- Annick Mayer

“I was just inspired and wanted to lend my contribution,” explains PP, surprisingly laidback on an evening at the center of so much action. It’s all in a day’s work for the NYC native, who invited us along to his performance at Dominion Theatre, where we caught “The Worse it Gets,” delivered to a riotous subterranean crowd. We even snuck in some record hunting at In Living Stereo, all while PP shared some insights into how he brings his music to life… and you won’t believe the inspiration behind his name!

What’s got you excited about music right now?

I’m excited to see real musicianship coming to the front lines. Artists like Adele are opening the door for the next wave of powerful female vocalists. My album is very vocal-driven, and sonically it’s rock/R&B so there’s something for everyone to love.

What do you hope fans take away from your upcoming album?

You have such an empowered/empowering take on relationships and love. Where do you think you get that strength?

I’ve been through a lot, relationship-wise. I watched my mother struggle with my dad and I have a tight circle of female friends who have all been in love and heartbroken. I’m empowered by the idea that I’m still strong even the midst of drama, before I can even see the light at the end of the tunnel.

What’s up next for you?

People can look for the album in the early spring. We’ve been prepping the band and rehearsing for a series of live shows, to be announced as soon as they’re confirmed. You can get the scoop on bridgetkelly.com and also my twitter @theycallmebk.

The divine Ms. BK opens for Goapele at Los Angeles’ Key Club on November 8.

Park moved to New York around ten years ago to attend film school at NYU. Before making the move, he had called South Korea home for nine years. “I moved around a lot as a kid,” explains Park. After college, he worked on a show called Juan’s Basement, which pretty much ended up playing out the narrative of Wayne’s World. “I had known Juan for a while,” said Park, “and I had been helping out with the show,” which had been airing on smaller outlets. “One day I got a call from Juan saying, ‘I got an email from Ryan Schreiber [CEO/Founder of Pitchfork,] he wants to buy our show!’ We were like, oh shit…we’re going big time!’” Juan’s Basement went on to run for 16 episodes on Pitchfork.

Around the same time that Juan’s Basement got picked up by Pitchfork, Park was shooting his first music video for a band called Enon. “I didn’t know how to spend money at the time,” laughs Park, “it was kind of a disaster.” The video is based on the last scene of a 1981 movie called Ms. 45. “I really wanted to shoot a party scene,” explained Park, and “Ms. 45 was this old dirty gritty New York city movie, where the climax takes place at a Halloween party.” In the last scenes of the cult revenge movie, the main character dresses up as a nun and blows everyone away. “So we wanted to do that. We got all the costumes and Toko [part of Enon] played the nun.”

Fast-forward about four years to “Amor Fati,” a very different video. “I met Ernest Greene [Washed Out] a few years ago at SXSW,” however, it wasn’t until two years later that the two began talking videos. “We started trading images, and I think the first image he sent me was the album cover. That really set the tone for me,” Park explained. After deciding that they would shoot in Iceland, Park started gathering ideas. “I put together this package of Google images, just searching for basically ‘Iceland, beautiful.’ I came up with these postcard-like images, but I didn’t really know what any of them were.” But since so many of the images were from Flickr, many of them were Geotagged, showing exactly where the photos were taken. “So we punched that into Google maps and basically just printed out this itinerary.” At first Park thought, ”there is no way this can work…but I sent it off to my contacts in Iceland and they said, ‘Oh yeah this is actually a sensible itinerary.’ I couldn’t believe it.”

Although it may sound like everything came together effortlessly, there are always a few bumps in the road when coordinating a shoot across continents. “Originally I had thought that the video was going to be with Ernest and his wife. I needed at least a full week to shoot, but he only had two days off.” Ernest suggested that someone else play the part. Park admits, “I was OK with that but at the same time panicking.” Park ended up casting musician Luke Rathborne, who he had known for years. “We had actually met on a student film [shot and cast in Maine] in 2004. Luke was 16 at the time. Luke was this really smart and artistic kid.” So Park was on the train with a friend, “thinking ‘Oh God, I have to find someone,’ and the doors opened up and Luke walked right in.” Park asked Luke if he wanted to go to Iceland, and a few weeks later their tickets were booked.

