Q&A: Juice Explores Adulthood through 'Boyhood'
INITIALLY FROM BOSTON AND NOW RESIDING IN BROOKLYN - Juice is a seven member alt-rock band consisting of Ben Stevens, Kamau Burton, Michael Ricciardulli, Christian Rose, Daniel Moss, Miles Clyatt and Rami El-Abidin. After graduating from Boston College, they formed Juice and released their first EP, Workin’ on Lovin,’ in 2018. Their second EP, You Are Simply Magnificent, came out in 2019. Which was just before putting out their three singles in 2020, “Make Pretend,” "Konoha," and “DiCaprio (Love Me All the Time).” Their latest project, Boy Story, touches on topics such as jealousy, ego and toxic relationships; while also exploring the overall theme of growing out of adolescence and maneuvering through and dealing with adulthood (an experience that almost everyone will have no problem understanding).
A bulk of the songs from Boy Story were written throughout the summer of 2020 while the band lived in an Airbnb in Bloomfield, CT. It features their single “Girlfriend Song,” that tells the story of the main character as they juggle self identity, or lack thereof, and their awareness of this inner battle. Depending on how you interpret lyrics from this track, as well as the seven others from Boy Story, they can display a humorously bitter and satirical undertone. However, Juice’s ability to keep their music upbeat, lively, and entertaining does compliment this perfectly.
Since their previous plan of endless touring in 2020 was ultimately canceled due to Covid-19, Juice will restart their Boy Story tour on December fourth 2021. To kick off their 10 scheduled live show dates, they will be performing in none other than Boston, MA. Read below to get familiar with Juice and Boy Story.
LUNA: What do you want your fans to know about this project?
BEN STEVENS: I think we want them to see how far we’ve grown as songwriters, as a band, and as this new thing that we are trying to establish. We’ve got this little narrative going on in the project and a lot of really cool sonic elements that we worked really hard to do. This project was recorded mostly in our basement and various AirBnbs, so I hope they like it because we put a lot of work into it!
CHRISTIAN ROSE: I think we take a really cool journey through all the different genres that we’ve always touched on in our entire history of Juice as well as all the different storytellers moving around and different ways to get the songs from us to the listener. We use a lot of different colors and really cool tools to get the songs and the stories across and I hope people appreciate the way we took the breath of what we do as Juice and condensed it into one cohesive sonic thing and even a cohesive larger thing than just the sound.
LUNA: Do you guys find it hard to tell your story through lyrics while still doing so in a captivating way?
BEN STEVENS: I think us trying to hone in on the collective experience, we’ve known each other so deeply for so long that I think as songwriters, people become more comfortable being more vulnerable with one another and hearing eachother out or also just helping fill in the blanks in the story that maybe someone is having trouble finishing. I think that really has helped, also just all of the time we’ve had in Covid, we had so many songs that we had written. So many that didn’t make the project but once we found the lane it just kind of became easier. But yeah, trial and error honestly, for me at least.
DANIEL MOSS: That’s a good question. I think also to touch on that, we spent so much time together that I think each song tells its own individual story but I think that naturally songs come together in certain ways. You spend a bunch of time together, you experience a lot of the same things, not only as a band but we experience a lot of the same things in relationships to our family or relationships to friends, significant others, society etc. We have very different experiences and I think that comes out in the different stories of the songs you will hear, but I think there’s also this collective experience that we can all kind of tune into or just naturally gravitate towards when we’re writing songs even if someone is writing lyrics a part from everyone being in the same room. I think some of it is natural in that collective experience as well.
CHRISITAN ROSE: I also think that storytelling for songwriters is easier than storytelling for book writers or screenwriters because we have a lot less rules. We’re just trying to communicate our experience to the listener and it doesn't have to be like beginning, middle, end. We just have to tell you some stuff that happened to us and hope it comes across or that happened in our story- in our world that we are building through sounds, through lyrics, through what instruments we choose or what noises we choose to make. So, if we give you a speaker or narrator in a song or a person in a relationship or relationship to the world then all we really have to do is focus on that one plot point and get that across. It’s not like we are trying to write a book or anything, we’re just trying to communicate something that may or may not be hyper-specific in the way you would when you’re telling stories in different mediums.
BEN STEVENS: Right, because it’s also important for the listener to be able to have their own understanding of their feelings when they hear what we have to say. You don’t want to be too specific and I think that makes it a little bit easier like Christian was saying about writing a movie or something.
CHRISTIAN ROSE: I also think that every song, album or experience is different. It varies obviously from songwriter to songwriter, but also from project to project, piece to piece. Sometimes it is really important to get every lyric across and every aspect of the story of the song across. I think even on the project, on Boy Story, you will encounter different songs that have different levels of wanting you to understand what’s going on, these lyrics are telling a really specific story. That will happen more definitively sometimes then other times but I think in the larger context of Boy Story, the more important thing is that the listener understands that we or the character that we are creating as a representation of us, we just want you to feel that experience and listen and interpret in a looser way. There are stories in there, there's a tight story in there if you want there to be but that's not the most important thing on this specific project, even though I think it’s a cool aspect of it in that it is a boy’s story you know it’s a story that you can follow however closely you want.
