Interview: Living Body

Interview

15 Nov

Leeds collective Living Body are having one hell of a year, releasing two singles and a live session video, a summer tour supporting Owen (Mike Kinsella of American Football), Holiday Ghosts and Dolores Forever, and their own UK headline tour.

Led by immigrant songwriter Jeff T. Smith (f.k.a. Juffage), and shaped by Smith’s Midwest-US upbringing and longstanding roots in both US and UK DIY scenes, with a touring lineup including Alice Rowan (Mayshe-Mayshe), Sarah Statham (Crake, Fig By Four), Annie Prior (Parker Lee) and Matt Simpson, the band creates a blend of blissful synthpop and harmony-driven, groove-laden that will perk the ears of any melody-loving fan.

We had the opportunity on a recent Saturday morning to chat with Jeff, a fellow expat, all about his American upbringing and influences, being part of the Leeds scene, and his bleak yet positive, pessimistic yet hopeful music style.

Hi Jeff, from Living Body. Thanks so much for giving up some time to chat on a weekend. For starters, you’re not from here.

“No, I'm not and neither are you. Where are you from?”

I'm mostly from Idaho.

“I'm mostly from Michigan, but I'm also from Chicago. I grew up 20 minutes south of Detroit. That was the gateway for me into everything. We always had music in my house, but it was nice to finally start going to shows and being quite close to Detroit was good for that.

I'm sure you had great access to that good old Midwest emo. If you look back at that time of going to the shows were there any formative shows for you at the youngish age?

“Not necessarily shows, but since you brought up the whole Midwest emo thing, and we just played with Owen (Mike Kinsella from American Football's solo project). American Football's debut album became huge and sort of developed out of a cult following. I used to subscribe to the CMJ (College Music Journal) from when I was about 14 or 15 and it always came with a CD in the back with about 20 tracks of new music on it every month, and that's probably how I got into things like American Football. Then my friends were giving me burned CDs of bands like The Appleseed Cast.

I saw Cursive when I was around 16 or so, and Sufjan Stevens as well, playing to like 50 people at The Magic Stick in Detroit. A show that I really remember blowing my mind was the first time was Do Make Say Think, they're a band everyone should listen to. They played together really tightly, and I remember the first time I went to see them it was an 18+ show I had to sneak into. Before I could even drive I went with a couple of my friends to the last tour ever of Ben Folds Five.”

I love Ben Folds. He still is, but he was a massive part of my teen years.

“Especially that record, The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. It's a goddamn masterpiece of a record. There's a video online of them playing a set around that time in Japan called Freaking Out, it's so good. Only three people, all singing in harmony, and they're all doing so much stuff. And that's probably one thing that influenced me a lot too, just literally trying to do the most that you possibly could.

From when I was a teenager and even after I moved to the UK, I was doing this solo project with lots and lots of loops - drum kit, mixer, five different loop pedals, playing keyboard one handed, drumming with the other and singing at the same time. Just trying to push what you can do, not only in a band context, but as one person. I think that's something that I've learned from watching Ben Folds Five.”

When I listen to what you're doing with Living Body, I do hear kind of the indie stuff, but also that post-math-rocky stuff. I know you've got many collaborators in the group, but are tracking all of the things yourself, right?

“The band sort of started out of my solo project. I made a record and my friend Katie Harkin sang on it a bunch. Do you know Katie?”

We're huge Sky Larkin fans.

“Nice, I mixed her new record as well. So we met and started doing some stuff together, a few shows together. She got busy, so then my friend Tom who's in Vessels - they're a classic Leeds post-rock band, absolutely great - and he started playing in the live band. But basically, the only thing people play on the record is the stuff that I can't do, like horns, strings, singing. I like having lots of voices, the new songs got lots of people singing on it.

