Q&A: Bruiser and Bicycle Marries Impulse, Whit and Merriment In New LP ‘Deep Country’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY SYDNEY TATE ☆
Photo Credit: Sydney Tate
STRANGERS TO MONOLITH — Bruiser and Bicycle elegantly toils a convivial tale of predestined and enchanting clamor in their third full-length album, Deep Country, following high praise for Holy Red Wagon in 2023.
Bruiser and Bicycle hail from Albany, New York and find love everywhere. Composed of Keegan Graziane on guitar, vocals, piano, and synthesizer, Nicholas R. Whittemore on guitar, vocals, piano, and synthesizer, Zahra “Z” Houacine on bass and harmonies, and Joe Taurone on drums and harmonies, the band proudly self-releases with gusto gained over years of immersion and care within the Northeastern music scene as friends of folk, indie, experimental pop, and every vague sense of genre in between.
Deep Country spares no wanderer the charm or gaiety unearthed via a habit of challenging assumptions, whether the band’s own or against others’ attempts at definition of sound—an auditory amusement park fit for seekers of absoluteness in knack and attention to detail.
Luna discussed songwriting approaches, joining the circus and playfulness as a daily tenant with the band surrounding their newest release. Read on to find out more about each member’s favorite track and all else whimsical.
Photo Credit: Sydney Tate
LUNA: If you were in a Freaky Friday situation, who would you like to be for a day?
NICHOLAS WHITTEMORE: I'd be Joe so I could be a rock star.
Z HOUACINE: It's funny, I was also gonna say Joe because then I would be able to see what the other side of the rhythm section is like.
JOE TAURONE: That was my thought process, but I would love to be Nick so I could feel like what it is to be strong.
KEEGAN GRAZIANE: It would probably be Joe so I can know the parts that I make him play when I write MIDI drums, and I can understand his frustration.
JOE TAURONE: (Laughs) Yeah, I’m gonna full send on my answer, but I'm honored. I'm truly honored.
LUNA: If you open your phone right now, what song were you last listening to?
HOUACINE: I was last listening to “Baby Blue” by Cindy Lee. I stopped using Spotify recently and I don't have the app anymore, and I was just on an airplane, so I had no internet to listen to anything. The one album I have MP3s saved on my phone is Diamond Jubilee, and I just discovered that on VLC media player you can change the playback speed. I was really bored for the last two hours of my flight so I kept listening to the songs at different speeds and seeing what that was like, so it was “Baby Blue” by Cindy Lee, anywhere between 1.5-2 times speed. Really good song.
WHITTEMORE: I was listening to Lightning Hopkins in the bathtub last night. Bathtub blues time.
LUNA: Lots of blues.
HOUACINE: Baby blues, bathtub blues. What will they think of next?
TAURONE: My answer is really embarrassing, but I'm gonna stick to it. F*cking unfortunately, it was the Drake Bell cover of “Gucci Gang.” I want to change my answer because it's so embarrassing, but unfortunately, I won't, so there you go.
LUNA: (Laughs) That's the point of the question, though. It's supposed to be that you don't have control over how you're perceived.
TAURONE: I mean, yeah, the “Gucci Gang” Drake Bell cover is almost a cancelable offense, but I’ll send it.
GRAZIANE: I was listening to that Smog record Dongs of Sevotion, and there's a song on there called “Dress Sexy At My Funeral.” It’s awesome, great lyrics.
LUNA: When you’re making music, is it the music or lyrics first?
GRAZIANE: For me, I guess it's both. There's two sides of it: One, I'll have a phrase or a lyric, and that'll inform what the song is going to sound like. Then sometimes I'll have a melody, and then sometimes I find what word fits that melody and go from there. I go between those two [methods].
WHITTEMORE: Usually my notes app will be full of one liners and prompts. The music comes first, and then when I have the melody, and I'm ready to put lyrics into it, I go into the notes app, and I figure out what works with the melody.
