Last month, Hanalei released its first full-length in over a decade, entitled Black Snow. We spoke with singer/guitarist Brian Moss, (The Ghost, Great Apes) and talked about what inspired the creation of this album. Upon learning that he was going to be a first-time father, Moss felt compelled to begin writing as a means to deal with the fears of bringing a child into such a turbulent world. We addressed his concerns regarding climate change, income inequality, social media and more, and how these topics influenced the lyrics on this record. Additionally, we discussed how the album was recorded, the overall style of its songs, what Moss has planned for the future of Hanalei and more.
Bill – With it being over ten years since the release of the last Hanalei full-length, what gave you the inspiration to revive this project?
Brian – There were a couple factors. Number one, when I started writing this, I think it was shortly after Great Apes disbanded. I was doing this band Sub Dio for a while, but it was going rather slowly. My intention with that band was to not be the primary songwriter. I was doing dual vocals with it, so I wasn’t the frontman, nor did I want to be. Things were moving slowly, so I didn’t really have an outlet where I could kind of just do my thing. So, there was that as a factor. And leading up to my wife’s pregnancy, we’d been fairly back and forth with whether or not we wanted to have a child. My reservations were always…it’s not that I didn’t want to be a dad, because I certainly did. And if you’re with someone, that’s a discussion where both parties’ views obviously need to be considered on an equal level. More so, I think I was willing even to give more than my 50% if need be. But my reservations were really about looking at the world, looking at the hate in the world, the rise of divisiveness in recent years, politically. Looking at the lack of equality, the lack of real justice and just seeing pain everywhere.
That kind of paired up with environmental concerns, which seem pretty grave at this point. Especially if you’re a person that actually believes in logic and science. As an outdoors enthusiast, I’ve seen a lot of shit firsthand that really upset me. Climate change and population boom is just very evident. It’s all around you if you’re looking at it through the right lens and have a history with it that you can compare it to. I just became really torn about bringing a life into this world. And then my wife got pregnant. I was entirely overjoyed on one hand and excited and nervous. It was kind of the standard spectrum of emotions that I think a lot of expecting parents face. But the climate angle for whatever reason, whether it’s kind of my ins and outs with mental health issues at times or just something that actually really logically deserves the attention or obsession if you will, it just started kind of eating me up. It was like, “What is this world going to look like for my son? Is he going to be able to enjoy what I did as a kid? Where are things going to be in 20 years or in a generation or two down the line?” I think that applies not just to my son, selfishly, but anyone that’s a generation or two or three below us.
As a teacher, I see the anxiety, panic, frustration and anger with students and it’s intense. As it should be. Especially looking at high schoolers, there’s a lot of difficulty just being of that age group in general, kind of regardless of your background. Obviously, some people face far more obstacles and struggles than others, but to kind of pile this on top of all that is really sad. It’s a real deal for these people. It just kind of drove me to the point where I was tail-spinning internally and just consumed by these thoughts. And I started writing lyrics as a means of dealing with that and centered the entire record around a vignette basically of near future fictional snapshots of a post environmentally collapsed world. And then society kind of in a lot of the songs subsequently collapses as a result of the climate collapse. I know that was a lot, but that’s what led to this.
Bill – No, that’s great. I guess there’s probably three or four different follow up questions that I could ask, but I’ll go with can you maybe describe that conflict of emotions when it comes to having a child? On the one hand, this should be one of the most joyous times in your life, but it’s also mixed with terror given the current state of the world.
Brian – Yeah, as I said, there’s the expected level of joy and I certainly felt that. And again, there’s also that anxiety that’s not attached to what I’m specially talking about. I think certain expecting parents won’t talk about this, but I think it’s always there or at least for the most part. I can’t blanket statement and say everyone feels it, but there’s that like “Oh shit. Can I handle this?” kind of emotion wrapped up in there. But yeah, just looking at the world and turning on the news. Or in California, where there’s been these insane drought years and then the fire season ramps up. Pre-Covid, it’s almost as if we were prepared because everyone had N95s and masks around, because every fall or late summer it just looks like a hellscape for a while. I spend a fair amount of time in Hawaii on Kauai. I go there now and the landscape is the same, but upon closer inspection, there’s plastic everywhere. I’ve met people that live there that are literally syphoning microplastic out of the sand. Again, it’s very real if you look in the right spots or look at it through the right lens. And it just kind of set me into a state of panic, anxiety and depression.
