Interview With Beach Death

Imagine yourself at the beach. A warm humid breeze with a salty aftertaste that makes you thirsty. You look around and you see someone is selling soda and water along with other foods, but you don’t care about that. You are so thirsty that you can’t imagine trying to talk. You leave the home base that you set with your towel and you travel, feet shifting in the sun-warmed sand. The sand relaxes you a bit and you look forward to the rest of your day. You grab a water and throw three dollars at the man working the register. You drink! And it’s so fulfilling that you feel like going for a swim. You jog back to your towel. You throw the water on the home base and take off for the waves. The soft and warm sand massages your feet while your excitement grows. The water feels good, and you’re having fun dodging the waves and playing tag with attractively-tan looking people. One moment you’re swimming and the next you’re overtaken by the undertow and dragged out 100 yards away from shore. You can’t fight it much longer and you’ve never swam for your life before but now you test your limits. Meanwhile the lifeguard on duty was on his way out to get you, and when he did get you, he got you with immense force ultimately saving your life. But as he dragged you to safety you could tell something was wrong. You end up dragging the lifeguard the rest of the way up the beach and you watch as he is most likely having a stroke; he is twitching, but you perform CPR on the Lifeguard and the ambulance takes over after some onlookers called 911. When the ambulance starts pulling out, another lifeguard speeds up the road because he is late for his shift, and he drops some of his granola bar, which causes him the right amount of distraction to horribly crash into the ambulance. It is horrible! Everything is on fire, and you can’t believe what you’re seeing. Emergency response workers looking for their arm, people herding the severely shocked victims to a safer place beside something that wasn’t on fire, and you are the seed, maybe the cause of all that death. 

That is exactly the type of paradox that the band Beach Death is interested in and along with the fact that they are also interested with authenticity in their songs and performance. They talk about why they formed their band, and what sorts of ideas that have come from their creative “project” that they have been scheming about for a year now.       

Beach Death is operating out of the salty city, united by Rylee McDonald (guitarist, singer, and producer), Adam Manwill (guitarist and singer), Cason Wood (bass, synthesizers, and shakers) , Mike Lofgreen (Drummer), and Ian Steuart (A.K.A “Ian Pee’n”; singer, and songwriter). Salt Lily got the honor of interviewing these gentlemen while they approach their release of their single, “Sleeping”, on March 6th, and their show at Urban Lounge, March 8th. 

Q: Where are you guys from? 

Ian: Collectively we come from here but individually we come from elsewhere. Really, we’re all from the suburbs, but we like to play shows in the city. 

So how did Beach Death come into being? Also, how did you guys meet?

Ian: We are actually a fairly new band, because we joined, not last summer, but the summer before last summer. We knew each other for a decade because we were in and out of each other’s bands. Rylee and I started playing together from there with everyone else coming along

What are your inspirations?

Ian: We’ve all played different types of music, and after working so hard on tweaking the rules of music in various indie bands we had an interest in going to a different form. I think when we talk about inspiration for the band [it] is that feeling you feel when you hear your favorite band in middle school. Those bands usually had a simple structure to their songs, but along with that they were a lot more emotionally complex. We can paint with more broad strokes rather than creating little intricacies, not that there are no intricacies, because the emotion is intricate … I guess bands like Weezer might be a good example, MAYBE, I don’t know a lot of pop punk bands have that energy we go for … I also wanted to challenge myself and write by the book. I put the verse, the verse, the chorus, and everything within a set structure. I just wrote classic song structures, and with structure there is less freedom.

I feel like the nature of your music is paradoxical, being so playful in your music within a set structure and playing somewhat serious songs in a fun way. What do you guys feel about that observation of paradox?

