Skinny Dippers Interview

0:00 Skinny Dippers Music Appreciation

0:11 Luke F. Walton Hey everybody, what's up? Welcome to Music Appreciation 101, which has now turned into Love Music More. I'm joined by a very special guest, Skinny Dippers, aka Ryan, who is going to be talking about his musical journey, kind of what it's like to be a musician on the other side of the United States and all that comes with that. So welcome, welcome to the pod, Ryan.

0:36 Skinny Dippers Thanks, Scoob. Good to be here. Excited to be on the show.

0:39 Luke F. Walton Yeah, it's great. Just a little bit of background. We have worked together. I actually did a remix of one of your tunes, Highs and Lows. I'd love to talk about that process, talk about all that goes into being a musician. But before we do that, why don't we just start with a little intro about yourself? What's your project like? How did you kind of come up in music?

0:57 Luke F. Walton Let's let the listeners know a little bit about you.

1:01 Skinny Dippers Sure. Yeah. So as you mentioned, my name is Ryan and I developed this kind of new indie music project, I guess, for lack of a better term during the pandemic called Skinny Dippers, where kind of right as the pandemic was about to hit, I was getting some friends together.

1:16 Skinny Dippers We were thinking about playing some gigs, maybe doing some recording, but it was very loose, free form, didn't really have much of an idea of what we wanted to do with it or how it was going to work. But then when the pandemic happened. I had all this free time in my hand and was kind of learning more about production and making music and decided, hey, I think I'm going to put out a single.

1:34 Skinny Dippers That's like my kind of first goal here. And then from there, it's kind of picked up into a larger project with lots of different collaborators that I've brought in, but grew up my whole life playing music. I'm from Maine where I played keyboard when I was about four or five years old,

1:48 Luke F. Walton Okay.

1:48 Skinny Dippers played trumpet through middle school, high school band and was in ska bands with friends and kind of picked up a guitar just from a friend. From there, I've played in lots of bands. I played banjo in a folk Americana band coming out of college and mostly now guitar, bass, vocals, but I do a little keys, still play a little trumpet every now and then. So that's kind of the background of how I got started.

2:10 Luke F. Walton That's awesome. And then kind of in terms of you moved from Maine to Brooklyn, is it?

2:18 Skinny Dippers Yeah, so I moved down to New York to go to school down here and then. lived kind of in like the village for a while and moved out to brooklyn where now i've been in brooklyn for the last 10 years or so yeah

2:28 Luke F. Walton very very cool yeah i love the love the music scene out there um really really uh really really fun times in both brooklyn and and the village love um should we go to fat cat the um i guess called the cellar dog now love that spot all my nyu

2:43 Skinny Dippers fat cat's

2:44 Luke F. Walton buddies

2:44 Skinny Dippers really cool great jazz music in there uh you can't go wrong anywhere you go in new york i feel like you're You're probably going to catch some good music on any given night.

2:51 Luke F. Walton Absolutely. Even the park. Yeah.

2:54 Skinny Dippers Yeah,

2:54 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

2:54 Skinny Dippers especially the park.

2:55 Luke F. Walton Heard some head turning jazz musicians in Central Park. So yeah, let's talk about multi instrumentalism. I feel like that's always really interesting about kind of the musical paths that people choose and maybe find them of going from instrument to instrument. So what from early on what attracted you you know, to trumpet, I guess?

3:18 Skinny Dippers yeah so trumpet i think was different for me because i had played piano for a few years

3:25 Luke F. Walton Yep.

3:26 Skinny Dippers it was more like my parents you know were like hey you should get a hobby and you know learn piano yeah and i loved

3:32 Skinny Dippers making music and kind of I loved being a performer so there's there's a really funny video of me when I'm probably four or five years old kind of spinning around on these race car helmets and sombreros all these other kids playing Leroy Lazy Duck I still remember the song I could play it for you on piano right now

3:47 Luke F. Walton Awesome.

3:47 Skinny Dippers but with trumpet I think I saw it as this great soloist instrument where to me it seems like oh if you're the trumpet player you're playing you know the melody and you get to play all the cool parts that stand out and brass instruments seem so

4:00 Skinny Dippers big and bold and brash and so I think that was really attractive to me as like a 10 year old who was kind of sick of piano and keyboard and I wanted to play in a school band with my friends and learn more about how I could do more music I guess because to me it was always this is the thing that your parents told you to do that you practice and you kind of sign up and I liked figuring things out but to me trumpet was a way to do it with friends as part of school band which was really really cool

4:26 Luke F. Walton That's awesome. Yeah. Do you feel like some of that stuff like foundationally changed the way that you think of music now? Like when you are, you know, writing a tune or whatever, do you feel like that experience of doing it in ensemble settings and in different genres and stuff like that inform kind of the music that you're ultimately making now as a pro?

4:46 Skinny Dippers I think somewhat. So I think. probably the way in which i think about arrangements probably came from playing in like orchestra jazz band where you have you know four or five trumpet parts and there's harmony and i used to love probably my band teacher would hate this but like making up little parts where when you're playing with like a hundred kids you know and it's this cacophony of sound i would sometimes try to play harmonies or make things up and i'd get a little bored and so

5:10 Skinny Dippers I do the same thing now when I'm writing songs right where you kind of make a part and then rather than kind of writing out parts as some people might do if they're working on arrangements I'll kind of just play a bunch of loops and think about harmonies which I'm sure a lot of other bedroom songwriters will do and that was I think kind of instilled in those early days of just playing these trumpet parts with an orchestra and kind of seeing how it all fits together versus again you solo at a piano just kind of playing some parts as you know a kid when I wasn't really playing with other people yet.

5:39 Luke F. Walton I like that. I like that. In terms of your process, let's just jump around a little bit going into like arranging and the way that you are doing that, like doing loops, what kind of do you use a DAW like is there a program of choice and what's your kind of workflow for that improvisational side of arranging?

5:57 Skinny Dippers Yeah, so I use Logic,

5:59 Luke F. Walton Cool.

5:59 Skinny Dippers got a Logic setup with Mac and For me, I usually start with a melody. So

6:05 Luke F. Walton Nice.

6:05 Skinny Dippers I've tried to play around with form and kind of songwriting styles to see what I can do that might be a little different or step outside of my comfort zone. So I've actually done some pretty cool classes through a program called School of Song, if you've ever heard of it.

6:20 Luke F. Walton Not familiar,

6:20 Skinny Dippers And

6:20 Luke F. Walton no.

6:20 Skinny Dippers a lot of it is these songwriting exercises where they have really, really cool, sometimes well-known musicians and songwriters come in talking about their process and talking about different. and exercises or tools they'll use to write a new song

6:32 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

6:32 Skinny Dippers and so that's been pretty cool mixing it up but i also feel like getting back to my bread and butter it really is grab an acoustic guitar find a cool chord pattern then find a melody that works over that so i typically start with that i feel like you once you have that kind of foundation of or i have that foundation of melody and guitar chords it kind of starts to get a vibe and i know what the song might be about based on the kind of

6:57 Skinny Dippers chord character that you're using

6:58 Luke F. Walton Okay.

6:59 Skinny Dippers uh

6:59 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

6:59 Skinny Dippers so you know if it has minor chords it might be a sad song or that kind of thing major chords might be happy and so from there i think that then feeds into where i might go arrangement wise where if it was a really you know melodramatic sad songs for a simple example

7:15 Luke F. Walton Sure.

7:15 Skinny Dippers maybe I would have some soft piano or something behind it right or some sort of string pad I would use in logic whereas if it was maybe more upbeat and energetic maybe I would grab my trumpet right and start to layer on some of those where I want to have that bombastic energy that a brass instrument might bring and so I think sometimes the mood you're going for and the kind of dynamics of what you're recording can kind of inform the way I would think about arrangement and what songs would

7:39 Skinny Dippers ones would fit best in it

7:40 Luke F. Walton I like that. I like that. And then when you're when you're like part writing, when you say say you pick up that trumpet and you're looking for something bombastic and you're you're looping stuff, what are you what are you kind of trying to do? Are you are you trying to jump off of that melody? Are you trying to add new sections?

7:53 Luke F. Walton Like kind of how do you end up building that nucleus and then fleshing that out into a full full tune?

