Q&A: Friko Travels Around With Their Latest LP, ‘Something Worth Waiting For’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY CHLOE GONZALES ☆
“It felt like a good move for us to try something completely new, because keeping things fresh and exciting, and putting yourself in new spaces, can really bloom creativity.” – Bailey of Friko answers on the shift from Chicago to Los Angeles recording location. While you may expect Chicago-based Friko to be stationed at home, this departure from their city is very on the nose for Something Worth Waiting For. A record depicting many forms of transportation, the four-piece band is always on the move, as seen on their album cover or their song titles, such as “Hot Air Balloon.” The band and their album isn’t hard to catch though–full of youth and whimsy, it’s easy to catch yourself pumping yourself up to single “Choo Choo” or becoming intrigued by Niko’s vocal performance, one that’s always pushing for more.
While the aesthetics are depicted differently, it seems like a funny, slightly witty continuation to the band’s previous release, Where we’ve been, Where we go from here, at least when comparing album titles. The colors switch from a crimson red or maroon to a deep, dark blue. To beat a dead horse, the band doesn’t feel as stuck or stationary anymore.
Luna had the pleasure of interviewing Niko, Bailey, and David of Friko, discussing the new record and its evolution.
Photo by Adam Powell
LUNA: You guys stated in a previous interview that maroon was your color. What’s the color palette for the new album?
NIKO: Dark blue, I’m trying to remember why that happened?
BAILEY: I might have the timeline wrong on this, but we were on tour or playing a show out of town. It may have been last August or September, but we were kind of talking about what the potential record cover could be. And I had brought up that when I was listening back to the mixes and such, blue kept flashing into my head, like I was seeing a lot of blue for this record. And I think that may have been the first time we talked about it. I could be wrong, but I’ve always seen and felt a lot of blue from these songs.
DAVID: I remember we were having a discussion when we were on tour, kind of discussing what it was. I remember we were in a hotel room and I remember [Bailey] said blue for the first time. And I was like, damn, that’s crazy, I don’t think of any color–I thought about black and white a lot of the time. When we started doing a bunch of stuff, adding the blue in, the more and more I heard the records, I was like, “Yeah, this is the only color I can think of.” It was originally Bailey throwing it out there.
NIKO: We can have red and blue as the two colors, so then it can be in 3-D.
LUNA: Transportation is the main theme of this album. Before touching on the album’s connection to transportation, I was wondering what your favorite mode of transportation was.
NIKO: Mine’s definitely a train.
BAILEY: I don’t do it very often anymore, but I feel like my favorite might be skateboarding. I put longboard wheels on my skateboard so that it’s easier to not get caught on cracks and pebbles and just how freeing it feels to ride on it and cut through the streets and such when there’s no cars around.
DAVID: I’m gonna say running, or by foot. A lot of my favorite experiences when it comes to traversing is usually when I’m listening to music and I’m either on a long walk or I’m on a run and it gives me a lot more time to think in the process. No hate to vehicles, but I love running a lot.
LUNA: Yeah no, honestly, we need walkable cities and to go back to our roots! What inspired transportation for the record? Did the transportation or the record come first?
NIKO: Definitely would say the record. Definitely just touring so much and being in transit all the time and that movement was a very big factor. And honestly, the first one that involved transportation was “Hot Air Balloon” and that came from a story of ours–we were in a Cracker Barrel parking lot one morning in Albuquerque because we slept there and we woke up and there was the Hot Air Balloon Fest. That song came from that experience and then along came the other [songs]. Yeah, we just ended up having like half the record be songs about transportation, but it all made sense with the “something worth waiting for” motif as well.
LUNA: I also wanted to touch on the music videos, which I really enjoyed. Are you guys planning on releasing any more?
NIKO: We are going to do some live performance music videos for the next couple.
LUNA: Super cool, I liked the aspects of “7 Degrees” being more rural and “Choo Choo” being more urban. I loved the “Choo Choo” video, it seemed like it was fun, navigating around the city and such. Was it fun to make?
DAVID: All the credit goes to Nico’s partner, the entire video was her idea! She put together everything–the shot list, an entire storyboard for it. We initially had a different idea for the video, but it ended up not working out. So the spontaneous nature that you might be sensing in the video, it’s there for sure. But also there was a solid amount of planning that went into it. Definitely a mix between the spontaneity aspect but also some planned chaos too.
BAILEY: Yeah, it was really fun! Spending the entire day sprinting with our friends to random locations was fun. And we were all saying that we saw more of the loop that day then we had in our entire lives, like I don’t really spend that much time [there], but we were just going everywhere and following where our guts were telling us to go alongside places that were planned out.
LUNA: That sounds really fun! I was also wondering why you chose this album’s singles as the singles, and if you were going to release any more before the album.
NIKO: There’s a couple more coming! I think the singles [we chose] are just the most approachable tracks on the record.
DAVID: I think a part of it goes to thinking like, what would be one of the first songs that we would show somebody that hasn’t heard the record yet? Not even just a stranger, but friends of ours too. What would I want to show a good friend of the band before anything comes out that way? I think “7 Degrees” was a sound that we all loved before it came out.
BAILEY: My mom was really excited for “7 Degrees” to come out, because she’s seen us play it a number of times and we’ve been playing that song live for a bit now. And so she knew it already, and was really excited for it to come out. It actually came out on her birthday and I deliberately didn’t tell her, because I wanted it to be a surprise. And she texted me and was like, “Oh my God, this is amazing!” It was very cute.
