Interview: Erik Garlington, Proper.
Proper.
Proper. is the band that made me fall in love with new music again. After a fateful bus ride towards the end of my university days destroyed my meticulously curated music library hard drive, I drifted away from seeking out the best new music. I just felt too difficult.
I continued listening to the bands I’d grown up with, only growing my record collection with latest releases. But a couple of years later, when I saw a tweet from Gareth David (frontman of my favourite band of all time, Los Campesinos!) professing his love for a band called Proper., my curiosity was sparked. Delving into any streaming I could get my hands on, I was blown away by their emotive blend of punk rock. It was as though someone had put all the parts of my favourite genres into a blender to create the perfect band, just for me.
I’ve watched over the years as Proper. have gone from strength to strength. Last year’s The Great American Novel was my ‘album of the year’, and this year’s EP Part-Timer inspired me to write over 1000 words in the first draft of my review for their EP, running at just over 12 minutes long. Outside of my own obsession, Proper. have found themselves building serious attention in the alt-scene this year - playing multiple dates of Hawthorne Heights’ Is For Lovers Festival, Afropunk Festival, and about to depart later this month on Coheed and Cambria’s S.S. Neverender cruise.
Frontperson and primary songwriter, Erik Garlington, managed to find time in his hectic schedule to chat with me about the band’s hectic summer, the mindset shift that resulted in Proper. opening for their idols, and the band’s desire to come back to the UK in the near future.
You’ve had a packed month with the EP releases and a lot of gigging - how are you feeling?
(Erik): Feeling good! We've never dropped something in the middle of a tour before, so it was really stressful. We did two legs, and then the five days in between where we thought we'd have a break.
We had to do all the music videos, the promo pictures, the interviews, and the live sessions. Our drummer lives in Seattle, and our new guitarist lives in Toronto, so now when we have any free moment we have to do as much as possible. We thought it would be a nice relaxing break, but it was just straight through doing something every single day. It was a good rollout, but definitely a new experience.
And you just did a run of the Is For Lovers Festival, how was that experience for you?
It was really cool. It was one of those things where I just shot my shot. They'd already announced it, and I messaged saying “Hey, I'm in this band we're trying to get a tour figured out, we've got an EP coming out and we'd love to play one on the festivals.” They offered six of the ten dates but we could only do five.
It was a really cool thing where they're just like yeah, this is sick would you want to play? Usually, it's a whole audition process that can be kinda soul-crushing. But it most easy process where they just said, your band’s sick, if you can make it to these days, we'd love to have you. I obviously grew up listening to all of those bands so it was really fun.
From the outside, it seemed Is For Lovers had that ‘Warped Tour close-knit community’ feeling, was that your experience?
It was kind of like that, except if the people at Warped Tour were bringing their children along. It was much more family-oriented than I thought it would be. I'm 32 and I don't have kids, so forgot that other people do. There was a good all-age mixed variety to a lot of the shows; it was pretty cool to see. I went to Warped Tour when I was 19 and at 22, so over a decade ago and it was really cool to see my peers from those times as real adults.
It's one of the higher-profile things we've done. It reminded me of Manchester Punk Fest. We've done that a couple of times last year we played it in Groilla a big 1500 cap room. Is For Lovers definitely had that kind of feeling, the electricity was there. We would go to get food and people would recognise us and ask for pictures. So it compared to that.
Sounds like it kept a grassroots feel to it, or was it slightly more corporate?
It was a bit in-between. Hawthorne Heights was the band of the Hot Topic emo era and then on top of that Thrice, Saosin, Thursday and Silverstein all of these huge bands. I talked to one of the guys from Hawthorne about the idea that Is For Loves was to be what Warped Tour should have been.
So basically it’s the whole Warped concept, brought up to date. But to do that, you need sponsors and you need vendors. So there was that corporate aspect, such as, there was the Dunk a Punk dunk tank that we had Elijah (Watson - drummer) do. It was that good mix of things that you have to do to pull off something of that scale.
You have S.S. Neverender: Raiders of Silent Earth coming up, the cruise hosted by Coheed & Cambria. Will this be your first cruise?
Well, my mom's in the military so when I was 11, we moved to Alaska and had to drive all the way to Seattle and then do a four-day ferry. But that was a ferry with about 1,000 people on it. So not quite this magnitude, and possibly not even 1,000 people, I'm probably misremembering cause it’s been twenty-odd years.