7:59 Skinny Dippers i think sometimes just finding the hooks or the earworms so i try to have that mantra that most things should be able to stand on their own right so

8:08 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

8:08 Skinny Dippers there's definitely the kind of parts that are just the glue parts i think i think of them as where they're kind of in there to make the other parts fit together but you want to have those earworms that people are going to be humming or what stands out even if it's not a vocal melody if i'm creating a trumpet part or if there's a lead guitar part i want people to be able to

8:26 Skinny Dippers whistle it or kind of hum it in their head and me and some old bandmates used to have a pretty funny joke where whenever somebody would write a song we'd bring it in for the band we would say it has to pass the kazoo test and the kazoo

8:36 Luke F. Walton Okay,

8:36 Skinny Dippers test would be the

8:37 Luke F. Walton I like it.

8:37 Skinny Dippers melody of the song and then like essentially the bass part or like the root chords right and if it was good if you just played it with two kazoos then it's probably a good song but if it's really more reliant on other things then it's probably maybe good because of lyrical content but it's not good because

8:52 Skinny Dippers good because of the hooks and so if you can start by getting really good hooks then my idea is you've got the great foundation of a great song

8:58 Luke F. Walton i like that that's a great little nugget that could go in what was the thing called song something uh the master class series that

9:04 Skinny Dippers yeah

9:04 Luke F. Walton you were talking about

9:04 Skinny Dippers the school of song yeah

9:05 Luke F. Walton school of song that's like that's like a school of song nugget right there the kazoo test i really like that i mean that's that's a cool way to think about it too like uh some people have told me about how if the song could be sped up or slowed down no problem

9:18 Luke F. Walton then it's a good song too and i i actually think it's really interesting like tiktok and and social media is like all about sped up and slowed down because that is like a classic test of a great melody is if it's flexible it can go to different keys different different tempos and i like the kazoo thing is like an extension of that that same kind of idea if it's good it can it can fit

9:39 Skinny Dippers Yeah.

9:39 Luke F. Walton into a different space yeah or

9:41 Skinny Dippers and

9:41 Luke F. Walton like um

9:42 Skinny Dippers that's

9:42 Luke F. Walton yeah

9:42 Skinny Dippers almost like

9:42 Luke F. Walton go

9:42 Skinny Dippers i was

9:43 Luke F. Walton for it that's

9:44 Skinny Dippers gonna say it's almost like how you hear these totally different genre covers of songs and they

9:48 Luke F. Walton exactly

9:48 Skinny Dippers still what sound

9:48 Luke F. Walton i'm saying yep

9:49 Skinny Dippers great because it's it's got that great hook it doesn't matter you could do it in any way you could arrange in any way so all the points i was maybe making earlier about like giving this close and careful thought to arrangement almost doesn't matter if you've got a great song to start with

10:01 Luke F. Walton right that's a good point but it also speaks to what you were saying about um about like starting with melody and having that kind of be the centerpiece of what you're doing doing because yeah if if you're failing on that then it doesn't really matter what other things you put around it um it's it's it's losing that center of gravity that nucleus that it needs i agree with you there yeah

10:21 Skinny Dippers A hundred percent.

10:22 Luke F. Walton that's a really good point um in terms of kind of the so you you have the bedroom side of kind of what you're doing which is that you know solo introspective you're looping you're kind of in your world um in terms of like collaboration and getting out of that i know that

10:37 Luke F. Walton a lot of musicians kind of went through this where you kind of had pandemic mode and now we're like post-pandemic mode and trying to like come out come out of my shell and doing just fine kind of thing of like bringing people back in so how did you conceptualize that of doing these reworks these remixes involving other people and and kind of growing your your community

10:59 Skinny Dippers Sure. So I would say even prior to the remix project definitely wasn't doing it all alone. So I think the kind of support crew that I have is a huge part of what Skinny Dippers became,

11:09 Luke F. Walton Okay,

11:09 Skinny Dippers right? Because

11:09 Luke F. Walton great.

11:10 Skinny Dippers again, the idea originally was doing some shows with some friends. I've got these songs I really want to put out into the world, but none of them were recorded. So when the pandemic started, it was all right, I'm going to make some demos. I'm going to up my production chops because I had always had logic, but never really knew what I was doing. It was kind of just playing around. but

11:27 Luke F. Walton Mm

11:27 Skinny Dippers i

11:27 Luke F. Walton -hmm.

11:27 Skinny Dippers was just watching videos like crazy reading everything i could read and just playing around to actually get some decent recordings as i was doing that um i put out a single with my buddy harper james he's a brooklyn-based producer and he actually did one of the reimagined versions of one of my songs so uh i did a song called wedding ring that he recently kind of remixed and did his own middle youth version of that you can find uh everywhere my music is up online

11:53 Skinny Dippers but we did a song called panties that was kind of a joke that i made just for fun as this kind of quarantine bop and then i just put it out there to say hey i just want to have something out there that's just me as opposed to these other groups i'd played in where you know i might have played banjo in a band or bass in a band or that but i said i just want to do something that sounds exactly the way i want it so harp and i put out a song went well but i wanted to keep growing that musical community so so

12:18 Skinny Dippers I had the idea of putting out this album called The Town and the City, which is the album that I have out now on Spotify that includes the original highs and low track.

12:26 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

12:27 Skinny Dippers And the whole idea was I'm going to take a bunch of the songs that I wrote in the years between kind of when I first left Maine and moved to New York, almost like a greatest hits just to get these songs out into the world that I've never actually recorded and published because I feel like if I don't do that, I just will never have a clean slate. Like I've got to finish these basically. and

12:44 Skinny Dippers Yeah. uh after having put out my first single panties i kind of got to learn the landscape of how people kind of promote their songs and how to get on playlists and whatnot so i was using tools like submit hub or other people use some like groover or playlist push or some of these tools and while on submit hub i was seeing a lot of other artists uh on the genre charts so may have been how i first found some of your stuff i'm seeing like other artists that are you

13:10 Skinny Dippers that are doing well that blogs are picking up or they're getting on playlists i found another band that was a brooklyn band called verne mats and i was like this is a really cool track i'm loving this uh i'm gonna follow this artist on instagram uh and actually i think at the time i might not have even realized he was in brooklyn i just said this is cool music i'm gonna follow it right and i was like oh this guy's also a brooklyn guy i'm gonna have to go check out a show and i realized he was posting more and more like produced with toledo

13:36 Skinny Dippers So for

13:36 Luke F. Walton Ah, cool.

13:37 Skinny Dippers another Brooklyn group here, it's two guys, Dan and Jordan, they have this band Toledo. And so I noticed that.

13:43 Skinny Dippers i love the verne matt stuff i love toledo stuff they have this sound that i think sounds a lot like what i'm trying to do it looks like they're in the same neighborhood as me i should shoot these guys a message so i literally just reached out on instagram said hey guys like looks like you're in bushwick i'm in bushwick we should get together for a coffee and talk about music like i'm working on an album and they were like yeah that sounds great and so we maybe even done a zoom first kind of like this but and this is maybe getting a bit long-winded but

14:10 Luke F. Walton No, no, I like it. It's good.

14:12 Skinny Dippers Yeah, we can chop this as

14:14 Luke F. Walton No,

14:14 Skinny Dippers needed,

14:14 Luke F. Walton no,

14:14 Skinny Dippers but

14:14 Luke F. Walton no, no.

14:15 Skinny Dippers so I met

14:16 Luke F. Walton This is great.

14:17 Skinny Dippers Dan and Jordan from

14:18 Luke F. Walton Go for

14:18 Skinny Dippers Toledo.

14:18 Luke F. Walton it.

14:20 Skinny Dippers We had a couple conversations so I could really figure out like what their process was, how those guys work and kind of how they think about.

14:26 Skinny Dippers creating music and they said yeah let's do a couple songs we can create a mood board for the vibe send us a playlist of some references of stuff you like uh we got together and they totally just spoke the same language like we were talking about all the same bands that we liked um they knew a bunch of the stuff that i'd sent them and they were like we're totally

14:45 Skinny Dippers on Nice. board this is really cool we were going to do something like three songs and we ended up turning it into a whole album and then uh so i played some guitar on that a little bit of bass but dan and jordan jordan they both play a bunch of instruments too so jordan played a bunch of lead guitar parts

15:00 Skinny Dippers Okay. because i wouldn't consider myself really much of a shredder and then dan played all the drums played a lot of the bass parts played some guitar stuff as well so between the three of us we did pretty much the whole album just in their basement at their studio they had and then i brought in my friend joanna schubert who plays as or pendula to do a bunch of harmonies as well throughout the entire album so basically between those two guys my friend joanna

15:23 Skinny Dippers joanna excuse me joanna we

15:24 Luke F. Walton Mm-hmm.

