Like all of your previous albums, you recorded Middle Spoon at New Monkey Studio with Greg Cortez. How did your creative partnership with Greg begin? What keeps you coming back to this studio?

Greg: When we were talking about where to record the first album I was like, “You know where it would be cool to do this? New Monkey because it was Elliott Smith’s studio”. We’re all Elliott Smith fans and there’s still all his gear in there so it really has this special DIY magic to it. Greg runs the studio and is the house engineer so going into it we were like, “Oh yeah, this will be fun to do here”.

Around LA there are some studios with instruments but there are a lot without them because people bring their own stuff, especially if they’re a famous artist like, “I don’t want to use house gear, I want to use my own things". It is a place where not only is there house gear but the house gear itself is very magical. That’s one of those things that keeps us coming back. We get to use Elliott’s Trident A-Range mixing console and his Fairchild compressors and his piano. We can take a nap on his couch.

Mandy: And his harmonicas!

Greg: Yeah! On this record, we used his harmonicas. [laughs] There’s a box that says “Elliott’s harmonicas” or “E’s harmonicas” or something like that. We were honking on those harmonicas on “Wind Is Gone”. We were literally inhaling ancient Elliott Smith spit when we were playing those. So yeah, very special.

Greg really became a part of the workflow and how we make a record. He came to understand our shorthand for how we like things. When we say, “We want this to sound bad” or “We want this to sound too loud” or “We want this to sound annoying”, I think he knows what we mean and knows how to deliver it whereas Producer X or Engineer Y might just be like, “Uhhhhh….”

[laughter]

Middle spoons show up in the lyrics for “Wind Is Gone” and “Content Baby”. What is a middle spoon? Did the lyrics or the album title come first?

Greg: The lyric came first. The middle spoon is between the other spoons.

How would you describe your songwriting process?

Mandy: Greg and I will text each other like, “Do you want to write today?” and we normally say yes. [laughs] Then we go to our practice space and have a chat with each other about what’s going on that day or that week or how we’re doing. We have a little bit of a friend catch-up and touch base. Then we get to “What music are you listening to? What are you feeling?” We might listen to that song one person has been listening to to get inspired by it. We just plug in and jam together for a little bit until we come up with something that sounds fun and that we’re both like, “Yeah! Let’s build a song off whatever riff that was!” We’ll randomly start adding stuff. We’ll do the groove first, write the music, then do the lyrics and backing vocals.

We do it very quickly and try not to be too precious about it so it stays fun and you’re not beating a song to death. It comes out in a fun way and an unexpected way instead of in a way where it’s overthought. Same thing with the way we record it. We record it really quick. We don’t do too many takes. We do maybe 3-5 takes of whatever it is and pick the best one and move on. Everything has a sense of being new and doesn’t feel like it’s been overworked. I think that’s very purposeful in the way we write our songs.

What helps you protect the fun?

Greg: I think we just try to listen to our initial instincts of, “This seems like it’ll be fun” or “This seems like it’ll be annoying or a hassle” and just not do the things that seem annoying or like a hassle. We’ve all been in a lot of bands. [laughs] I think when you’re younger in a band sometimes you’re like, “Oh, that seems annoying or weird but I’m going to do it because I think that I need to for some reason. There’s some benefit even though at face value it doesn’t seem that great”. I think we’ve all learned through trial and error - especially error - that a lot of times when you do the thing that you know is stupid, you feel stupid about it and it doesn’t get you anything that you were hoping to get out of it. I think that we try to stay cognizant of how important it is for us to be having fun and how that’s more important than doing a thing we “need" to do.

All those things build up and you realize you haven’t done what you want to do because you’re always doing what you “should” be doing.

Greg: Yeah. Even if you’re only doing stuff you don’t like 10% of the time, the amount of your brain that 10% takes up turns out to be an extremely huge amount and ultimately corrodes your relationship to the work and to the project and to the people you work with. I think we have the benefit of doing this long enough that we’re just like, “First off, let’s have fun making music with our friends and everything else can follow that”.

Speaking of making music with your friends, this is the most collaborative Cheekface album. There are so many guest musicians including McKinley Dixon, Jeff Rosenstock, Salome Hajj, Barry Fowler, Brittany and Tim of Catbite, and JER. How did you decide who to work with?

