Q&A: Tangerine on the key to bittersweetness with debut record
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY LENA FINE ☆
After a long and fruitful journey, Tangerine have finally released their debut album, You’re Still The Only One. The LA-based duo of Marika Justad and Toby Kuhn have brought over a decade of work and collaboration into the foreground. The record captures the bittersweet edges of what it means to grow and change and deal with grief while infusing it with warmth and sunshine.
Tangerine was encouraged by early successes, including frequent plays on KEXP, and touring with Bleachers. After the devastation of a family loss in 2019, Tangerine took on a slightly different shape, fully realized in You’re Still The Only One. The marriage of Justad’s tender and powerful songwriting prowess and Kuhn’s pop-driven and sparkly production expertise makes for an incredibly nuanced and rich listening experience. The record is the clear portrait of difficult growth marked by tragedy and how to work through the hard parts and reach something beautiful.
Fresh off the release of their debut record, Tangerine is also in the process of getting vinyls of You’re Still The Only One pressed, which will be their first physical release. We sat down with Tangerine to discuss the You’re Still The Only One and how years of work and change have finally – and thankfully – become realized and crystalized.
LUNA: Congratulations, first of all! I wanted to start specifically with one song, though I feel like this is a throughline on the record. “Over The Fence” reads like an epic poem; it feels like the guitar and the lyrics are in direct conversation. What was the writing process for this song?
TOBY KUHN: I love that that’s how you heard it, that’s a really special way to interpret it.
MARIKA JUSTAD: I think it’s very accurate, and I hadn’t thought of it that way because I do all the lyrics and melodies – sometimes, I’ll have guitar thoughts, but Toby’s like the guitar player, so it is kind of the two of us having this conversation. It’s not like the guitar’s just a texture for Tangerine, it’s very melodic and almost like another vocalist.
KUHN: In our writing process, sometimes Marika will come to me with a more full-formed song, I suppose, but in the case of “Over the Fence,” it was a very collaborative writing process and not us doing our own thing and then coming together.
JUSTAD: You wrote the bassline and then I wrote something over that.
KUHN: Yeah, and then it did just kind of go back and forth. So the writing was a conversation, too.
LUNA: It’s hard to achieve that in a collaborative writing process, so it’s cool that that worked and seems to be how it naturally happened. You guys have been at it for quite some time; it’s a beautiful thing to see a band change over time and maintain an earnest sound and love of music. How has the shift from being a multi-piece to a duo changed the music?
KUHN: Quite a bit!
JUSTAD: I think that that comes back to the conversation observation that you made, which is that it’s become much more of a dialogue creatively between two people. I feel like there was always an element of that in Tangerine between you and me being the primary songwriters.
KUHN: Yeah.
JUSTAD: It just became a lot more like, this is literally true now that it’s just the two of us. My sister, Miró, our longtime drummer, is no longer drumming with the band but we still love her. She shot all our press photos; she made the 3 videos for the album. So, that’s become a different kind of collaboration. But I think at first it was actually kind of hard, we definitely had a bunch of arguments because we’re both very strong-willed, opinionated people, and there’s no tie-breaker. So, we’re just, like, battling it out creatively.
KUHN: Sometimes we’ll bring in Miró for a tie-breaker.
JUSTAD: We did actually call her to break the tie on something the other day, and she didn’t side with me. I was annoyed because, traditionally, she and I always had the same opinion, but times have changed! It hasn’t been completely easy. We’re also in a relationship, we’re a couple, so I feel like that dialogue just gets turned up and it’s this very intense, very fruitful collaboration, but there’s a lot of emotions.
KUHN: There are times when we’re arguing about something that has to do with music and it’s like, “man, wouldn’t it be nice if music and our relationship were completely separate.”
JUSTAD: But we just love making music together. The collaboration ultimately feels so natural, so we just get back to it.
LUNA: Is there something that’s almost more satisfying about it when it does work because it is a product of both music, work, and love?
KUHN: I think so.