15:25 Skinny Dippers tracked and recorded the whole album to get it mixed uh i was considering doing it with my buddy harper who had been great done a track with him uh but when i showed the toledo guys dan and jordan one of the songs i had a mixed reference so i said yeah i want this song to sound kind of like this song meets this song and one of the the artists that was one of my mixed references was melina de torte from jason and they were like oh

15:51 Skinny Dippers we actually know melina

15:52 Luke F. Walton Cool.

15:52 Skinny Dippers like she might be a cool option to mix

15:53 Luke F. Walton Nice. Nice.

15:54 Skinny Dippers the album.

15:54 Luke F. Walton Great.

15:54 Skinny Dippers And he was one of my reference tracks. I was like, oh, that would be so cool.

15:58 Luke F. Walton Yes.

15:58 Skinny Dippers So ended up getting the connection there, spoke with Melina. She was super on board and she ended up mixing the whole record too. So. So kind of just from these random occurrences of meeting people that led to someone else that led to someone else, I feel like I really built this great team who

16:11 Luke F. Walton Mm-hmm.

16:12 Skinny Dippers knew exactly what I wanted and matched up perfectly with the kind of references I had going into it because I kind of saw it out a certain type of. you know, player, mixer, producer based on the sounds I like.

16:24 Luke F. Walton well i really like that and and don't feel like that was long-winded because i think there's a lot of really cool information in there about you know say somebody's coming up and they're like okay how do i actually do this like say they're say they're a musician they play in their bedroom they but they're like okay i have gaps in certain skills like i need a lead guitarist like you're saying or a mix engineer that i feel really strongly about that's a great way to do it like you can start just virtually

16:47 Luke F. Walton And then you might find out, hey, there are people in my city, especially if you live in a major city, you know, there might be that synchronicity of following one person realizing that they're down the street and then you are suddenly creating together and making something you never would have expected. So that's that's really beautiful. That's really cool. Yeah.

17:07 Skinny Dippers Yeah. And again, I think it's worked out whether they're down the street or whether it's somebody you meet online.

17:12 Luke F. Walton Great.

17:12 Skinny Dippers Some of the connections I've made for these remixes, which I can talk a little bit about,

17:16 Luke F. Walton Please.

17:16 Skinny Dippers or even, you know, how to find the guy that doesn't like mastering like that kind of thing was just, again, finding music that I liked, figuring out who made it and then, you know, making some connections sometimes saying, hey, is this somebody that actually speaks same language as me that I want to work with? And that's worked out really, really well for me where I feel like.

17:33 Skinny Dippers if before someone had told me like just go find all the people that you like and send the messages I think I would have been maybe a little intimidated by that

17:40 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

17:40 Skinny Dippers but because of the way it kind of laid out step by step it actually worked out being really easy and I think if you bring something to someone that is in the vein in which they like to work and they hear it they can you know make up their own mind whether they want to work with you and do something cool right

17:56 Luke F. Walton totally, totally. And I like the way that you were doing it too. And I think that's instructive of

18:00 Luke F. Walton of you were kind of finding what you needed at that moment you didn't just try to find the entire team all at once you you know like we need to produce this record you produce the record you identify the songs and then it's like okay now we got to mix it now you find the mix it now we got a master you find the mastering you didn't have to like lay out the entire team all at once which is something that you know i i i felt daunted by as well of like you need a lawyer and you need a manager and you need a mixer you need a mastering and all these

18:26 Luke F. Walton all these things all at once it seems impossible because it kind of is you got to do it piece

18:31 Skinny Dippers Totally.

18:31 Luke F. Walton by piece yeah yeah love that um in terms of just like music scene i'm just curious just uh switching gears a little bit uh brooklyn music scene indie music scene what what's it like what are the places that you like seeing shows how do you um how do you like network um what are what are some of the things that make you feel like you're you know involved in the community and a part of the scene

18:56 Skinny Dippers Yeah, so I think we were talking about how you can see good music in so many places here in New York.

19:00 Skinny Dippers no way I'm pretty fortunate to live right down the road from a really cool venue. It's probably my favorite in New York, Baby's Alright, where they've just got amazing shows so I can walk five minutes and go see some of my favorite bands,

19:12 Skinny Dippers that's which is pretty awesome cool. that's so cool all right i'm book Yeah, marking book

19:15 Skinny Dippers I've marking right now seen some bands like, yeah, one of your favorites too, have you been there?

19:19 Skinny Dippers no i haven't been there i i i I don't know a ton of, I'm from San Diego, so I don't know a ton of venues

19:25 Skinny Dippers Yeah. in Brooklyn, but I got it. I got to go. It's bookmarked. um yeah that's that one's great

19:31 Skinny Dippers sick yeah bummer um unfortunately there have been a few that have shut down after the pandemic which is a bummer because uh i used to bartend when i first graduated from college when i was kind of figuring out how to make this music thing work you know kind of what i want to do with my career and so i actually went to a lot of the venues that i played at and said hey can i bar back or like run the ropes here and

19:51 Skinny Dippers that's so a good i idea worked at this place meeting factory in the bowery electric in manhattan and so So that was great because I already had some inns there because I knew the people that had basically booked me there

20:00 Skinny Dippers Perfect. while I was in college playing. Love it. And that also, I think, allowed me to meet a lot of bands and meet other people that were in the music scene because a lot of people that work at those kind of music venues are other musicians. So that opened the door, met a lot of people through school. So just going to school here in New York at NYU,

20:17 Skinny Dippers Totally. doing a music program, there's a million amazing musicians, which is always a really great thing to have around. Other than that, I think just meeting people through open mics and shows like house shows, concerts,

20:31 Skinny Dippers House shows, I yeah. feel like. It seems like although Brooklyn's a huge place with millions of people, there's always kind of the same small crowd that goes to a lot of these smaller shows at these like, you know, 100, 200 person venues.

20:43 Skinny Dippers So I end up seeing a lot of the same people around and meeting folks through other friends who are other engineers, other artists, other mixers. And so that opens a lot of doors for really cool people you can work with, I feel like.

20:54 Skinny Dippers I like that a lot how have you um since you've been since you've been there a while have you felt like the scene has evolved have you have you noticed any kind of change or has it felt kind of the same the whole time

21:07 Skinny Dippers one thing that I think's changed a lot which maybe isn't as much of a positive uh I don't know if this is unique to kind of what I've seen or maybe even just being a young person in college versus somebody that's been out for a little while but I feel like back in the day it seemed like a lot of the bands I knew that seemed like

21:25 Skinny Dippers quote-unquote serious bands Yeah. were just always gigging right so you had the weekly residency you're

21:30 Skinny Dippers Yeah. playing three four or five gigs a month and now it seems like with such an emphasis on streaming and bedroom recording and everyone kind of taking production to their own hands I feel like most of the artists I know and the musicians I know are far more frequently working on recording and not playing that many shows which I think can be a little bit of a bummer because

21:51 Skinny Dippers because i want to go out and see my friends play all the time but it seems like even my friends that have you know pretty successful projects with a lot of followers even if they do many tours they'll take long breaks where they're not really out playing once a week in new york and i don't know if that's because of the venue is and that it's just really hard to kind of pay musicians and get out there and do it so frequently or if it's more about just how easy it's gotten to record and people are focusing on that

22:17 Skinny Dippers but But that seems to have changed quite a lot from again when I was like 21 in the city to now.

22:22 Skinny Dippers Yeah, no, I think that's a big part of it. One of the hardest things I think for musicians that have to have, you know, side people is just the cost. And it's really, I'm curious how you perform live, but, you know, for me, that's always super daunting when you're looking at a bill and you're like, might make a few hundred dollars definitely spending a few hundred dollars. And it's like.

22:43 Skinny Dippers it's like the the math is always like guaranteed expenses and not guaranteed income it's always super hard so then you're like hey at least with streaming you know i'm making i'm making pennies but it's at least there's like income um curious what what your take is on kind of the expense of playing and also how what's your lineup how do you how do you usually look in um into live performance

23:08 Skinny Dippers Yeah, that's been the hot topic for me, I feel like recently, Yeah, as I've still

23:12 Skinny Dippers absolutely. been kind of figuring that out. So just like you said, for special shows, I want to have those, I want to book them. And I feel like there's something really, really cool about being able to play live and to help bring those songs to life. And that's why I originally got into music because I want to get in a room with people and make music like I have fun in my room recording and writing songs.