Bill – Yeah, that’s definitely disheartening to hear about Kauai. That’s probably the most pristine place that I’ve ever been to.
Brian – Yeah, I think a lot of this too is population boom. There’s nothing you can do about that. By no means would I say to start wiping people out or putting restrictions on the ability to have kids. And I get the irony there as someone who’s concerned with population boom and I just had a kid. Without proper education on how to treat the planet or places you visit, there’s going to be problems. I think a place like Kauai in particular, the infrastructure just isn’t really there to handle that many people. People unfortunately suffer as a result and the environment certainly does. It’s been frustrating to see more people that have been there for generations get pushed out because real estate has gotten exponentially pricier. It’s like, haven’t we learned about how we should treat Hawaiians and the importance of that? Millionaires and billionaires keep coming in and jacking all the rent up and people have to leave or sell their land.
Bill – That question, “Haven’t we learned?”, we could apply that to a lot of things nowadays. You touched on this a little bit earlier, but I wanted to ask about the decision to narrate the album from different perspectives.
Brian – Sure. There was a point very early on when I was playing in Great Apes, before Thread came out, where I hit a wall in terms of writing first-person lyrics. Whether it was about things that I thought I was going through or that other people were going through as well that they might relate to, or about how I felt about larger social justice or political issues. By no means am I saying that’s a bad thing. I just kind of got bored with it and felt as though I had said what I wanted to say for almost two decades in various projects. It was time to take a different approach and to really consider other perspectives. Obviously if you’re writing fictionally, a lot of your own experiences and ideologies are going to seep in there. It’s just inescapable. That first Great Apes full-length, literally I asked friends of mine particular questions about things they were interested in, interviewed them, and then kind changed what they said. If they wanted to write something more creative or poetic, I just kind of put it into lyrics to make it work with the song. And ever since then, everything I’ve done, other than smaller seven-inches or digital single releases, has been loosely conceptual. It’s been narrated since then from a speaker’s voice that’s not my own. And again, of course with this record, my own concerns and issues and emotions come into play, as well as my experiences. It’s just a way for me to approach things differently. I think music needs a little more of that sometimes and it’s fun too.
Bill – Yeah. I can see how it would be freeing in a sense, without sounding cliché…
Brian – It opens up a lot of options too.
Bill – The record’s first song, “Screen Echoes,” talks about a traveler in the near future who comes across a cell phone in the desert. What inspired you to write this song?
Brian – I am just as much of a phone or a screen addict as anyone else and it bothers me. It’s something I’m deeply concerned with. We were talking before the interview about screen fatigue. It like, “Fuck, man. If I added all this up, how many days, months and years have I taken away from my life, just doing this trite, meaningless shit?” People from our generation have seen both sides of this. We were on the cusp of the internet boom. I really get to thinking, how many of us when we’re on our deathbeds, if we have a chance to kind of look back, how many of us are going to regret this? And what are we missing out on every day with doing what we’re doing right now? That’s by no means to say that there aren’t benefits to this, especially during Covid. It’s a way to check-in on people’s lives and to stay in touch with people, but it’s clearly gone too far.
I kind of had this idea that there’s been this climate collapse that has led to somewhat of an apocalyptic society. I don’t think this is necessarily that realistic, but let’s imagine that this new world is devoid of technology or at least personal devices. So, the idea of someone discovering this phone that somehow still works and kind of getting a glimpse into the society that led up to climate collapse and what people were obsessed with. There’s a lot of lines in there about Instagram or social media photos, where everything is posed and there’s this expansive, beautiful landscape behind the individual. And it’s an ass shot and they’re more fixated on their own body or the amount of likes that they’re going to get or the validation they’re going to get, than the splendor that’s all around them. That was kind of the idea there. The thing that bothers me a little bit about that song is that it’s set loosely in eastern California or western Nevada. I kind of envisioned it as a female character. People have interpreted it in other ways, but I feel like I kind of got a little too much of a Mad Max vibe or a desert apocalypse kind of deal in there, but it’s done now. I can’t redo it.
Bill – For what it’s worth, I didn’t pick up on a Mad Max vibe in that song. The next song on the album, “Antibody,” is especially eerie in that you wrote it roughly a year before Covid-19 emerged. Can you tell me what was going through your mind when you wrote that song?