JUSTAD: We’ve been collaborating for so long, so it’s almost just second nature to us. I do feel like we have a very intuitive understanding of each other and what the other likes or wants. I feel like I’m too deep in it, it’s just very natural to us. Of course, it’s become more crystalized by being in a group without other people, but, if anything, this needed to happen. We needed to have this album to be able to finally have this conversation musically together and, ultimately, yes it’s very satisfying.
KUHN: Yeah, it’s really fun. It was a really fun period of time where it was just our whole life together. It took a while but it was personally really fun for me because I got to do everything.
JUSTAD: Toby did all the production. He engineered, mixed, mastered, and played every instrument except for – I played acoustic guitar in “Thieves” and “Arizona.” So, I think that was really fun for you.
KUHN: Right, so I suppose this is not a new experience for you because you’ve always been in the role that you’re in currently, which is writing the songs. For me, it was a blossoming of doing all this stuff and it being a really special and intimate project for us in that way.
LUNA: That seems like a natural realization of things when it does become much more focused just being two people, additionally being in a relationship – it makes sense that it feels that way. Speaking of “Arizona,” I really love that song and had noticed there are a lot of allusions to travel and leaving home in the pursuit of something else, especially with “Arizona” and “Lonely Ride.” Was this something that was on your mind writing the album?
JUSTAD: I think first of all, and I don’t think this is very unique, but I always want to write the kind of song that people want to listen to on a really long drive by themselves. That’s why “Timeless” is the first track, because to me I just picture an open highway when I hear that song. For those two songs you mentioned, it’s funny because they are both about leaving, but one is kind of about seeking refuge in something. “Arizona” is about a fear of change and turmoil and wanting to go to a place that feels very eternal to me – my family used to go to the Southwest a lot when I was a kid and I feel like, literally just the landscape out there looks very unchanged, eternal, you can see the shape of the Earth. That song’s about seeking comfort in that. “Lonely Ride” is more, I’m paraphrasing the line that I repeat but, that it’s really hard to walk away from something that is not necessarily bad but is just not fully right. That’s more about having faith and stepping into the unknown, which is a very different emotion, actually. I think that those songs kind of represent me being caught between those two feelings of wanting safety and realizing that life is about change and that you can’t control it. A subliminal lyrical thing in all my work is wanting to be able to control fate or outcomes and not being able to.
LUNA: It’s really interesting that you can have these two songs that are saying really different things but have the throughline of going somewhere to achieve either feeling.
So much of the album is informed and inspired by nature – can you speak more on this? How did you find yourself so connected to nature?
JUSTAD: I didn’t realize that was a theme until I sat down and had to describe and try to crystalize the feeling of each track. The album is kind of wrestling with some existential themes, although you would really have to want to listen to the lyrics to pick up on that because I think it still has this breezy, indie pop sheen to it that I love and is very Tangerine. I think that’s always been very Tangerine, to have lyrics that are actually really sad or bittersweet with music that feels very sparkly, for lack of a better word. I love that combination. I don’t always want to hit people over the head with things, I want to let them discover the layers. The nature theme, to me, kind of just tied in with exploring existential themes because we are animals and we are part of something that we don’t really understand, and I think that accepting the facts of life including beauty and death and grief, which is what I was going through when writing this. I think there’s something about watching the cycle of that play out in nature that feels, I don’t want to say comforting, but it resonates. I think that’s just kind of always on my mind. One of the first songs I ever wrote about grief was when my mom passed away in 2014, which again is a very sugary, fun, breezy bop called “Tidal Wave,” which is not online right now. When my mom passed away, I kept having all the recurring dreams of a tidal wave. I think it was me realizing this awe-inspiring force of nature that’s scary but it’s natural and you can’t fight it. I think that’s been a little thread that’s maybe been in my work for a long time but I hadn’t really analyzed it.
LUNA: Obviously, everything in nature feels so much bigger than us, because it’s outside. Especially with you talking about your dream, it makes sense that everything that’s inside becomes superimposed on what’s outside and that becomes the easiest way to capture it. You guys are originally from Seattle. Obviously, there’s been a lot of other changes in the history of Tangerine, but how did the change in landscape from there to LA inform the music?
