Q&A: Rubber Band Gun Hits The Jackpot on Studio Masterpiece “Cashes Out”
LABEL MACHINE MUSIC- As Rubber Band Gun, Kevin Basko previously released albums about Spider-Man, baseball, and a heroic dog named Napoleon. The one constant is a commitment to worldbuilding: when you press play, you’re beginning a journey (both sonic and narrative). In 2019, Kevin embarked on his most ambitious project yet, RBG25, a quest to release 25 records in a year. Cashes Out was recorded during that time with contributions from Jonathan Rado, Sam France, Michael and Brain D'Addario (The Lemon Twigs), Jackie Cohen, and Johnny Costa. True to his typical process, Cashes Out was recorded in only a week with minimal demos prepared beforehand. They allowed instinct and strength of collaboration to shape the record.
Cashes Out has a Vegas polish, layers of piano and guitar interweave in stereo. Basko’s lyrics recall the do-or-die mentality of Born to Run-era Springsteen. He and his team are playing with everything they’ve got as if it's an encore on the last night they’ll ever take a stage. The sound is a new direction for Basko; “Like That” is poppier than any song in the RBG catalog, driven by a drum loop and earworm chorus. The affinity for cinematic characters is still present, look at the lazy-eyed lady on the slot machine who occupies the first verse of the title track. “Fear” is a standout, a mid-tempo crooner that doesn’t stop building until the players are on overdrive and Basko’s vocals turn into a scream.
You can never quite tell how many instrument tracks are happening at once, they interweave and solo, recalling the recording technique,“Wall of Sound,” throughout. Rado’s production allows the vibrancy of its recording process to play out in front of your ears. The main character this time isn’t a trope or construct, but instead a version of Basko himself, going into a studio (then label) with nothing but a handful of ideas and a dream. Sometimes betting all in pays off.
Below we talk to Basko about Cashes Out’s concept, storytelling in music and the benefits of having a high quantity of releases. Cashes Out is streaming now.
LUNA: Is Cashes Out part of RBG 25?
BASKO: It’s a little bit of a grey area. It was recorded during the 25 challenge, but it obviously came out much later.
LUNA: Is that why you choose this one to have a vinyl release and be highlighted?
BASKO: The idea behind this record was to kind of put something into the machine, so to speak. I think of it as far as putting a penny in one of those zoo squishing penny machines that turns into a lion or animal. That’s kind of the idea. I’d been releasing stuff independently to my Bandcamp for almost seven years with RBG. I knew that I wanted to make something that was a little more part of the system that was churning out records at a slower rate... I wanted to put my feet in that water slowly to see what it was like… It was almost in a sense trying to make something that was quote-unquote, “accessible,” and that was on the nose behind a lot of lyrics, behind the themes, behind the way we recorded it. It’s a little bit more modern than some of the stuff we’ve done before.
LUNA: Who were you listening to while making this album?
BASKO: I’ve always been a little bit of an Old Head… There’s some Billy Joel kind of stuff in there… I’ve been a huge Springsteen fan for a long time. Me and Rado...we’re on the same page with the direction. We did this record really quickly like a lot of the albums from the 25 and before that, which is kind of funny why it took so long to come out because we recorded it in probably about a week… I remember talking about MIA at one point for some of the sounds. There’s a weird mix of things we kind of messed with… In 2018, I did this writing exercise where I tried to write as many songs a day as I could for three weeks. I ended up coming up with about 50 demos... (“Cashes Out”) was the only track that made it through. The intent was to write a bunch of tracks to bring to Rado to try to make something… that labels would understand how to market. Again the idea being that it’s not like a desperate attempt, this is my last swing, this is my final dance, ya know… it was a little more, the fascination with the record industry and labels and having not really had a good run of that, just wanted to try to see what that process was like. Which is very much what this record is about and in my opinion, sounds like.
LUNA: What appeals to you about releasing tons of records instead of heavily curating?
BASKO: I released a lot of music when I was in high school, I was in a bunch of bands. I feel like my whole RBG career in a way is trying to make up for releases I made when I was younger. It’s almost like I’m trying to bury them, in a sense. I’m trying to prove my younger musical endeavors weren’t what I think represents my taste or what I do. I was heavily influenced by people who put out sometimes three to four records a year. People don’t really do that anymore. They get stuck in the album cycle and they get stuck in the gears that are turning. When I was in music school, a lot of people would take a long time releasing things. They would really sit with it to the point where 1. they hated it, and 2. they were getting away from where they started and the kind of spontaneity and life that comes with the recording process.
LUNA: I guess nothing is stopping you from releasing a new album tomorrow.
BASKO: I like putting things out quickly. It's been a little bit of a weird thing with this record having to wait on things. You don't want to second guess yourself. I think a lot of times if you put it out, it’s not gonna define your whole life. It's defining you, the way you are now. That's an important distinction to not put everything into one album and try to completely sum up your life's work and perspective. I love finding artists with an immense discography to dig through- how have I not heard of this person? Someone like R. Stevie Moore. The idea that you find this artist and you're like, “oh my god there's 60, 70 records to dig through.” To me, that's a fun way to jump into the world of an artist. Can be kind of a rare thing but when you find it, it certainly can grab you. Because there’s something there you’re gonna like. Usually, if you're putting out that much stuff, there's something there you're gonna like.
LUNA: Many of your releases are concept albums. What appeals to you about that specifically?