LUNA: You guys recorded in Los Angeles for this record. How was it being away from Chicago?
NIKO: We all stepped away liking Los Angeles a lot more.
BAILEY: We had a great time!
DAVID: Even though it wasn’t a side quest, because obviously, recording a record is a main objective as a band, it felt like a cool side quest where we were in Los Angeles for two weeks. When am I ever going to do that? So it was great. The last record was recorded in Chicago with two folks from Chicago, and that’s a very great thing to do. I would never dissuade anybody from recording in Chicago ever. But that’s kind of how the cards fell this time.
LUNA: I didn’t know if you guys felt out of your element at all or homesick, maybe feeling some sort of loyalty to Chicago, because I could understand that.
BAILEY: I think we all, individually and as a band, feel so deeply connected to Chicago that there is an element of it that was a little weird. I think not making the second record in Chicago and also working with somebody who wasn’t a close friend. But I don’t know, I think we all like to push ourselves and follow our hearts. And it felt like a good move for us to try something completely new, because keeping things fresh and exciting, and putting yourself in new spaces, I think can really bloom creativity. We walked away from it with a record that we are all really proud of and two new friends, John Congleton and Alex Bhore. We had a wonderful time. And it was very sunny, which was great. We went to this cafe that was around a five minute walk from the studio almost everyday, called Doubting Thomas, and got their passionfruit pie almost every single day. It was amazing.
DAVID: I would actually want to record a record again just to get that pie.
LUNA: What the record tastes like – Passionfruit pie! I wanted to also ask specifically about “Alice.” I really like the lyric, “That rabbit is a pawn / And we are only pieces to move.” How did it feel to make a song in reference to Alice in Wonderland, when there are so many songs about or in reference to it? How did it feel to try to take a stab at it and try and not do it the same?
NIKO: Actually, the idea started with our friend Alice, who’s done a lot of video stuff for us, and will be doing the music video for that song. It started about her and then the Alice in Wonderland references came. And so I think that made it feel like, even just lyrically, I was combining these two things and it felt great to me. You know, feels like something I could write about in my own voice.
LUNA: I also really liked the lyric “To be a hahahaha” in “Guess.” I just wanted to tell you that when you sing it, it works.
NIKO: It definitely does. That was just when you’re writing a song and it feels like something that is not really done ever, it’s like, “Oh, cool!” It feels good to do something like that. I love to perform that song and the band comes in.
BAILEY: Honestly Nico, the way you were able to sing those ha’s with so much power is so impressive. Because sometimes when we’re playing that song live, if I’m really feeling it I’ll just sing off the mic a little bit and when we get to the ha’s, I have to stop, like I can’t do it. It’s really hard.
LUNA: I’m in this niche internet corner, where they change memes to a pirate version. And I was just thinking you guys should do a pirate version of “Guess” like “Ar ar ar ar ar” instead of “Ha ha ha ha.”
DAVID: We actually have a pirate bit in the band, like somebody will ask something and then one of us, unfortunately me most of the time, will repeat it in a pirate voice.
BAILEY: I think “ar” is hilarious. Sometimes, when we’re at rehearsal, we will have pirate jams for fun.
LUNA: Sea shanties!
BAILEY: Exactly! Like a stomping type of thing.
LUNA: That’s amazing. Well, I propose a pirate version of “Guess.”
DAVID: If Niko came out with a harmonica and a pirate hat and started playing that song, it would be pretty funny. We could do that on a Halloween show. We have, what, seven months we can prepare for it!
LUNA: The album artwork also looks very fun. I’m kind of jealous, honestly, feeling FOMO. Was it fun? Who photographed it?
DAVID: Alexa Vicious, she’s out here in Chicago! Yeah, we literally just rounded up like thirty people [for the photo]. But the original photo reference was an old photo from when I grew up in Ohio, specifically Reynoldsburg, Ohio, there was this amazing antique mall that had a bunch of old newspaper articles from the 1930s and 40s. And there’s an article called “Barking Lights Only”–I wish I knew the photographer because I’ve looked everywhere for this original article and I cannot find it. But it’s the scariest looking picture I’ve ever seen, maybe a hundred dogs in the middle of the night running toward a camera, and you can see some of their reflections of the flash in their eyes and the silhouettes of the dogs in the background. When we were discussing what the album cover should be, a lot of the record to me feels a lot about reclamation of youth. And I was like, “How can I do that myself in this record?” So that was where that original idea came from. Except not scary, you’re right it was a very joyous experience. I feel like it’d be impossible for us not to smile doing that shoot, it was pretty awesome.
LUNA: The photo of joy and whimsy. How could you not be on a bicycle, smiling whilst going down a hill? When you guys go on tour, how do you want to do it differently from your last tour cycle and encapsulate this album? How do you want to present it to the audience?
NIKO: We have some projection ideas, like old transit videos, but just musically and as a show, we grew so much over the first record touring and now we’re traveling with more consistent gear and our sound person, and the consistency is just the biggest help. Because instead of soundchecking, getting everything from ground zero every night, we’re starting at a certain point and then practicing and making stuff better. We're definitely just gonna make it more of a full experience, lean even more into the ebbs and flows, the dynamics of our sets, and just linger on stuff and let people sit on it.
