Q&A: The Ophelias Walk Through a 'Spring Grove' of Past Lives
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY SYDNEY LITTLE ☆
Photo by Frances Weger
THE OPHELIAS RETURN WITH A HAUNTING REFLECTION ON LOSS AND GROWTH — Lead singer and songwriter Spencer Peppet found the ghosts of old relationships at every turn. Haunted by vivid dreams and resurging conversations with people she hadn’t spoken to in years, she turned to songwriting to explore the conversations she couldn’t have. Spring Grove, named after a Cincinnati cemetery, explores the nuanced feelings of losing friends, grappling with her sense of self, and coming to terms with the present.
Spring Grove surges with a cinematic sound, powered by Andrea Gutmann Fuentes’s dynamic violin. Peppet’s introspective lyricism immerses fans in her personal journey and allows them to reflect on the figures haunting their own lives. The album rings with Peppet’s compassion for her subjects, especially towards herself. Despite the difficult feelings explored throughout the album, Peppet ends at a place of freedom. Now, as The Ophelias prepare for their upcoming tour, she’s excited to celebrate by playing these songs with her friends and being in community with queer and trans audiences.
Read below to learn more about the process of making Spring Grove, filming and directing music videos, and how The Ophelias have evolved over four albums.
LUNA: You’ve described the album’s sound as “movie music.” Can you speak more about how you developed this sound or what inspired it?
PEPPET: Our bassist, Jo, who’s also my partner, is a filmmaker. She went to school for film and has made two features, and I did the score for the features. A lot of our work pulls from this cinematic universe that already exists. I also think the violin lends itself to this big, cathartic orchestral sound. It’s a dramatic instrument, it can do a lot of things, and it can increase the drama to create a world. I like the idea of creating worlds with music, so that’s what “movie music” is trying to do.
LUNA: Have you always had a violin in the band?
PEPPET: Yes! The band started in high school, which is crazy, considering our violinist is now getting her PhD. When we were seniors in high school, I sent a Facebook message to our old bassist, our drummer, Mic, and our violinist, Andrea. I asked if they wanted to play in a band together, and they said yes. We had one practice, and we wrote the entire first album in that first practice.
We all knew each other through the other teen bands in the scene, and everybody played in different bands. The first band that I was ever in had a cello! I love string instruments. I played stand-up bass in middle school, and I was really, really bad at it, like last chair in the middle school orchestra kind of bad. I've always loved music with strings in it, and I had a friend who was down to play, and now here we are many, many years later.
LUNA: You and your fiance co-direct your music videos! How does the experience of directing affect your creative process?
PEPPET: Jo and I have been together for eight years now, so I've become very attuned to her process. Obviously, my main way of expressing ideas and feelings is through music, and Jo's is through film. We've really lucked out having Jo in the band because she brings all of her film knowledge to the process of making music videos.
One thing that she's always said that I feel like I've been saying recently is that music videos are the last form of widely accessible experimental filmmaking. A lot of people are not actively going to seek out experimental films unless they have a movie theater nearby that plays experimental films, or a subscription to Criterion. For a lot of people, music videos are something that’s already part of their music consumption, so being able to include experimental aspects is a really exciting and cool way to keep that tradition alive. Jo is really into trying to do homages to their favorite filmmakers.
We’re both very into horror movies. Fun fact, I actually grew up without TV or movies. I didn't watch TV or movies for real until I was 18. My parents lied and told us the TV didn’t work. Meanwhile, Jo’s dad was a local TV critic, so we're coming at it from two different perspectives. I think that there are a lot of really interesting things going on in the horror genre currently. For example, when we were doing the “Salome” music video, we were thinking a lot about the biblical story of Salome, all of the art that has been created from that story, including a lot of really beautiful movies, plays, and paintings, and also the traditions of the horror movie genre. We tried to follow some of those. There’s a classic horror trope with chase scenes of having the villain walking while the person being chased is running.
LUNA: You just released the music video for Salome, which you shot at a cave that was originally built by the oldest American doomsday cult. How did you choose that location, and what was the filming experience?
PEPPET: Jo found it on Atlas Obscura. We went one weekend to scout it out. In that time in between, I read about it, and we brought an offering when we went to film, because I wanted to be careful and respectful. The cult lived there back in the 1600s. This little cave is like last remaining structure, but it used to be a whole set of much larger structures that they built. They're called The Society of the Woman of the Wilderness, which is in reference to one of the women in the Book of Revelations when the apocalypse comes.
LUNA: You’ve mentioned a few biblical references. Is that something that you pull inspiration from?
PEPPET: I went to Catholic elementary school and Catholic high school. My parents are not Catholic. I am not especially religious, neither are my parents. My sister is currently in divinity school so she's doing her own thing, but it's not even especially religious in the classical sense. I'm really interested in the kind of imagery that the bible provides. I think that it's a great source for weird images and a not-so-great source for laws.
LUNA: With this being your fourth album, how has the band evolved since your first?