23:31 Skinny Dippers But to me, my favorite, favorite part is about the collaboration. Mm-hmm. which is why I think I was really happy that for this kind of quote-unquote solo album I was able to turn into something so collaborative with a lot of those people that I highlighted but when I play live uh I'll bring in my friends and essentially hire my friends to be the band right so

23:48 Skinny Dippers Right. as you said it it adds up quickly right so I'd love to play every week but I want to bring in people who I think are the absolute best that are going to make the songs really shine right and to do that most of those friends you

24:00 Skinny Dippers are the people who are gigging like pretty much every night right they're doing music for a living and so you know while they certainly would give me the friend rates it's just it really adds up really quickly right and kind of like you said oftentimes when you go to these venues you might bring 30 people to a show but you might then get you know 100 bucks or something right

24:18 Skinny Dippers Right, right. and so you're losing money when you play those shows even when you have a lot of people coming out and you're filling a room and you're playing to some packed house because not only did you bring 30 people but the other three bands all brought 30 for you people people yet somehow you walk out losing money which is i

24:32 Skinny Dippers Yeah. think difficult so Yep. i've tried doing more of the solo thing recently just so i can play some some shows where i'll go uh with an acoustic guitar and

24:42 Skinny Dippers Nice. just just play true songwriter style but Totally. more recently i played a show uh i guess it was a couple months ago now but i brought an electric and all my pedals and like a looping pedal and try to do a little bit of that but it's not quite as fun for me as playing with a band it's never quite the same experience

24:58 Skinny Dippers No, well, it's. it feels way more like work when you're doing it alone because it's just like i don't know what it is there's just a certain energy to it and i'm trying to crack that too where it's like that's of course that's ideal because then you can do it anywhere anytime you don't need to handle schedules or whatever but um yeah music is collaborative especially when you write it i think in the way that you and i write it where we're not writing it for loops we're writing it for a band and like there's like personality on every

25:28 Skinny Dippers instrument and every like part so when you flatten that personality and it's just kind of like tracks or looping or whatever it's a little bit more difficult but at the same time like we were saying in the very beginning of the conversation

25:41 Skinny Dippers there's got to be a way especially because the tunes are good if it can pass the kazoo test certainly there is like a way to kill it as um you know somewhere between singer songwriter and and track track world um solo performance but it's hard and

25:55 Skinny Dippers i feel it's not easy like that's always one of the debates too is like should i just go all in on daft punk style computer music

26:01 Skinny Dippers i know and i just know right exactly it's super tempting right i mean i i feel that too you know you know i don't know maybe maybe it is maybe that's just like the economics of at least this stage like i um for example i i saw um jw francis who's kind of in in this world as well and he's just touring

26:19 Skinny Dippers As just did I. solo yeah yes i'm too nice nice I saw him play rough trade here in the city. So he's actually one of my favorites as well. So I've seen him play a few times now.

26:29 Skinny Dippers awesome yeah it was cool it was cool he did a good job It was great. yeah Great show.

26:31 Skinny Dippers yep yep so um There are ways to do it. There are ways to do it. But having a full band, there's a certain magic and there's a certain space between notes and conversation between players that is very, very hard to replicate. I think.

26:50 Skinny Dippers Absolutely. Yeah. In terms of just kind of like future plans, where is your head at in terms of the evolution of this project? I think it'd be really cool to let the listeners in on kind of the strategic thinking of like arc of project and growth and evolution stylistically, all that kind of stuff. Just curious where your head's at looking forward.

27:13 Skinny Dippers yeah Cool. so i think right now i'm kind of wrapping up what i'd maybe think of as phase two of the skinny dippers project

27:20 Skinny Dippers Okay. right where it's this remix project Right. right so i've got a few out right now i think yours was the second one that came out

27:27 Skinny Dippers Cool. i've got a third one coming out Nice. with another artist who i met through that school of song uh

27:32 Skinny Dippers Oh, program great. you Awesome. know we met just doing these zoom song shares where it's like a big big class and uh she lives in iowa so it's another one of these very like remote remote remote kind of

27:42 Skinny Dippers Yeah. friendship over instagram things but um for that one it was a little more collaborative where again we kind of like postal style service trade uh sent like tracks back and forth for a while and i'd be like hey i got this idea for kind of cool synth part and i'd send it over and then they'd be like yeah i've got that but now we we put some drums over that and so uh that was working with uh marissa and scott from a band called holding hour so they've just changed their name from what was previously

28:09 Skinny Dippers Ellis In so this will be their first holding hour release and it'll be my song Icarus Emerge but

28:14 Skinny Dippers Oh, instead of a kind of pretty folk kind of acoustic version it's a like shoegaze rocker version

28:20 Skinny Dippers Nice. Great. very Can't different wait to hear it. Awesome. and tentatively the idea has been to get

28:27 Skinny Dippers 10 versions of the original songs which as i've done it i'm like this might be really ambitious to do an entire like cover remix remake album so i've been kind of thinking about is that realistic or do i want to do some just totally alt versions of my own songs like an acoustic version of one of the like indie rocker songs um so i'm kind of figuring out the last stages of that for this kind of reimagined album of the town in the city which i first put out then from there

28:56 Skinny Dippers there uh i've got a batch of songs for a second ep which Nice. is going to be a lot more kind of like acoustic songwriter folky because this one uh partially was inspired by a lot of the songs i wrote through that school of song class

29:11 Skinny Dippers which Oh, were just cool. like me with Yeah. an acoustic guitar in a room um haven't fleshed them out with a band yet but i think it probably leans a little more towards the folkier side again and i would say i drop from a lot of influences like

29:22 Skinny Dippers sufjan stevens uh and that kind of thing where it's like very indie folk and i want to have like i would say some kind of synthesizers but not like your big brash buzzy saw synths like more of like uh ethereal it's kind of whimsical very folky still uh maybe some like affected string type stuff uh and that's going to be probably like a four or five song ep

29:49 Skinny Dippers In addition to that, I have this other kind of simultaneous project. I think it'll be more singles that I'll be putting out like in between and around doing albums and EPs where I've just had a lot of fun doing covers.

30:00 Skinny Dippers Cool. So I think actually my most popular song right now is a cover of this 80s song, I Just Died in Your Arms, which was so much fun to make. And so I really enjoyed.

30:12 Skinny Dippers being able to just lean into production with friends and kind of putting my stamp or my spin

30:16 Skinny Dippers on Mm-hmm. these kind of classic songs and Yes. kind of flipping them on their head because I feel like especially with an 80s song like that just died in your arm it has like such a a distinct you know 80s style because i feel like you can hear 10 seconds of a song like oh that's clearly an 80s song

30:33 Skinny Dippers Yes, right so right, yeah right. the idea here is find incredible songs that pass the kazoo test but

30:39 Skinny Dippers Yes. that are stuck and kind of caged in their production so reproduce them in another way so they have new life

30:46 Skinny Dippers Love it. I love that. And there's certainly a market for it because I mean, I've seen the same thing. I did a Dancing in the Moonlight cover and that was one of my most successful.

30:56 Skinny Dippers um for sure because yeah people love it because i also think that there's something to it where when you're introducing yourself as an artist and there's no real like big marketing budget or something behind you it's a lot to ask of a listener to be like okay first of all this is me as an artist this is a new voice that you've never heard here's a totally different arrangement and mixing style that you've never heard and a new song and if you can like isolate any of those variables it makes it so much easier so like a feature with the weekend or something like that it's all of a sudden that song is so much

31:27 Skinny Dippers Yeah, more familiar I'd be great. right i'm just like okay yeah i get it um but but like say the cover is kind of does the same thing where it's like hey this is It's this familiar thing that you hear at the grocery store, and now the only thing that you're hearing is my rapping around it. And then I think that it's a nice bridge to the rest of your music to be like, okay,

31:56 Skinny Dippers yeah and that's the exact plan you couldn't

31:59 Luke F. Walton cool nice

31:59 Skinny Dippers have described it better it's

32:00 Luke F. Walton great

32:00 Skinny Dippers basically how do you get a foothold into new listeners right that otherwise wouldn't have heard your stuff that can get a sense of your sound and hopefully if they hear that and they like it they click on your page and they go listen to something else and they say okay like i get what this person is doing and i'm into this yes

32:14 Luke F. Walton but i think the key to it is it's still being your sound like i've seen some people that do like a cover that's like totally different style and then it's kind of like hey

32:25 Luke F. Walton like hey your project's that now like people know you as this and so like it's kind of not that that's a bad thing maybe that's what they should have done all along but um it is a slightly precarious but it's also like great great reward great risk reward sort of in in some ways um but since

32:42 Skinny Dippers yeah

32:42 Luke F. Walton you

32:43 Skinny Dippers no

32:43 Luke F. Walton know you

32:43 Skinny Dippers the idea

32:43 Luke F. Walton know

32:43 Skinny Dippers literally

32:43 Luke F. Walton yourself in

32:44 Skinny Dippers like

32:44 Luke F. Walton the works

32:44 Skinny Dippers the most skinny dippers song you could ever hear right so it's like distilled into like what at its core is the essence of your songs and and for like a few things it's like oh well i i love harmonies

32:55 Luke F. Walton Mm

32:55 Skinny Dippers i

32:56 Luke F. Walton -hmm.

