Babehoven turn a simple touring game into a wider study of attention, memory and perception on Three Reds, the latest preview of their third album, I See Them, I See Me.
Due September 18 via Double Double Whammy, the 14-track record finds singer-songwriter Maya Bon and producer and multi-instrumentalist Ryan Albert opening up their recording process. Working across four studios with engineers Sam Evian, Kevin Copeland and co-producer Phil Weinrobe, the pair captured much of the album live with a six-person ensemble.
The expanded setup shifts Babehoven away from meticulous home recording towards instinctive live performance, following Bon’s recovery from right vocal-cord paralysis.
In this FM PRO Quickfire 5, Bon discusses the hidden meaning behind Three Reds, the album’s parallax perspective, returning to singing and why surrendering control became a powerful production choice.
Sometimes the production is creating the conditions for something to happen and then letting it happen.
Q1. Three Reds began with a game you play on tour, counting cars of the same colour. What made that small ritual feel rich enough to become a song about perception, memory and exposure?
What I have realized while playing our simple car game is that you start noticing little gems around you that you otherwise wouldn’t consider. When you’re driving for hours for days on end, it’s easy to tune out the world around you. Highways blend into one another, states come and go.
But when you focus on what color cars are passing by, you start to have an entirely different notion of the world around you. This type of fixation comes out in my songwriting a lot. Looking deeper, peeling away the edges and checking out what’s underneath both emotionally and literally. What is happening around me right now? What am I missing?
This game provides a simple example of how much our perception is shaped by what we’re looking for. The cars have always been there, in a sense, but once we decide they matter, they suddenly become hyper-visible. And I think memory works in a similar way.
You can have all of these experiences happening around you, but certain ones become illuminated because of where your attention is at a particular moment. I can remember, for example, the outfit I wore to most of my first days of school. We choose what matters and we run with it.
So the song started from a mundane tour ritual, but it became more about that feeling of realizing that your experience of reality is always somewhat constructed by your own attention. You’re looking at the same world as everyone else, but you’re not necessarily seeing the same things.
We may be looking at the same barren hill of depleted dirt on a Southern Californian highway but one of us might see something fallow, forgotten, empty, another one of us might see that there is so much more underneath; entire insect lives, minerals, seeds, clay! “There is clay inside the earth, rip it out, make a bowl. There are shapes to all the folds, fill them up.”
Q2. I See Them, I See Me centres on the idea of a parallax view. Different perspectives on the same reality. How did that concept start shaping the way you wrote and sequenced the album?
Two people can be experiencing the exact same thing and have completely different experiences of it. Not only has this been proven scientifically but it’s something each one of us have experienced time and time again in our daily lives. It can feel alienating, exhausting, isolating…Maybe by accepting that each one of us has an entirely unique perspective, we can let go of the obsession with being right.
I often feel baffled by people. I can spend entire days ruminating on something someone said, something I said that wasn’t understood, trying to untangle where lines got crossed. This definitely comes out in my music; the loneliness of confusion, of wishing to understand someone else and wishing to be understood myself.
The album started to feel like it was circling that idea without me deciding that it was going to be the concept. A lot of the songs are about relationships, about trying to inhabit another person’s thoughts, but also realizing that you can never completely get inside someone else’s perspective.
You can get close, but there’s always a distance. To be honest, these reflections came up after the album had been written and mostly sequenced. So it didn’t really affect the making of the album in any direct way consciously.
Q3. Maya, after losing the use of your right vocal cord and facing the possibility that you might not sing again, how did returning to your voice change the emotional energy you wanted this album to carry?
It changed everything. For a while I really thought I might not be able to sing again, and that was a profound notion to have to sit with. Singing has been a huge part of my life since before I could even talk. It wasn’t something I had ever imagined losing, something I imagined I could lose. But now I realize how impermanent it is, how much our voices are tied to our health, our vitality and honestly our youth. Voices change. Your body changes. I want to enjoy every minute of it.
Singing when you’ve had to confront the possibility that you might never do it again feels completely different. I’ve become much more interested in the physical feeling of singing and in letting the voice sound like a voice, rather than trying to make it perfect.
I also think it made me realize how much I had been taking certain things for granted. Being able to sing, being able to play a show, being able to make an album with other people; those things suddenly felt much more precious. There’s gratitude imbued in the record, even in some of the darker songs.
Q4. The album keeps returning to ideas of perception, reality and how we choose to see the world. Did writing it change the way you understand your own perspective?
I’ve always been someone who thinks a lot about what things mean, why I’m feeling a certain way, whether I’m seeing a situation clearly. Sometimes that can be useful, sometimes you can just get completely trapped inside your own interpretation of something.
If anything, I think I’m a little more comfortable now with not knowing exactly what the truth is all the time. You can hold multiple interpretations of something and let them exist next to each other. I think that’s probably healthier than trying to decide, “this is what happened, this is what this person meant, and this is what I am.”
Q5. FM PRO TECH Q: This is the first Babehoven album made across four studios with several engineers and much of it tracked live with a six-person ensemble. How did the “no playback, no headphones, no preparation” approach change the performances and the way you thought about production?
It was very different for us. Normally Ryan engineers everything at home and he plays most of the instruments. There’s a lot of time spent listening back, tweaking tiny things, fixating intensely on the details. We’re comfortable in that world but it also has been challenging at times to spend months going so deep into it. So playing with a bunch of people live and tweaking things in the moment with players right in front of us instead of us in the box was a little scary at first but also provided a lot of levity and ease in the process.
Phil Weinrobe loves to capture the feel of people being in a room together, and the “no playback, no headphones, no preparation” thing was really about not getting too far inside your own head. You couldn’t sit there and analyze what you were doing while you were doing it. You just had to listen to the other people and react. A handful of the people he brought in to record with us had never met us before and had no idea which band they’d be playing with today. Phil does that intentionally so that they don’t prepare. I think that’s awesome.
I think the biggest change was just realizing that production doesn’t always have to mean controlling everything. Sometimes the production is creating the conditions for something to happen and then letting it happen. That was really exciting for us, and it’s definitely something we want to keep exploring in the future.
©fm
TOUR DATES
Thursday, October 8th – Catskills, NY @ Avalon Lounge *
Thursday, November 5th – Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s *
Saturday, November 7th – Brooklyn, NY @ Baby’s All Right *
Saturday, November 14th – Chicago, IL @ Beat Kitchen (support from Shoulder Bird) #
Tuesday, November 17th – Seattle, WA @ Sunset Tavern ^
Wednesday, November 18th – Portland, OR @ Show Bar ^
Friday, November 20th – San Francisco, CA @ 4 Star Theatre ^
Sunday, November 22nd – Los Angeles, CA @ Zebulon ^
* support from Jane Lai | # support from Shoulder Bird | ^ support from Pileup