Greg: It kind of came up through each of the songs. As we were doing ska songs for the record we were like, “We need ska people who add the real sauce; the people who live it and breathe it”. That’s why Catbite and JER are on the record. They are people we know are awesome at it and we asked them and they said yes. Jeff was the other way around. I think I tweeted out, “Does anyone play bari sax?” He texted me and was like, “Hey, I play bari sax! I’m pretty good at it”. I never would have thought to ask him, honestly, but he volunteered himself and that was really cool. I was like, “Ok, I’m going to send you this part and it’s the simplest part ever, it’s one note”. [laughs] And he crushed it, of course. There were other referrals from friends.

We knew McKinley was a fan of ours and when we were working on “Military Gum” there was this extended instrumental part in the middle section so we were like, “What are we going to do there?” As we were sitting in the studio talking about it, I was like, “You know what, it’s either going to be a synthesizer solo or it’s gonna be a guest verse from McKinley Dixon for some reason!” I just DMed the song to McKinley and was like, “Hear me out here, this is a very esoteric moment on the album but if you wanted to give us 16 bars, I think it would sound fantastic. But also if you think it’s too weird, absolutely no offense if you don’t wanna do it”. He DMed back a few minutes later and was like, “Sounds cool, I’m in!” Then he flipped the verse back to us in a couple days and it sounds like it sounds on the record. It’s fucking awesome. McKinley is a rapper without peers. He’s an extremely talented artist and it’s very cool to have him on the record just personally as a fan. When he comes in I’m like the Elmo with the fire GIF.

[laughter]

In “Don’t Dream” you have the “pick it up” section. What inspired that?

Mandy: Well, we’ve done that before. We did it on Too Much To Ask.

Greg: We did it in “Pledge Drive”.

Mandy: As far as “pick it up” and ska, I love any rhythmic vocal that goes in spaces, similar to bass. Anything that has a syncopation. With ska I love the back screams when everyone’s like, “Pick it up!” It also engages the audience; everyone wants to say, “Pick it up!” [laughs]

Greg: Also, me and Mandy like ska and maybe Echo.

Echo: I also like ska, for the record. [laughs]

Greg: When I was a literal child, ska had a moment in the spotlight. So it was in the sonic wallpaper of growing up where every TV commercial or bumper music in a TV show would have some ska horns or something. It’s very embedded in what music sounds like to me. We listen to it, like we’ll put on The Specials in the van and stuff like that. It made sense as we were just vibing to it to incorporate it into what we were doing.

I think specifically with “Don’t Dream”, the Sublime-like Southern California ska-punk thing was cooked into the song even though the original idea wasn’t all ska. Then it was like, “Oh yeah, we can incorporate this sound that’s both in the wallpaper of my growing up and also regionally of where we are based”. Ska’s not native to Southern California but that particular sound is very, very tightly related to Southern California. It gave us a sense of place to be in a little bit of tradition of being from here.

What was the original idea for the song?

Greg: I think we had gone between both a ska feel and a straight-ahead strumming rock feel. It was the rock feel for most of the song and then it dropped into the ska breakdown.

Mandy: The song I think started as the ska breakdown, it was all ska. Then we smushed it just to the breakdown. [laughs]

Greg: Yeah, that’s true. We’ll have to unearth the original ska version.

Mandy: Yeah!

There’s a bunch of different references on the album including to Joseph D’Lacey’s book Meat on “Flies”. How did that particular reference come about? Do you have a reference on the album that you’re proudest of?

Greg: Some of those very specific references are observed things. [laughs] I’m pretty sure I was sitting in front of the library and someone walked out with two copies of Meat and I was just like, “Alright, sure”. Some things are where the mundanity of daily life almost seems non-notable but then you write it down and it seems like you’re on the other side of the looking glass. Sometimes just watching people or watching myself do my daily routine I feel like I’m an alien watching humans and trying to figure out why they’re doing what they’re doing, which I think is probably a familiar feeling to many. You’re out going about your day and then you see someone doing something and you’re like, “Huh, I wonder what about that makes internal sense to them because it makes no internal sense to me and yet to them, it’s intuitive enough that they’re just doing it out here in public without a second thought”. Probably some people will listen to our band and think that.

[laughter]

Greg: Like, “What about this makes internal sense to these people making this music?” Because it doesn’t make a lot of sense when you look at it from the outside.

You’ve also said the liminal cake line in “Content Baby” was inspired by a true story. Do you often find liminal food?