This will be my first real cruise as an adult person. Honestly, I'm just hoping to not get motion sick; I get motion sick just sitting in the back of a car. So four days on a cruise is gonna be a big challenge.
There are three days out in total and we have to play a unique set every time. We're lucky that we have three albums already. We're trying to do three sets where we don't repeat any songs. And I'm hoping to get that sense of community again, that we saw at Manchester Punk and at Is For Lovers. Coheed is the reason I picked up a guitar at 12 years old, so they're the reason I've been doing this for two-thirds of my life. And on top of that, just seeing what something of this level is like. I never thought we'd be able to do something like that.
I guess it will also put you really close to your fans - there's nowhere you can really avoid bumping into people other than your room.
It will be very interesting to see. I've never been in that type of setting. We're pretty good about being at our merch table at shows to say hi, but we never lived in almost a week-long experience with fans. It's gonna be very interesting to see.
How does it feel to be included with these massive names like Coheed and Hawthorne Heights?
It feels good. We started out pretty emo-pop-leaning. I'm not good with waves, but whatever wave of emo that Modern Baseball and Front Bottoms came up in. That was my initial “thing”, but my heart was always with prog rock and heavier stuff. And it can be pretty hard to break out of the thing that you start out in.
I worried for awhile if we’d ever get to tour with bands like Coheed or At The Drive-In. So it's been really relieving to see the crossover from our last record and what it's afforded to us.
I used to just tell myself we're just a small emo band, let's just have realistic goals. But at some point, something shifted in locked down, and I was like, NO, I want to open for Coheed! I want to open for my idols, and let's see if we can do it.
Luckily, it's pretty good. I'm trying to create this to where everyone in the band gets to open for their idols. Coheed is the top of the top for me, plus we’re gotten to play with The Wonder Years. Elijah has had Saosin. For Tasha (Jonson - bass), I think it’s Taking Back Sunday and for Jon (Lyte - guitar) it’s Billy Talent. We're working on getting those last two.
So your new EP Part-Timer is amazing it's one of my favourite releases of the year. I’ve read that you wrote it over a two-day period. Are you normally that productive or did it just flow out of you?
The joke I always have is that I don't really write because I'm inspired. If I'm going to write, I write because there's a deadline.
We had this manager for a bit, and they used to say that you should drop something every year, whether it's a single remix or a project. They noticed we didn't have an EP, and asked if would we want to do that. My initial response was “no, not really” but then my bandmates said we really should, though. Which turned into me agreeing.
Once I find the topic I want to write about I just knock it out. The last record took three weeks to write and the record before that we wrote in four or five. This one, only being five tracks, once the idea came to me I just knocked it out in a couple of days and then sent the demos to my bandmates. We just quickly kept it moving, got into the studio, got everything done.
We were in the studio for three days, so nothing crazy. It was right before we went on our Canadian Tour back in March. Three days in the studio, and then we had to hit the road.
In the EP, I notice you’re questioning whether to continue pursuing the music dream. I read that you’re still questioning but resolved to try. Are you still in that place?
Yeah, that's pretty much where I am. I'm still going to try! We're hopefully going start talking to labels soon about the next record; aiming for a little bit of a step up to get a bigger budget so we can have more expansive videos and more time to promote. I'm pretty nervous about it.
I’m one of those people where, I look at what other people have and question why don't I have that, when we clearly have something fun going on with people that I love. I'm mostly trying to unlearn comparing myself. If we get the label that we're hoping for, then that's great. But I'm resolved that, as long as I'm doing it for fun, then that's all that really matters. Because every time I try and be a businessman I end up really hating it.
Was working on the EP part of that cathartic process for you?
After every release, I take negative reviews or questions about “whether they’re going to be able to top this” and get in my head about it. It was cool to focus on that. I have a story that I don’t think enough fans really talk about. So I'm not gonna worry about it.
It’s also just an EP. I don’t need to worry about blowing people away for an hour. Let me try and do more with less. It was really cathartic to just do it for fun and not feel like I had to prove anything. I just wanted to use all the leftover ideas from the last record, and the little things that I've learned since, and pack them all into one little project. It was a really fun gratifying moment.
I really love that screamoesque breakdown in “Middle Managmet” was that something you had been sitting on for a while?
