Q&A: Partygirl Honors all Things Gained and Lost in New EP, ‘I’m so charming, I forgot who I was’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY SYDNEY TATE ☆
IN FEELING FULLY AND WITH NO REMORSE — partygirl’s latest EP, I’m so charming, I forgot who I was, is a devastatingly elegant and unearthed ode to overthinkers, idealizers, and scorpio venuses everywhere. The band welcomes onlookers by passing an overly optimistic and simultaneously critical torch to the turmoil of consciousness. Whether an avid poet, an orchestra member, or a woman scorned, your home lies here.
Although the band members hail from a breadth of backgrounds geographically and musically, a dedication to the art marries their perspectives ingeniously and fosters lasting friendship. Now based in New York City, partygirl is challenging all who wonder if sonic abundance has a place in our modern realm. Without spoiling your first listen, the examination is an ardent yes.
Luna had the privilege of joining Pagona Kytzidis and Fran Pastore of the band in a fated Brooklyn bar (after walking twenty minutes in ill-fitting shoes) to ultimately get emotional. Keep reading to find out more about their usual coffee orders, being rock n’ roll since birth, and what bravery really looks like.
LUNA: What was the best thing that happened to you this week?
FRAN: The best thing that happened to me this week is I made a new friend. Their name is Hank, and we met for coffee. They also lift, so it’s nice to have a potential lifting buddy.
PAGONA: On the note of friendship, my freshman year roommate from college - Natalie - had her birthday this week, and we went out to Rule of Thirds. It was really fun to celebrate her, and it was fun because we have so many memories. We’ve grown so much together, and it felt nice to reflect over many years of friendship. She’s one of our collaborators now, she did our album and single covers, our lyric book, and our logo, and our EPK.
LUNA: Does everyone in the band come from a similar musical background?
FRAN: Absolutely not. We’re all coming from different places. I’m coming from an emo, alternative rock background, à la Paramore, à la Julien Baker, etcetera. Jonathan comes from Phish, prog rock, the South,
PAGONA: Like four-hour-long gigs.
FRAN: Jenna's the one who's a full-on jazz kid. The only one of us who was in jazz school. Andrew went to music school too, but for engineering. He has a classic rock, prog, jazz vibe.
PAGONA: Claire is classically trained, this is her first band that she's been in. I have always written songs. That's always what I say, and it’s so corny, but I wrote my first song at eight and joined my first band at 11. I’ve been playing rock music my whole life, and that's been great. I'm in the tradition of classic rock singers, but also ‘90s alternative songwriters, so I love Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, PJ Harvey.
LUNA: That sort of answers my next question—I was wondering if you thought you’d be in a band when you were younger.
PAGONA AND FRAN: Yes.
FRAN: I think my first band was at 12.
LUNA: Gotta start ‘em young.
PAGONA: That’s the thing—I always wanted to do this and now I'm doing it, and it does stress me out every single day, but it is the only thing for me that's worth doing. Playing in a band is so different than playing solo music. The most magical thing is you’re on a team of people making the sound together, and you don't get that when you play alone. It feels really special to be in a band with you guys.
LUNA: How do you deal with disagreements?
FRAN: We’re blessed not to have many big ones.
PAGONA: Since everyone has different creative backgrounds, when there are disagreements, it's more personal preference. Then we can always try different things and see what people like in the end. We experiment a lot to see what fits, and everyone offers their perspective, which is really useful and a great dynamic that we have.
FRAN: We’re very reverent that it’s us writing for the music and trying to make the best song. Especially with this group of people, it’s really special that we all leave ego at the door when we try to write. We’re trying any idea and if we don’t like it or if it doesn’t feel like it’s working with whatever we’re trying to accomplish, then we can save it for something else. There’s never any tension regarding it.
PAGONA: We have also been blessed, and who knows, maybe on tour everything will change at any given moment, but we try to communicate clearly and look out for each other.
FRAN: We try to be really direct in a way that’s obviously not mean, but it’s helped us build a lot of trust with each other. Someone wouldn’t be saying something unless it could affect everyone or is something that could be improved upon. When it comes up we talk it out.
PAGONA: We’ve also all been in bands for so long. This is no ones first rodeo. We’ve had our fair share of band drama and we got our 10,000 hours in or whatever. None of us came to this band as friends before. We built our friendship and our love for each other through writing together, which I think is different from when you come into a project as friends, which feels harder in my opinion.
LUNA: Do you keep your bedrooms messy or tidy?
FRAN: I’m tidy as hell. *Group laughing*
PAGONA: I’m also clean. I will say though that my room reflects where I’m at, so right now my room is pretty messy because I’m very stressed.
