Diandra Interviews Soft Center: Music As A Keeper of Our Vulnerabilities

Releasing their debut, No Pattern, Soft Center have made themselves a duo to follow for those of us that have an inner, “soft center” or vulnerability. Everybody carries a spot in their soul that makes them melt with sentiment. For Soft Center that spot is the launchpad for their lyrics and sounds. Sonically, their analog record felt like the audio of a home video. In it, you heard the cries, the laughs, the dreams, and the setbacks of someone who had no idea where to go in life, but knew there was somewhere she had to get to. In our interview, Soft Center talk about the road to their music. 

Diandra: Having met each other in grade school. What is your first memory of the other?
Sean: My first memory of Gina is that she was Gina P. which differentiated her from Gina M. Also, we were grouped together fairly early on because we learned to read early; so they corralled us with other academically achieving nerds.

Gina: Yeah, I definitely remember getting corralled together with all the nerds. Funny how they pick the weirdos out so early on. But I actually really do have a super vivid memory of Sean being supremely into Metallica and Nirvana in maybe 4th or 5th grade. He had eclectic musical tastes from a very early age. We also played in our grade school band together. I played clarinet and Sean played french horn. Talk about nerdy.

Diandra: How do you think knowing each other for so long has influenced your creative process? How have you seen each other grow?
Sean: It makes a lot of things go more quickly because we have a very developed sense of what the other person is thinking. It makes it so that we are often able to get on the same page for taking songs in certain directions, sonically, without having to do tons of communicating where in another situation getting on the same wavelength might be a more gradual process that takes more steps. 

And I’ve absolutely seen Gina grow as a writer and performer. This record was exciting because it was really about developing and capturing her music in a way that is the next evolution of all the old lo-fi home recording projects she did on her own as well as past bands she had with or without me.  

Gina: Sean has always been a musical prodigy, and I’ve spent all the time we’ve played together, from when we were kids to today, leaning on him and learning from him. I do agree though that that long relationship makes it a lot easier for us to quickly get on the same page. While we were making this album, we would joke that the only thing we didn’t instantly agree one was the art (we have very different color preferences). 

Diandra: What was the moment when you decided to form Soft Center?
Sean: We were at the Bronx Zoo with some old friends and Gina approached me asking if I wanted to, maybe, play a whole bunch of instruments on some new songs. She told me that she had gotten 4 days of recording time booked cheap through a Kickstarter campaign at the then brand new Tiny Telephone Oakland studio, and I was excited because I had been eyeing it up myself and now I’d be going. I was also very excited to have an excuse to play drums.

Gina: I kind of booked the Tiny Telephone time on a whim, not really knowing what exactly I’d do with it. Even when we first got into the studio, I wastalking to Beau, our engineer, and I was kind of like, “I have these songs, I don’t really know what we’re going to do with them, I guess we’ll see how it goes?” Everyone was very supportive of that exploratory approach. Sean was a natural first choice for a collaborator, because we do share a lot of creative sensibilities and because he is a musical whiz kid who seems to be able to almost perfectly play any instrument he picks up…and I do mean “picks up” in the physical sense. I was also excited to have a smaller project with less people to wrangle than a traditional band.

Diandra: What is the inspiration behind your name: Soft Center? 

Gina: We toyed with a lot of different names for this project but ultimately landed on Soft Center for a few reasons: a lot of the songs are quite vulnerable and we liked how the name sort of conveyed the vulnerability that everyone carries with them. We also just liked how the words sounded together…and to be totally frank, it somehow wasn’t taken. 

Diandra: What made you choose No Pattern as a title?

Gina: No Pattern is the title of the record but also of one of the tracks on the record that we’re most proud of. In the context of the song, it refers to not knowing where your money or your next meal’s coming from, but part of why I liked it for the record is that this collection of songs is kind of an assorted mix. We learned a lot from making this record and I’d like the next one to feel a lot more cohesive than this one does. That said, we think the songs hang together…it’s just kind of hard to distinguish a pattern…although I think if you look hard enough, you’ll find a few.