I’ll write based off of the prompt or one liner and I work around it like that. It’s really the music before the finished lyrics, but maybe there’s a line that’s older than the music. Though, the melody is the most important thing to all of us.
Increasingly we've been putting more thought into the lyrics, or at least I have on my side. At the end of the day, if there is a hierarchy, the music is the most important thing, and then the lyrics are an enhancer, or they add some sort of depth to the music.
LUNA: Would you join the circus?
GRAZIANE AND HOUACINE: (In unison) Yes.
GRAZIANE: I’d love to have a pet monkey or something, I think that'd be cool.
LUNA: What would your role be in the circus?
TAURONE: Clown, easy.
HOUACINE: In another life I'd love to be a trapeze artist and be able to do some really kind of insane physical stunt…contortion, I don't know, something like that.
GRAZIANE: Maybe some sort of exotic animal handler, but they're not in horrible conditions, and I’d get to chill with cool giraffes and mountain goats. I guess those aren't that exotic. They're kind of normal.
WHITTEMORE: In spirit, I'm an elephant on a unicycle, but in reality, I'm a contortionist.
LUNA: So poetic. If you could only listen to one song from your album for the rest of your life, what would it be?
WHITTEMORE: Hmm, “Waterfight.”
GRAZIANE: Maybe also “Waterfight” for me.
TAURONE: It's hard to say.
WHITTEMORE: We have a couple of longer songs on the record. There's “21st Century Humor,” and I think that would be a good candidate.
TAURONE: That’s probably my pick.
HOUACINE: They're all good picks.
GRAZIANE: I'm thinking “A Horror Man Chopped Lamb”
HOUACINE: I’m thinking “A Horror Man Chopped Lamb” or “Part Of The Show.” They’re both pretty straightforward, but I never really get sick of the groove.
LUNA: Is there anything that you know for certain isn't real, but that you want to believe in?
TAURONE: Love? No, I'm kidding. (Group laughs) Maybe a megalodon shark or the Loch Ness monster.
GRAZIANE: (Laughs) Love is crazy.
TAURONE: Yeah, Loch Ness monster, Nessie. I f*ck with the Loch Ness monster.
HOUACINE: Probably manifestation. I don't think that it's real in a magical sense of “I think, therefore it is.” I think it's more that if you put time and focus into something then it will happen in some way.
Things will start happening, but the idea that you can will something into existence purely from brain power? I would like to believe, but I doubt it.
GRAZIANE: Maybe Where the Wild Things Are, where you arrive and there's creatures in the woods that are dancing and celebrating—
WHITTEMORE: And when you get mad at your mom, you can just storm out and hang out with the monsters.
GRAZIANE: Yeah, exactly.
WHITTEMORE: I've never read the book. I've only seen the movie.
LUNA: That was the book of my childhood. I have my dad's copy from when he was a little boy.
HOUACINE: I had the little stuffed animals with opposable joints. I had Max and the bluish gray guy with the horns. I love that book.
LUNA: Do you have any thoughts on surveillance art?
GRAZIANE: Isn’t there a music video with the backup cam of a car?
TAURONE: Oh yeah, I love that sh*t. I love the fisheye of the Ring camera doorbell and how when you get really close to it, it makes you look crazy. On that principle alone, I think surveillance art is cool, but I'd have to do some more research to make an accurate answer.
LUNA: Totally, I appreciate that you don't want to get canceled for two things.
TAURONE: No, the “Gucci Gang” thing was already pushing it.
HOUACINE: I think it's cool, but I'm trying to think. In my life, I feel very conscious of living in a surveillance state.
Right now, I'm answering this question in a Walmart parking lot which has cameras everywhere that will send your license plate number to the police if it automatically detects that there's a problem with it. Then we’re all using smartphones all the time which have cameras and microphones, so I think it's interesting, but maybe it's a struggle to say something interesting that hasn't been said about it already when it’s so prevalent and commonplace.
That’s not a critique or a dig at anyone. It’s cool to see art that uses the same technology that surveillance tech uses, like the same kind of thing that would look for a human body to identify them in the room or to map out their gait.
