 On a calm, rainy day, I had the pleasure of engaging in merry banter with Spencer Fort of Mothé about their love for listening to CDs while road tripping on desolate roads, throwing ass amid doomed days, and creating an indie subtype that is less insufferably ‘cerebral’ and more danceable. Fort’s album “I Don’t Want You To Worry Anymore” was released on April 8th, and they will be touring with The Wrecks this summer. One of Spencer’s main goals in life is to become the role model they used to idolize on the big stage, and I know they will do just that. Listen to the full interview here: Emma: So, delving into the album, I have a few different segments that have similar themes to each other. Before delving into the nitty gritty, I wanted to ask you some more playful, conceptual questions. The first question I had in that realm is when you imagine the essence of your album, any visions and themes you've captured, I'm just curious, where do you most envision it being listened to? Is there a specific place that comes to mind, in your head, abstractly? When painting the scene? Spencer: I guess it's just meant for wherever people want to consume it, but I do listen to music mostly in the home…there's a very specific feeling when you're driving through the desert, or on a long road trip, and you finally have a chance to listen to a full record. Not to be in playlist mode and skip mode because you're driving for, you know, five plus hours. I like the idea of it being consumed in desolate areas, with not a lot of attention to be given to anything else. Emma: I do really like that idea because there is something there… especially when there's no service or any way to really even use a streaming site. It's so nice to just pull out a CD and listen to it all the way through. To really, really dedicate your energy to just that, knowing that you're going to experience it in its full nature. That's a really cool answer. So, delving into the cover as well, I really like it. I see that in it, the vinyl pressing at least, you're posing firmly in front of an ablaze painting, it looks like. There's also a lot of commonalities between the color palette in the actual album cover and in the singles - there are a lot of the same colors prevalent. I was wondering, would you consider all these panels to be part of a common series? How in your head do you think they interact if they do? Spencer: They definitely all interact because Celia Jacobs does all of our art direction for this album cycle. She and I sat down and started planning out visions for the feeling of the record. There was this impending doom that the record touches on, but it always touches on it in a sort of light-hearted way. It’s like, “hey, it's gonna be fine, you can't really control these things!” The impending doom is just out of your hands. That is kind of the theme of the record, where it's like, “the world's ending, holy shit!” All of this stuff is happening, and then, lo and behold, the world was gonna end a lot more after I wrote it. It has continued to get worse and worse! But you can't freak out about all this stuff forever because you don't have the capacity to, and you can't change these things, and you have to enjoy what you have, and accept that…doom is just gonna happen. It's on its way, so it's always gonna feel weird. So, when we were talking about that concept, we wanted to touch on a light-hearted approach to the apocalypse. [When she brought that really vibrant, stunning red in], it felt completely right. Then, the lighter blues to, sort of, soften it? It was always gonna have this really vibrant red, so we designed the color palette first after the concept. Then, she did all the illustrations for all the singles leading up to the ending where there's finally this giant painting of the fire behind me. She did draw it, it’s a really large painting in my house. Then, Kylie Shafter took the photo under that direction. That was the theme of the whole thing, the colors were supposed to bring in that mood of intensity, but you soften the blow. Emma: Hmm…yeah, I really like that, especially in the actual album cover. Just [you] being in front of it rather than next to it, not interacting with the painting as much, is much showing more of an acknowledgement that it's there but not really getting too enraptured by the doom itself. Knowing that there's some closure in the fact that it's going to come and it's inevitable, unfortunately. Spencer: Mhm. Emma: Yeah, I really like that. So then, I wanted to ask a few similar questions just going into which songs, or maybe one or two songs, specifically come to mind first when I ask each of these. In general, which song would you say on the album was the hardest for you to write, and that could be in any way - whether it’s just mentally difficult to write down, or the hardest for you in a personal way. Spencer: “Breathe the Air on the Moon” went through three or four renditions before we finally found something that felt right for it. The writing itself was not necessarily the hardest, but as somebody who co-produces their own work, I'm very involved in the arrangement as well. I just could not unlock that arrangement….could not unlock that arrangement. Robert Stevenson, who co-produces all my work with me - he and I work very closely together in general- he and I just sat there and tweaked and tweaked, and then scratched… got completely rid of everything, put everything back in, redesigned the drums. That song was just a nightmare. Whereas we both tend to be a little more committal…like when we're recording and writing and producing, it's kind of the first thing that feels good, that strikes an emotion, an “aha.” We tend to commit, to put it down, and not touch it after that, and it works most of the time. But, for some reason, “Breathe the Air on the Moon” was just this impossible song. Emma: Which song feels the most personal to you? Which one do you think strikes a chord the most, I guess? I'm sure they all do to an extent, but is there one that sticks out the most, do you think? Spencer: It's hard because they all kind of touch on personal concepts. I think that “dancing on an empty floor” is literally the most personal in the sense that it's about…the whole song is accounting for this really wild woman I'm chasing and following and seeing and watching and observing. I think she's beautiful, but she's very dangerous, and I can't get too close to her. After putting it down on paper, I realized that I was writing about my experience with my own gender - I was observing the woman that was too dangerous for me to become. So that one, for that reason, is obviously incredibly personal because about this relationship with feeling like a woman but not not feeling ready to do anything about it, you know what I’m saying? Emma: Mhm. Spencer: That one was extremely personal for that reason, though, it's quite hidden in metaphor. The other one that comes to mind would be “everyone is everything.” That song, to me, really sums up the sentiment of the album, and where I was coming from with the more vague concepts. There's concepts of gender, there's concepts of these impending doom, there's concepts of just waking up, struggling with depression. “Everyone is Everything” is the song where it's like, as a human race, we grieve collectively. I am a part of this experience, because we are a part of this experience, and tracing it back to