Diandra: You talked about your earliest memories of playing music being pre-smartphone era. How do you think technology has altered how people/ you both collaborate?
Sean: In the demoing stages of this record, having easy ways to record ideas, and then pass them back and forth via cloud storage in order to develop songs was something that just wasn’t widely available 10 years ago; when we were recording with our old band Palmyra. So, it’s been beneficial to us in that way. I remember reading a Tape Op article that Deerhoof did an entire record with everyone in different cities, so it’s impacted collaboration in a lot of great ways for making things possible. 

Gina: Yeah, there are a ton of benefits to technology…but also some drawbacks. I remember being a kid and discovering a new band from a mixtape someone gave you or going to see a show and knowing that this was the only time you were going to experience seeing that band unless someone bootlegged it and burned it onto CDRs or something. There was something magical about that, which made the music feel a little more compelling and special. We tried to recapture some of that feeling with this record by recording it all analog. 

Diandra: In leaving tech behind to record, what were some of the vulnerabilities you saw within yourselves as artists/ persons?
Sean: I’m kind of a perfectionist by nature, but leaving computers out of the picture meant we weren’t going to fix up a sloppy drum moment in an otherwise good take. It’s like a photoshoot with no photoshop afterwards. Over the course of the process though, so many things that sounded “wrong” that I would have fixed in ten seconds of computer based editing became left in the fabric of the track and then later became totally fine or sometimes even highlight moments of a little weirdness.  

Diandra: You have said you “found the beauty in imperfection.” What do you see is the beauty, and why do you think people find perfection real and beautiful?
Sean: For me, the beauty is the realness. Like if something is just perfect with no blemishes, that can be cool, but in 2018 that is kind of everywhere given the level of digital control and the urge to edit everything. But if something is beautiful and it has your specific kinds of imperfections, then it’s more of your own fingerprint, and it’s a bit more special. It brings a new level of how you can relate to it.

Diandra: You are very heartfelt in your verses and sounds, which of your songs really pushed you to reflect on yourself emotionally? Why? How so?
Sean: Working with Beau Sorenson (engineer) was key in realizing our sonic visions and pushing them to places we got to on the record. In particular, Fireworks and Temple stand out to me as tracks that we really just developed a lot of the sounds themselves on the spot in studio: with a bit less of a preconceived plan. 

Gina: A lot of these songs are vulnerable from a lyrical perspective. Some of them are a little more autobiographical than others, but, even if I was telling stories, I tried to find nuggets of truth throughout. Additionally, about halfway through this album, I hit a writer’s block and had to give myself a kind of assignment to get over it. The assignment I gave myself was to think about some of the experiences I had in the early 2000s, which were a pretty crazy time for me, but were also very much in the past. It was a nice way to engage with that craziness from a removed place of safety. I actually even toyed with calling the album the aughts. 

Diandra: Being your debut, what were the particular messages and style you really wanted to emanate to the audience?
Gina: We really just wanted to make the music that excited us and scratched our creative itches. We probably should have thought about our audience more, but to be honest, I think we mostly thought about our own enjoyment of the process of creating. I guess one thing we did focus on was quality: we really wanted this record to hold together and be good. 

Diandra: Your songs can be very nostalgic. What do you most miss of the past? 

Gina: Yes, especially those ones written about the early 2000s. Revisiting those years was bittersweet for me. On one hand, there’s something fun about the recklessness and ennui….but also, Jesus, the recklessness and ennui.

Diandra: Your songs are about observing the strangeness and disconnection of this world. What do you feel is the strangest or most disconnecting part about being human? How do you feel music either furthers or heals such “strangeness” or disconnect?
Sean: I think it’s very easy for people to feel isolated by difficult emotions and feelings. It’s gotten to a point where more people are talking about mental health in a way that tries to shed stigma, which is great. But I think that music can help in the sense that, while you might feel totally isolated by depression or something else, other people are going through their own things and everyone can have their own takeaways from the same piece of music. Similar or different, we have our struggles and I think various kinds of music have unique ways of healing whether it’s uniting people, bringing joy, or acknowledging pain.

Gina: I also really like that music, especially music with lyrics, lets you transpose your experience onto someone else’s. I’ve had people come up to me and tell me a song really spoke to them or mirrored their life experience and I know that means they’ve found some of their own truth reflected in what we’ve done. That definitely feels like a way to become closer to one another.

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