Greg: Food can be liminal. I don’t know if it’s usually liminal, but the liminal cake was definitely liminal. We were at a rest stop in Eastern New York State on tour last year and it looked like there had been an employee birthday party at the coffee shop in the rest stop. All that was left was a disposable green tablecloth, a huge plastic bag of like 100 plastic forks, and one slice of cake on a paper plate. The rest was just rest stop; generic bottled water that says “New York State Rest Stop” or whatever on it, bags of chips, crackers, and things like that, and then there it was, the liminal cake.

I just marveled at it. You can’t see something like that without imagining what the narrative is that put it there, those hundreds of plastic forks and the one single slice of cake on a rest stop table with a disposable tablecloth. It was just so damn liminal. There’s never been a more liminal cake than the Eastern New York State slice of cake. It went into my iPhone note of thoughts that I had which was, “Will you eat the liminal cake?” From there, we were working on a song and we had the groove and I was just singing random lines. Then I was like, “Will you eat the liminal cake?” And Mandy was like, “Yep, that’s the opening lyric!” [laughs]

Mandy: From what I remember, you wanted to take it out and I was like, “Nope, that needs to stay!” [laughs] I think we might have tried to use it in another song but I was like, “No, it works in this song”.

Greg: That’s right! “Eastern New York State” was also a lyric in the song but then I was like, “That gives it too much sense of place. That makes it too weirdly specific”. You want the liminal cake to exist out of space and time, you don’t want it to exist in a specific rest stop, so it got written out. The liminal cake survived and it will live forever on your favourite DSP.

One of the main themes of the album is growing because you have to, not necessarily because you want to. What’s helped you deal with that?

Greg: I was thinking about it earlier today and growth has this romanticized place in culture where it’s like, “I’m gonna do my breathwork and meditation and go to therapy and then I will grow into this better version of me”. When you think about how things grow, like a tree or a plant, they don’t necessarily grow into the most beautiful version. They grow around a rock or get damaged by a dog that tries to bite it or whatever. I feel like I often grow through collision with things and not through the intention of being better. I think that there’s some benefits to that and some bad parts to that.

I was certainly living through various life stuff while making this album, my grandmother died on the eve of us going on tour and my dad spent a lot of the last year in the hospital after a stroke. I kind of felt the ugly kind of growth where a lot of things are happening and I’m growing through collision with them and wanting it to stop, wanting to take an off-ramp that didn’t exist. I feel like that resistance is kind of the ugly part of myself or a part of myself that I judge negatively. I think that I didn’t want to attempt to tie a bow on that feeling and just be like, “It all ends well in the end and we all lived happily ever after unless we died”. I think it was more like, “I see this thing and it certainly feels real to me”. Is it good? Is it bad? I don’t know, I don’t want to attempt to make that judgment of myself. It’s just a real thing that I subjectively feel. I think there’s a lot of that throughout the album. You can write a flowery metaphor for something and that works for some bands, but in our band, you can say, “Growth sucks”. You don’t need a flowery metaphor, you can just say what it is.

Mandy: For me, it was like life throws you a lot of crap even when you’re doing your best to better yourself and be very conscious and kind. What happened to me in the past year and a half was going through a really tumultuous breakup of a very long-term relationship and then realizing that I was trying to build a life that just crumbled. You can’t make plans, it just doesn’t work that way. So you go back to who you really are, you go back to your core of you. In my opinion, what happened to me was I got farther and farther away from who I am so I was reminded by the growth like, “No, you forgot who you are! Go back to that”. Growing sometimes means going backwards. [laughs]

Your video for “Living Lo-Fi” was directed by Ben Epstein and David Combs and features lots of cool people including Chris Farren, G Leonardo, and Lexi McCoy. How did the idea for the video come about?

Greg: I was allergic to making music videos for most of the time in the band because it’s very annoying to make them. It took lots of persuading me that it would be fun to do one and it was David specifically who persuaded me that it would be fun. We’ve toured with Bad Moves and we love them. We came to know David as a really menschy guy. He was also quite insistent that he got what our band was about and if we ever wanted to make a video, he was the guy to make it. When we wanted to do a video for “Life in a Bag” we were like, “Yeah, we gotta do it with David and Ben. If anyone gets it, it’s them”. They crushed the “Life in a Bag” video! I just love what they did with that. So then we did the “Flies” video with them and the “Living Lo-Fi” video with them. It became one of those creative partnerships where you’re like, “Let’s see what they come up with next”.

