Part 2

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

Keely: My first favorite album was Torches by Foster the People. (It’s funny because “Houdini” just started playing on my computer as I read this question. I’ll take it as a sign from the universe). Taking in such an explosion of electronic indie pop carried a huge impact in my little twelve year old brain, and it carried strongly throughout my adolescence when I started to write my own songs.



It’s clear that although there’s a lot of risk taking and genre bending within those ten tracks, the product seems like an open embrace of pop music. It’s greatly affected the way I see songwriting, and creating in general.

Piper: Emotions and Math by Margaret Glaspy is an album I probably return to more than any other, and her Tiny Desk performance is especially stunning to me. She has a way of conveying so much emotion and power through relatively simple ideas and I never fail to be inspired by it.



I think my creative process is most successful and rewarding when I’m able to let the ideas kind of express themselves. I tend to feel the need to endlessly expand on an idea in ways that don’t always serve it, so it's a constant effort to interrupt that impulse and allow space for simplicity.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

Keely: I write by myself whenever I can, but I feel way more productive when Piper and I write together. Although I’ve been trying to nurture this fear a bit, I am always slightly apprehensive when it comes to writing lyrics. Luckily Piper is a wizard with words so we tend to even each other out.

Throughout the years – and especially while we were apart – our writing process consisted of us individually finding seeds to a song and then meeting in the middle to solve the puzzle. But I cherish when we plant that seed together and really get to see it blossom simultaneously. We’ve gotten the chance to do that more now that we live in the same city.

Piper: My private relationship to music is drastically different from my communal / collaborative one, both in terms of creating and listening. I think I lean toward the communal and collaborative side of music – which is funny because it's one of the very few aspects of my life where I don’t lean towards solitude.

A song is never the same twice when new people contribute to the experience, which allows for it to live so many different lives. And I think that's so beautiful!
 
How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

Our work relates to the world around us in that we use music as a way to process it. That’s probably true for most if not all artists, and is one reason why music plays such an important role in society.

Everyone’s just trying to make sense of things, and music can be a beautiful place to find shared understanding and meaning.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

Taking in the perspectives and experiences that other people share through art is such a vital way to learn about the world, and in turn yourself. All of those “big topics” are ones that are explored in so many mediums; and ironically, often allude to the artists failing to understand them.

It’s a comforting crisis that everyone is in, and although that understanding can seem unachievable, being exposed to how those topics affect other people allows us to think introspectively instead of avoiding it all together.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  

Keely: I was actually talking to my good friend about this. I think that although music can be a pure extension of creativity that shouldn’t always be analyzed technically, I do think it’s fascinating how it’s essentially a psychological manipulation. Sometimes I become conscious of  which chord progressions would cause a greater emotional response, or at least I try to infer that based on what triggers my own emotional responses.

It sounds a little warped, but I think it’s more so just really interesting, and is present in pretty much all music. Not just sad music. And they’re all individual based on the brain that is taking it in. It’s crazy, and pretty scientific – although I don’t have the knowledge nor vocabulary to properly explain it. Maybe someday.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Piper: I don’t think I could say that the act of creating or playing music is inherently different from that of any other task or ritual, although it’s definitely compelling to do so. Music can be and feel so profound that comparing it to making a cup of coffee seems to diminish its significance. But I ultimately feel like any act of creation can be seen as an art form, depending on the level of care and attention that goes into it and the level of satisfaction one gets out of it.

That being said, I can definitely express myself with much more complexity through music than I could through most supposedly ‘mundane’ tasks, but that doesn’t make the two categorically different in my book.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our eardrums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it is able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

There likely isn’t a simple or satisfying explanation for this, but we’re entirely unbothered by that. Basically everything we experience can be reduced to waves or vibrations or particles, but understanding that doesn’t actually alter the way we experience the world around us.

Ultimately people are able to create music that has such diverse and meaningful messages because the human experience is diverse and meaningful.