After two weeks, Park returned from Iceland with footage from a road trip, flecked with the humbling landscapes of Iceland. “It was mind-blowing to see the countryside,” exclaimed Park. “[We also met] such awesome people, who totally got what we were trying to do.” Park adds that the video seems “more like home movies than a narrative, but we did have a loose script going in. We were having such an amazing time that we would be like ‘Oh, we have to put that crazy thing that just happened in the video.’”

One of these unplanned scenes appears when Luke is being lifted up by a bunch of dudes at a house party. “That was the guy’s [house where] we stayed for the week prior. The guy was a promoter in Iceland. We needed someone who would put up with drunk guys… I mean we are all professionals,” Park justifies, “but the spirit of things was kind of shaggy. We ended up partying with these guys and everybody in that scene was just friends at that point. It was just coming from a really good place.”

After watching Park’s striking treatment for “Amor Fati,” we are definitely excited to see more from this director. Park is currently finishing up a new video for Psychobuildings, which he tells us will be completely different from this one – expect dancing. Park is also teaming up on a creative production company, called Neighborhood Watch. “We are pooling all of our projects,” says Park, “and just doing projects that turn us on.”

What is your inspiration for the A44 exclusive podcast?

We love music in the studio and we’re always banging out sets to keep us jamming through the day. The inspiration for this mix is ‘all Australian’ —specifically, Aussie artists and bands that we recently sponsored to attend the Aussie BBQ at SXSW in Austin, TX.

The Aussie BBQ is the biggest live showcase of Australian music talent outside of Australia—a brilliant set of gigs that is a must-see each year – devotedly brought to us by the top chow at Stage Mothers. We love their ambition, their creativity and of course their music. The mix is quite eclectic due to the number of different bands that attended the shows but a fantastic example of the diversity and talents of young Australian artists.

What’s the Aussie BBQ like?

It’s wild. For the likes of Austin’s SXSW, the town sits down and focuses 100% on gigs—they rock out from every venue and on every street corner. If you like festivals but prefer a more organic presentation, the Aussie BBQ is raw energy featuring the best talent Australia has to offer.

How does music fuel your everyday?

Music IS our day—no matter what we’re doing in the studio, we always find time to source, mix and play tracks of all genres.

This podcast is a great way to share some amazing Aussie bands with a global audience. What should we know about the music scene in Sydney?

The state of Aussie music is so strong across the board that to answer this question would require me to write a thesis! In short, the only radio stations to listen to is Triple J and FBI who continually unearth and break new local acts. We have a plethora of fantastic live venues that support our local artists—The Gaelic Club in Sydney being one of our favourites! And bands like Birds of Tokyo are going great guns, popping up everywhere in Australia and abroad—good friends of ours and avid supporters of ZANEROBE!

Though his hometown isn’t the only environment that affects his music. VanGaalen discloses, “A lot of my sound is really governed by the spaces I record in.” He has recorded all four of his albums in different spaces, ranging from a basement bedroom to a professional studio. VanGaalen uses the word “machines,” to describe his recording equipment, coming across as rather wary of the equipment. “The machines I use now, I have somewhat mastered. Soft Airplane and Diaper Island were recorded on the same machines.” For Diaper Island however, “I pushed it a bit more for some dirt,” he explains, as “Diaper Island was more or less of a metaphorical title based on the idea that the trash we create over a lifetime disappears when we put it out for the garbage removal,” and as VanGaalen clarifies his amusement, “I like to imagine all of my trash becoming a single entity.”