the full concept of being alive as a species ends up feeling the most personal. I think, for me, that really summed up the sentiment I was really trying to get out for the record. That’s why it was the last song on it. Emma: Yeah, so it seems like there can't just be one [choice] because one [song] is more macro, and one is more micro, but they're both just as personal in very different ways. Different scopes, for sure. Going into doom and the catastrophic changes in our all of our lives in the last few years: I had seen [you mention] in prior interviews that you didn't get to perform a lot of the songs on the album live for a while because of COVID. [It seems there was] a time period of waiting, and then finally performing after a while of settling with the songs. Would you say that your perception of these songs have changed at all? Once you performed them in front of people? Have their reactions to the songs changed or opened your eyes to anything that you might have not experienced while creating and keeping it in your own personal space? Spencer: Oh, yeah, it's very different. It changes my relationship with the songs quite a bit. I've only gotten the chance to play, I think, three full band shows. I've done a few spur-of-the-moment solo sets where it’s just me. No, maybe two. I think I've only played two full dance shows. Emma: Oh, wow. Spencer: Which is really exciting. I used to play live all the time. I think my favorite part of music is playing live because there's this really wonderful tangible connection that you get with the other person that's in the room with you. You don't necessarily get it when you're just releasing music to the internet and it comes back to you in the form of numbers. I prefer it when it comes back to you in the form of people dancing, or people smiling or enjoying themselves. It's something I can actually understand. So, it definitely changes the meaning of the song for that reason; to see it interact with a real human. The other thing that happens, I’ve found, is that it makes me more self conscious of the song than I ever was while I was recording it because I'm like, “Oh, this song! Ooh, this one should have been a little faster” now that I'm standing here in front of these people [and I’m] like, “ooh, like, are they dancing enough?” It becomes this thing where I’m like, “is that line stupid?” I sort of get into this really weird headspace with it sometimes where it makes me second guess the song because I'm performing it in real time, live in a unique way every single night with no real ability to change anything that I committed to years ago when I wrote it, so it definitely changes the relationship. It feels like it digs up old bones a bit. Emma: That’s a super interesting way to compare the process of being alone with your music versus being with others with your music. I'm sure for you, there's always this small part of your brain that's always thinking, when you're creating this music, “what are other people gonna think of this?” “Do I want people to dance to this song? Do I want them to cry to this song?” A bunch of different ideas as to how people will perceive it. Once you actually experience it, [and] maybe it's dissonant what you initially thought it would be, it feels like what are you going to do about it, and maybe that’s a good thing. I think it's always great to be questioning outcomes and changing perceptions of your own music and your own, I guess, image and everything. But, that's the scariest thing about performing for me, just seeing how other people are reacting and even for smallest things [I think], “Oh! Was that what I wanted out of that?” Spencer: Right! Emma: Yeah, it makes it so much more real. It makes it feel more tangible as well - other people are listening, and like you've actually really, really done it. I think that definitely makes a lot of sense. Things are looking a little bit better now. There's another wave coming, but I'm excited to hear of any upcoming performances you have for this album because I feel like it's gonna be a real hit. I loved listening to it - I've listened to it a few times now, and I'm a huge fan. Emma: What would you say your inspirations for this album were, do you have specific styles and musicians you have been inspired by specifically in this album? As a second question, over time, do you think that your inspirations have changed? Spencer: Yes. I'm basically caught in this weird thing as a consumer. I listen to so much music, just anything, I love it. I found myself in this world where I just naturally write pop songs. I love Lorde, I love Charli xcx, I love a good pop record. I fucking love the people I just referenced, but a lot of pop music, for me, is very clean and stale. It has this emphasis on high fidelity that doesn't entirely interest me because I also listen to a lot of underground music and a lot of experimental music. My whole vision for this project is to take these extremely alternative genres that I do love and package them in a way where these alternative genres can reinforce a chorus that Lorde would have written. To just say we're going to use things from harsh noise music, we're going to use things from ambient music, we're going to throw this really weird pop beat on it, and we're going to do the Lorde thing. But we're [also] gonna have these textural elements that most pop artists don't have access to because they don't listen to these types of music. That was kind of the approach. The other thing is that Robert and I are both very big fans of analog recording, which is just expensive. Luckily, I have people who allow me to do that on the label. They will let me do an analog recording, and they prefer it that I do. I'm really, really appreciative of that. That is another thing. I'm just a lot more interested in capturing moments that actually happened because then making a record is a lot more like documenting a sound in a room than it is crafting something digitally within the computer - trying to feign a moment that never happened. I love all kinds of production, so it's not to throw any shade to that. I do also find myself doing those moves here and there, but I think that there's a thoughtfulness that we have to keep in mind when we choose to do these things. So having just a deep love for analog recording and underground music has been the kind of thing that has inspired me to be like, “what can we do?” “How far can we take pop, how dirty can we make it?” Also, between writing the album and now, there has been quite a shift because I'm not as interested anymore in being so ‘thinky’ or too profound in any messages or the music. I don't find myself wanting to go to indie shows anymore because I want to dance! I want to go to the gay bar, and I want to dance to some insane beat. I don't find it as fun to be listening to people with guitars, strumming them, singing songs anymore. So now, I'm trying to take the songs that I've already made and translate them into a live show where I can say “how do I make these indie songs make people want to dance?” Now I've already done the thoughtfulness at the front half. I would love to be like, “yeah, we're a band, but we're a party too.” You're not just coming here to see some fucking self-absorbed person play guitar, let's fucking dance, you know, let's do the whole thing.  Find Mothé on Social Media:
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