INTERVIEW: THE BUBS

We met with Ethan Tapper of The Bubs at The Radio Bean on one of those early March afternoons that teases Burlington with the memory of springtime. Ethan was soaking up the sun and enjoying a hot cup of coffee, bike helmet close at hand, on the coveted window couch when we arrived.

hope: Hi! It’s nice to see you again, how’re you doing?

Ethan: I’m doing great, sitting in a sunbeam here! How’re you?

hope: I’m doing swell in the sun, too. I have some questions for you, but there’s no time limit, so we can go however long and in whatever direction we want. Okay?

Ethan: Okay!

hope: For anyone who’s seen y’all play live, it’s very clear that you all love each other. I just want to know what came first, the friendships or the music?

Ethan: Well, the friendships definitely came first. Basically, it was just me playing music and then started the band with Jon, who’s the drummer, Mitch, bassist, Ben, guitarist, and Addie. Ben and Mitch were friends with Jon, I wasn’t friends with them, but then everybody else who’s joined the band has been a friend of ours. Lydia was like, “I just wanna be in the band!”.

hope: Who is a bright light!

Ethan: She is and she’s such an important part of the band, but she doesn’t have the “traditional” musical skills, but she wanted to be in the band and she’s like our best friend. When I lived on Elmwood Ave, we were practicing some of the songs, like very early days of the band, and Ian, who just had a kid a week ago, and is not in the band anymore, he was like “If I come to all the practices and if I try really hard, can I be in the band?”. And we were like yes! One of the cool things about it is that a lot of the people in it, have never been in a band before.

hope: I think that’s one of the things that makes people love groups like that. You’re like, “Well, if they can do it and have so much fun and sound great, then I can do it, too!”.

Ethan: It’s the punk rock thing where you just learn your instruments and play them badly, but in such a good way.

hope: Oh, yeah. Did you ever read “Please Kill Me”? Like that’s where it’s at!

Ethan: Yeah. “Please Kill Me” is where I learned about all my favorite bands. I read it when I was in high school.

hope: I mean, look at The Ramones who had essentially no skills at all and just did the thing.

Ethan: It’s a very democratic form of music, punk music is.

hope: Definitely. I think we’re sort of coming back around to that and that’s why you all play so well here. People feel it. I was wondering, with 10 of you at the table, there must be a lot of variety in your musical inspirations and preferences.What is the meeting of the minds like when it comes down to arranging each song for that unique Bubs vibe?

Ethan: The cool thing I’ve been thinking about for promoting this album, is about how the songs developed. Many of the songs that are on Golden Thread are re-arrangements of songs I wrote that were like electronic dance club songs in 2015. “Ima Do Me”, which is going to be a bonus track on the new album, the original demo is like a club jam. We just brought it up to all these people and everyone added stuff on. The way I write songs now, is that I write them on Bandcamp and I start with the drums and then the lyrics and vocal melody are always last. I really like melody, but lyrics are hard for me. But now, I make these demos that are like full-band demos and I bring them to everyone. Probably like 80% of them never actually become songs. Some of them will catch on in one way or another. The melodic core of the band is Jon, Mitch and Ben, and they’re so good at their instruments and are really interested in making it complex and adding things that they really like into it. The other members add so much energy and cool vocal parts and arrangements I never would have thought of. Sometimes we’ll just be goofing around and something will happen. “Ima Do Me”, I was joking around and was like “this cannot be one of our songs”. Then we were like “let’s just play it four times as fast” and I just started yelling and now it’s on the record.

hope: Yeah, and going from the Golden Thread EP to the full-length, Cause A Fuss, it all hits so much harder and brings the urgency of your music to the listener. What was different in the process? Was your vision and approach different, especially with the crossover tracks like “Pest” and “Golden Thread”?

Ethan: Part of that is that the demo was just two live-takes for each song. We recorded it as cheaply as possible. This one was teaming up with The Tank and they are so good at their jobs. Rob O’Dea just understood us and what we were trying to get at. It was more of a process, this whole weekend we spent there building up these songs. We all got to record the vocals together in this big room. With that many vocal parts it would be easy for them to get smashed and not really be able to hear them, but Rob did a really good job of recording them.

hope: You did more individual tracking of instruments and vocals then?

