Pigeon Spins Featuring an Interview with Until They Burn Me

Until They Burn Me - A Carnival of Reveries

Until They Burn Me is Cody Carlyle and Travis Jordan. Their music is an eclectic mix of Americana, old-timey murder ballads, garage rock, dark country, punk, punkgrass and folk. A Carnival of Reveries is the perfect album in which to get lost. Folk-punk, blues-rock and Gypsy jazz brings stories of traditional and modern poetry, as Until They Burn Me launch their sensational, impressively organic, melodic, gritty and infectious new album.

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Interview with Until They Burn Me

(º)> What inspired the title A Carnival of Reveries?

Most of our songs are little stories. As a lyricist, I like to paint just enough of the picture to set the scene or scenario, but leave enough out that it becomes engaging for the listener to apply the story however they like. The mystery and the freedom of personal interpretation is important in any interesting art, I think. Once we had an idea of what the song list for the album was going to be, it just seemed like a collection of loosely related daydreams. Many songs have common themes and even common sounds, but different scenarios. They felt like reveries to me. A few of the songs definitely have a strong old-timey circus feel. Like klezmer music or haunted waltzes. So it seemed like an appropriate title for a collection of such songs.

(º)> How do you blend folk-punk, blues-rock, and Gypsy-jazz into a cohesive sound?

Honestly, I’m completely incapable and unqualified to answer such a question. I have no idea how it works for other songwriters, but for us there is almost no direction whatsoever in the beginning. We just start with a feel and see where it goes. Sometimes the lyrics dictate the feel of the song, and sometimes the instrumentation determines the subject matter. As for blending genres, I think that just happens subconsciously. Most likely it’s just the product of having a pretty eclectic mix of different kinds of music that we’ve listened to throughout our lives.

Even 35 years ago, in The Dry Season, none of us ever really discussed what kind of music we were going to make or what genre we wanted to be. It has always been all over the place for us. For example, Fire Mountain Stomp from Mud Music began as just a very simple bluegrass type of riff. I tried singing it in a bluegrass style and it just didn’t work. It sounded terrible. We tried a bunch of different things and nothing was working. But we really liked the song, so out of frustration, I just started to belt it out with attitude. Since the lyrical content was about being frustrated with humanity in general anyway, it felt like a natural approach. One of the greatest things about punk music is that it’s entirely about feel and not about carefully crafted composition, or a premeditated scheme, so that song just came out as a strange kind of hybrid. And that’s just usually how it goes for us.

(º)> How do traditional and modern poetry influence your songwriting?

Interesting lyrics have always been very important to me. As a kid, I remember loving certain songs until I actually read the lyrics and then felt disappointed. I’ve written “poetry“ since I was a teenager but I never really wrote lyrics until a few years ago. Writing lyrics is very different, and I’ve only recently begun to understand that. I remember stealing books by Robert P. T. Coffin and Edna St. Vincent Millay from the library when I was about 16 years old. That got me interested in reading other classic poets like Frost and Dickinson, but to be honest a lot of that older, classical style of poetry got pretty boring pretty fast for me.

I would have to say that it wasn’t until I discovered Kerouac in my early 20s that I got super excited by someone else’s writing. Kerouac would definitely be my biggest influence I suppose. His spontaneous prose style was, and still is, absolutely captivating. I had never read anything so engaging. I still love to reread his books. And I absolutely love to hear him read his work over the top of Steve Allen’s brilliant piano. It’s the perfect marriage of words and music. It so beautifully transports me to another time and place. I’m not exactly sure what qualifies as “modern” poetry, but I like Nick Cave‘s work. Is he modern?

(º)> How has your collaboration evolved over 30 years of playing music together?

As a guitar player and a bass player, it really hasn’t evolved. We still work pretty much exactly the same together as we did when we were 19. But I guess the biggest difference is that I never used to write songs. Or sing. All of the old songs, from The Dry Season days, were always written by Travis and our vocalist/lyricist, Travis Martin. I have never wanted to sing, and I absolutely did not want to be the singer of UTBM, but that’s just how it turned out. At least for the time being.

When you start to write songs, you kind of have to sing them as you’re writing the vocal parts. And since we didn’t have anybody else to sing, I just started to sing the stuff I was writing myself. So

that’s definitely the biggest change over the years in terms of collaboration. But Travis and I clicked musically, pretty much immediately. He was hearing the same things I was hearing, but his interpretation is almost always different than mine. That’s what makes it so interesting and satisfying for me personally. But that has always been the case for us.