The first record that we put out is really diverse and I think that made it quite hard to promote, or for people to get into. But I also love that. I have ADD and I don't want to bore people. I don't try to like not be pigeonholed, I think I just get bored of my own ideas a lot so I try different things. And so the record is really diverse. But I kind of love the idea of people listening to it and wondering if it's a compilation. So having lots of different voices on it is really nice. But other than that, I actually play everything. Then the band kind of evolved out of that first record. It got to a point where I thought, I can't really do this with loops anymore, I need a band together to do it.”

For anyone coming on to your music for the first time, how would you describe what you're doing?

“That's really hard. Like I was saying, sometimes I feel like the album almost sounds like it's a compilation, right? I've always been really bad at describing this. But you know. It's sort of pop rock indie math shoegaze with drummers, double drumming. Really vocal harmony-driven singing. After a while, my ideas started to really lean into the vocal harmony thing because I think our voices blend well together and it sounds nice.”

You had an LP out in 2016, some singles in 2017, then a bit of a gap. Then two singles out this year. So what can you tell us about why the gap and why new music now?

“The only real reason I can come up with is that it just takes so long because I'm doing everything. The gap isn't always intentional. And I think we're going to have a gap from touring now. It's kind of insane that that album is that old. I have more new songs, but I haven't recorded them.

I can spend four months working on a song, it just takes a really long time. I'm playing it, tracking it, mastering it, you know, I like doing everything. And we did quite a lot of touring when the album came out. For a good two years we did Europe and the States. Probably towards the end of 2017 it got to the point where I didn't want to tour anymore without new songs so we took a bit of time off. And then we did a tour in 2019 with new songs and that was really good. Then the pandemic. I could have been more productive during that time but it was a pretty miserable time for a lot of people. I did record drums already for the next album, I spent a lot of time doing that.

So putting out new music now, I wanted to share something that was more representative of what the band is like now, especially with the two drum kits. I worked hard to put a song out before the tour was done and we had the live videos. as well and stuff like that. Yeah, I just decided to do it again. When we did this tour. Yeah, to get more new music out there that's representative of what we actually are doing in the show.”

The new single has got a pretty sizable message in it. Do you try to put "big" thoughtful messages in every song?

“It's hard for me to even think about myself as a songwriter. I was talking to a friend about this the other day because I'm always sort of like grabbing the ideas and trying to finish them. So lyrically, I don't really feel like anything's deliberate. The best thing I feel I can do with lyrics is make them sound good, if that makes sense. Phonetically they have to fit in with the melody.

Around 2017 we released a song, "Cream", and that's kind of about death and debt. I think that was the beginning of all of our songs being about money or about capitalism in some way. There's so much to talk about in that arena. Our first single this year, "Consumer" was a bit more about how the algorithm knows you more than you know yourself, and also the influence of tech companies both in challenging the role of traditional higher education because you can Google anything and what it mean that one company can dictate what all truth and reality is, and that's quite scary. So I guess I haven't run out of things to say. I think previously, our songs were just a bit more existential. And there's always a bit of that in there too.

I don't think I do it on purpose. It's just the least I can do, as an artist, drawing attention to these kinds of issues.”

Is there anything you would hope that listeners take away with them?

“Something I started to gravitate to more with Living Body is, even if the songs are kind of bleak, I want the music in the show experience to be like a release. It should be joyous. And that's why there's grooves and bliss in the songs as well. You want people to forget about their problems for a while, even if the songs are talking about quite bleak subject matter. I think music is the most important thing in the world, and it's gotten me through so many things. Songs that I really love, it's kind of cheesy, but they keep you going through life when it's really hard. If your music can have that effect on people, helping them in some way to just exist on this planet that we live on, that's all I've ever really felt was the reason for doing all this.”

You mention the groove and I noticed watching the live video, the baselines are super melodic and that you're playing a lot of the harmonies quite high up the neck

“I love the bass. I think I spend more time thinking about the bass than I do the guitar. A lot of times when I write a song, I've written it on the bass with the vocal melody, and then I'm building the whole song around it. I think I can only comment that it's because I listened to lots of Motown. I grew up near Detroit, that stuff was still all on the radio all the time. Motown, those baselines, it's the best. It's the best bass ever.