I'd been sitting on that for a year or so. I thought it maybe wouldn't work as a Proper. song. Then, as usual, my bandmates said let's just try and it became one of my favourite tracks on the EP.
With Jon now officially in the band, does having another guitarist around change the way you approach your writing?
It used to be that I just wrote every guitar part, and now I'm excited to collaborate. We want to do that cool band thing where we rent a cabin and write a record. But that fully depends on what kind of budget we get. We want to be more communal.
With the first two records, I just wrote everything and sent it to the band. On the last record, we did a bit more writing together - Elijah and I got together and knocked out around ten songs, but we had another deadline because Elijah was moving to Seattle. And there’s a few things we worked on with Tasha, and they are my favourite parts. Such as “Red, White, & Blue” was the three of us really coming together. I want to have more moments like that.
The next record will be the first time where all of us can actually work together unencumbered. With Jon in the mix, I'm really excited to see what he brings to the table with his Canadian pop-punk influences, like Sum 41 and Billy Talent.
I know LP4 is still some time away, but do you expect to go into it with a central theme in mind lyrically?
I think there will always be a theme. I'm a sucker for concept records, as you can see with my love for Coheed and all the prog bands that do epics. So there'll always be a theme. But musically, I'm excited to just where we go when putting all of our influences together. I'm still going to have a pretty tight lid on the lyrics and the story. I don't know what the story is gonna be for the next one. But once I figure it out, I'm excited to see what new things we can try.
Looking at your work and your approach, it seems to me that have a set of core values that go into everything. What would you say they are?
Definitely advocating for yourself. If you don't believe in yourself, no one will. I saw this really good quote, “no one cares until everybody cares”. Trying to not let that part get to you and making something that you like and that you think might need to be heard by people.
I struggle every day thinking that I could just write a quick 10-track, safe, 30-minute record, and we’d probably be a lot bigger than we are. But it's more gratifying to see what we're making on our terms. Granted, we're taking longer than some of our peers. But we own our masters, we advocate for ourselves, we submit for tours that we have no business submitting for, and then we get included. Those are the core values of believing in yourself, and as cheesy as it is, trusting the process. The process might take a little longer if you do it your way, but it's really gratifying when it pays off.
Do you have any plans to come back to the UK at any point soon?
I want to as soon as possible. We've done a good amount of festivals now over there. I would like to see what the medium to higher-tier festivals are like over there. I keep hearing about 2000trees and Slam Dunk, also Pitchfork Music Festival has a London edition now. I really want to try and do some UK festivals.
There’s so much that we haven't done over there, so I’m thinking, let's just knock it out next summer. We really focused a lot on America this year. And plus, we just love it over there so we’ve got to come back.
I first came across Proper. via Gareth from Los Campesions! love of your music. You supported them on their North American tour last year, what was that experience like for you?
That was probably my favourite tour ever. We're all a bunch of 30 and 40-year-olds so doing like a short run, a two-band bill, where every night we got to be in bed by 10pm was amazing.
But that aside, the shows were great. I'm a lyricist, so opening for another heavy-hitting lyricist, and an amazing performer like Gareth, made me want to step up my game. It was really inspiring front to back, especially since they've been doing it for close to two decades. They're a band that's stuck by their morals. They really care about bringing out acts that they like. A lot of times you don't see that. You get offers where they’re trying to fill a quota or just want someone who will do it for as cheap as possible. Los Camp are very much like what I aspire to be.
Final question, if there could be one song you could experience again for the first time what would it be?
That's a hard question. Probably “All Falls Down” by Kanye West. I remember when that record came out, it shifted everything as far as the way black people dress and the way that we express ourselves. Even just being able to wear pink as a man, which sounds insane now.
It was groundbreaking for a rapper to not be homophobic and to talk about toxic masculinity. I remember that was probably one of the first times I listened to a CD and was blown away. After getting into Coheed, I definitely leant into prog rock and heavier stuff, and I kind of wrote off rap. I was 11, I didn't know. Then I heard that song and every single after that. When I heard the record, it shifted everything. Definitely that, experiencing pure Kanye for the first time would be life-changing.
Thanks Erik for taking time to speak with us. Find Part-Timer on Bandcamp, the new EP from Proper. Might we suggest picking it up on the next Bandcamp Friday? ;)