Etha: Yes. We were able to go back and add stuff and then record the vocals separately. It was so fun, it was like in a movie where people are recording an album there’s to-go containers everywhere and everybody’s laying around. It was really special. It was so fun!

hope: And that’s the point of making music at the end of the day, even when it’s painful and you’re processing stuff, you’re supposed to have fun!

Ethan: That’s The Bubs magic trick! This has all been an exercise in letting go. I’ve become comfortable in the magic of letting these songs be filtered through other people and some not catching on. It’s like, if I try to force it, it wouldn’t work. It has to go through this process because that’s how everyone in the band feels like they own it and they love it and they’re connected to it, because it’s passed through all of us.

hope: That was another one of my questions. It’s nice to hear that y’all are thinking about how to keep eachother engaged and supported in this process, although unsurprising.

Ethan: We’re playing our music. And my role is to write the songs, but that doesn’t mean it’s any more important than the role Lydia plays or Jon plays. Everyone does different stuff and it just has to happen like this. Another challenge has been the decision making process. I want it to feel equitable. It’s like a democracy challenge and we all need to have an equal share in it, but with this many people it’s hard. With this album release we’ve started a new thing to have sub-committees. I was like, I can’t hold all of these things in my brain and individually delegate them. We need an album-release show committee and a vinyl committee.

hope: It’s community investment in a band. You can’t fake that.

Ethan: It’s so important to us. It’s so joyful and also super tender for everybody. It’s this extreme catharsis and outlet of crazy energy where we have to create the space for people to feel safe to scream as loud as they can. How many people have screamed as loud as they can on purpose and joyfully? I don’t think the energy of punk rock has to be apathetic.

hope: Yeah, it’s kind of the opposite. You can’t really be apathetic when your body is so in it, you know?

Ethan: Yeah! And you can be angry and screaming about real shit and still find the joy in it and be healthy.

hope: Exactly. Do you have a song off the album you’re most proud of?

Ethan: I think the song that consistently is the most meaningful and powerful for people is “Golden Thread”. It started with a poem I wrote about resilience and having wounds. Instead of hiding them, it’s about sewing them up with something flashy and showy and beautiful. Like, here I am, here are my wounds. I sent it to Lydia, because it reminded me of her, and it turned out that, at that exact time, she was at The Hive working on a piece of art which involved sewing tons and tons of golden thread. So, almost every time we play the song, I dedicate it to Lydia. It’s this powerful, cathartic song, all of us singing about sewing up our wounds with golden thread.

hope: Community healing.

Ethan: I love it. My step-nephew, he’s like four, and asked me, “Do you play music on a team?” and I was like, “Oh my god, you see me”. I was like “I really do!”. We identify more as a team than as a band trying to perfect the craft. We’re just trying our hardest and working together. Some of us started shaking hands after shows and being like “good game”. Lydia keeps threatening to bring orange slices to a show.

hope: No pun intended, people would eat that shit up if you just sat down and started eating orange slices on stage. So, I’ve listened to the album a few times now, and I think “Flower” is my favorite. You wrote the lyrics “When I pick a flower, I think of times so far away. If we all die, if we all fade, I hope it’s not ‘cause we would not change”. I loved how open to interpretation that was. It could be about our political or ecological climate, about romantic, platonic, familial relationships, it could be about your own relationship with yourself. Any listener can put themselves and their story in that. That accessibility is punk and is community. When you’re crafting your songs, lyrically or not, are you thinking in those universal terms or are you just thinking “this is my shit”?

Ethan: I think of myself as a bad lyricist. The lyrics are last and by the time I get to them I already know what the lyrically melody is, so I’m just trying to grind the lyrics out to fit. Sometimes I don’t know what they’re about and I’ll send them to other Bubs and they’re like “what is this about?”. And I just don’t know. Sometimes, years later I’m like “Oh! That’s what this song is about!”. Somewhere in my subconscious I know exactly what’s going on. I’ve just become more comfortable with not always knowing exactly what it’s about and letting it become something.

hope: Just being in the unknown and being okay with it. That’s a practice we all need more time with.