Ian: Yeah that’s why the project is called Beach Death. When you think of the beach, what do you think of? I think most people would think of a fun day at the beach. Beach has cognizations of ‘easy’ I guess, and death is not so easy. So, I really like that contrast and I really like happy songs that are really brutal. Our album isn’t out, but at some point the music gets darker sonically too … The truth is that is how life is too. We all go through all this deep stuff at any given time and that doesn’t mean it’s all bad. You can feel great and still be going through it, or not feel great at all and nobody could know.

So, that is where your name comes from? 

Ian: Yeah that’s basically it. I was showing my boss at Grey Whale and she was like, ‘that’s so beachy and deathy’, and another thing too was when I was writing music before our band was fully formed I used to write a lot about the ocean, and I had a lot of summer metaphors, beach metaphors, and I also had a lot of death, and ghost metaphors. So, it is literally what the album is about and what our band has been about since, and it’s the best name we had out of the ones we came up with of course.

Do you have any specific writing process? Or do you just improvise until something comes out that you like?

Ian: We have riffed some stuff out that we really like, but usually I bring the skeleton of the song to Rylee and I always have the lyrics ready to go. Rylee and I work on it and we give it some muscle and some blood, we record some things, we get some things down, and then we take it to the boys! We give our blueprint to the rest of the band. We know our parts well enough where we click into it pretty well.

 Do you have a favorite place to play?

Ian: I don’t know if we have one in particular place we like to play, but there is this kinda hidden gem called the Art Garden. They put on a lot of local hip hop, and it’s not in our genre scope, but we had a blast playing there! Also, [Urban Lounge] is always good. They just always help us put on a great show.

Do you have any message or question that you are trying to get through to the audience?

Ian: I think the main thing I want to get through is authenticity. I want this to be the most organic and real feeling band. That’s what I mean by like the music you fell in love with in middle school and high school is different than the bands you love now, your tastes grow, and I love all sorts of stuff I didn’t like back then, but there is a different attachment that you get with music at that younger age, and I just want to make music that you feel. The bottom line is to have the most organic form of expression possible.   

Cason: The songs are not difficult to play physically, but they are emotionally intense to play. It’s really enjoyable for me because we don’t have to focus so much on what chords we’re playing and it’s all about delivering that emotion. I think that is freeing for all of us. 

So, were all of you burned at one point by tedious structured bands?

Rylee: Not necessarily burned, but I think that the dynamic of the three of us me, Mike, and Cason who all have been members in a progressive rock band for years which requires us to create extremely complicated songs that go through big long instrumental passages, vocally complex, instrumentally complex. As a musician in that kind of music you don’t have time to focus on your performance because your full attention is on the song … So, that is why Beach Death is so liberating for us because we don’t have to worry so much ‘am I playing it right’, but we can focus on putting on a good show.

Mike: Then it creates a much tighter connection with your audience when you’re playing it, and as a drummer, I love getting that connection with the audience. I also love being able to hit hard and jam on a groove with all the guys and looking out on the crowd looking back at us.

Ian: Yeah that’s what’s cool at every given time we are just a mess on stage, and I love that. That’s the thing too this is the type of music where if you mess up it’s like, “so what?”, as long as they walked away with that feeling we try to get through … Before I did this, I did weird ass indie hip hop stuff, and that was me alone on stage trying to breath in the right places and deliver the correct line. So, this band is a lot more freeing for me and everyone else, I think. I have some of the most fun playing music with these guys.

Rylee: I think it all comes back to that authenticity thing, right? Like the music means something to you and you’re performing it and you're excited about the message you’re putting out and the music you’re putting out, and that applies to all of us. The audience can feel that we are just as excited about the music as they are, so that mutual authenticity is formed at that moment. 

Ian: Yeah, ultimately it’s a give back, when you see the right bands live it’s like you can just take that, and I want to be able to give back in a great way.

Beach Death was a delight to speak with, and they mentioned that they had some things coming up. They will first release their single on March 6th and play a show at the Urban Lounge on March 8th.  They also expressed that getting their album out this year is one of their top priorities. Exciting things to come from Beach Death.  

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