26 July 18th-July 24th, 2024 phoenixnewtimes.com PHOENIX NEW TIMES | NEWS | FEATURE | FOOD & DRINK | ARTS & CULTURE | MUSIC | CONCERTS | CANNABIS | Onward and Upward Phoenix musicians Let Alone have chosen to be a great rock band. BY CHRIS COPLAN I n some ways, choice is an especially vital element of Phoenix band Let Alone. Like, if the Phoenix experi- mental rock band hadn’t decided to pull the trigger at a most precarious time in history, maybe they wouldn’t be here at all? “We became a band, recorded a whole EP and had it finished and ready to come out as of March 2020,” says frontman Marcus Rushmore. That self-titled EP (which ended up debuting in 2021) was only really a preview of sorts. They’d need to do more to really achieve the dream. “The EP we made was a sampler of different sounds where we all made those songs, but they didn’t quite sound like a genre or a band vibe yet,” Rushmore says. “That was just us coming together and making that happen. When we got done, it was like, ‘I see what we are now.’ And then we got to confidently write in that direc- tion. That gave us so much.” Luckily, the band — which is rounded out by guitarist Jeremy Silva, drummer Justin Liddy, bassist Alan Fulrohdt and violinist Sam Camacho — have benefited further from extra sharp decision-making. Case in point: Rushmore’s appreciation for Nathan Hussey and his band All Get Out led them directly to record their debut album, “Same Science,” with the rocker/ producer. The album release show for “Same Science” will be held on July 19 at Crescent Ballroom. “People I know involved with mastering the EP I’d mixed asked me for a reference band of what we wanted the mastering to sound like style-wise,” Rushmore says. “I told Matt Keller that I wanted it to sound like All Get Out. So instead of mastering my record, Keller and my buddy Trevor (Hedges) from Sundressed reached out to him and ended up having him call me. Five minutes later, we were talking on the phone about making and mixing a record together.” In fact, so much of that larger process is why Rushmore and company even got together in the first place. “I’ve always wanted to rent a cabin somewhere and self-record a record because I’ve been an audio engineer for a while,” he says. “So when we decided to do this, we said, ‘Let’s do this project. And when we get this done, I might even be happy.’ Like, my musician resentment would no longer live with me. I will have checked off the thing I’ve always wanted to do, which is make a record and mix a record and have some songs that I wrote and then everyone else put their magic on and have this really great thing.” But just because you make the seem- ingly right decision doesn’t mean your journey is going to be so easy. Once they’d booked time and a space with Hussey, they still had to make it out to Charleston, South Carolina. Hussey had booked the band quite the studio in The Space, which is owned by Band of Horses’ producer Wolfgang Zimmerman. And it turned out to be quite the place for a few different reasons. Rushmore, who describes himself as a “nerd for the lore around studios,” says that the studio was brimming with objects pulled from recent music history. “It had the exact board that we wanted for the sound of this record,” he says. “Nathan procured the drum set that was used on Death Cab for Cutie’s ‘Transatlanticism.’ Conor Oberst had a baritone guitar there that we got to put on the record.” But it wasn’t just the instruments, either; it was very much the space itself. “It was a really cool redwood, almost like an airplane hanger-style room. You can hear that room on our record,” Rushmore says. He adds, “It becomes part of what you’re making because you can’t take it out. Like, you can overproduce records, that’s true, but the way we did this, we wanted to make a record that sounded almost exactly like what we sound like live. We want people to leave our shows going, ‘Damn, that sounded exactly like the record.’” But just because they’d made decisions to get them to this magical space didn’t mean they were done yet making big choices. In fact, Rushmore says the very notion became integral to the album’s core sound and themes. “The whole motif here ... it accidentally became this big centerpiece of weighing things out over and over and over again,” he says. “It seemed to be all I was doing when I decided I wanted to front a band. Because I had drummed in bands and stuff before, but this is really my first band where I’ve gotten to lay out the foundational base for song- writing and be a vocalist.” Rushmore notes that he’s especially “obsessed” with understanding and even manipulating the decision-making process. “My life runs off spreadsheets,” he says. “When I write a song, it’s four shots of espresso, a word web over here, my vocab sheet over here, my random orphaned lines over in the center, and then somehow they connect to make one thing.” But how exactly does the theme of weighing everything, according to Rushmore, become the inspiration for actual music? “It really came down to writing the closing song for the album, which is called ‘Sure,’” Rushmore says. “You could be picking out whether you’re going to wear dress socks or regular socks that day, and you use the same science to determine whether you should quit your day job and try to tour for zero money. It ended up just being the way everything fell into place.” Or the album track “Stoics,” which has had a rather interesting lifecycle. “We worked with the Arizona Education Association, and we did this single release at Gracie’s (Tax Bar). The song’s about how the public school system in Arizona is just absolute garbage,” Rushmore says. “And it’s a whole song about weighing, like, ‘Do these children all deserve the worst? Well, we should take a vote on that. But let’s not take too long to vote because my tee time is at 4.’ It’s this whole tongue-in-cheek idea of when other people weigh out things and when they weigh those costs, and they don’t some- times even see human beings.” It’s an overarching theme that’s espe- cially relevant after what we’ve been through collectively in recent years. “It’s funny because COVID started making me think that a lot of people, defi- nitely me, make these weighted evalua- tions in an echo chamber,” Rushmore says. “Instead of being out there and seeing what feels right or chasing whatever’s actually happening with opportunities and things like that. We had to weigh them out alone in a bedroom and hope that it was the best for me and the other four people that have decided to do this with me.” Given that recent connection, Let Alone wanted to do more to really immerse people in the album’s concept. For one, they built “7-foot scales that are part of our light show. And I have every beat of our show ... our whole album top to bottom now has an intricate light show attached to these scales,” Rushmore says. But somehow that still wasn’t enough, and so the band turned to the internet for their next big creative decision. “We did split video things,” he says. “We released two songs at one time in one video, and we forced them to listen to it with headphones and pick one side or the other. You can’t even watch it just on your cellphone. I wanted to involve some chaos in this that felt like people could join us in this just not being, like, a normal thing.” On the one hand, the idea has at least some creative merit. “The cool thing is we’re what I would call a second-listen band,” Rushmore says. “We do have some catchy stuff, but we hear folks say, ‘I think if I listen to that a second time, I’m going to catch lyrics that I didn’t catch or pieces of it that I maybe didn’t.’ It’s the same thing with this concept.” On the other hand, it did generate a bit of “controversy,” and that’s often a smart choice if you’re trying to build up your new-ish band. “TikTok shut down our account because of it,” Rushmore says. “They didn’t know what to do with it. It was a very weird situa- tion. They gave us what they call a human moderator. They tried to change the content. It was like this whole thing. It was a lot of fun, and it was pretty punk rock. It made TikTok tell us, ‘Wait, we don’t have any rules against this, but we don’t know what to do. Should we have rules?’” It’s not all fun and algorithm-smashing, ▼ Music Music