Ethan: Trusting your intuition. I think about it in terms of instinct sometimes. All these other animals have instincts, why wouldn’t we? Instinct is a shade of intuition. Trusting whatever it is that wants to come out and letting it do that. Same thing as with a live show, letting the tiger out of the cage!

hope: Your live show is so fun! I remember the first time I saw y’all play was at The Hive a few years ago, before the name change. I didn’t know who y’all were and I could not stop dancing and smiling and laughing. You bring people together and into their bodies. Especially with the new energy of the album, and getting to travel to New Hampshire and Maine for it, people are getting to experience y’all outside of Burlington now.

Ethan: I still don’t even know how it all happened. How lucky is it to be able to be in this band that makes people happy. It’s really cool. With a lot of bands, I think people want to play music where the end game is being a professional musician, right? With us, nobody thinks about that. Our end game is just like, “What if we can continue to play music and have it be part of our lives and play it for more people in other places?”. Nobody in the band is trying to hustle to get on to whatever the modern version of MTV is. We like doing it and we feel like other people like it when we do it, so we just want to keep playing , not because we want to get famous.

hope: That was something I was wondering about though, with all this momentum, if there was a big romantic idea of a tour y’all would want to play?

Ethan: I think we had such a fun time on the tour we just did, that we want to do it more period. It was also an incredibly validating thing. You can be a Burlington rockstar, but you know everybody who’s at the shows, you know? We’re a neighborhood band which is really cool, but we went to these other places and felt like we kinda blew people’s minds...like people didn’t know who we were and they still liked us!

hope: How does that feel now? Are you still reeling from it?

Ethan: Yeah, it was so joyous. It made me just want to go to more places and interact with more people. People just came up to us and bought t-shirts and were saying that what we shared was really special to them.

hope: I feel like, for our generation, there is a coming back around to say that music and artistic endeavors are important and need to be supported. We’re creating a positive feedback loop where folks are like, “Oh, I want to buy that band’s shirt because they just rocked my socks off. And now I’m inspired to go share this part of my art, too!”.

Ethan: It’s like what you’re doing with Bursting the Bubble. Community and special stuff doesn’t just happen. You have to make it and you have to support the things in your community that you believe are important. If you’re not supporting any of the cool stuff going on, you’re going to be like “Why does my community suck?”. I’ve been thinking about that a lot in my personal life, who and what I want to support.

hope: Yeah, y’all are always sharing bands and events happening around town. It’s awesome and sets a good standard of community support.

Ethan: We’re all in it together. More music makes the world better.

hope: Speaking of more music, the album comes out on the 14th.

Ethan: Pi day!

hope: It is! And you’re doing the album release show the same day, too?

Ethan: Yes, at Old Spokes Home. And we’re gonna have a pie eating contest! For speed, not for quantity. No hands, you get a little mini pie and the first person to finish it wins. Eric George is gonna recite the first 50 digits of Pi, which he’s memorized and he’s really excited about it. We wanted to bring in a benefit aspect of it, so we’re gonna have people bake pies and then auction them off. Doors at 7:30, starts at 8. It’s three other bands: Community Garden, Roost and Pyros.

hope: Oh, that’s gonna be such a good show, such an epic release night!

Ethan: Yeah! And our album is available for pre-order, too. We like to think of it kind of like a CSA except it’s a CSM, Community Supported Music. You don’t have the food yet, but you pay for it to help the farmer grow it. It’s the same with pre-ordering the record, except it is done!

The Bubs album release show happens at Old Spokes Home in Burlington, VT this Saturday, March 14th. Get tickets here and pre-order Cause A Fuss while you’re at it here.

THIS ARTICLE WAS GRACIOUSLY CONTRIBUTED BY:

G Cenedella is a writer, performer and curry-enthusiast in Burlington, VT. You can follow her work and shenanigans on Instagram @thesweetbbyg.