BEN STEVENS: Like a “choose your own adventure.”
LUNA: Can you tell me a little bit about the correlation between your music videos and lyrics?
CHRISTIAN ROSE: So the plot in the music videos does not directly reflect the plot in any of the lyrics. However, the first point of the music videos was that we wanted to create visual world around Boy Story where you could see us experiencing really crazy stuff and see who the characters are in the band, in our brains and in this world we created. For me I think the crazy stuff happening in the music videos, the alternate dimensions and crisis in parallel worlds, all that stuff, is kind of an extended metaphor for the more grounded crazy emotions going on within the project. So it’s not directly connected to it and I don’t know if this is the “official” answer because we all did our own little bits of writing on the music videos. I don’t know if we are supposed to give it a label but for me personally, it’s an extended metaphor for the wild but more realistic world of the lyrics on the project.
DANIEL MOSS: Yeah and you know if you take a breakup song, you can always make a music video of a girl and a guy but I think we tried to explore and be a little more creative and abstract. We still wanted to marry the energy of the songs with what’s going on in the music videos since they shouldn’t be entirely unrelated and they are still obviously very directly linked. There’s this overall narrative of the character in crisis in parallel so that’s a point but also as it relates to the songs I think it’s more just the energy we felt from the songs and an alternative narrative for this feline piece that can guide you through the song even if it’s not like, “they talk about this and then I see it in the music video,” because that can be cool too but I think we wanted to explore being a little more abstract.
LUNA: You use a lot of musical instruments within your songs, is there one or multiple instruments that you haven’t either mastered yet or hope to use in your musical endeavours in the future?
DANIEL MOSS: Well I think right now theres a lot of instruments that we used in the studio this time that we haven’t used before. We’ve used a lot more string parts that aren’t necessarily new, but there's always a divide when you see us live and there's the guitars, violins, base and the drums so a lot on this project expands upon that in terms of pianos, strings and synthesizers and pretty much any noise you can make with a computer, which is a lot of different noises. That’s where all of the noises that could possibly be made by man or machine, so I think that’s where our sonic development, we aren’t planning to get an obo on the next track or anything like that.
BEN STEVENS: I do know we have been talking about percussion. That’s definitely something that’s fun, we’re big Talking Heads fans, so just honing in on some of that energy would be cool going forward I think. We’ve got rhythm in this bunch, we can handle it!
LUNA: Having a seven member band, is it hard to tell stories that all of you can relate to?
BEN STEVENS: It depends, I think we have gotten better at allowing an idea to take a few shapes or to grow a little bit more. Say there’s a seed that someone brings in that maybe a few changes or a passage or two if lyrics or maybe we’re in the basement jamming we just have to hone in on a tone for the lyrics or the delivery. Yeah, I think we have gotten better at allowing those to grow a little bit before either moving on or saying that this is the one. I think we do a good job of relating in that way but then again with so many people it’s sometimes hard to get unanimous feelings about certain songs, which is okay and we’re good at making concessions although sometimes we hope not to. There’s no right answer to that.
CHRISTIAN ROSE: To continue on to that answer, in my opinion, the more time we spend together as a group and the more songs we write, the easier it is to sort of know what unites everybody, what everyone resonates with, and what ties us all together. Maybe not always doing this but sometimes trying to tap into what that thing is that holds Juice together and trying to write with that in mind, it’s easier and easier to do that the more we write together. That’s obviously not always what happens but I do think that we all understand each other so well and one level of our experience is unified and that leads to more natural and organic lyrics that people all like because it represents everybody in one way or another. We’re not always trying to do that but that does happen more and more.
LUNA: Following that, does everyone in your group participate in writing the lyrics to your songs?
BEN STEVENS: Depends, but I think on a whole it’s a team effort. Some people are more involved than others but we’re very collaborative in that regard.
CHRISTIAN ROSE: You’ll see different lyrics, different verses, different hooks that will allow you to experience different perspectives clearly coming from different band members at different points of the project that sort of all contribute to this larger thing that we’re building, this larger character that represents all of us. Sometimes it’s really easy to tell that one person wrote one part and another wrote a different part and sometimes it doesn’t matter.
LUNA: Has the pandemic stunted your creative endeavours as a band, or were you able to take this time to push your music further than before?
DANIEL MOSS: I think it was in March, we all went home for a few months and then we decided that the best thing for us to do with our time now that we can’t be touring all the time, because we were used to half the year being taken up by that, was to write a project. I think those months being at home and then coming back together definitely sparked something very powerful. When we came back there were a lot of ideas flowing and it was a very creative time. So in that way, we did try to take that time and make something out of it but obviously there are difficulties presented to a band who now for a long time can’t go about their normal routine but I think it did spark a lot of a lot of stuff for us. It sparked half of these song ideas, so I think both. Emotionally it was a weird time too, you’re locked so I think that can sometimes do either. It could lead to a bunch of creativity because you have time but a lot of songwriting comes from experience and you at least have your past and it’s not like you’re not doing anything over COVID, but that totally different experience of life, of being locked in can be fuel for something or it can also feel empty and that can be harder to write in that mindspace if you’re trying to write a certain song. Not to be vague but it’s song to song, and I think we found some inspiration during that time. I think we also had some difficulties finding inspirations and connecting with our methods of being creative that we used for years.