KUHN: I feel like Seattle is a really awesome music scene to be a part of and to come up in. There was something really refreshing about the different vibe down here. It feels a little bit more, not pop-centered but pop-accepting.
JUSTAD: I think in the beginning, in Seattle, we had a bit of a complex. We were like “sorry, guys, we do really love pop melodies even if we’re a garage rock band.” I think a lot of people in the Seattle music scene were transplants from other places who really found themselves there and came alive. Everyone in the band at that time was born and raised in Seattle and were living either at home or 5 minutes from where we had grown up. I think we needed to do that, also. Seattle is really amazing, but we’re from there. For me, it was like, we needed to go somewhere new, feel that discomfort, feel that excitement, and start over. To feel inspired.
LUNA: That’s also a huge testament to the importance of a local music scene. Being able to come up in a place you’re actually from and get so much out of it and then have that natural desire to go to a place where the music you actually really want to play is a bit more of the standard.
JUSTAD: Yeah, it’s not at all like, “we used up Seattle and now we gotta move on, we got everything we need!” It was more just like, this is our journey and we really want to feel excited and we need to leave home. The Seattle scene is honestly amazing with the infrastructure it has – things like KEXP, stuff that can really support small bands. Naturally, it’s just gonna be more exciting if you move there from somewhere else.
LUNA: Do you guys feel, especially now with this project being finished in one way, do you feel that excitement about where you are now and where you’re going?
KUHN: Yeah!
JUSTAD: I love LA! It’s hard to imagine living anywhere else, at this point; and that’s not even career-specific, I just really like this city. A lot of people don’t like LA and don’t get it. We’re not gonna justify it, we just love it.
KUHN: I agree. I’m also doing a bit more production and engineering outside the scope of Tangerine and, you know, you just meet musicians everywhere here and it’s a great place to be connected in that way.
JUSTAD: It’s a good place to be creative. I feel like I stumbled into work here that I wouldn’t have necessarily found back home. I was doing personal assisting work in the art and music sphere in a way that was actually very rewarding and exciting, I really enjoyed it. I just feel like there’s always some sort of strange opportunity in LA that just suddenly will fall into your lap if you go down the right path. I think that’s very inspiring.
LUNA: There’s almost a serendipity to it. Going back to something you said earlier, I wanted to talk about the writing and the production and how they exist together. You talked about how so many of the songs focus on heavier topics lyrically, how do you get to that point of bringing those subjects into bright spaces in terms of sound?
JUSTAD: I have this quote in my head from someone, I think it was one of my parents, they said something like, “sometimes people who are really sad write the sweetest songs.” Because something has this charm or this lift doesn’t mean it’s shallow or that this person hasn’t lived through quite a lot. Sometimes they want to bring some beauty into the world, at that point. I think that definitely has always resonated with me. I also think with Tangerine, there’s this alchemy that happened with the band in the early years. We had our bassist, Ryan Baker, we had Toby on guitar. All of us were deeply melodic people. Me and Ryan would be shredding these melodies and then you’d come in with so many guitars, like 4 riffs and hooks, and so much melody. I love a good melody, I love pop music even if that’s not what I ultimately make. That was just our musical chemistry. The lyrics are gonna just come out how they come out. Over the years, my lyrics have changed because there is something psychological about it for me. I always felt like I was writing for a group, so there was this thing like, this isn’t supposed to completely be my internal monologue. Looking back, sometimes I think the lyrics are good but not really me. I think maybe just because it’s become a smaller project, I naturally feel like the lyrics became more personal, as if you’re hearing one person speak to you. Ilove that juxtaposition, that’s very evocative to me. I love sad music, I love sad songs that are very obviously sad.
KUHN: I feel like I’m not as crazy about obviously sad songs.
JUSTAD: Sometimes the saddest songs, to me, are when you realize there’s a little bit of bittersweetness to them. Not just hitting you over the head with it. I just think that’s more profound, because life is always more than one thing at once. I keep coming back to the word bittersweet, it’s not all bad and it’s not all good. That’s the Tangerine dichotomy!
LUNA: It’s really nice when it can be surprising in that way. There’s something really rich to that bittersweetness, which I think you guys have been really successful in achieving, especially with this record.
