Q&A: With Hardships and a Sense of Hopefulness, Spencer Hoffman Returns With Debut Album ‘Apple Core'
YOU MINDLESSLY SINK YOUR TEETH INTO A RIPE, JUICY APPLE — eating away at it without a care, to then be left with nothing but the core. You toss away and reach for another one, starting a cycle of consumption and depletion. Unlike the moon, an apple can’t replenish itself once eaten, which is what burnout can feel like. We consume and deplete ourselves, and it feels as if we can’t regain a sense of rest and peace, especially in the current state of the world when things feel like it’s one thing after another. Spencer Hoffman returns with his debut album Apple Core, expressing burnout and the hardships he went through during the pandemic. As dark as it seems, the record carries a sense of comfort and warmth. Drawing inspirations from “Cass McCombs, Vetiver, or Cotton Jones, with an added sharp literary sensibility culled from Mary Shelley and Ursula K. Le Guin … it’s the kind of record you can put on and slip into like a bath.”
Hoffman teamed up with Melina Durtete (Jay Som), Rob Mills, and Seth Kauffman for the record, explaining, “Melina and the community around me really championed the record and made me feel that it was worth pursuing and sharing.”
With already released singles “French Diseases of the Heart,” “All Time Lowe,” and “Song of Ignorance,” Apple Core is just in time for fall, as the visuals are wrapped in brown, gold, and sepia tones and encased in beautiful melodies warmed up by a tape machine, what most of the record was recorded on.
Read down below to understand the core developments of Hoffman’s debut album.
LUNA: Hey Spencer! How have you been these days?
HOFFMAN: Doing very good! Definitely seems like at this point in the pandemic, it’s a little rough on everyone. I think everyone's kind of struggling to make ends meet and everything's getting even more cost-prohibitive these days. So trying to figure out and balance all these kinds of life decisions and stuff at this time I think is relatively difficult. So just trying to keep my head on my shoulders while putting a record out is interesting, but maybe doable. We'll see (laughs).
LUNA: Apple Core is such a beautiful record — what inspired the title?
HOFFMAN: I wrote this tune called “Apple Core,” it’s the first song on the record. That kicked off the process of what would end up becoming the record. It was just this organic recording/songwriting situation when I was reading this book called The Last Man by Mary Shelley. It's about a pandemic that wipes out all of humanity. And it's one of my favorite books — I think it's really beautiful. But in the beginning, she's talking about this frame narrative that begins the book. She mentions these leaves in this cave that contain scribes of the book; it’s this very strange framing narrative. So I was kind of musing off that and imagining walking along the shore and the moon as a physical object in the sky, shedding itself onto the ground, instead of it just being light that's making it look like it's waning.
Then the little analogy that my brain cooked up was that man looked like an apple core that it was getting bitten into. I thought that it was an interesting little poeticism, and it seems to be carried through the record, where the moon is constantly waning and waxing, it's … replenishing itself and then it's being taken away. But I think there's this feeling that something is going away and it can't come back. When you're eating an apple, you know it's not going to come back. When you're left with the apple core, that's it. You throw it in the trash. And I think that is our perspective of how we consume things and how we deplete ourselves. Often it feels like it's just not going to come back, the energy isn't going to come back. And I was feeling super burnt out when the pandemic hit and I think that was the initial process of just acknowledging that I was feeling very used up and trying to find some peace and some continuance through that. So I took that apple core analogy and ran with it.
LUNA: “All Time Lowe” and “Fight No More” were my favorite tracks on the record — take us through the creative process of those tracks.