Imogen Heap maybe did something with hand tracking to control sound and I find that really interesting, but that kind of technology is also heavily used in surveillance. Maybe that’s more interesting to me because it’s imagining use for these tools outside of observing everyone’s every move and trying to profile them.
LUNA: How important are the titles of songs to you?
GRAZIANE: I would say quite important. As long as I resonate with it or how it looks, it doesn't necessarily have to tie to the song entirely, but I need to resonate with it.
WHITTEMORE: Sometimes I'll have the title for a song before I have the music or the lyrics because it’s just something about the words. Sometimes it’s what the words mean and sometimes it’s the aesthetic of the words or letters.
I have certain letters that I gravitate towards maybe, but I would say titles are one of the most important things to me. People see the title before they even hear the music, sometimes. That alone makes it important.
LUNA: How important do you feel that it is to be playful in life?
GRAZIANE: It's maybe one of the most important things.
TAURONE: Very important.
WHITTEMORE: Playful is the end. You’re asking how important it is to be playful, but life is just a means to be playful.
GRAZIANE: I like to think of it as taking life seriously but not seriously enough. It’s sort of going between both sides of the extreme—dancing between serious and non-serious—that creates playfulness and that’s a good feeling.
LUNA: What's your most controversial opinion?
TAURONE: The open high hat is super overrated. It sounds like dog sh*t, but you have to do it sometimes.
WHITTEMORE: Yep, that's a good one. I'm not crazy on crash symbol either.
TAURONE: Crash symbols, overrated.
GRAZIANE: F*ck drums. I'm just kidding, I love drums.
TAURONE: No, for real. I agree.
HOUACINE: Kick drums overrated, same with the snare.
TAURONE: Okay, that I disagree with.
HOUACINE: It's hard to pull up a controversial opinion because any serious stance I would take is heavily justified and reasoned with so it doesn't seem controversial to me. That's my non answer. I’m right about everything, therefore, I don’t have any controversial opinions. (Group laughs)
LUNA: Are you fans of Modest Mouse?
GRAZIANE: I used to listen when I was younger, but I haven't really listened recently. The early records I enjoyed.
LUNA: I thought of them when listening to “Million, Million.”
WHITTEMORE: Keegan and I were in a band before Bruiser and I think we did a “Dramamine” cover at one point.
LUNA: What’s your favorite album that you would categorize into your teenage years?
WHITTEMORE: Well, Keegan and I really bonded over Ice Age, Plowing Into The Field Of Love. That might’ve been college for Keegan, but that was a huge thing for me in high school. Ice Age is my favorite rock band of the last ten years.
That was a big one, but there’s a lot of music that feels very important. Forever Dolphin Love by Conan Moccasin is one of my favorite albums of all time. It’s a genius album and you could credit it with bringing back blangering chorus and making that indie again. A lot of that slacker-type indie rock that came out in the 2010s like Mac Demarco and King Krule, they were all inspired by Conan Moccasin.
That's really cool, but also, that album sounds like nothing else to me. The lyrics are really funny and surrealist, and the guitar has this very washy, flandry, thin sound to it that makes me think of hay and felt. It has this soft quality to it that I always tried to replicate and could never figure out how it was done.
TAURONE: The album that comes to mind originally is maybe Embryonic by Flaming Lips. That was a pretty big album for me in high school.
WHITTEMORE: When we’re talking to Scoops, who produces a lot of our records, I reference Dave Fridmann a lot, who recorded a lot of the Flaming Lips stuff.
HOUACINE: I listened to loveless by my bloody valentine for the first time when I was 16 and that definitely blew my mind. I hadn't really listened to anything like that before, and it’s one that’s grown on me.
I listened to it a lot in high school, but then anytime I revisit it I appreciate it more. That band felt so influential when I was reading about their whole life story, very interesting and inspiring.
WHITTEMORE: There’s too many. There’s so much music that’s life changing.
Photo Credit: Sydney Tate
