life in a way that feels livable?
LUNA: How has creating this EP compared to past musical projects? What is the musical creation process like for you?
BON: I’ll start with what the musical creation process is like for both of us. I write the songs, as like a singer songwriter-esque moment on the acoustic guitar, record it on my voice memos, go back, write down what I liked, bring it to Ryan and go from there. When I say we go from there, it means we go to recording. We don’t start with, “What will the live band sound like?” — we start with, “How can we record this and how can this sound?” Sometimes I come to the table with a set idea, but often — especially as things have progressed with us recording together — in a way, I’ve thought of it as the way seahorses have children. The female-bodied seahorses, the ones who produce eggs, create this egg and then they give it to the sperm-body seahorses and put that egg in them. Then they gestate, grow the baby and release it. I’ll pass it on to Ryan.
ALBERT: Yeah, Maya just hands me these really beautiful songs, and it is then my job or opportunity to flesh out the songs with what I hear. Maya is always there to give either a thumbs up or a thumbs down, or, “I really like where this is going, can we try this?” Then I’ll take that information and try to create something with that idea or just start tinkering away, being like, “What do you think of this, what do you think of this, what do you think of this?” That’s kind of how our process is. With this Sunk EP, I think it’s personally the first time I have felt confident in myself as a producer/orchestration/writer person. I would say [that] before Sunk I felt good, but it was like, “What am I doing?” There’s a big learning curve here, and on Sunk it’s the first time I felt like, “Oh, I actually know what I’m doing, and I’m going to just trust myself,” which with everything else I didn’t trust myself, or had varying degrees of trust for my ideas.
BON: And then I think ways that Sunk has been unique for me is that I wrote almost the exact same song three times.
ALBERT: Yeah, all of Sunk is like the same three chords, just in different time.
BON: “Fugazi,” “Get Better,” and “Creature” are almost entirely the same chord structure and it was accidental. It’s interesting.
ALBERT: They’re all the same chords, just in different positions on the guitar.
BON: So, oops! (laughs) But altogether interesting.
LUNA: I noticed that “Twenty Dried Chillies” is the most detailed song on the EP in terms of the story, and was also wondering about the context behind “The Way That Things Burn.” Would either of you want to share about those songs?
BON: “Twenty Dried Chillies” is definitely the most detailed song; I wrote that song in 2018. I was sitting in what was then Ryan’s room, but then became our room in LA. He had dried red chillies on his windowsill, so it kind of started with me just sitting in this room. This is like the voice memo style, I was just talking about the fact that I’m sitting in this room, and I’m living in LA. So it’s just: done with walking days because you’re always in your car, I’d rather be on the couch watching TV. It’s kind of like a joke, but I had never lived in a house with a TV before, and you guys had a TV at that point. It was very early on so I was processing that I was living in LA, driving everywhere and watching TV like who am I? It just felt very weird and then [there were] 20 in a row drying out chillies. That kind of goes into a lot of my music. It starts with noticing where I am literally, physically, and then it peels back one layer. “And I recall when you were a teenager I wanted to be just like you,” or something like that, then peeling back layers of family, and then peeling back further layers of earlier childhood memories.
ALBERT: Or like a psychoanalysis onto those memories.
BON: Psychoanalysis onto those memories, processing toxic masculinity, abuse, generational trauma, loss, how to hold all those things at the same time, mixed with current memories of my family friend sharing what came out in that song with me that changed my life, because I didn’t really know about those memories. This cyclical narrative of it’s all just so messed up. It’s all just so messed up.
ALBERT: That song to me represents Maya opening a can of worms and being like, “Here is my guts, take it or leave it,” and as most of the other songs it’ll be like, “This is referencing my emotions, but it’s not alright. Let's talk about this.”
BON: Also, it was like an estranged family member’s birthday, [so there was] processing time passing, and just a lot. At that time in particular in 2018 and 2017, and I guess in 2019 too, this came up. I was writing with compounded experience that was painful; all these things would pile up at once. I’d write a song about, for example “Confident and Kind” does it really well: “all of these weird things are happening, and I accidentally paid $500 to get a keratin treatment on my hair.” Basically, I was just in this dissociative space, which I’m still dealing with, but it was very severe at that point. I’d find myself in these very intense experiences, but I was floating, and then I would come out in song like, “What in the fuck is going on? I’m so confused.” So that’s the “Twenty Dried Chillies”-esque ramble.