32:56 Skinny Dippers love mixing acoustic guitar with kind of jangly electric guitars

33:00 Luke F. Walton Yep.

33:00 Skinny Dippers i like kind of these like dry drums kind of like dead drum sounds and so like not only is it those production choices but again it's sort of like the arrangement again right

33:11 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

33:11 Skinny Dippers so like i'm gonna probably have a melatron and i'm gonna have some harmonies and i'm gonna have maybe some sort of like slap back or like very specific vocal production and so i feel like if you stick within those boxes you make it totally your own right

33:25 Luke F. Walton Yep. And but the key is you figure out those boxes before you wade it into cover land. i think that's the i think that's like the lesson i'm trying to impart to some people is like if you could go dive right into cover land um without knowing yourself first then it's like who's covering who and you know you could get get

33:42 Skinny Dippers or

33:42 Luke F. Walton turned around

33:43 Skinny Dippers the people who just do the like dead on covers that just sounds

33:46 Luke F. Walton yeah yeah

33:46 Skinny Dippers like a slightly

33:47 Luke F. Walton yeah

33:47 Skinny Dippers different version of a song like what's the point of that right

33:50 Luke F. Walton yeah no i yeah i don't really know what the point is of that unless you want to show like vocal facility like i can do it you know then but i i

33:58 Skinny Dippers for

33:58 Luke F. Walton find that

33:59 Skinny Dippers production

33:59 Luke F. Walton right

33:59 Skinny Dippers right like i i can

34:00 Luke F. Walton can

34:00 Skinny Dippers produce nail this it it sounds just like

34:02 Luke F. Walton yeah

34:02 Skinny Dippers this cover right but then it's probably making like karaoke

34:04 Luke F. Walton like right

34:04 Skinny Dippers backing tracks

34:05 Luke F. Walton yeah exactly yeah maybe uh elevator music and karaoke backing tracks not that there's anything wrong with that that is a very that'd be legitimate that'd be kind of a kind of a sweet thing it's like yo i crush it i do 500 karaoke tracks a year and like one of the most prolific musicians alive

34:23 Skinny Dippers and actually i have some friends of friends yeah that view something similar now to think about it where

34:27 Luke F. Walton cool

34:27 Skinny Dippers like commercial work

34:29 Luke F. Walton yeah

34:29 Skinny Dippers right where

34:29 Luke F. Walton right

34:29 Skinny Dippers you've got

34:29 Luke F. Walton right

34:29 Skinny Dippers the like yeah we want this to sound kind of like a black keys song but like that's going to help us sell hummus you're like got it and it's like the

34:36 Luke F. Walton so

34:36 Skinny Dippers exact like resources sound

34:37 Luke F. Walton in

34:38 Skinny Dippers like you

34:38 Luke F. Walton other

34:38 Skinny Dippers just

34:38 Luke F. Walton words a black keys song because

34:40 Skinny Dippers yeah exactly

34:41 Luke F. Walton they just they make my truck commercial music now

34:43 Skinny Dippers right or like no lyrics

34:45 Luke F. Walton yeah right no i get you and i actually that um i was i was i was thinking a lot about ai and commercial music is the easiest thing in my head of it being like disrupted because it basically feels like ai prompts whenever i i've done some of that work too and i'm trying to read this this creative brief and there's just a bunch of words it's almost like you're telling like dali like hey this is what i like paint me this song yeah Yeah,

35:12 Skinny Dippers yeah it's 100

35:12 Luke F. Walton weird.

35:12 Skinny Dippers i love that stuff as well and uh when you're talking about the idea of features i think that's an interesting one where pretty sure this will all be blocked but there was maybe you talked to this on your podcast i know i'm a few behind but uh there was that song that recently came out that was uh basically like drake in the weekend right

35:29 Luke F. Walton Yes,

35:30 Skinny Dippers i think

35:30 Luke F. Walton right.

35:30 Skinny Dippers it's called heart of my sleeve it blew up right and so if there was a way to use this sound of an artist to basically make it sound like you were featuring them

35:39 Skinny Dippers um is that something that's good is it bad i know i personally wouldn't want to do that because i want to try to find my own voice but again if you're not saying hey this is drake in the weekend doing this and instead you just want to have hey i'd love to have a male vocal part that sounds like i'm singing with someone in the style of drake right that's still creative there's creativity

35:59 Luke F. Walton oh

35:59 Skinny Dippers there

35:59 Luke F. Walton yeah

36:00 Skinny Dippers right

36:00 Luke F. Walton oh yeah well um one of my this is actually i haven't thought of this before so thank you for bringing this up because this this just like ringed a bell in my head In Japanese music, there's a Vocaloid genre, and Vocaloid, I'm not sure if you're familiar with the listeners might not be,

36:15 Luke F. Walton so it's like a software that you can program all of the words that you wanted to say, the pitches, and kind of the way that it's being delivered. It's kind of like Siri, and it's been out for a long time.

36:27 Luke F. Walton So you've most people have probably heard this or they've seen the like hologram pop performances in Japan where everyone's around this like computer. One of my favorite Japanese pop artists, Yonezu Kenshi, he started as a Vocaloid artist and so he was Hachi and so everybody found out that they loved his melodies because he was programming this familiar robot.

36:54 Luke F. Walton robot voice and it's like that's not that different than programming a ai drake and weekend song if you do that really well and then you just take that same thing and sing it like it's like you isolated that variable people got bought in but now little do they know they bought into your melodies they bought into your song form and now you can flip them over here just like he he's like a top 10

37:18 Luke F. Walton musical artist in japan now and he started with robot music it's awesome it's

37:23 Skinny Dippers That's pretty cool.

37:23 Luke F. Walton so cool and he's a great singer it's like like he chose to go into this vocaloid thing uh and

37:30 Skinny Dippers Well,

37:30 Luke F. Walton it's dope

37:31 Skinny Dippers that's like you hear apparently like T-Pain is like a fantastic singer.

37:34 Luke F. Walton yes yeah yeah he yeah uh-huh

37:36 Skinny Dippers uses that like autotune as a choice, which is cool.

37:39 Luke F. Walton that's actually a good point autotune is kind of the same thing like it has a certain in timbre to auto-tune itself so when you slap a bunch of auto-tune it's like oh it kind of sounds like kanye and t-pain and boni ver in that era you know it's like kind of gives you that

37:56 Luke F. Walton that headspace so it's almost like wrapping your voice in a familiar thing i mean i guess one could say that this microphone is kind of the same thing like people are so familiar with the sound of this mic that it makes it sound more like the it makes it sound more like the genre that we're in i don't know the bedroom whatever

38:13 Skinny Dippers I think I made that joke. I was like, let me get my podcast mic for today and take out the SM7B.

38:18 Luke F. Walton exactly exactly it's all um it's all

38:22 Skinny Dippers different versions of the same thing some way less extreme than others like a microphone choice but um i mean like if i was going to try to make a beatles song that felt beatlesy i would use like a u-47 and i mean u-47 like a tube microphone and it would take you much more there or like i did a beach boys cover and i used a virtual version of capital reverb chambers because it's like that'll sound like the beach boys it's their it's their reverb you know

38:48 Skinny Dippers You know, so those little choices, they're all they're all not that dissimilar to having AI Drake on your music.