HOFFMAN: “All Time Lowe” was the first track I made with this tape machine that I bought during lockdown. Most of the record was started on a four-track cassette tape machine. There would be drum machines, bass, vocals, and acoustic guitar. And then I would dump it into my Pro Tools setup and build upon it with that. Then my friend Rob Mills would play drums on it. Further on into the recording of the record, it probably didn't dawn on me that it was a record yet. It was just recording songs. My friend Nick Fritas is an incredible songwriter and one of my favorites. At the time, he was my studio gear guru. We were chatting about tape machines to get and trade stuff back and forth. I'm obsessed with this certain tape machine called the TASCAM 388, which was made in the ’80s. So many of my favorite records were recorded on it, like Dr. Dog records and, more recently, this Twain record, Rare Feeling. I just love the sound of every 388 record that I've ever listened to. I was very obsessed with it. But they're super expensive right now. It just so happened that a week later, Nick had a friend who was selling one for super cheap! So I bought it, and “All Time Lowe” was the track where I was trying to figure out the machine by recording that track. I just started building it. But lyrically at that time, I was recognizing my burnout. I had this realization that me and my girlfriend have been together through so many different hard personal stuff, hard financial stuff, and then through the pandemic. The song was about how we've got each other and instead of our relationship being strained by all this stuff, we stuck through it all together.
It's also about being thankful for the people you have around you. Then “Fight No More” I wrote to be the last song on the record. It was written months after the George Floyd protests. I was engaging a lot with activism online and in person at that time. I was attending events and Zoom calls, rallying and fundraising, trying to draw attention to these issues and stuff, and I think I was trying to reconcile my own passivity. I had this feeling of “If I'm such a pacifist personally, nothing will ever change.” I thought, “What if my passivity is the passivity of everyone around me?” We actually need to produce the change that we are wanting to see. [I] also [recognized my life] and all the familial fighting that I grew up under that produced my aversion to conflict. I have friends that have a lot more depressive and anxiety issues than me and where they come from economically is a worse situation than me, or they've had to deal with prejudice. I have a lot of privilege in my life and [I was] just kind of recognizing that my own sense of burnout at that point felt so unearned. So that song is kind of trying to reconcile feeling so burnt out and so passive yet I feel like I haven't earned the right to be passive and burnt out, especially in this world that we live in where there's constantly something to fight for the better.
LUNA: How was it working with Melina Duterte and other collaborators on the record?
HOFFMAN: Melina Duterte is someone who I looked up to for a while before working with her. I'm a big Jay Som fan. I was in a spot where the record was done and it was tracked. I was mixing it and I felt like I mixed it up to best of my ability. But I liked the songs a lot. I felt like they hadn't quite reached their potential, especially some of the trickier ones to mix. I was struggling to find someone to help me out with it. I didn't really want to send it around to people that much and get rejections or whatever. [Melina and I] have some mutual friends, and I had this feeling that she would be the perfect person to mix it in, and help me get across the finish line. A friend of mine sent it to her, she dug it and really carved out time for it and was a big champion of the record… Immediately, we just became super good friends to the point of distraction, where we had to separate so that she could mix it and we wouldn't just bullshit (laughs)... She just did such a fabulous job with it and has been extremely supportive outside of mixing that record. So yeah, I'm a huge fan boy (laughs). She's fantastic. It was a really nice change of pace for me because I think before the pandemic I was supposed to work with some producers, and they would be musicians that I really admire but were kind of aloof dudes who were a little emotionally distant and [probably] just trying to make money, which is great, I would love to be in their position as well and I would do the same thing, but you can tell when someone's not super passionate about a project or something, [so] it is cool to have someone who was so down for the cause and also someone as talented as Melina. No one has an ear like hers.
One of the other big partners of the record was Rob Mills, who plays drums for French Cassettes and Tino Drima. I've known him for a while. During the pandemic — I can't remember if they built the studio before the pandemic or not — but he had a studio at the house that he was living in with his other band, Spooky Mansion. He was getting into doing drums remotely at the time. So I had all these tracks that I was recording to the drum machines, before I had the guts to annoy my neighbors by playing drums in my apartment (laughs). So I just sent it to him and everything that he sent back was what you hear on the record. I loved everything that he did. I would send the record to my friend, Louis, who plays some slide and keys on the record. Tyler is my bass player live. He sent in bass for “Out of the Running”, and my ex-neighbor Zuk plays guitar on that track… Another one of my other musical heroes, Seth Kaufman, who goes by Floating Action with his music, sent over a bunch of wonderful overdubs on “French Diseases of the Heart”. I'm a huge fan of his, too. Hearing his voice singing harmonies on my track was super surreal to me. It was a really fun collaborative process where it is my solo music, but whenever I collaborate with people I'm really lucky to know musicians that love what they do, and I love their instincts. So I would really trust them to come up with whatever they wanted to. And there would always be enough space for them to just do their thing.