Literally the day after we finished “Flies” they were like, “Let us know about the next one!” So we sent them the session bounce of “Living Lo-Fi” and they came back to us with a list of ideas that they would want to try and one of them was the Dunning-Kruger effect. They were like, “One character embodies the Dunning-Kruger effect and thinks that he’s helping but makes it worse and worse”. That was what we were gravitating towards and we were thinking, “In what context does that concept and this context intersect?" One of the ideas was making a music video. It can seem kinda cheesy or meta to do that but it allowed us to use lo-fi filming effects to express something that is visually lo-fi and it started to make more intuitive sense. It didn’t seem quite as random or twee and meta as it might on paper.

All those people in the video are friends. We are so grateful for their time. Walter from Walter Etc. is in there playing a cop, our keys player AJ - of Why Dogs Why fame - is in there as a paramedic, and Greg Cortez, who produced the record, is also in there as a paramedic. It was very fun having all the homies in there.

In your album breakdown video you said that David Combs was the reason behind the “slice of cake the size of Lincoln’s shoe” lyric in “Wind Is Gone”.

Greg: Yes! I think that was the first time we played in DC. We played the show and Oceanator was opening for us. Elise is from DC and David’s from DC and they were like, “After load-out, after everything’s done, let’s go to the monuments!” Since it was 1am or 2am, there’s obviously nobody out there and it’s kinda creepy. They’re like, “Yeah! This is what you do when you’re a teenager and you’re trying to get into trouble, you go in the middle of the night to the monuments!”

We went to the Lincoln Memorial and David was like, “One question we ask everybody when we take them here is: do you think you could eat a piece of cake the size of Abraham Lincoln’s shoe?” The shoe is like 5 feet tall on the statue. I personally think I could. I love sugar and I can eat a lot of it. I probably could do it. But then David was like, “If you don’t think you could do it with a piece of cake, is there some kind of food that you could eat if it was the size of Abraham Lincoln’s shoe?”

As we were writing the song, we had those lyrics about the marble god and the golden statue which obviously suggests something monumental and I was like, “What’s the other thought that completes that?” And Mandy was like, “Isn’t there something about Abraham Lincoln’s shoe?” I was like, “Yes! There is something!”

[laughter]

Mandy and Echo, could you eat the cake or would you pick a different food?

Mandy: My response was no way to the cake. I’d pick pizza. [laughs]

Echo: It’s gotta be an airy, cheesy snack for me. It’s gotta be like Goldfish crackers or Cheez-Its. I can’t do more than an actual piece of cake, an actual shoe-sized piece of cake is probably my limit. [laughs]

Mandy: Not Lincoln’s shoe, just an actual shoe-sized piece of cake.

Echo: Not Lincoln’s shoe, just my shoe.

[laughter]

You’ll be touring North America starting in April and touring the UK with Martha in July. What are you looking forward to about these shows?

Greg: We love to play shows and we love to see the Cheek Freaks. We love to create the moment and be part of it with people. I think Cheekface fans are really cool and that’s not true for the fans of every single band. [laughs] Because Cheekface fans tend to be pretty cool, we like to hang out at the merch table after the show and say hi to people. A big part of it for us is being able to make that connection. When you’re onstage and the lights are in your face, you’re doing your best to give the most entertaining show and create the feeling and experience but it’s not the same as when somebody walks up to you and says, “This got me through a hard time” or “Here, I made you this mug” or something like that.

Have you gotten any weird gifts?

Greg: Tons!

Mandy: We love the weird gifts! Bring us more weird gifts!

Greg: We love a weird gift. Although I will say, just keep in mind that we don’t usually throw them away because it’s emotionally difficult to throw away a fan gift, but if you give us something awkwardly sized we have to travel with it for as long as the tour keeps going. Anything that we can pack away flat is a lot easier for us to manage than something that’s 3-dimensional, especially something that’s large and 3-dimensional. [laughs] But we will never be like, “Oh, we can’t accept this”.

Mandy: We love food! Food just goes right in our bellies. [laughs]

Greg: We’ve gotten various home-brewed liquors over the years which is kind of interesting.

Echo: Yeah, there was mead from Pittsburgh. Full disclosure, we were too nervous to drink it right away.

Mandy: We drank it though.

Echo: We waited until Chicago.

Mandy: Until the last show. [laughs]

Echo: We were like, “We don’t want to drink this and be sick for the next day for a show” so we held onto it until the last show on that tour.

Mandy: It was perfectly fine.