If possible, VanGaalen’s explanation of the song “Peace on the Rise,” is just about as meditative as the song itself; “Simple things that make me feel at one inside of all this mess,” says VanGaalen, “that’s where I got the inspiration from for ‘Peace on the Rise.’” Also, just in case you thought VanGaalen’s talent begins and ends with songwriting, consider yourself mistaken. VanGaalen happens to be the genius behind all of the animation for the video, which he explains, “was done by myself over a period of about a year, but it was broken up by me having another child and recording records.” Ending our interview with his plans for the imminent year ahead, VanGaalen responds with the same appreciative calm as when the interview began, “My plans are to hang out with my daughters, wife and dog as much as possible… and just breathe.”

So, why the name 1,2,3? According to Nic—it’s the anonymity that drew them to it. “It just popped into my head a few years back and stuck. It was simple, meant nothing, and gave the reader no preconceptions of what we sounded like.” Nic and Josh’s emphasis on openness is even more clear in the music itself. On 1,2,3’s album New Heaven, there is this amazing ability for songs to dance between triumphant mid-tempo tracks like “Work” to slow and ethereal songs like “Just Like Heaven (is gone)” or “Heat Lighting”—all the while maintaining a unified and solid album throughout. Nic hesitates to explain this, as he pauses; “Umm, it was organically intentional. What it boils down to is that I just like all sorts of music, and really have trouble containing myself when I sit down and a song comes out. It’s too difficult to constrain it into one category. Hopefully there are parallels people can draw throughout all the songs. I believe there are, but it’s just never really been a concern of mine.”

Nic is also not afraid to pay homage where homage is due, “There is certainly a large category [of musicians] that I will always return to with much admiration…and to be quite honest they’re all fairly cliché,” he prefaces, “Dylan, the Beatles, Neil Young, Marvin Gaye, I’m a big Bacharach fan, Roy Orbison, and Van Morrison just makes me happy—especially in the summer. But you always have to try to realize what it is that makes those people great and bring it into your own world.” Nic also mentions how other mediums offer him inspiration with songwriting. “Classic movies like Apocalypse Now or the Last Picture Show are always inspiring on more of a subconscious level.” Also, he says, “Lots of post modern writers like Raymond Carver and that whole Gordon Lish crowd. I related to [those writers] on a pop song level,” which he explains; “you need to take the most important themes and motives, and make them compact. The first line always has to be great.” He continues, “I liked a lot of flash fiction. It was the 3 1/2 minute pop song of the literary world.”

For the song “Work,” Nic tells us that it was written in parts over a long span of time. “I wrote the music about a year earlier,” before writing the lyrics. “It was just a tambo and kick loop. I think I had three different sets of music put over it at various points. The first sounded like something from Bowie’s Station to Station. It was too derivative though, so I changed it.” The lyrics came more effortlessly, fueled by the way Nic has experienced the working world. “The only real jobs I’ve ever had were manual labor jobs. I was a farm hand for 5 years through high school and college, then I hung drywall, worked for a paint crew, things like that. So I suppose that was kind of running through my mind when I wrote the lyrics.”

Although it appears to be perfectly simple, just like the pure and down-to-earth quality of the song, the video for “Work” was “kind of a mess,” as Nick describes. “We had a bunch of different treatments but they all got thrown out due to budget issues. So Drew [Norton, who directed the video] drove down from New York without us having any idea what we were gonna do. The original idea was to involve Braddock, PA, which is like this post-industrial wasteland that is on the rise. They have this really outspoken young mayor who’s all tatted up and is really changing the landscape. We wanted to involve him but we never heard back from his office. So we just started driving around town shooting whatever.” Ultimately, the premise ended up being two laid-off workers who are “having one last day of fun before we go home and tell our girlfriends/wives.” Nic admits, “I was sick to my stomach half the time because I was so worried it wasn’t gonna be good. Drew seemed to pull it together after about a month of editing, though.” For those of you who have just watched the video, I’m sure you can agree that he pulled it together just fine.

Catch 1,2,3 on tour with Givers in late June, and watch out for a potential tour of the UK. “I’ve already started worrying about the second album. I think I want it to be a double album,” Nic resolves, “We’ll see.”