FRAN: If it’s cluttered or disorganized I can’t work because then everything is a distraction.
LUNA: It definitely is a reflection of your headspace. I’ve had a messy room my whole life. What’s your relationship to caffeine?
PAGONA: My relationship…I am an addict.
LUNA: What’s your typical order?
PAGONA: Double shot of espresso.
FRAN: Cold brew black.
LUNA: Okay, very serious. *Pagona laughing*
PAGONA: It’s such a funny question because we’re also the types of people who will have coffee at 8:00pm.
LUNA: Does it keep you awake?
PAGONA AND FRAN: Yes.
PAGONA: I have sleeping issues but it’s not related to the coffee. Coffee is just one of the most beautiful things in the whole world.
FRAN: Also sugar-free red bull.
LUNA: How long were you working on these songs before they became this album?
PAGONA: There’s a lot of asterisks to this. Some of these songs I wrote the first versions of them when I was 16 years old, so that would be ten years. As a group, me, Fran, and Jonathan were working on some of those in that iteration of the band in 2022, which is three years, but this current band wrote and arranged the bulk of the record in 2023.
How we write is I’ll come to the table with a concept, chords, melody, structure, whatever, and we’ll work through it together. The third song on the record, “goodbye, goodbye,” I wrote that first version when I was 16, but we completely rewrote it.
It's the same chords for the most part in the background, but Fran wrote the riff and we rewrote the bridge, so it’s different than before. I changed the lyrics a lot over time, I edit them obsessively like a crazy person.
FRAN: The album itself is about a year-ish.
LUNA: What are you most excited about with releasing the album?
FRAN: Just to have it out and to have something that’s an accurate reflection of who we are. That’s my main thing because the EP is good, but it doesn’t reflect how we are as a band now. I think this one is better because we’ve gotten better and put way more time and effort into it. I’m so excited for people to hear what we’ve been hearing for a long time, and once it’s out, we have the freedom to start working on new stuff.
PAGONA: I want to answer this question in a very spiritual way, because this album means so much to me. It is my life. It is a story of my life from very critical and very hard years, and I'm excited to put it out there. I hope it finds other people who need it, or it can help them. Some music was there for me and my friends were there for me…Fran was there for me and we got to make this together as a project that was commenting on the world as it stood, how I was experiencing it, how we were experiencing it, all the bad and the good.
When I hear feedback from people or get to talk to them at shows or even receiving DMs where someone is saying this means a lot to them, that’s what I’m excited about. We gave it our all and it is everything I have in these songs. That’s also the scariest thing ever.
FRAN: You’ve got the most vulnerability out there because you wrote the words, man.
PAGONA: It’s a glimpse into my mind in a weird way. I think it’s important to be real and critical in a way that’s also artistic because I think we’re lacking that. Not to make this into a cultural criticism, because there are so many great artists out there and I don’t think I’m above anything, but I have that desire.
LUNA: Give me your top three values.
FRAN: Honesty.
PAGONA: Honesty, top.
FRAN: Even if it hurts, it makes everything so much easier to get through. It’s the most efficient way to do anything.
PAGONA: The record is about this a lot, too. It’s the only way to live. We have ended up in this world with a fascist takeover, among other things, partially because we’re lacking honesty as a culture. In every single facet. Whether it’s the economy, politics, or interpersonal relationships. No one can communicate and everyone is scared of being vulnerable.
FRAN: That’s another one, vulnerability.
PAGONA: Bravery. It’s all the same thing, really. No one’s brave enough to try something new or trust other people or help other people. This permeates every aspect of our culture and politics. I don’t mean bravery in an imperialistic, masculine way.
FRAN: You need bravery in order to expose your vulnerability.
PAGONA: To be honest and make things better. “Weakness” is a part of that, whatever weakness means. Those three values are all there in the record. The music that we choose to make is earnest in the way that it’s not trendy.
FRAN: At times it’s ugly!
PAGONA: At times, there are ugly moments. I throw some crazy chords in there.
FRAN: Especially with you, you don't shy away from showing ugly feelings or ugly modes of being, all that good stuff. You’re very visceral in how you talk and write, and I think we need more of that socially. All this to say, bravery.
LUNA: Do you like having your nails painted?
PAGONA AND FRAN: No.
FRAN: In college, I used to have black nail polish.
PAGONA: That makes so much sense.
FRAN: I got lazy.
PAGONA: As a musician, it chips.
LUNA: And quickly.