Echo: It went down smooth.

[laughter]

You’ve mentioned that you like supporting local businesses when you’re out on tour. Do you have any places in particular that you’re looking forward to going on this run?

Greg: Oh man, so many! At this point, we’ve been touring long enough that we have a favourite spot in every city. In some cities, we have two favourite spots so we’re like, “Oh man, I hope we can make it back to both of those!” or, "We have to pick just one!" I’m vegetarian and lactose intolerant so I’m partial to vegan places. Now I have a vegan place in pretty much every city and it’s fun to go back to those places like Vegan Nom in Austin. Also there are some non-vegan places that are so good that you can’t help looking forward to getting back to them like Torchy's Tacos in Austin. You can eat your way through Austin for quite a while without getting bored of it.

Going to Vinnie’s Pizza in Brooklyn is a classic and also Oasis Falafel in Brooklyn. We go to Lou Malnati’s when we’re in Chicago, we go to Pine State Biscuits when we’re in Portland, and there’s a falafel place we love in Vancouver, BC called Aleph. Our last couple of times through Toronto we were just doing venue food but that’s not really that remarkable. [laughs] I’m sure we’ll hit a Timmie’s again just like when we’re in the UK and we eat at Greggs. Not because it’s the highest quality food but definitely because it’s part of the culture.

Mandy: They have a vegan sausage roll that’s pretty good! [laughs]

Greg: For 2 quid it’s totally worth it.

Which part of Middle Spoon are you proudest of?

Echo: I think I’m proudest of “Content Baby”. I feel like that was one where as soon as we started running it in the practice space the drum and bass groove really locked. I really love the layered guitars with the rhythmic picking. Some songs are hard and they’re rewarding because you figure them out and crack the code. Others are rewarding because they naturally lock into place and I feel like that was one of those where it felt good from day one and still feels really good. That’s a moment I’m proud of for sure.

Mandy: I’m really proud of this! [holds up the Middle Spoon vinyl LP]

[laughter]

Mandy: Of course, I’m incredibly proud of all the songs. I feel like we really challenged ourselves through some stuff. I’m proud of the whole thing, it’s hard to pick one thing.

Greg: The album art is fire. As a songwriter, probably “Living Lo-Fi”. That’s one where I feel like we really hit it on the screws as far as what we were trying to do. To me, it feels like a very emotionally satisfying song and pulls together a lot of things that we enjoy doing and unites them under one roof.

I think as far as creation of the recording, “Wind Is Gone" is one I’m really, really fond of. Anytime we get to push things to their most annoying extreme, that’s a place that, personally, I really enjoy going. It’s a little bit tricky to go there. It’s easy to write something that is very harmonic and consonant and make it feel listenable. It’s hard to write something that’s very dissonant and unharmonic and aggressive and have it make sense at all. That one has so many tortured elements to it like the phone dial tone, the out-of-tune violin, and the harmonicas blasting. As those things happen, it changes which way the light shines on the vocal. When the violin’s in, the vocal feels like one emotional feeling and when the guitar’s in, it feels like a different emotional feeling. I just love how it turned out! I love going on the adventure of, “Let’s annoy the shit out of people and see how much we can’t get away with”.

Mandy, what inspired the album art?

Mandy: The idea for me while we were writing Middle Spoon was finding joy and living your life when things are getting thrown at you and it’s super hard. You’re just kind of grinning your way through it. I used to live in New York City and a lot of the time was like that in New York City - you deal with what’s in front of you and you try to make the best out of it. It’s a hard lifestyle there. I mentally felt back there this year.

It’s remembering that you’re living this life alongside all of these things that are considered vermin and are unwelcome in your life but it’s also such a part of your what you see every day. I was trying to portray those vermin in a beautiful way, like, “Life is actually beautiful living alongside these things that you might think are making your life hard or dirty”. It’s the embodiment of that. Inside the artwork, there’s also lots of different kinds of urban vermin that I tried to draw in a way that made them majestic and beautiful. [laughs]

Do you have a favourite urban vermin?

Mandy: The pigeon! The pigeon made the cover. [laughs] I have such a love-hatred for pigeons. They’re always in your way when you’re walking in New York. There are pigeons everywhere and they’re pooping everywhere and they’re dirty but I would miss them if they were gone. They are beautiful elements of an urban environment. When you actually look at a pigeon, they are rainbow-coloured. They are beautiful. They’re always traveling in big packs and showing affection.