I think the bass is like the bridge between the drums and the vocal melody. Someone who previously played drums for Living Body once said, it sounds like people write a song and then they go "I'm gonna put a beat on that". But the Living Body songs are like, I'm gonna put a beat in that. I think everything has to be complementary and not on each other's toes too much. I don't always succeed in that. But that's kind of what I'm thinking of in terms of arrangement.”

You mentioned you're working on an album?

“I'm going to record. It will be an album but no idea when really. I'm going to work on that more. Recording is actually what got me into all this in the first place.

You asked about shows that influenced me, but also, I think just learning about recording was really formative for me too. Discovering records like The Microphones. The Glow, Pt. 2 was a huge record for me. People who use the studio kind of like an instrument and do things you couldn't do in a live setting. Playing around with that in a completely naive way, like running drums through delay pedals, I had no idea what I was doing but it was really fun and kind of a liberating thing to do on my own. I played piano and drums young, but because of recording I got much better at things like bass, guitar and singing. Because you're just recording yourself, teaching yourself how to play an instrument. I spent a lot of time as a teenager doing that in the basement. I was from the middle of nowhere, you know, I had a lot of time.

Yeah, I was privileged to have what I did, but it was all very, very limited. Like a hard disk recorder that took zip disks. And before that just recording piano onto a boombox and then playing the boombox back, and one microphone.

Tape Op Magazine was very formative for me. It's a magazine about recording, but it takes it from quite a DIY approach. Where other magazines were selling products, this would have articles like how to make your own spring reverb out of a tin can. Reading about that and reading about recording while at the same time getting into music that sounded a bit more weird than what was on the radio was kind of a light bulb moment.”

You've got the next wave of tour coming this month right?

“Next week we're playing in Newcastle and Glasgow and then we're doing this all day in Stockton-on-Tees which looks pretty fun. Our friends, Mi Mye are playing that as well, they played on "No Debt" actually. And then the following week, we're doing the last run shows in the North with a band called Real Terms from Liverpool. We've wanted to do a few shows with them for a while so that should be fun. Then a bit of a break, not contribute to the profits of the fossil fuel industry.”

Last question I've got for you is, if you could listen to any song in the whole world again for the very first time, what would that song be?

“That's really interesting too, because, I know this isn't really answering the question but you know when you listen to a song that you still think is great that you've listened to forever, if you listened to it for the first time now, would you think that it's cheesy? Or would you still think it's amazing?”

Some people might. I am consistent. I'm nothing if not consistent. If I like something, that never changes.

“I'm like that too. But there's music from when I was younger that I still love and then other music that I don't.”

I can't think of any music that I've ever thought, I love this and now I hate this.

“That's pretty amazing. I'll say, "What A Wonderful World". They can play that at my funeral. It's pretty timeless. It's pretty sombre sounding. I like that balance between the bittersweet in music. You can take a really serious subject matter but still not take yourself too seriously. Kind of silly, but it's also quite deep.”

I can understand that. Hearing what you're making with Living Body, I can absolutely understand that.

Thanks so much to Living Body for taking the time to chat with us. Catch Living Body on tour this November and stay tuned for album release news!

November 16: Newcastle - Cumberland Arms (w/ Waves of Dread, Madeleine Smyth)
November 17: Glasgow - Glad Cafe (w/ Come Outside)
November 18: Stockton-on-Tees - Georgian Theatre (w/ Walt Disco, Gallus, Mi Mye, etc)
November 22: Salford - the Eagle Inn (w/ Real Terms, Oort Clod)
November 23: Liverpool - Kazimier Stockroom (w/ Real Terms)
November 24: Nottingham - JT Soar (w/ Real Terms, Kaliugah)
November 25: Leeds - Wharf Chambers (w/ Real Terms, Jooloosooboo)