LUNA: Considering this project is called Boy Story, did you purposefully put the tracks in a particular order to convey this story?
BEN STEVENS: Definitely. We actually had a few different iterations but there were definitely sound points that we had, like four or five foundational pieces that were sort of like a beginning, middle, and end contour that we wanted to hammer home for you guys.
DANIEL MOSS: Yeah, and I think you have the narrative which is important in ordering that then you also have the sonic narrative which I think is directing that order of the songs just as much as any sort of actual character narrative is. I do think it is. We had a lot of conversations about that, we have conversations about that all the time even when we play live with our set lists and how we want to carry emotion through and if we want to bring people on this rollercoaster, when to give them a break, when to give them everything in full force, so I think it is very important to pay attention to the order for narrative reasons but also for sonic reasons.
CHRISTIAN ROSE: And we do have two songs on the project that do literally book end it for story and sonic purposes. The first song on the project is in fact the intro and the last song on the project was intentionally supposed to be the last. I mean, maybe not from its conception but by the time it was done it was like “oh this makes sense as the last one on the project.”
BEN STEVENS: I mean also lyrically that song is just a perfect end too, and also sonically it’s funny because it kind of sounds like an older version of us too.
DANIEL MOSS: I think that last one is cool because it's got everything in there, you mentioned instruments before, I think it works not only in that narratively but also it’s the song that we hacked the most into in terms of bombased. There’s just a lot of different stuff going on which I think is really cool. And it feels like a grand finale or something in that way.
LUNA: Out of the eight songs on this project, is there one particular song that best represents your relationship as friends? Or is there one that took you out of your comfort zone?
DANIEL MOSS: I think a lot of the songs are our individual relationships to the outside world which I think are very linked. However, I don’t think we necessarily explored too much on this project or that any of the narratives are directly dealing with our relationship to each other but more so our common ground that we find each other and relating to the outside world.
BEN STEVENS: There were a bunch on this project that took us out of our comfort zone.
CHRISTIAN ROSE: The first song you hear on the project is “Starlove” and the entire instrumental background with the exception of some violins and some chelos and it’s like the sounds you hear in movies. It’s a soundscape of production and that’s totally different from things we’ve done before. It’s not even really a song, it’s an intro or a hook and then a spoken word or rap so that was different in terms of a band project. I think in “End Of The World,” which is the last song on the project, we used a bunch of sounds we have never used before. We are trying to put together some sort of collage to represent everything that the project had been leading to, so that was a little bit harder than stuff we’ve done in the past.
RAMI: I would say that “Never Let You Go” took us out of our comfort zone. In the past we leaned towards higher energy and higher tempo music, a lot of it had to do with the fact that when we were performing live how we would get the strongest reaction out of a crowd that didn’t necessarily know us by bringing a lot of energy. So “Never Let You Go” is like a sound tempo song that really took us out of our comfort zone. I feel like writing it was pretty easy but gaining the confidence to believe in it and put it out did take us out of our comfort zone since it’s the opposite of the high energy music that we’re used to doing.
LUNA: Finally, since Boy Story is being released on December 3rd, where do you hope this project will take you for 2022?
BEN STEVENS: I think this project opens the doors for us creatively because it positions us in this place where we’re making music that is a culmination of all the things we’ve been working on in the past few years but it’s very strong, diverse, and still cohesive. So I think it will let us to maybe take a step to the left on the next project with a slightly different tone or sound that we would like to go for. It definitely opens the doors for us creatively for us to do what we want which is exciting.
DANIEL MOSS: It is the longest project that we have put out so I think that just in the fact that it is longer and created around the same time it gives us a rock in terms of our shows and where we go creatively. I think it is an identity-defining thing for us before it’s long and we spent so much time on it. You know, there’s visual aspects to it so it’s more of a bedrock for us to go off of than I think we had before. In terms of shows, how we did the videos and how the songs turned out will totally impact how we decide to play the songs or how we decide to look on stage. All of the smaller stuff as well. It being the big thing that we can jump off from is new because we’ve never released a project that was more than four songs.
BEN STEVENS: I think also just for people encountering us for the first time, historically or maybe even before two or three years ago when we were just on the road grinding and people would encounter us live or through word of mouth, I think this project stands firm in a way that if someone encounters it they would be like, “damn this band is really cool, I'd like to come see them live,” as opposed to the other way around which is fun and good.
CHRISTIAN ROSE: Similar to what Daniel and Ben said, I think that it really does allow us to be more things, in a way that makes sense. Before we had our live show and the music that was out that sort of reflected the live show, because this project has the essence of who we are as Juice, but it also expands what people might understand us to be in a way that doesn’t overshadow what people already understood about us. Whether we want to make a folk song, “Never Let You Go” is on the project or if we want to make a more hip-hop or a harder rock song, or even if we wanted to create our own thing, there’s a lot of different doors that it opens and I think that’s very cool creatively.
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