Brian – Yeah, correct. And there was conversation about putting that song out as the first single or putting it as the first song on the record. I’m not Nostradamus. The virus comes up in that song from fracking or offshore drilling and it’s basically unearthed. It takes over the world and there’s some heavy lines in it, like “I kill for life” and “I kill for love.” Once Covid hit, I was like “Fuck. This song makes me incredibly uncomfortable. It feels really insensitive.” That’s always why I’m trying to throw the disclaimer out that the lyrics were penned a year or a year and a half before Covid was even a discussion at all. It’s creepy, for sure. Had that been written during Covid or even when Covid was barely starting to spark up, it would have been immensely insensitive and tacky. I always want to clarify that.
Bill – Maybe it’s because I know you it was clear that it was written a while ago. It’s obvious it was just kind of a coincidence.
Brian – Yeah, I did an SF Weekly interview with a friend and I told him and I’ll tell you too that I do sincerely believe earth has its own immune system. The more we push and the more we devastate, then these things will continue to happen.
Bill – I don’t think that’s an outlandish thing to say at all. The title track is definitely one of my favorite songs on the record. What made you want to name the album after it?
Brian – That was the first song that I wrote for the record. At first, I was like “This isn’t going to be one of the standouts.” As I spent more time with it and have listened to it more beyond being completely invested and imbedded in the writing and recording process, I agree with you. I like it and I think it’s one of the better songs on the record. It’s more upbeat than a lot of the songs and I really like those two words together, “black snow.” When I think of black snow, I honestly think of Chicago a few days after a beautiful blizzard once the cars have smeared it all up. I realized later that there’s a song on One Big Night, it’s the song about Chicago that uses those two words in a line. I wasn’t intentionally referencing that or trying to make an illusion to myself, because that would be fucking ridiculous. Then I was like, “Oh, that makes it even cooler.” There’s also this book I like a lot called Black Rain that’s about the World War II bombings of Japan. If anything, it’s more of an illusion to that.
Bill – In terms of the music on Black Snow, there’s a lot of hooks and indie rock and power pop influences. Did you intentionally go for that kind of style given the rather heavy lyrical content?
Brian – Yes. I think so. You know, you have your handful of slower songs on there. I was just talking to my students about this. If you look at what a lot of stand-up comedians do, they’re actually dealing with really, really dark material. At least certain comedians. And it’s coupled up with comedy jokes and gesturing, because that makes it more palatable. It’s a juxtaposition and if musically every song on this record was pitch black, it’s almost like it’s too much. You need to have that kind of upbeat angle to balance out the cynicism or the bleakness of a lot of the songs. That was certainly intentional. Not to the sense where I was like, “Oh, I can’t write a slow song,” but I wanted to make it a little more poppy and a little more midtempo to upbeat in a lot of instances.
Bill – For sure. Tell me about the recording process of Black Snow. I know you recorded the album at home and played a majority of the instruments. And then the drums were recorded at Atomic Garden by Jack Shirley, who also mastered the album.
Brian – Sure. The first thing I would bring up is having the ability to record at home. I only used two mics, one condenser mic and it’s not super-nice, and an SM57. But with where recording technology is at, just having that ability to spend an infinite amount of time if you’d like at home, where you can do it on your schedule. And of course, having a newborn around for a good portion of this record. I was really trying to work around my wife and be helpful there. And it’s kind of like you just need to be able to do it when time presents itself. The amount of time I spent on this record would be insane if I added it all up. There’s just absolutely no way I could’ve afforded studio time for even one twentieth of that. I was writing as I was recording, which is a really fun thing to do. Everything was played to a click track. The drums were added later, so I knew I could just kind of wiggle parts around and drop them in because everything was not perfectly on-time, but close enough. It allows for so much experimentation and layering. I’m the type of person that will layer and layer and layer until I’ve destroyed whatever goodness was initially in the song and then I’ll have to pull it back out.
Doing that all at home definitely allowed me to take my time. I’m into learning more about recording too. I don’t really have the money to buy a ton of gear, but like I said, in the modern age, even with some basic shit you can do a lot if you put the time into reading and learning about it. Jack Shirley was fantastic in terms of whenever I’d text him or call him for advice, he was very generous with giving me snippets of information that would be useful. I have some other friends that are engineers and they did the same. I’ve recorded in the past, but I definitely turned it up a notch for this one. That was really fun. It was a learning experience. My friend Jerry who was in a fantastic band called Daikon and he was in another band called Under a Dying Sun, an old hardcore band from the Bay, he played drums on it. We added them later and that was a bit of a struggle. We certainly should’ve done drums first. Had we done that, I would have just put everything over the drums. But because I was writing on the fly as I did each song, it just didn’t work out like that. And because of the time constraints we had to do it that way. We recorded those with Jack and then I mixed everything and Jack mastered it. I need to give credit to Jack though because there were many phone calls or texts about the mixing process where shit wasn’t really working out exactly as I had planned. The help he provided, I couldn’t say enough kind things about that guy and it really made the record sound better.