“The Way That Things Burn” was in 2020. When I wrote it, I was helping the metabolic studio in Los Angeles, which is run by my mother. I was leading a workshop around wildfires — the wildfires of the West — but specifically focused on Indigenous traditional burning practices and cultural burning. Because of colonization, and because of who can run what land, Indigenous fires have not been permitted legally for the past 300 years. That is in large part why we’re seeing such large scale fires. All of the fodder that would have been burned off by cultural burns are now building up, so it’s mixed with climate change, which is also just a broader lens of everything being so messed up. The fact that there’s just so much to burn influences climate change as well. An interesting fact about cultural burns and low heat burns is that it actually strengthens the root systems. It doesn't kill off the plants so the roots are able to sequester more water, which then leads to more evaporation and precipitation. It actually burns in the way that it should happen in a managed pattern, which leads to less drought, which leads to less heat.
Anyway, it was about this cyclical process that’s been intentionally covered up because of racism and colonization. The lyrics “I’m reading about the way that things burn on paper and in textbooks,” and “I’m thinking about the way that we learn in some time or in no time,” are just about the human condition of existential dread and how complicated this all is, and then overlaying that onto my own personal pain and existence.
LUNA: What was the inspiration behind the layered images in the “Fugazi” music video; is that artistic choice connected to the lyrics? Feel free to share anything else about the creative process for the video!
BON: Truthfully, there is really no inspiration. Well, that’s not true. Inspiration-wise, Marie Claire Wilcox, my friend who made the costume with me and for me, she was visiting. She’s this incredible seamstress, costume maker and clothes maker. We were like, “Ryan and I need to make a music video for ‘Fugazi,’” and we think music videos are often kind of stupid and I feel conflicted about making them in general. No shade on music videos. (laughs) My experience is just, “Why do I have to make something visual about this?” But I don’t have to, sometimes it can just be fun. That’s the other side of things, is trying to see the fun in it.
So Marie Claire was visiting, and I was like, “Okay, well we have this amazing creative person here so why don’t we make a costume?” We went to Goodwill, and they have these bags of fabric that are I think 50 cents? Or maybe a dollar? We found one that was all these interesting scraps of old basketball jerseys, mesh and rope, just a bag of very interesting fabrics that were all white. I’m half Croatian and half Ashkenazi Jew. Marie Claire has also studied balkan singing, as have I, and we’re both interested in that slavic connection. So she was talking about if we made a riff on traditional Croatian costumes and singing and performing costumes for women. The headwrap and the sash and the frills, those are all playing on traditional Croatian clothing, but then obviously it’s all white, so it references sanctity and religion and the virgin purity. Then me ripping off the clothes, there’s this layer of an expulsion in some way. There’s many ways to read it. That’s the visual of me in the costume.
Ryan and I were trying to figure out how to film it, and we had talked about how in the past we had someone put a headlight on me to get this beautiful glowy shot. Ryan had the idea of putting headlights in the garden, so he parked his car. That's where the white light on me in the dark came from, and then I slowed it down and reversed the imagery so it’s very strange. The way that rope Marie Claire made moves around me, it was snakelike and alive. In terms of overlaying, we just walked around the neighborhood and our yard, and took a bunch of videos of the sunset and trees. I just really like the way overlaid imagery looks. I don’t know how to edit things properly; I just use iMovie and explore. Often it just ends up being like, “This looks cool because I overlaid it.”
ALBERT: Which largely is what music videos are, “Wow, this looks cool, it’s gonna be our music video.”
BON: Which is totally valid. So anyway, that’s me playing around with what my skill set is, which is very minimal. Do you have anything you [want to add]? I guess it’s mostly me editing.
ALBERT: Yeah, I just was like, “The sunset looks pretty! Let’s film it.”
