INTERVIEW: No Stranger
WTBU DJ Danya Trommer spoke to Delaware-based rockers No Stranger about their latest album In Tangible Company and the songwriting process for it.
Danya Trommer: So I’m interviewing you guys for Boston University’s radio station–
Jonathan Cooney: Hi Boston! What’s up, YouTube!
Gil Gonzalez: Go Terriers!
DT: So I wanted to interview you guys about your new album, In Tangible Company. The first thing I noticed when I saw you guys play is your quiet-loud-quiet-loud formula. It’s very Nirvana-like. Who came up with that? Is Nirvana an inspiration?
JC: I wrote all the songs for In Tangible Company structurally. I’m not really a Nirvana fan, not out of distaste, I just don’t really know them.
DT: So where’d that style come from?
JC: Sam [Barry] and I used to be in a band in high school, and one of the things very early on that we wanted to try was experimenting with dynamics and having a peak-and-valley structure to songs. That way we could get people’s attention and then change it. Well, not change it, but you know.
DT: It’s definitely different from other bands.
Sam Barry: I think another part of the dynamics thing is our loud parts aren’t actually that big compared to other bands we’re playing with, but they seem really big because we get really quiet.
GG: I joined the band late, but at least from my background in high school, I was big into marching band. At least on a percussion side of things, when you do things really quietly and really loudly in terms of dynamics, it makes the big parts stick out a lot. Especially as a jazz player, I love to make big parts big and that dynamic contrast really helps things stand out. That’s always been a thing that I pride myself on with my playing, as well.
JC: We like flexin’ on ‘em [Laughs].
DT: So I noticed on the Bandcamp your description is, “Every song is a love song.” Could you tell me a little bit more about what that means?
JC: Everything we do, we do out of love. Be it music, or cooking, or politics. Love can be very easily misguided or perverted, but I think at the core of everything we do, it’s all about love.
SB: We played a show a week ago where Jonathan introduced every song with, “This is a love song.”
DT: I know your previous EP, Haste, was made very quickly a few years ago, but it had a really impressive outcome. You included the same recordings from Haste on this LP. What went exactly into that decision?
JC: When we made Haste, I meant it to be a preview of In Tangible Company. That’s why we did it so quickly and left a bunch of pops and squeaks and faltered notes in there, because we wanted it to be this sort of raw preview of what the record was going to be like.
SB: Fun fact for the listeners: Haste was made in a college radio station.
JC: We did it in ten hours? Or twelve, or something.
DT: So it was meant to be a preview for this LP, but it came out three years prior?
JC: In Tangible Company took an unexpected amount of time to make. Haste came out in 2015. Much of In Tangible Company was already written at that point, or at least the stuff that I would play by myself. By the summer of 2016, we had finished arranging all the drum parts, which is what we did last. I wrote all the guitar stuff. Our former bassist and I wrote all the bass, then he left the band and Dylan [Walker] joined early this year. We recorded the record out in Chicago with this fella named Matt Frank; he plays in a bunch of bands in Chicago like Lifted Bells and There There There and Recreational Drugs. I don’t even know if they’re active anymore.
Dylan Walker: No.
JC: Nooo. We did a session–just drums and bass–in February of 2017, and then we did the rest of it at the end of summer, and then it just took forever to get it mastered.
DT: What made you go from a solo project to a full band?
JC: I was always wanted No Stranger to be a band. For the first three or four years of me doing No Stranger, I basically just wanted to be Evan Weiss of Into It Over It, so I was like, “Well, I’ll just play by myself all the time and I’ll be a band.” Over the course of that, I realized that there’s so much that I don’t know about being in a band, that I just tried to let it happen really gradually. I love playing solo, but I love playing with these fellas too.
DT: So how did this band of fellows get assembled?
JC: Well I was born on October 9 [Laughs] in the great city of Chicago, Illinois, 1991. The only palindromic year of the 21st century.
SB: 20th century.
JC: 20th century, fuck! All right, interview’s over! [Laughs] So I started this in 2012, and then we played our first full band show in 2014. It was just me, our old bassist, and our old drummer. Sam joined the band in 2015 in January, and then our old drummer left. Then we got Gil in 2015, then our old bassist left in 2016 after we finished the record, then Dylan joined early this year. Wait, no! Luke, our old bassist, left towards the end of whatever last year was. Time is a flat circle.
DT: Yeah, you know, you can interpret it however you want. Now the title of your album comes from your song “Great Grey Towers.” What’s the meaning of that line and why’s it important to you?
JC: “Great Grey Towers” is about experiencing loneliness among a lot of other people. All of us were feeling things simultaneously that we couldn’t really experience together somehow. We all felt lonely, together. I think a big part of loneliness is grappling with one’s self, and that’s where the line in the song, “You and me, my intangible company” comes from. But the record is three words: In Tangible Company. So it explores life among other people and how that influences my thought processes and stuff and comparing that to the lack thereof.
DT: Yeah, I noticed that there was a difference in the spacing–
JC: Flipped the script!
DT: Yeah, there you go! So, do the other members of the band have any part in the songwriting at all in terms of lyrics?
GG: Lyrically, no. As for percussion parts, the drums were pretty skeletal structures, and then I–for about two or three weeks–met one-one-one with Jonathan and we would hash it out in my basement. There were even tracks that had no drum parts to them whatsoever, and it was very like, “Ok, this is the first part [mimics guitar].” Ok, and I’m like “I’ll add a little bit of this, little bit of that” and then trial and error, and here we are.
JC: It’s a very frustrating process, because I don’t know how to play drums. So I’ll be like, “Ok Gil, I want you to do something like this [mimics drums].” And he’s just like “I-[frustrated noises]”.
DT: Now, I noticed that when you’re playing “Cornerstone” live, you call it something different. I was wondering why you do that.
JC: A lot of the time, I just forget to call the songs their names. I’ll just say, “This is a song about X!” Did I call it something else tonight?
DT: You called it, like, something about God–
JC: Yeah! “Cornerstone” is about me grappling with faith and how I don’t–well, not so much grappling with faith, but grappling with my history of grappling with faith [Laughs]. That’s often just me saying, “This is about the big man in the sky and how I don’t understand the things that he tells me.” I still don’t, and I probably won’t ever.
DT: So if you could choose a unifying theme for this album, what would it be?
GG: Taking those old records off the shelf [Laughs], and puttin’ them right back on the shelf!
JC: Hmm. Love. It sounds like a cop out. Every song is a love song, truly. Home, as well. I used to have this prepared spiel that I would say at solo shows whenever I would play “Southeaston”, and then I didn’t say it for a while and I forgot it, and then I would try and improvise it and always mess it up. But I think the record is about a lot of things, but one of the things I think about a lot is home and what that looks like and how an individual gets to define it.
Interview has been edited for length and clarity.