Brooklyn-based songwriter Ian McFarland examines the cost of remaining an artist in New York on Summer Rain, a four-track debut EP shaped by live repetition, close collaboration and a city in constant transition.
Developed with Jared Pease and Rijk van Zanten through studio sessions and regular Baker Falls shows, the EP captures a band refining its arrangements in real time while preserving its live chemistry.
Across Coffee Shops and Modern Rock, Leaving New York, If the Sun Never Came Up Again and The Booming Business of Missed Opportunities and Heartaches, McFarland combines early-2000s pop-punk drive with modern indie-rock detail.
Soaring guitars, conversational lyrics and dense vocal harmonies carry reflections on unemployment, changing identities, romantic near-misses and the contradiction of loving New York while questioning whether it still supports the people sustaining its creative culture.
That community remains central to the project. McFarland’s Sunday Scaries event grew from informal backyard gatherings into a recurring Manhattan residency, providing independent musicians with an audience, a working stage and space to develop outside the conventional rehearsal-room cycle.
In this FM PRO Quickfire 5, McFarland explains how performing at Baker Falls reshaped the EP, why keeping a band together now defines success, what independent artists need from their communities and how Les Paul guitars, Egnater amplification, Electro-Harmonix pedals and carefully arranged harmonies gave Summer Rain its balance of live pop-punk energy and layered indie sonics.
For me, success is keeping the guys together, performing, and releasing music.
Q1. How did playing together regularly at Baker Falls shape the sound and chemistry of Summer Rain?
Playing together regularly at Baker Falls, and also in Jared’s studio in Crown Heights on a bi-weekly basis for over a year, helped refine the sound in a couple ways. One, we’d get to play the songs live as they were being recorded. I’ll never forget the shame I felt after playing Coffee Shops and Modern Rock one night. People applauded, but I felt like the energy had been kind of flat.
So we took the song into the studio and added the halftime part after the first chorus, added a drum solo, and changed the melody in the chorus from being kind of one line repeated four times to something with more movement, which was Rijk’s idea. Then once we got into the studio, of course I started hearing all these little additional harmony parts that I wanted to add to fill out the structure. I’m particularly proud of those cute little Beach Boys-esque falsettos during the bridge.
The other part of playing together is that our repertoire now features so many covers that we’re at a point where we gel really well. You hear people say, “Oh, that band’s in the pocket,” and I definitely believe in the pocket as a place where the best bands should be.
The difference, of course, is feeling like you’re outside of the jeans, but if you’re in the jeans pocket, it’s this comfortable rhythmic quality that can also be called Chemical X or the mystery ingredient that makes a band sound good or not. Being able to play together well live made going into the studio and tracking the bones of the songs together live pretty easy.
We also all get along really well. For example, the guitar/bass line in the chorus of The Booming Business was initially just a bass line, so I said, “Yo Rijk, show me that part,” and there was a whole “Can Ian play and sing that part?” thing, which of course I can. Once you open the gates on that, there’s a bit of, “Okay, do we add more licks?” Which we did. We added more licks for the transition into each chorus and then got a little extra nerdy and added a bar of three for the turnaround out of the last chorus.
Also, again, it’s like a band earning their stripes. Once you’ve played together that much in packed rooms, dead rooms, half-full rooms, and thrown parties with all sorts of planned events, there’s just an extra camaraderie that forms.
Q2. The EP explores loving New York while questioning whether the city still has room for artists. Has that tension changed what success means to you?
Leaving New York is the song you’re talking about most directly, but I think they all relate back to urban living and transitional times to some extent. Coffee Shops and Modern Rock was written partially because of my longstanding residency playing music alongside a poetry night at Book Club in the Lower East Side.
That tension does change what success means to me. I think at this point, as long as I can keep the band together, keep us playing clubs almost every weekend, and keep getting together to write and produce original music, then that is truly the success. Anything on top of that is awesome, but for me success is keeping the guys together, performing, and releasing music.
Q3. The Booming Business of Missed Opportunities and Heartaches is quite a title. What personal experience inspired the song, and which missed opportunities shaped its story?
The Booming Business of Missed Opportunities and Heartache is a track that was born out of being forced into transition and uncertainty. My wife and I both spent seven months without any income while living in a relatively cheap apartment next to the M/J train in Brooklyn. I had severance, but it gave me a lot of time to reflect on every mistake I’d made and how nothing that happened to me was necessarily personal, which almost made it worse because it made me realize how little I mattered.
The heartache aspect stems from little crushes. You meet so many people in New York that it’s tough not to fall in love with a few of them in some regard.
The title was originally Declan because Jared wanted me to write a song like Declan McKenna, but I utterly failed at that. Originally the arrangement was a lot more strum-heavy on the guitar and there weren’t really any seventh chords, but yeah, you get in a room and work it out. Now it starts with Rijk’s part and Jared and I join in on an anticipation.
Q4. What has building the Sunday Scaries community taught you about what independent musicians need right now?
The Scaries community is such a cool gang we’ve got here in NY! It started as me cooking a crockpot meal in a shared backyard and friends showing up and jamming whatever anyone wanted to hear. We ripped Backstreet Boys, Queen, and pop-rock music from the ’60s through to the present.
I have this friend who’d bring over flutes and saxophones and nose whistles, and he’s a polyglot and close friends with a harp, viola, sitar, and guitar player and singer who’s now a close friend of mine too and performed the strings on track 2 “If the Sun Never Came Up Again”. Between them and some other really extraordinarily talented friends who were happy to pull up for a pulled pork sandwich and lend their talents to the community, well, yeah, it was great.
After a noise complaint from the neighbors, we were able to venue-hop from my backyard to an actual venue. A close friend who hosts the poetry night where I’m a resident artist introduced me to a bar and venue called Baker Falls. We were there for over a year and celebrated milestone birthdays, hosted other bands, had a mothers day, and really had an absolute ball there.
I think Scaries gave us the support most bands don’t get to just keep going. I think if I’d tried to get my guys into a room to learn and workshop the tunes and it was just the same sweaty little rehearsal space every time, we’d burn out. Instead, we got to workshop them within a community. There was a sound guy, a bartender, and an engaged audience. It was all just kind of a dream for locking in as a group.
Q5. FM PRO TECH: Which guitars, amps, pedals and production techniques gave Summer Rain its balance of early-2000s pop-punk energy and layered modern-indie sonics?
Jared owns an Egnater at his studio, which I played my Les Paul through. My pedalboard is fairly simple. I’ve got a pedal that goes into a compressor, which goes into an OCD overdrive, or sometimes this Bogner overdrive which I think has been discontinued, which goes into two different Electro-Harmonix pedals that I think are the true secret sauce. One is the chorus/vibrato pedal and the other is the Canyon delay, which is something I’m not sure I can live without anymore.
It’s got this setting that combines shimmering overtones with a slight delay, and it ties a three-piece band together really well without needing too many extra guitar parts. There are very few overdubs on the EP that I can think of other than the second guitar solo in Leaving New York, since the first is a chord solo, and that cute little pentatonic melody during The Booming Business of Missed Opportunities and Heartache.
We really dug in on vocal harmonies too. That was probably one of the biggest ways we made the recordings feel bigger without losing the sound of the three of us playing together.
Anyways, thanks for taking the time to read this! Big love from the big Apple. From me, my bands and anyone else who has helped out my songwriting career.
©fm
Live Dates:
8/29 – New York, NY – Sour Mouse
9/13 – New York, NY – Sunday Scaries at Berlin Under A
9/27 – New York, NY – Sunday Scaries at Berlin Under A
10/4 – New York, NY – Sunday Scaries at Berlin Under A