PAGONA: In the summertime, I like getting pedicures because they look really pretty in sandals. A little red nail polish? It’s classic, but as a musician, I cut my fingernails all the time and I don’t like when they peel. I have hand sensory things. Our bandmates, Jonathan and Andrew, both paint their nails the most. Maybe Jenna, I don’t know. I don’t think Claire does.
FRAN: Jonathan almost always does.
LUNA: Do you have a set of lyrics that is most special or sacred to you?
FRAN: “There is no glory in love, only the gore of our hearts,” Julien Baker.
PAGONA: That was so fast.
FRAN: I’m also in my Fiona Apple phase right now. “So what would an angel say the devil wants to know” was really clever.
PAGONA: The lyric that lifts me up the most, because it's from my favorite song, is Tori Amos: “Never was a cornflake girl / Thought it was a good solution.”
That’s so true. That Liz Phair lyric, “I only ask because I’m a real c*nt in the spring / you can have me by the hour.” It’s these one-liners! A good lyric that stands on it’s own and lifts me up because it’s smart and funny. Fiona Apple has that verse “And oh yes, oh yes, oh yes / There's a dress in the closet / Don't get rid of it, you'd look good in it / I didn't fit in it, it was never mine / It belonged to the ex wife of another ex of mine / She left it behind, with a note / One line, it said: / ‘I don't know if I'm coming across, but I'm really trying’”
FRAN: That’s so real.
PAGONA: That’s my final answer, it’s so good.
FRAN: It really captures this essence of anyone who's ever born.
PAGONA: She’s one of a kind.
LUNA: It's possible that I know your answer already, but if you could give a copy of your album to anyone—
PAGONA: *Interrupting* Fiona Apple.
LUNA: Okay, I'm sensing a theme here.
PAGONA: I'm gonna cry even thinking about that.
FRAN: I mean Hayley Williams, obviously. I honestly want to know what Reneé Rapp would think because I love her. We need to give it to someone out of left field just to know.
PAGONA: I did think that. I think she would f*ck with it. She’d be like “Bro, you can sing.”
FRAN: She’s also a vocalist. We need more vocalists.
PAGONA: The other answer is you give it to someone classic. Freddie Mercury, RIP. Or David Bowie, RIP.
FRAN: My final answer is Hayley Williams or Reneé Rapp.
PAGONA: This is another tangent. I woke up the other day in tears, because I’m very sensitive right now, but I will never see Fiona Apple on tour. The last time she was on tour was 2012. I’m happy she’s making art in the way she wants, but the fact I will never see her live. I would get on a plane to see her live.
LUNA: What kind of person do you think should listen to your album?
PAGONA: If you love rock music. That’s the most simple way to put it, we just play rock music.
FRAN: There’s so many different types of rock music now, but it’s capital R, rock music. We have guitars. Also young not-men.
PAGONA: The girls and the gays. This record and a lot of my music is for my friends. They mean so much to me and they inspire me. It’s for a group of friends that I am so lucky to have. We go on our adventures and we make our little playlists for each other…I want to be on one of those playlists. I’m thinking of those moments I’ve had with my best buddies. We do this to take care of each other and make sense of our world. That’s it. We’re in a loneliness epidemic. The power of friendship and collaborators is being lost as an art, and it shouldn’t be, because those are the most important people.
LUNA: When I was 15, I’d always burn and exchange CDs with my friends.
PAGONA: I would make my friends mixtapes all the time, too! It’s a lost art.
LUNA: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
PAGONA: We're releasing this project in two parts because of how the music economy is, to be honest with you, but also because the album is narrative. The first half of this record, which is the first EP, is the tale of a young person, a young woman in my case, in decline. You’re trying to make sense of the world, you’re being honest with how you’re approaching it, and it is not responding to you in a way that’s making you feel like a person.
That’s the first half of the album that will be out April 18, and the accompanying EP release show is that same day at Sultan Room with our good friends, This Holy Rodeo and Rat Palace, and Panik Flower is DJing. It’s all of our friends. The second half of the EP that will be coming out through the summer and into the fall is more about when things are bad and now you have to become a person that's gonna respond to that, protect yourself, and protect your peace of mind.
You're kind of going to war with the world, and that's the second half of the record. At the end of that, you have to find yourself, and that's the story of I'm so charming, I forgot who I was, which is all true. That is a true statement that goes back to those values.
FRAN: I get that. I really put on a face so well, and I can’t always believe that’s the person I showed up as. It’s a good lyric. Good job, bro. I’m so glad we decided on that title.
PAGONA: We were debating titles for a long time.
I’m so charming, I forgot who I was is out today.