LUNA: Apple Core is an expression of your hardships through the pandemic but carries a sense of hopefulness. The album was brought together beautifully — what made you feel ready to release it?
HOFFMAN: I was ready to put it out right as we were done mixing it, honestly. But I kind of got wrapped up in the waiting game that is kind of ubiquitous with releasing records. So I ended up putting an EP out before it and then putting this record out. I think when you finish a record, you're always super ready for it to be out the next day. If I could, I totally would, and I feel like in the future, sure, I might end up doing that more often — just finishing a project and putting it out later that month or something. I think it would be nice to kind of feel the relevance of something as it comes out. But luckily, these songs feel just as relevant to me now as when I finished them or when I wrote them, which is a rare experience. I still feel very represented by them. And I kind of knew when I was making the record that I was making something that celebrated my inner child and something that I would cherish to myself in a timeless way. So I'm just excited that it's coming out.
LUNA: You used a tape machine to record the album and did additional work in the studio. Take us through the creative process?
HOFFMAN: Before the pandemic, [I was] doing tons of recording in Pro Tools and was really comfortable with that. During the pandemic, as it kind of wore on, there was just way too much screen time, screen overload and news overload. I found myself really anxious about using it and being around any screen that could distract me from something, and I was really needing an escape from [it]. So the bulk of the recordings were me just sitting with a cassette tape machine on the floor, usually in my living room slash dining area. I would just set up a drum machine, play the bass, guitar, and vocals. Almost like a weird mantra flow state or something. It was very meditative to me. I wasn't really concerned about what it sounded like. I had to instinctually do all the technical aspects without really trying to steer it too much in any one direction. Just sort of let the tape saturation infect everything and make it sound warmer. But even when I got the big tape machine [or] when I would dump it into the computer and start tracking [to it], I would really limit myself and not stress about perfection. I just tried to get a good take in one or two takes and not worry about it at that point. I honestly felt like no one was ever going to hear it or I was pretty convinced that no one would listen to it or care.
So, really, [I was just playing] instead of getting into the uninspiring space when you're making a record and you're hoping someone is going to like it or listen to it, or they're going to be impressed by this bit or … by this production technique or whatever. I was really making what I thought was a derivative record for me. I wanted to derive everything from all of my [favorite bands] and just make a record that was a very comforting, warm blanket for me to listen to. So every step of the process, even though I tried to challenge myself in the songwriting or in performances, I never wanted to get into a headspace of “Is this streamable?” I just sort of went with the flow and used my little limited setup. Everything was relatively easy. I think it helped that it was all recorded in the same place, which was in my house. “NOTAFLOF,” for instance, I think I wrote and recorded it in the span of four hours. The recording that's on the record was recorded in this space… just following my instincts. Then I would kind of wake up from these fever dreams and this artifact would be there (laughs). And it sounded complete to me.
LUNA: In terms of some of the visuals, What inspired the album cover?
HOFFMAN: The album cover is a photo of me when I was 16 in my brother's Chrysler New Yorker at the time from, like, the late ’50s. It was such a beautiful car. I think that period of my life was the first time I was really coming into myself as a youth. I felt like I was making a record for that kid. So when I would put mixes up on SoundCloud to listen to in the car, I would use that image, and it just seemed very fitting to me. Even though I really didn't think it was going to be the final cover… The palette [of the record] is a mix of golds and browns. I feel like those are the colors that are in my head when I'm listening to the record — I think it's a very sepia tone record with little splashes of color. Currently, I’m working on a music video for “Song of Ignorance,” which my girlfriend and I… we've been doing these one long-take videos. For my EP A Flower from Behind, she did my video for “Like a Bird,” which was one long take, and that process of shooting a video was so fun and obviously very easy to edit. But also, it's front-loaded. All the work has to be done in front of the camera. You just do take after take until you get the right one. So I think that process is a lot more fitting for that for this record as well. So we're working on something for that.