38:56 Skinny Dippers true we're yeah gonna maybe be yeah one day you'll see someone like i guess i won't say any specific company names but you know one of those uh plug-in companies that will basically use ai to just essentially you would like choose the artist reference and then it would just apply the plugs to like match it so you know like let's use 2

39:14 Skinny Dippers waves is 40 doing seconds that waves and no waves is doing that is doing that yeah it's a doom very much mixed effect um but they're they're trying did pull true it off um yeah

39:25 Skinny Dippers that's pretty cool because i yeah imagine totally just performing i mean obviously i guess there is you want to mic things a certain way or you want to use you know a certain model guitar it's

39:33 Skinny Dippers that's like it's important just not just a plug-in the plug right so -ins yeah like

39:35 Skinny Dippers yeah you're not going to get the results just by doing the plug-in then but again though

39:39 Skinny Dippers if they've you have were to do a lot of the right i you seen the townsend sphere microphones they're so okay

39:44 Skinny Dippers i'm familiar yeah yeah for listeners um the uh so there's a microphone that that is supposedly like perfectly neutral so that they can apply a bunch of different microphone types to it so it sounds like you have a big mic locker even though you only have one $600 microphone um so like theoretically and you've got IR reverbs for rooms so you could fake it like you're in different rooms um yeah it's getting eerie you can do a lot of stuff

40:13 Skinny Dippers You know what I actually... read about the other Yeah. day is they released the the ir reverbs for uh the ps1 sounds so like on a playstation one that like all the reverbs from the old playstation games Oh

40:28 Skinny Dippers Oh you my can actually god. get the reverbs like it's free on somebody's like Thanks.

40:32 Skinny Dippers patreon or whatever Thank you. That sounds great. check it out it's pretty cool i

40:36 Skinny Dippers And it's just feel like you so you up my put alley. that in there's going to be this weird subconscious nostalgia and no one will know Why?

40:42 Skinny Dippers oh yeah exactly i mean i've got i've got this um what's it called speakers i think um i don't remember the plugin company audio thing maybe um and it's it's like you can load ir stuff but they have a bunch of things in there and there's also like ambience uh sounds and um

40:59 Skinny Dippers you can change what like the preamp and the speaker is and it has all sorts like crazy toy microphones and different like PA systems from throughout history and stuff and it's

41:11 Skinny Dippers i don't know if we oh sick yeah no i didn't mean to cut you off i was gonna say i don't know if we specified when we said ir we should probably clarify that's impulse responses for people who are listening right because

41:19 Skinny Dippers that is a very the sounds and the reverbs yeah and I'm pretty sure that they get that by having some sort of impulse so like a pure sine wave or a starting gun or something like that and they measure the way that the room or the speaker or whatever responds to that pure impulse and then apply it to other stuff think

41:40 Skinny Dippers Well, I think so. yeah Yeah, I've heard that as well about specifically, I think I heard that about like the gun sound somewhere.

41:44 Skinny Dippers gun sound yeah for like like if you it Was that on one of your podcasts might have been on one of my podcasts yeah exactly parroting myself yeah

41:51 Skinny Dippers Like that's quite specific. i know exactly because i know that they that's how they would do um different like taj mahal kind of like reverb there's a plug-in company

42:03 Skinny Dippers they'll come to me but it's like one of the gold standard reverb ones i've never been able to afford it because it's like a thousand dollars um but

42:10 Skinny Dippers I think UAD has a bunch of those ones where you can place it in all these different rooms or like famous rooms.

42:15 Skinny Dippers yeah yeah i oh i use those like crazy because i i always wait for the the sales because they usually have like a sale around christmas and i just smash those i got hitsville reverb which is the motown um like impulse response kind of thing and it's

42:29 Skinny Dippers the original detroit attic that they would use as a reverb chamber that was like not properly treated and you could hear it from the street and they said they had to go in there with microphones at all random hours of the day because they had so much bleed from like trucks going by and stuff That's one of my

42:49 Skinny Dippers favorite that's cool reverbs. i love It sounds so good. that stuff too though actually in my in my album talking a little bit backtracking about the process a bunch of the acoustic songs they just sounded really naked to me and so there's one like big city small apartment that you want to feel like you're in new york so literally i just have a mic just recording the street sounds and some alleys and then like me jangling my keys walking by and like things like that that i have mixed just very quietly in the background

43:15 Skinny Dippers in the background whereas for some of the other songs that are more like early album more about Maine i have like some crashing waves or like the sound of just the forest in my backyard and i feel like that stuff is so subtle but it just there's something magic about just dropping that into a track behind

43:29 Skinny Dippers well and i also like that you took it the step further where you didn't just like search forest you're like this is the forest in my backyard like

43:37 Skinny Dippers my house that's when i grew really up cool that's really cool no i like that that like it's i'll do the same thing where it's like it's not just i didn't just look up birds like these are the birds that i heard on my walk or these are the birds i heard when i was on that hike yeah exactly i think that's a really cool thing and also i think it like frees up your head if you're thinking musically about sound design and just walking around like always kind of listening i think all of that adds up to a more i don't creative soul

44:05 Skinny Dippers Yeah, I'm a... thousands of voice memos deep on my iPhone to Good. capture all kinds of stuff

44:10 Skinny Dippers It's in there. huge. And I think that the process of capturing is almost as important as the process of using because just. You have your antenna up and just by having your antenna up you're more engaged more of the time and you end up being better I think yeah

44:24 Skinny Dippers totally or i think another fun trick for people that i don't think i'm unique and i think tons of people do this but sometimes that melody just strikes when you're in the middle of nowhere right so i've literally been on the subway on my way to work when i just think of a melody and so my song wedding ring which is uh like one of my top songs by streams literally the notes came to me while i was on the subway and

44:47 Skinny Dippers Cool. so i just hummed something into my phone went home later and like wrote some words to it figured out the chords and then wrote the song over basically what was a voice memo so

44:56 Skinny Dippers That's great. cool way to start you know tap into that inspiration when it strikes actually

45:01 Skinny Dippers Well, and think about, i like, that's all of your time. was gonna say you can maybe hear it go

45:06 Skinny Dippers Go for it. ahead i No, don't no, no, you were saying you could hear know if the you can

45:10 Skinny Dippers subway. hear it because Uh-huh. Yeah, you can hear like cars going by. There was like a engine or like a muffler firing because I'm right here just I'm right on a pretty busy street in New York. So I don't know how much sound

45:20 Skinny Dippers No, I've got translation. pretty good ears. Once I crank that compression, the listeners might be able to hear it, but I'm good right now.

45:26 Skinny Dippers Oh, yeah. But jumping off your point, I think that it's so... eye-opening when you're like always ready to write and always thinking of melodies and stuff or even little rhythms whatever because think about how much time you actually spend

45:42 Skinny Dippers in the chair saying i'm writing a song versus how much time you spend just walking around or living your life or getting from point a to point b by opening that all of that time up to songwriting now all of a sudden you've you've exponentially increased the amount of time that you could be thinking of a melody or coming up with something great and your brain's different every day so record it i love it that's awesome subway subway is a perfect

46:08 Skinny Dippers Yeah. place for it the transportation those liminal spaces those are those are huge

46:12 Skinny Dippers I was going to say it's also no pressure, right? Yeah, I feel like I'm someone who's maybe not the best at this, but when I sit down and I'm like, oh, it's Sunday and I'm going to write a song today, I put a lot of pressure on myself and then I can't write anything because it's like, no, I'm just not naturally tapping into whatever I'm feeling. I'm telling myself I have to write a song and now I'm not going to write a good song,

46:31 Skinny Dippers yeah, yeah, yeah, right? yeah, yeah, uh-huh. like capturing that lightning in a bottle is always i feel like way more productive than trying to seek it out i wish i had that seal i think i know some friends that have developed enough of a process that they can kind of open that up and that's something that I'd like to work on more but I feel like for me I have to more just take advantage of those moments when I can other than trying to manufacture them

46:52 Skinny Dippers totally yeah i don't know if anybody's fully manifested it so they could call it at any time except for maybe like john lennon paul mccartney but like yeah i mean i've i definitely have felt myself get better at that um and uh but it a lot of it is like vibe and be able to try to you force yourself into like a flow state i like consider myself flow state addicted um so

47:16 Skinny Dippers Yep. i try to Another get that myself thing I would share is yeah yes going back to that school of song ideas

47:22 Skinny Dippers please and things I might have learned on that topic of kind of i won't call it forcing inspiration but

47:28 Skinny Dippers Huh? maybe channeling inspiration Channeling, uh yeah. the thing that's been maybe the biggest help to me it was even something i was doing without realizing it is this idea of presets so limiting yourself to focus on a very specific criteria so that all you have to do is stay within the bands of that criteria because i know for me when you just say i'm in write a fantastic song all of a sudden

47:51 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

47:51 Skinny Dippers all of a sudden paralyzed by choice and all the different things you might do whereas Whereas if you say, I'm going to write a song that uses three chords that's in a minor key, that's about... pigeons like

48:06 Luke F. Walton Mm

48:06 Skinny Dippers then

48:06 Luke F. Walton -hmm,

48:06 Skinny Dippers all of a sudden it's much easier right because there's only so many things you can do and so you've just got to work with that framework and so for me that's been hugely helpful is just realizing that you've got to start somewhere and it can always evolve later and so I've had a lot of fun working on some songs where I had a song where I sat down and I had just gotten this new little MIDI keyboard some new synth stuff and I was like I'm going to write a song about

48:30 Skinny Dippers the matrix like

48:31 Luke F. Walton Cool.