PEPPET: Well, Mic is a dude now (laughs). It’s crazy having a man in the band now. We’re just like “That's our number one guy.” Jo joined the band in between Almost and Crocus. I think we're all just more settled in ourselves. When I listen to our old albums, I can hear a lot of nerves, and I can hear a lot of that young 20s and late teens insecurity. A lot of those songs are about feeling freaked out and bad. I remember feeling that way, and of course, I still feel that way sometimes. Using songwriting as a processing tool is one of the coolest things in the world, but I feel like it's just a little bit of a different emotional experience now. I'm honestly pretty grateful to have a musical record of those years because I do feel different now. You know, I feel like a more crystallized version of myself, and I appreciate and am thankful for young, scattered Spencer.
LUNA: It’s interesting to look back at your music as a relic of who you were at the time.
PEPPET: It’s interesting and weird knowing that people might just know that version of me. There are people that I knew only at that one time, which, of course, I think happens to most people. For example, you have friends one year of college that you're not friends with a couple years of down the line for whatever reason. But also with that, someone could stumble across one of our songs on a playlist, and that song is the only piece of me that they know. Meanwhile, it's the most scattered, least accurate to now version.
LUNA: What was it like working with Julien Baker as a producer for this album? This isn’t the first time you’ve worked together—how has your professional relationship evolved?
PEPPET: We met several years ago when we played at a small venue in Nashville. It turned out that the person who was working doors had recommended that she come check us out. We got to talking at the merch table and exchanged contact information. In 2020 when we were working on our record Crocus, I got in touch with her to ask her to sing on one of the songs. It was such an easy, seamless process.
A week or two later, her manager called me and said that she wanted to produce our next record. Of course, I said yes! I sent her a Google drive full of songs, she picked her favorites, and then we did a rank-choice voting system with the band. We ended up with 13 songs on this record, and she had a hand in picking all of them. We recorded in Memphis, and it was amazing. She is so attentive, holistic, and very thoughtful about everything. She's incredibly smart, so she's thinking about very small details like one specific harmony in one specific line of a song, but then also within the context of the song, and then the record as a whole. That was very inspiring, and I still think about a lot of the advice that she gave on this record and about music as a whole.
LUNA: You’ve said that there are no breakup songs on this album. Do you feel that there’s an expectation to write about romantic relationships? If so, how do you grapple with that?
PEPPET: I think people often tend to ascribe songs about loss to romance. I think it’s because often, romantic relationships can cause the most intense feelings of loss. I was interested in almost giving the same amount of weight and gravity to those other types of relationships and the emotional impact that they have. A romantic breakup isn’t part of my life currently, but I was still feeling those very intense emotions of loss and grief. I was processing a lot of changes, and I think that can feel like a breakup.
Also, some of the relationships that are explored in this album are not as easily defined. A lot of these songs aim to kind of parse, or dig through the weird, dense emotions that come along with that kind of loss, regardless of whether or not it's romantic. I also think that people can assign their own meaning to the songs. The album sort of stops being mine as soon as it's in the world, so if someone listens to “Cumulonimbus” and resonates with it as a breakup songs because that’s what they’re going through, that’s good with me.
LUNA: What can you share about the experience of making music as a band with queer and trans members? How do these identities shape your work or your experiences?
PEPPET: I think it's tough because on the one hand, you want your work to speak for itself. On the other hand, when there's so much active persecution against trans people, especially, and then also queer people, I think it is important to be loud about it, and to show that we're still here. It’s also great to create a physical space for queer and trans people with our shows. I think that being able to be in a room surrounded by other queer and trans people is important. Isolation keeps people separated, obviously, and I think a lot of republicans are relying on isolation to make them seem scarier. Being in community with people is a salve to that.
LUNA: I’m interested in how you talk about the body, especially on “Forcefed.” Can you elaborate on the ideas that song explores about having a body, particularly a female body?
PEPPET: Forcefed is definitely one of the most vulnerable songs that I have put into the world. I think a lot of it is stuff that I wouldn't normally say, and a lot of the subject matter often gets handled in a way that is both reductive and feminized. A lot of what I was trying to do there is just to explain how gross it feels. There's a slimy, gross underbelly of that feeling. That song aims to explain the undercurrent of the feeling, rather than just “This sucks. Having a body and having a female body and having a sick female body sucks,” because of course, that exists, and then there's all the stuff underneath that feeling.
LUNA: You’re about to head out on tour, and you just announced your openers. I love that you have local bands opening in each city! What are you most looking forward to with this upcoming tour?
PEPPET: A lot of them are our friends! A lot of them are people that we love and like to play with and wanted to celebrate with, because we wanted these shows to feel very celebratory, like party vibes. Most of these folks are people that we've known for a very long time, and then a couple of them are people that we are newer friends with, and whose music I really love.
Spring Grove is out April 4, and you can catch The Ophelias on tour from April 4 through May 14.