It's been hectic trying to get visuals together at this crazy time right now. But I think, you know, better late than never — they will come together. So I'd like to lean into that, instead of making something super over the top and eye-catching… As much as I think I would love to benefit from that, the record isn’t that kind of record. I think it's a slow record. I think it's one that is meant to be listened to with intention. It isn't something that's super flashy. So I'm trying to sort of figure out how to represent that visually.
LUNA: I can't wait to see it! It all sounds so nice. Especially when you brought up the color palette for the visuals. It's perfect timing for the fall.
HOFFMAN: Right! I think it is the right season for it.
LUNA: You’ve had a few performances this summer — how was it performing live again?
HOFFMAN: It's been good! Shows have been really excellent in Los Angeles. I had a tour [where] I was gonna go [to] the West Coast that I had to pull out of because I couldn't after SXSW. I couldn't afford to do anything else. So I've been staying in LA, but luckily that's been a super supportive community of musicians down here. So I feel super at home down here and very fortunate to play with incredible acts that live around me. Right now, I'd love to tour as well, but sometimes it's hard to put yourself in a position to do that these days. But yeah, it felt really, really good. I'm doing a record release at the Moroccan lounge down here in LA [Nov. 10 with Alice Sandahl]. I'm also going to do a show in Portland, OR, where I lived for a while, on Oct. 26… I think people seem to be a lot more attentive these days. It's a lot easier to get people to pay attention, or they just seem ready to pay attention or participate or do whatever. I think a lot of people are still feeling that yearning for social interactions and music. It has always been a very communal thing rather than a product. So I'm happy that there's more communities that are popping up around.
LUNA: What brings you joy?
HOFFMAN: Oh man, that’s a hard question (laughs). It's hard not to resort to platitudes or whatever but I think that I definitely wouldn't choose to spend so much time on music if it wasn't the biggest source of joy in my life. But also, I've felt the weight of finding joy shifting to more mundane stuff over the years. Especially over the past couple years, where I really need to actively seek joy in daily experiences. For example, having a really early morning cup of coffee, watching a really stupid meme on YouTube in bed with my girlfriend, or rereading a really good book. I also have two cats and they help out a lot, if I'm being honest. My two little cats bring me a lot of joy. And of course, playing music, man (laughs).
LUNA: Awesome! That actually has been a common answer with this question. A lot of people have been learning to take joy in the simplicity of small things, which I think is great because I'm big on finding joy in the small things.
HOFFMAN: It’s like, you have to. You have to absorb those moments where you find that almost irrational sense of joy — when you're with a close friend or family member doing something, that's totally mundane (laughs). And you just realize now is now and things may change. You might not be around forever, they might not be around forever. There's a huge sense of the weight of the world sometimes. You just have to acknowledge [it] sometimes even if it makes you feel corny. I think it's important because if you're gonna be apathetic to that, then what's the point? If joy has to be a complicated, inaccessible experience, like climbing a mountain, you're gonna be constantly driven away from your own life and the people that you love.
LUNA: Question for fun: If you were a song, what would you be and why?
HOFFMAN: Oh, man! I feel like there's a cool answer (laughs). But I think the one that comes to mind is “Good Vibrations” by The Beach Boys because it was the first track that blew my mind as a kid. In terms of a recording, that blew me away. And I feel like as a Californian, I say “vibes” and “hella” way too much (laughs). As erudite as I'd like to think of myself, I think I say [those words] way too much for that to ever be possible. So maybe it's “Good Vibrations.”
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