You either love indie pop—that C86-enshrined sound
typified by brightly fuzzed-out guitar jangle, bashfully hopping
backbeats, and fey boy/girl vocals—or you’re just flat-out wrong.
(You jerk.) For fans of the genre, the past year has been a veritable
dirty dream of twee, spearheaded stateside by the venerable and beloved
Slumberland Records, and with no more perfect poster boys and girls
than Brooklyn foursome the Pains of Being Pure at Heart (twee as fuck,
they took their name from a friend’s children’s story). The band’s
self-titled debut full-length for Slumberland is one of the year’s best
records, indie pop or otherwise. Its melodies are familiar and
effortlessly catchy, its sound is dreamy and sweet, its songs concise
and clean pillars of pop songcraft, its lyrics clever and coy and
sometimes just a tiny bit crass. Heaven(ly) help you if you haven’t
totally fallen for this band. Singer/guitarist Kip Berman spoke to us
by phone from his apartment in Brooklyn.
MERCURY: I notice you have a Portland area
code.
KIP BERMAN: Yeah, I actually lived in Portland from 1998 to 2005. I
went to school at Reed College. I actually interned at the
Mercury.
Based on a couple of songs on the album, “Young Adult Friction”
and “The Tenure Itch,” I was going to ask where it was you went to
school that everybody was being seduced by their professors and fucking
in the libraries, but maybe Reed makes some sense.
For better or for worse, that’s where I went to school. I grew up on
the East Coast, but getting to go out to Portland was really eye
opening. There was a strong indie-pop community out there and just
great bands, and I got exposed to a lot of stuff I don’t think I would
have at that age had I not been in that part of the country—the
Aislers Set down in San Francisco, the Gossip, and the Need would play
in Portland all the time; Dear Nora was one of my favorite bands there;
the Exploding Hearts were a big band in Portland at the time; the
Hunches, the Thermals emerged sort of right before I left.
A couple of your songs have lyrics about being a teenager,
teenage years… what have you. Were these songs that you wrote a long
time ago, or is it just good songwriting sense to appeal to the
youth?
I don’t know, I’m pretty immature. I feel like the songs from the
album are kind of about stuff that happens to you when you’re growing
up, but I also feel like that process doesn’t really stop at 18 or
something like that. The experiences that shape you aren’t limited to a
specific adolescent age range; it’s a constant process of becoming the
person that you are.
There was this Deerhunter interview where [frontman Bradford Cox]
said you write songs for your 17-year-old self, which I thought was
interesting. We wanted to be the band that we would have loved when we
were 17, when music does mean everything to you and it’s a really
idealistic time in your life. We were all kind of nerdy kids who hung
out at diners and talked about bands that we liked all night; the music
and who you were were almost one and the same thing. I think it’s
important to hold on to the reason you loved the music so much that it
meant everything to you.
You have a couple lyrics that seem like intentional nods to other
indie-pop bands. There’s a line about “crashing through,” which was the
title of a Beat Happening song, and one about “another sunny day,”
which was the name of a British band.
I feel bad about the “another sunny day” one, because I realized
after the fact that Belle and Sebastian did that, too. And not everyone
has to name drop Another Sunny Day to get anorak cred. “Stay Alive”
originally was going to have a Velocity Girl reference in it, but I
couldn’t say “crazy town” in a song without cracking up, so that one
didn’t actually make it. “This Love Is Fucking Right” is kind of a
reference to a Field Mice song, “This Love Is Not Wrong”; it’s kind of
the flip side to the coin.
To me it’s fond and loving. Everyone tries to act like they’ve made
the most original music ever created, and I’m like, I love other bands,
and I’m not afraid to say it. I’ve always loved other bands, and I’d
like to be in a band like the kind of bands that I love. Sometimes it’s
fun to leave little love notes to the bands that have allowed you to
make the music that you do.