48:32 Skinny Dippers it was very specific i could just focus on a certain type of lyrical content i knew how i wanted to arrange it and it was really easy because i knew exactly what it had to be and it was also based off of a certain chord progression i already had where i kind of knew like i'm just going to sit down i know exactly what i'm going to write

48:48 Luke F. Walton I like that. I like that. I like the creative parameters. And I also like that second part that you said it can always evolve later. I like

48:58 Skinny Dippers Yep.

48:58 Luke F. Walton that too, where it's like not like having parameters, fairly rigid, but knowing when it's time to blow out a wall, like like I actually second verses for me are the ultimate like.

49:10 Luke F. Walton that because the first verse is your parameters you're like this is what the song is about this is how i'm saying this is kind of the loose rhyme screen rhyme scheme and melody and now we're at the second verse we're at the repeat it's like how much do you want to repeat or do you want to just blow it up and do something completely different or do half and half or that's that's one of my favorite places to play and also to you know use those use those creative parameters that you built for yourself and then sometimes

49:37 Luke F. Walton knock down a wall yeah oh

49:40 Skinny Dippers 100%. It can be tricky though. I feel like that's

49:42 Luke F. Walton yeah

49:42 Skinny Dippers why sometimes the second verse can be tough because you've got to

49:44 Luke F. Walton hardest

49:44 Skinny Dippers beat

49:44 Luke F. Walton part of the song

49:44 Skinny Dippers it into

49:45 Luke F. Walton hardest

49:45 Skinny Dippers the prim.

49:45 Luke F. Walton part of the song no problem like nothing is close because it like i used to think that the bridge was the hardest part of the song but the bridge is so optional at this point um just with how modern music has gone you can just do the chorus three times uh at the end and people are cool with that now so you don't really need it but the second verse losing that really

50:05 Luke F. Walton really like gums up the whole perception of the the delayed gratification and then re-gratification of that chorus returning um it's yeah i i struggle the most with second second verses as well which is probably why i end up writing totally different melodies or pretty hardcore melodic variations because it's just like i don't want to do that again because it's boring or like i need to do something else to um

50:30 Luke F. Walton to not to continue to progress i don't know what do you what do you think was what what's what's the hardest part of songwriting for you is it second verses is it anything specific rhythms chords like what what is the thing that you end up like getting hung up on most

50:46 Skinny Dippers I feel like it's a little bit of a cop out, but lyrics.

50:48 Luke F. Walton Lyrics?

50:48 Skinny Dippers So

50:49 Luke F. Walton No,

50:49 Skinny Dippers I

50:49 Luke F. Walton no, no. It's not

50:49 Skinny Dippers feel

50:49 Luke F. Walton a cop

50:49 Skinny Dippers like out. I could write, I

50:50 Luke F. Walton It's not a cop out.

50:51 Skinny Dippers could write melodies all

50:53 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

50:53 Skinny Dippers day long and I love playing around and putting different arrangements on things. But to me, finding something that actually resonates with me is why I find it hard because like, I feel like rhymes come fairly easily and you can write things, but to write something that is cohesive and means something to me or that I want to sing about, I feel like is.

51:12 Skinny Dippers like it's just tricky because I could just spill words all day but

51:15 Luke F. Walton Mm-hmm.

51:16 Skinny Dippers to actually feel like I'm connecting with something I feel like it's got to be a little special and so

51:21 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

51:21 Skinny Dippers I put too much pressure sometimes on myself because I think that way like it's

51:25 Luke F. Walton Okay.

51:25 Skinny Dippers got to be special it's got to be the best thing I've ever written

51:27 Luke F. Walton Right,

51:27 Skinny Dippers right and

51:27 Luke F. Walton right.

51:28 Skinny Dippers I think sometimes you've got to forget that until you're actually a ways into it I also think you know something I've tried to do more is let's say you're trying to write that second verse write 10 verses right and then keep the two best or the two that connect

51:41 Skinny Dippers connect the most or whatever it is that leads you to two right because i think i used to just be like i've written the first verse now i'm going to write the second verse and then i'm going to write a chorus and then i'm going to be done right but i think that idea of just like no you have this whole block you can mold and chisel as you see fit and so uh iterating on things playing with it coming up with like weird variations sometimes when you get to that seventh verse where you've like warped into something completely different is where you're like oh this is where it's actually getting juicy right so

52:10 Skinny Dippers I think lyrics would be toughest, but also in terms of something structurally like, oh, second verses are hard.

52:16 Luke F. Walton Mm

52:16 Skinny Dippers For

52:16 Luke F. Walton -hmm.

52:16 Skinny Dippers me, I've tried to just throw song format out the window. And I write pretty, I would say standard pop songs,

52:24 Luke F. Walton Mm

52:24 Skinny Dippers but

52:24 Luke F. Walton -hmm.

52:24 Skinny Dippers a lot of my songs will be like ABC, ABC, where it's like a verse, a pre-chorus and a chorus, or like playing around with this idea of like a post-chorus, you know, something that happens after the chorus, but it doesn't yet go back. Back to the verse and

52:37 Luke F. Walton so Mm

52:37 Skinny Dippers I

52:37 Luke F. Walton hmm.

52:37 Skinny Dippers love just messing with simple form things like that

52:40 Luke F. Walton Totally agree. I love that. Yeah, that helps break up so much. And also, I think it allows you to have stream of consciousness moments like when they do strike,

52:49 Luke F. Walton you know, because they don't always strike. But every once in a while, you're like, Oh, no, I got way more to say or I've got this whole different left turn. It's like, let's throw a pre chorus in even though there was no pre chorus before the chorus that time the second chorus, let's throw a pre chorus in or whatever.

53:03 Luke F. Walton whatever i agree with you playing the song form is one of the most potent tools in the toolkit to to keep it fun yeah for everybody not just the writer but for the listener i'm excited

53:14 Skinny Dippers Absolutely.

53:14 Luke F. Walton for like your like american pie someday like where you write the 10 verses but you're like i'm keeping all 10 you know that's that's that's what i'm i'm here for

53:24 Skinny Dippers yeah we'll see uh i feel like i've never written a song that's more than like four minutes my songs tend to be pretty

53:30 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

53:30 Skinny Dippers short but i'd be curious to do the like eight minute song

53:33 Luke F. Walton oh,

53:34 Skinny Dippers but i don't know i think you'd have to have a lot of you know interesting chord changes like i'm all about the interesting chord changes too so i feel like maybe i glazed over one of the most interesting parts but when i said i've got to find some chords and put a melody over it

53:47 Skinny Dippers usually it's like some sort of weird chord pattern that might have like borrowed one particular transition from a song where it's like okay going from that minor and then going down a half step and staying on the major like that's pretty cool where it has this one kind of tonic note like that's a cool transition and then i'll build a whole song around that so it's like one of those little ideas is usually what sparks a new song or it's like literally i just learned a new chord like i'm gonna write a song around that

54:15 Skinny Dippers that

54:15 Luke F. Walton like

54:15 Skinny Dippers so those are the things that get me really excited

54:17 Luke F. Walton to make sure that i'm following you're saying you have like one tune and there's something harmonically interesting in tune a and that spawns tune b because you're taking that harmonic nugget and you're developing it into another tune is that what you're saying or

54:31 Skinny Dippers no i was

54:32 Luke F. Walton Okay.

54:32 Skinny Dippers even saying like if you hear something that inspires you right

54:34 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

54:34 Skinny Dippers uh

54:35 Luke F. Walton yeah, yeah.

54:35 Skinny Dippers i

54:35 Luke F. Walton Okay.

54:35 Skinny Dippers go grab a guitar and i figure out what was that

54:38 Luke F. Walton Gotcha.

54:38 Skinny Dippers weird change or what is that interesting chord that i haven't heard right you figure it out and then i'm inspired to want to write a song using that chord that i haven't written into a song before

54:50 Luke F. Walton I like it. Yeah, yeah. And then you have that harmonic development. And one of my one of my

54:55 Luke F. Walton previous songwriting people it would basically said like you can't that is having strong chords the strong melodies just can like fall from them which is what makes three chord songs like the most difficult thing in the world especially nowadays because it sounds sometimes it can sound really old for something like just because that's what songs used to be so it's hard to make like modern three chord songs but i challenge myself to that too because i like your your creative parameters and i have i have a few um but they're they're the hardest ones to write

55:23 Luke F. Walton right for me too um yeah but anyway i like the idea of like developing a harmonic nugget into an entire entire finished piece that kind of is the the keystone of the whole thing i think that's that's really uh really cool way to do it i like that a lot yeah that's actually my uh my song feels so good i did that

55:45 Luke F. Walton Pretty much because I wanted to use an augmented chord going into a post-chorusy thing.