BON: Then Ryan filmed a side profile shot of me singing. I guess part of the inspiration as well with that video, is we are just being ourselves basically. I’m just wearing my balaclava singing into the sunset, and exploring my roots dancing in the yard. Just having fun with it.
LUNA: How has your musical career/relationship to music changed over time?
BON: I never thought I would do music seriously; I studied environmental studies and my plan was to go into environmental law after graduating. Then in 2018 I released Leap. I just recorded it on my Garageband on my 2011 Macbook Pro with no added microphone, just the computer mic. I was like, ‘La la la, this is silly and fun,” and then I just randomly made the name Babehoven because I didn’t want to release it under my name. It was a very stupid, very fast pun that came to me. I wanted to start a band, because I didn’t want to do folky singer-songwriter vibes anymore. It felt boring to me at that point, not that I feel that way about singer-songwriters, but just in my own experience. Then we started playing; Elias Williamson was on drums and Skylar Pia was on bass. These are folks who live in Portland.
All of a sudden, Good Cheer Records, which at the time was kind of a big deal in Portland, all of the bands I really looked up to in Portland were selling to them, were like, “We really like your stuff.” So we recorded “Sleep,” and then The Fader covered it. I didn't even know what The Fader was honestly. I did not care about music in that department at all, but it felt like, “Okay, I can do this.” Then Fresh Finds put “Out of This Country” on their playlist on Spotify, so all of a sudden we had 50,000 monthly listeners and I was like, “Woah, okay, I’m good at this.” (laughs) I thought “I’m gonna do this again,” and then it just went way down. You know how it goes, getting playlisted and then it just disappears. I feel like since then I’ve just been chasing this feeling of, “No, but I’m good. I feel like I’m worth it.” I started taking it more and more seriously, and then when I met Ryan that really changed the game, because it changed the way we recorded. Previously it was like me going to my friend's basement, Jessie Robertson in Portland, recording exactly as I had played it live and getting it done in four hours. The entire two EPs were recorded that way, in four hours, and then I met Ryan.
He's a recording artist with skills and an idea of how things can go that I had never even thought of, and actually really stressed me out initially. As we’ve worked more together on this, he is the other side of my project that I was missing; now it’s our project. I can write the songs, but I’m also a very impatient person. I’m very much like, “Let’s get it done,” but Ryan is able to open a whole new door and explore the songs in a way that I could never do, and don’t have the skills for. We got signed to Double Double Whammy, which is amazing; now we can do it in some regards professionally, where they’re giving us funds, so Ryan doesn’t have to work. He can record these songs in a really deeply important way. It kind of went from me being like, “I’m never going to do this professionally” to “I was playlisted once and The Fader wrote about me, so all of a sudden I think I’m hot shit.” Then it disappears, and you’re like, “Wait, but I’m good at this, so why is it disappearing?” Now I’m just committed; I want to be seen.
ALBERT: For me, I used to do this alone in my bedroom in high school. Now I’m doing it with Maya in a different bedroom, and more people are listening, and it feels really good. So it hasn’t exactly changed much for me, I’d be doing this anyways. It’s just that more people are listening, and more people care now. That feels really nice, not like, “Oh, people are listening to me,” but just that it feels good that something I’m doing might actually make someone happy. That feels really good, that more people are finding our music and enjoying it. I’m happy that they’re happy.
LUNA: What are your upcoming plans; is there anything else you want to add?
ALBERT: We’re about to go on a crazy tour!
BON: We’re about to be touring from late February all the way to mid April, and we’re about to release Sunk, which feels huge. We also have a bunch of merch now which is exciting. So we’re really trying to sell some merch.
ALBERT: Yeah, we’re just like a band now. We’re not like a pandemic bedroom band; we’re turning into a real, in the world band.
BON: Which is growing pains a bit, a little anxiety-provoking. We’re trying to be positive and figure out how to do that, and hopefully make some money? Question mark.
ALBERT: Question mark. That is our plan though, to make money from playing music. We really make money from selling merchandise.
BON: Then we’ll come back from tour and record [more music].
ALBERT: That’s the goal. We’re gonna be recording; you’re gonna be writing songs.
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