BASKO: When I started making albums with RBG, that was what I thought set me apart from my contemporaries... I've always been a big fan of telling stories and characters. When I was writing the first couple records, I was trying to write screenplays and stuff too. I wanted to tell stories… I was studying Joseph Campbell... You really don't have that clock journey, where there's like 12 steps. You have it in movies, in TV shows, you have that in books, but you don't really have that in music. A lot of albums are 10-12 songs, which feels very cyclical. There’s a step motion to that in the same way as there's steps in the hero's journey. I was really fascinated by that when I wrote my albums like Girl Cop!... I tried to actually make the song structure, especially the order of songs, following in the same way that a play might… it feels like there's more world there than you hear, so it leaves more up to the imagination to figure out who's that character that he's talking about. There's a lot in there that I didn't really go into further, in-depth, but I've written down a lot of info for that record.
LUNA: Will there be a sequel to Girl Cop! maybe?
BASKO: Yeah, I've always thought about it. I was joking about it with Rado a long time ago. Maybe one day… I want to revisit that material because there's a lot of stuff I wrote down that I touched on briefly that would be cool in a bigger, more canon, there's a lot more there that can be delved into. Girl Cop! was ironically supposed to be similar to Cashes Out... my attempt at making something... I thought hadn't really been done. There weren't too many modern rock musicals that felt fleshed-out… And that record, I always joked, even though at the time I wanted it to be on a label, that record was 100% for me. That was for a person like me and for me and Cashes Out was kind of the opposite. In a sense, I wanted to make something the machine would like… a little bit winking at it but the idea being that I wasn't going to push buttons song-form-wise and melody-wise. I wanted it to grab people in a way that was traditionally accessible, in my view of things, how I thought a robot might enjoy certain songs. If anything my appeal is the diversity, the different sounds, different stylings. I quite honestly believe there's one song for everybody in my catalog.
LUNA: Was Cashes Out recorded analog?
BASKO: All recorded analog except some vocals later on… We did one song a day and then at the end of day we bounced everything off the tape machine into the computer… I didn't do any crazy messing with the stuff that Rado got. It’s all print to tape and produced by him... That's all his studio in LA. It certainly has that classic Rado quality, kind of bombastic and has a lot of life. There isn't too much down-tempo stuff. It’s all pretty bombastic.
LUNA: I love your production work on this year’s Little Errands by Jake Elijah. What does the process for you recording other artists look like?
BASKO: Jake hit me up at the end of 2019 to record in January 2020… He was great, he came up with his brother; we did stuff for a week… We hit it pretty quickly. His songs were really great, a lot of them were just voice memos if not very bare demos. Which is how I like to do it because it gives me the freedom… it’s not as fun when someone comes in with a track and they have like 20 instruments on it and it’s essentially making a more analog version of what they did. Which I understand, I want to execute the artist's vision but a lot of the best stuff I’ve made is when we're making it together and collaborating in a creative way… Some of the most interesting and creative stuff is when they come in with a melody and chords and everything else is in the moment, on the spot. Trying to really figure out what it needs as a team… I’d rather surprise them with what they didn't know they could do or didn’t know they wanted vs them just checking off instruments on their agenda. The Jake Elijah record, we were able to do a lot on the spot and figure it out. That record plays really well because every song has the context of the other songs to make it different both arrangement-wise, production-wise, they all kind of fit in their own little world so when you listen to it through it’s not too much of the same thing… They each had their own context because we built it up together, so I think that's a really strong part of that record.
LUNA: After an accessible record, “Catches A Trout” is an experimental freakout ending. Where did that come from?
BASKO: That was just the end of “Be Together.” Classic those boys, both the Twigs and Rado, they just kept playing. They did that on a couple songs, they did that on “Fear” too. You can't stop those guys from playing, they're so good. At the end of “Be Together,” they just kept going. I remember what happened specifically, Micahel was laying down guitar- one of my favorite things on Cashes Out is Michael’s electric guitar on “Be Together”... there’s so much life in his guitar playing and real heart in it. I think it was a first take... He didn't really know the song in the way that we didn't work out what he's gonna play. He played drums, then we did the live track, then he overdubbed this electric guitar. I listened to that on a solo track and it is so- he’s just got so much life in his playing and so much energy. He’s brilliant. I mean they're all brilliant. That guitar part specifically really brought it up. Then he just kept playing after “Be Together” was ending and Rado was messing with the tape machine speed.
LUNA: On “Fear” that outro wasn’t coordinated?
BASKO: There’s a whole jazz outro that’s not planned. That was just the boys having fun, and kept going. Again we did this all really quickly; I kept my hands off in terms of production, a lot of ideas. Frankly, a lot of the songs didn't have concrete melodies and stuff written out yet. So sometimes the frustrating part was trying to write around that from the boy’s perspective, and from everyone's perspective, trying to make the song without knowing what the melody is. Which is kind of hard. Especially “Fear,” that was the case. There weren't any lyrics, I think I had a general melody, I was humming it to Michael... and “Fear” just kept going… At the end of the day, these guys just love to play. We didn't really have many set rules... Most of the songs have some kind of elongated outro because, ya know, we were having a lot of fun.
LUNA: Do you have any future plans to work with Rado or Lemon Twigs?
BASKO: I helped a little on The Twig’s new album. I played some guitar and helped engineer a couple tracks and their album is phenomenal, as always. I have this new album I did here in Philly. I tried to do a couple different things with that. It’s kind of a summer album and it’s a little bit of a bummer that it took me so long because it feels like it maybe would have hit a little harder in the summer… My last full-length record was last October and for me... it feels like a long time between records. I like putting out a couple a year. Cashes Out still came out but I'm used to updating people a little more on what I’m doing in terms of new material and stuff. So I'm excited to put this new thing out.
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