Bill – Cool. That sounds like a very unique recording process for sure.
Brian – Yeah. I wouldn’t do it again this way, (laughs).
Bill – Given that you began writing Black Snow roughly two years ago, how does it feel to have it finished and released now?
Brian – It’s crazy. I think given the work that was put in on it during my wife’s pregnancy and the birth of our son, there’s a lot of emotion wrapped up in it. Also, the pandemic, as I was mixing during the first two or three months of quarantine. I’ve never worked on something this long and it’s wild. I think it’ll finally be done for me when I have the actual record in-hand and I can listen to it that way. I’m super-excited to hear how it sounds on vinyl. Obviously with doing it at home, it’s a digital recording. It’s just been so long. I’m used to being in a band and writing a record over six months and then going into the studio for a few days and it’s done. But the vinyl delays these days are crazy. Great Apes dealt with that a lot with our records on Asian Man Records. It’s certainly not the label’s fault or even the pressing plant’s fault. It’s just a materials issue and it’s like you’re waiting six or eight months for vinyl to turnaround at certain points. That’s how it was with one of the Great Apes records. By the time it came out, I was just like “I’m over it. I don’t even care about these songs anymore. I don’t want to play them. We’re writing new stuff.”
Bill – That is a really long time to wait. Have you started to think at all about the possibility of playing shows in support of the record?
Brian – Yeah and the funny thing with that is none of these songs work well with just me. They’re so layered. I don’t even think it’s the drums necessarily. I don’t think that I’m gifted really at all when it comes to super-catchy vocal lines and there’s a lot of guitar leads on this record. And when I say leads, I certainly do not mean solos. But there’s just these kind of melodic leads that are catchier than the vocal lines and they function as the hooks. I’ve tried playing some of them solo and they suffer, they lack. I suppose I could get into looping them, but I don’t know how I feel about that. So maybe a band thing at some point, or just figuring out ways to rearrange the songs to make them fit into a solo context, which I’ve certainly done in the past with other songs I’ve written. But yeah, hopefully. I miss live shows immensely and at this point I really miss loud music. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to just plug in my half stack and blast.
Bill – I can imagine. If you had to guess, do you think it will be another ten years before the next Hanalei album?
Brian – I hope not. I think the new thing, as the Steve Buscemi skateboard meme comes out, is you have to follow up constantly with digital singles or EPs. I’m definitely taking a little creative break right now from Hanalei and I don’t have a band right now, so I’m not doing that. And again, just the amount of time and emotion that’s wrapped up in that record, I needed to just decompress, but I’m sure that I’ll start writing soon. I doubt that it will be ten years. I’m doing something too, it’s not official news yet, but Paul from The Ghost and Neil Hennessy, (The Lawrence Arms) and I have been doing this distance recording project that’s been really, really fun. Admittedly, when the Hanalei record was done, I didn’t pick up a guitar for months, which was crazy for me. That’s unheard of. It’s minimally a weekly thing if not multiple times per week. Those two guys called me up or texted me one day and were like, “Hey, we’re doing this Zoom cover thing where we pick songs for each other. You want to get in on it?” I was like, “Fuck yeah.” I love both those guys and that was a great reason for me to pick up a guitar again. That kind of led into them asking me to do vocals on this project. I would describe it as kind of arty and a little shoegaze, yet also a little bit of old school emo and light math rock. They’d been keeping this under the radar and just sending tracks back and forth. Paul is in Oregon and Neil is in L.A., and I guess they didn’t have vocals that were gelling, so they asked me to do it. I’ve just been putting down vocals, Paul’s writing the lyrics and it’s been a blast. I’m not writing the songs. Obviously, both of them are incredibly talented individuals and great people, so that’s been really fun too. I don’t know. Maybe we’ll do a show sometime as well.
Bill – Very cool. Appreciate the breaking news.
