TASHA ABBOTT & ZACK NESTEL-PATT OF NO SWOON
The inception of No Swoon and that of their latest record Take Your Time is one of polarities and silver lining. The duo’s respective musical upbringings are as disparate as the geography that originally separated them. With Tasha Abbott coming from a background of performing musicals and listening to Bauhaus and The Cure and Zack Nestel-Patt immersed in jazz and classical music, it is surprising that a match between the two could exist. To add to the mix, Tasha grew up in Los Angeles and Zack in Boston, yet despite these seemingly irreconcilable musical differences and intractable social distances, the pair have produced a record that fuses all their contrasts into one cohesive and dynamic record. Making it all the more remarkable, is that the record took place in the face of the global pandemic which was set to destroy any hopes of Take Your Time getting out of the gate. However, the grounding effect of the pandemic was as it turns out the very thing that afforded the time and emotion to produce a startling follow up to their 2019 self-titled debut. To find out a little more about the record Tasha and Zack took the time out to speak with Musicology.
Question: Congratulations on your new record Take Your Time. A truly remarkable album and one that showcases both your musical strengths. Is it fair to say that some of those musical strengths come from both your musical backgrounds which are in their respective rights, very different fields?
Zack: Yeah, I think we approach music very differently and so the contrast and tension helps to build something better than what either of us could do alone. Tasha is definitely the main song writing force of the two of us.
Tasha: With this album specifically, I pulled a lot from my personal life and experiences. The writing is more emotional than on our previous record. I think I was tapping into being a little kid singing to Mariah Carey ballads and musical theater in combination with driving around with my mom listening to her 80’s new wave and goth music, which was usually our form of escapism. So music was always more emotional for me than it was analytical.
Q: Did you find those formative musical years still coming to bare on Take Your Time or this record to be the product of your musical evolution?
Z: Every record feels like we start from scratch. After it’s written, I can see how we grew. I think this record pulls from everything we’ve learned over the years, but in it, while we are making it, it's literally like we have never recorded or written anything before.
Q: Can you describe how you both met, and the No Swoon project came to be?
T: We met at college and I was writing folk music that needed strings. Zack offered to make string arrangements and play bass in the band. We did that for a couple of years, but around 2015/16 I felt compelled to shift to electric guitar and make more noise.
Z: Around the same time that Tasha got an electric guitar and a distortion pedal, I got my first synth. Tasha was in LA and I was in NYC so this wasn’t coordinated per se, but as is often the case with us, we tend to move in parallel.
Q: Take Your Time being your sophomore record, what lessons did you learn from first release and in what ways did you want to push the sonic boundaries on this album?
T: Honestly, I didn’t really want to write a record. It was the beginning of the pandemic, I was really angry, sad, and displaced, as many of us were, and didn’t really want to play music at all. Zack had been writing, but then it got to a point where the pandemic wasn’t really ending, and I didn‘t have anything else to do. It was a very introspective time and my head was in a very different space than when we made the first record.
Z: I’m not sure about lessons learned, it's all a process and I feel like everytime we write or record we are searching for sounds, songs, and lyrics. I do think we got much better at recording. The first record was us figuring out, for the first time, how to record everything. We learned a lot doing the first record and I think we continued to learn through this process as well.
Q: Thematically and lyrically, what cues does that record take from the external world which were channeled into the album thereby producing the overall message and style you were aiming for?
Z: The world was pretty terrible when we were writing and recording. We had the opportunity to have an empty house for 3 months, so we figured a good way to spend that time would be to make a record. The sound of this album is deeply influenced by how we were feeling. We were questioning everything about our lives and I think the lyrics and songs on this record reflect that. You can hear us thinking about our past choices and reckoning with where we were at personally and with our place in the world.
Q: With contributors including drummer Jon Smith, Peter Wagner on guitar, Jake Aaron on additional production + Charlie Van Kirk and Chris Coady mixing the album, specifically how did they each deliver something idiosyncratic and unique to the record that you felt really shone through?
T: Jon had played drums with us on our West Coast tour in Feb 2020. This record wouldn’t have happened without him. Not only did he record and play drums, but he was also a big part of thinking through arrangements and acted as a sounding board for our ideas.
Z: When we were tracking drums, we had Jon record a lot of extra percussion and drum parts. We reached a point where we were lacking any critical distance to the songs and needed fresh ears to help make choices about what extra things we recorded should be included. Charlie played that role, and some of my favorite moments in the record, like the drum fills at the end of “Beside,” were edits he made.
T: Pete is one of our closest friends (definitely check out his project Furrows) and is always someone we send demos to and get feedback from. I’m not the best rhythm guitar player, and it happened that Pete was looking to get out of NYC for a week while we were recording. It made sense to have him come up, hang out, and try out some things.
Z: All along, we decided we’d only bring on external producers once we felt we had pushed the songs as far as we could push them. Towards the end of the process, a couple of the songs were still not working, so we reached out to Jake for help. He had a huge impact on a song like “Nothing” which prior to him, we could never make work.
T: When we were reaching out for producers, we also got in touch with Chris Coady, who has worked on like 95% of my favorite records (Beach House, Yeah Yeah Yeahs). It didn’t work out for production, but he was down to mix the record. We had such a great time working with him in the mixing stage and he really made everything sound incredible.
Z: Yeah, he really mixed the crap out of this record.
Q: Distance, change and reconnection are sentiments that feature throughout the record in terms of your respective home bases and moving somewhere new. Do you feel that this attitude was imbued in the record due to your move from NY to LA?
Z: Not really - in some ways it's the exact opposite. Throughout the pandemic, from March 2020 until we landed in LA, July 2021, which was well after the record was finished, we were in a state of limbo. We weren’t able to go back to our home in NYC at the start of the pandemic, so we proceeded to float between short term rentals, house sitting, and family homes. I think that sense of purgatory imbued the record with much of it’s emotional content.
Q: Extending upon the analogy a little further, the concept of movement continues on the emotional and maturation spectrum for you both. How did this influence your writing, the personal subject matter you wanted to explore and were you forward thinking in terms of what state you will be in on your next record compared to that of this record?
T: Honestly, I'm still taking it day by day. I definitely wasn’t thinking about a next record. 2020-2021 was such a rollercoaster of emotions, so naturally that played a big part in this record.
Q: On a technical level can you describe some of the fx and equipment you used throughout the record? And of this equipment can you describe your creative approach in terms of your methodology. That is to say, is it an fx and sound first driven approach with the lyrics following suit or conversely, the lyrics and conceptual tones guide the precise instrumentation and sound you look for when creating a certain atmosphere and aesthetic?
Z: The gear we used was pretty simple. Prophet 6, Korg MS-20, Electric Guitar, and a handful of pedals. We worked really hard to get the sound that we wanted in the room, so there weren't many effects added later in the box.
T: We wrote most of the melodies and lyrics on guitar first, then arranged everything else, which was a very different process than our first record.