(º)> How do Americana, murder ballads, and punk elements coexist in your music?

Again, I guess I would have to say that it’s just not contrived. It’s just what comes out. Personally, I have never been interested in playing country music at all. Aside from the older classics, I grew up hating country music. Probably because all I was ever hearing was pop country which, of course, is not real country music at all. Three or four years ago, Travis showed me Colter Wall, and that changed everything. Kate McCannon and Snake Mountain Blues are some of the best songs I’ve ever heard. Colter‘s voice is second to none. He has all of the texture. All of the passion. All of the character. It’s all there. I hadn’t heard any music with that much feeling to it in a long time. Suddenly, I had a hankering to write me some murder ballads! I’m still not sure what Americana is. We’re old guys. It seems like music styles are divided and subdivided into so many ridiculous categories now. I don’t understand it and I can’t keep up. As far as I can tell what people are calling “Americana“ now is pretty much what we’ve always just called folk music. But I’m sure there’s plenty of people that wouldn’t mind correcting me.

In truth, there’s really not a lot of punk in either of our two albums so far. Maybe it’s just more of a punk mindset or approach, or an attitude to the songs or the music in general. It’s certainly not traditional punk at all. For us, it’s important to have a fairly raw and very authentic feel. That means imperfections. We don’t like a highly polished or highly produced sound. It should sound intimate and real and we try to preserve that in the studio recordings. So I guess there’s a little bit of a punk-ish sound that comes from that?

(º)> What makes this album more organic, melodic, and gritty compared to previous work?

I’m just not sure that that’s accurate to say at all. I don’t think that this album is more organic, melodic or gritty than Mud Music. I do think there’s a little bit more complexity in composition on this album. But all of our songs are pretty simple. It’s certainly not prog.

(º)> How do you approach storytelling through such an eclectic mix of

genres?

Often an entire song is written around a single line. I’ll have a lyrical idea that has a very implied sound or feel to it, and we just build from there. Sometimes along the way it ends up changing direction, but if the foundation is good enough, all you have to do is feel it out. The song will tell you where it wants to go. If there’s a certain level of snark or cynicism in the lyrics, then the music around it should express that. Likewise, if the song is about heartache or fear. Or, sometimes it’s just a certain element of creepiness. Licorice & Lollipops is an old Dry Season song that we loved so much we couldn’t let it die. So we reworked it. But musically, it always had a kind of creepy feel to it so I wanted to make sure to be consistent with that feel lyrically.

(º)> How do punkgrass and dark country influence the album’s

atmosphere?

It’s really difficult for me to try to define music by genre titles. While I understand that it’s a way to categorize or organize music for a listener, I just think it’s really limiting and fundamentally counterintuitive. But, since streaming platforms and radio stations seem to insist on genre classification, it’s just something we have to adapt to. Punkgrass feels accidental - Just take Bluegrass music, which is already up-tempo and driving, and flesh it out with attitude I guess. I really don’t think there’s much of that on this album though. Of the two, I would say dark country would more aptly describe this album. Probably just in the subject matter and the use of some traditional, old-school country riffs.

(º)> How does your history with The Dry Season inform your current sound?

Primarily in knowing what we like and what we don’t like. Sometimes you’re not exactly sure what you want a song to be but you definitely know what you want it not to be. Having experience with The Dry Season has helped us to stay focused on what we want regarding the final results. We’ve also started to work with Travis Martin again, which is fantastic. He’s an extremely talented artist and having his perspective and a third dynamic has been great. Just like the old days. But as for Jordan and myself, we basically picked up immediately where we left off. We hadn’t played music together for around 20 years and when we got back together, it was as if no time had passed. It’s always felt pretty damn solid.

(º)> What experience do you want listeners to have when exploring A Carnival of Reveries?

The most I could ever hope for is to provide somebody with the kind of experiences that I’ve had with music. We used to get caught up, transported, and lost in Pink Floyd albums. I remember staying up all night and laying on the roof of the house, listening to Animals blaring from thestereo beneath and watching the morning sky slowly illuminate. I can still feel the gritty, wet shingles on my skin and the sensation of astral traveling to Gilmour‘s guitar work.

Experiences like that become a permanent part of who we are. That’s how we used to listen to music. Not one song at a time, but one album at a time. And I suppose that would be the ultimate accomplishment for us musically. I would hope that someone likes the album enough to disconnect from the world for an hour, sit next to a campfire or retire into a darkened room, turn the album up loud and get lost.

(•)> That's all Folks! Check out Until They Burn Me on the Pigeon Spins Playlist