By Allison Staulcup
Shawn Fogel and Josh Cohen from Golden Bloom sat down with The Vinyl District at Schubas before their last show on the Make America More Awesome Tour. They covered everything from their next big step as a band to their rally for an excuse to say “Blagojevich.”
They closed out their tour with lots of laughs for comedian Timmy Williams (“The Whitest Kids You Know”) and lively sets full of good-humored pranks from Golden Bloom and The Grownup Noise.
How did Golden Bloom get started?
Shawn Fogel: I think we played our first show under the name Golden Bloom in 2008. A couple years after college I recorded a solo EP and I put together a band just to do a CD release show in New York and I loved it so much I was like, “I don’t want to play solo shows anymore, I want to do band shows!” And we started doing band shows but I felt weird about the shows being billed under my name and having a full band. So, we started trying to figure out how to at least make it sound like a band.
What are your musical influences?
Shawn: That’s tough, but I’d say older stuff: The Beatles, Neil Young, Elvis Costello, and Tom Petty would probably be the biggest influences. I like a lot, a lot of stuff, but those are probably the bullet points. I like really poppy stuff like Apples in Stereo, early of Montreal. The more modern stuff: Luna, Pedro the Lion, Wilco. I’m up for listening to anything. We listened to Ol’ Dirty Bastard as we were driving to Chicago.
What is one record everyone should own?
Shawn: The Harder They Come movie soundtrack. I don’t have a huge vinyl collection at home, but that is one album I only like to listen to on vinyl. I will put it on if I’m doing dishes or vacuuming and cleaning up or if I’m just having dinner and relaxing. It’s mostly Jimmy Cliff, but there are some other Reggae and Jamaican artists on there as well.
Josh Cohen: My default has always been Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue which is great on vinyl, because it sounds awesome and that is what it was meant to be listened to on. I feel like that record transcends all time and music. It’s an old, cool jazz record.
What was your first experience with vinyl?
Shawn: We had records and a record player at home when I was a kid. I just think the tactile experience of being a kid and putting the record on the record player and moving the needle onto it and watching it spin, you make more of a connection. You’re more physically connected to the music, because there’s a physical object there.
Josh: Growing up my dad worked in radio, so we always had vinyl around. He had like five hundred records. He loved sixties music, so he had a lot of Beatles, The Association, and Iron Butterfly. So, I grew up listening to a lot of vinyl.
Do you have a large vinyl collection?
Josh: I don’t personally. I probably have maybe fifty records. But every time I travel I love to go visit local record stores and go through and if I have a way to get it home, I’ll grab stuff.
What made you want to release on 7’’?
Shawn: I really like vinyl and it was something I always wanted to do. It was actually before our first album came out, so I thought it would be a good way to just get one song out there. And it was more fun to get those back than CDs. We made them a randomly mixed colored vinyl. The plant takes all the scraps from the colored vinyl and throws them together, so they’re swirled up and every single one in the batch is different. There’s dark purples all the way to really light blues. It came out really nice.
What was it like writing the record together this time around?
Josh: It was great! Everything used to be just Shawn by himself and then we would get together and take what he had done and translate that to the live show. But this time Shawn, Jeff and I went up to a cabin in Maine and it didn’t even feel like we were working. We would get up and cook and go on hikes and then come back at the end of the day and it’s like, “oh! we have a song!”.
What brought about this tour?
Shawn: I met Timmy Williams last year when we made a music video up in Portland, Oregon for a song off our last EP. He’s kind of the star of the video and he’s hilarious. Ever since then we’ve been trying to do something collaborative and I’ve seen a lot of shows with bands and comedians on the same bill, so I’ve always wanted to do that.
And The Grownup Noise, I don’t want to even say that they’re opening for us, because it feels like a co-headlining tour. I think throughout the night everyone has an equal amount of stage time. There were a couple of nights we flip-flopped the order a little bit just to have fun with it. I met them a couple of years ago and we just kept piecing together more and more common friends and more and more things we have in common musically and it just made a lot of sense. We’re really sad that the tour is over tonight. It’s like the end of summer camp.
On this tour we were trying to figure out as many things to add to make it more special and fun for us and fun for anyone else who ends up joining in. Two of the things we’re doing have to do with the video we made with Timmy. In the video there’s a political rally scene and I shoot lightening bolts out of my guitar and everyone into hippies.
So, we’re giving away the guitar that’s in the video to someone at the end of the tour and then we’re doing fake absurdist rallies in every city. We called it the Make America More Awesome Tour, but it seemed like in a lot of cities it was the Make America More Confused Tour. Sometimes the rally is specific to the city, so for Chicago it’s a rally for the excuse to say “Blagojevich” just because politically wherever you stand on him, he has a great name. It’s fun to say. I miss him being in the news and hearing people say his name over and over, so that’s what our rally is for, an excuse to say his name.
What do you like most about touring?
Shawn: I like seeing places I’ve never seen before, exploring interesting parts of town , weird seedy underbellies of towns. You’re on a constant quest for the cool record shop or a really awesome kale salad. We’re also big into roadside attractions, especially anything that begins with the “World’s Largest.” The last tour we did, we got to stop off at the World’s Largest Frying Pan in Brandon, Iowa. You can actually stand in it. It’s huge. A couple days ago in Casey, Illinois we saw the World’s Largest Wind Chimes.
What’s next for Golden Bloom?
Shawn: This tour is part of us transitioning Golden Bloom from being my solo project that has a live band sometimes to being a band. We went on a little band vacation in June. We rented a cabin in the woods up in Maine for a week and tried to write new songs together for the first time. Usually, I write the songs, record all the instruments, make the record and then we learn the parts and make arrangements for them as a live band.
So, this time we’re doing it a different way, we’re writing and arranging together. Before we started this tour we went into the studio and did basic tracks. We’ve got drums, bass and guitars done already, so when we get back I’ll do vocals and hopefully in the next couple of weeks we’ll have that EP finished and start figuring out when we can roll that out. It will be the first album that Golden Bloom has made as a band.
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Top Photo by Alicia J. Rose