55:53 Luke F. Walton And so that's like the linchpin between the feel so good hook and the other stuff. And then everything was kind of built around that because I just thought it sounded so sick and like nobody's using augmented chords anymore. And, you know, I was like, I gotta, gotta help, gotta help the cause.

56:11 Skinny Dippers that's awesome i love that i think kind of the same thing as like in my song big city small apartment i just learned this chord it's pretty easy one but it's just a sorry a minor over f sharp and it just has this really interesting sound to it i think where it's like you've got the kind of

56:29 Skinny Dippers sadness of the the minor chord but then it's just got that f sharp that gives it this interesting change to it and so uh it just goes from sort of a c down to that note and so that is the entire song basically is written around that just because i was playing around and stumbled across that chord and then that inspired me to write the whole song

56:48 Luke F. Walton Yeah, that's really nice. And I like that point too about You can take those simple chord shapes, but throwing something else in the bass can completely recontextualize it. That's what Sting has said that in some interviews about how he loves being the bass player because he can determine whether or not a chord's major or minor. And it's just like nobody can do anything about it. He can just

57:09 Skinny Dippers Yeah.

57:09 Luke F. Walton be like, I'm playing down here now and now everything sounds sadder. I'm going to play an F sharp over that A minor and now everything sounds jazzy or more interesting. And the power of those bass notes is. This is immense.

57:21 Skinny Dippers I feel like that's a fun bridge trick, too.

57:24 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

57:24 Skinny Dippers If you

57:24 Luke F. Walton it is.

57:24 Skinny Dippers need a bridge, it's keep the chords similar, but start throwing in the funky root notes. That way you can get some interesting changes.

57:30 Luke F. Walton Really, really good trick. I love that. That's a really good one. Any other songwriting tips or tricks? I like you've even rattled off some really good ones. I'm hoping that this will lead to some inspiration out there. How about

57:45 Skinny Dippers Wow

57:45 Luke F. Walton like techniques or exercises that you had to do? Like you were saying you had the creative parameter limiting.

57:53 Luke F. Walton Did you have to do any like time limited stuff like maybe like, you know, write a tune in 90 minutes or whatever like any of that kind of stuff.

58:02 Skinny Dippers yeah a lot of them were like that um sometimes unintentionally so i'm that person that always you know wrote the essay with two hours to go before class or rest like i feel like i thrive under that pressure and so i need to have those deadlines so doing something like this school of song course or doing some sort of weekly meetup with your friends whatever it might be something that holds you accountable is an amazing motivator so that was the biggest part i think of of the class was just knowing that

58:29 Skinny Dippers knowing that i was going to have to share something over zoom with a small group of people that were expecting to hear a song and

58:33 Luke F. Walton Yes.

58:34 Skinny Dippers not wanting to completely embarrass myself right

58:36 Luke F. Walton Yes.

58:36 Skinny Dippers um there were some cool ones in there so one of them a lot of them sound so obvious but it was just about trying to get as specific as possible so

58:49 Luke F. Walton Okay.

58:49 Skinny Dippers one of the ones that's going to be on my next EP I literally wrote everything in the room that was around me the sounds that I was hearing like you know what I'm smelling and just and really really trying to put yourself in a physical space and

59:02 Luke F. Walton Mm-hmm.

59:03 Skinny Dippers then trying to write a song from that and so that I think that's always a great tip is just to try to think about it that way because a lot of people I think have trouble doing the the show don't tell right

59:15 Luke F. Walton Yes.

59:15 Skinny Dippers when you write words you want to kind of make an experience rather than just saying this happened then this happened

59:20 Luke F. Walton Yep.

59:20 Skinny Dippers and then another thing happened right

59:21 Luke F. Walton Right.

59:21 Skinny Dippers and

59:21 Luke F. Walton I feel

59:21 Skinny Dippers so

59:22 Luke F. Walton this way. I want this. Yeah.

59:24 Skinny Dippers exactly yeah and so I think trying to just describe something in the most ridiculous level of specificity is maybe i would say like one of the skinny dippers tricks like

59:35 Luke F. Walton Cool.

59:36 Skinny Dippers most of my songs have these crazy specific lyrics uh where it's like you tell me i'm the speck of pulp on the orange peel rind and a lot of these things are like from just conversations i was having with friends or like

59:50 Skinny Dippers true life things that would never ever have thought of except for the fact that they happened right

59:56 Luke F. Walton Cool.

59:56 Skinny Dippers and so then you

59:57 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

59:57 Skinny Dippers twist that on its head and you figure out well what does this song become about but ultimately there's there's a theme there right and so okay you you said this and then i said that you were the brooklyn bridge right and so you're comparing this speck of pulp on an orange peel to a brooklyn bridge all lit up and so that can be powerful you don't have to say what that means but when you look at that comparison and so

60:18 Skinny Dippers I think that, or again, just getting hyper, hyper specific into like silly little obscurities is something I really take a lot of enjoyment out of.

60:27 Luke F. Walton Cool.

60:28 Skinny Dippers And so I love throwing in almost like inside jokes, but they're almost. just relatable enough that someone can actually pick up on what you're talking about they

60:37 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

60:37 Skinny Dippers might not know exactly what you're getting at but i feel like people are smart and like brains work in a way where even if you say something that someone wouldn't know the exact scenario they can almost tell okay like this is a little secret that i'm in on now

60:49 Luke F. Walton Yes. Yeah. I like that. And I like you're kind of talking about smell and sense words. I feel like that's something I want to work on. I want to do more of that.

60:59 Luke F. Walton uh because it's it's very it's very palpable and like i don't know i was thinking about like university universality of lyrics and also specificity and how they're like they can be at odds but also together and that's part of the fun of songwriting is you know you have those verses where you can zoom in and the choruses where you can zoom out or vice versa um and yeah talking about that that's that's something i want to work on i want to use more evocative sense related lyrics because i think that's

61:28 Luke F. Walton That'd be good. I think people would enjoy that.

61:30 Skinny Dippers absolutely absolutely

61:32 Luke F. Walton Awesome. Well, I've really enjoyed this conversation. I feel like really fired up to go write some tunes. So I hope you feel the same way, Ryan. Anything else you want to add here before we start to wrap up?

61:46 Skinny Dippers i think we should just say check out the Scoobert Doobert remix by pies and lows if you called it out but uh

61:54 Skinny Dippers I think it was really fun when getting to work with somebody that was a little bit different where. I kind of mentioned I've got my way of doing things.

62:02 Skinny Dippers And so to have a song where I kind of told you about the project, sent you some stems and then to allow you to go put your complete spin on it was something that was so fun because it came back as something so completely different than what I would ever make, but so right up my alley that I think I really enjoyed it. And I think it's gotten a great reception from other people that have been checking it out. So

62:21 Luke F. Walton So

62:21 Skinny Dippers encourage

62:21 Luke F. Walton glad.

62:21 Skinny Dippers everybody give it a spin.

62:22 Luke F. Walton I'm so glad. Yeah, definitely. Definitely check that out. that that was a fun one because i didn't i didn't expect to make what i ended up making either so it was it was just it was quite an adventure you gave me the stuff i synced it up and then it just turned into its own thing and i really like it too it's a it's quite a ride of highs and lows um a lot of emotion so um yeah definitely check that out and where else where else can they find uh your music uh any like maybe throw your instagram handle out or something like that we can link that in the bio too so people

62:51 Luke F. Walton At least people can hit you up.

62:53 Skinny Dippers Yes, Skinny Dippers band on most of the socials. I'm on band camp. You can check me out there or anywhere else you stream music. Check it out.

63:03 Luke F. Walton Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much, everybody. This is Love Music More. I hope after this episode you love music more. Be sure to subscribe and throw a five-star rating if you can. It really helps people to find this podcast and share it with your friends and all that good stuff. I am Scoobert Doobert. My music is at scoobertdoobert.pizza. That's my website, scoobertdoobert.pizza.

63:24 Luke F. Walton And I will talk to you guys next week. Thanks again for coming on, Ryan.

63:30 Skinny Dippers Thanks again.

63:31 Luke F. Walton See ya.