In Conversation With Brandon Tong

Photography: Julia Tarantino

Interview: Benji Wason

Brandon Tong of Couch Prints is always working on something new. When I give him a call to discuss his upcoming releases and projects, he’s in the middle of working on a song.

“Just some lyrics to this melody I wrote,” he says in a tired voice. “It’s very fruitless so far. But you have to accept that sometimes you’re just going to have fruitless hours and that’s okay.”

This day-in day-out dedication to the process is something I noticed about Brandon ever since we first met in August 2021. Our bands shared a rehearsal space, and throughout the summer I would bump into Brandon practicing bass alone when his band wasn’t around — not because he wanted to be a great bassist, but because he was committed to serving whatever role was necessary to make his vision of Couch Prints come to life.

“Most things you want to do, you can,” he says during our conversation. “You just have to learn and try, you’ll find your way if you really want to. You can at least approximate some of the artists you’re really into — for me that was satisfying enough when I first actually was writing songs.”

For Struck Me Like A Chord’s latest feature, I join Tong to discuss middle-America nostalgia, themes of violence and boredom on Couch Prints’ 2022 EP Waterfall, future side-projects and more. Read the full interview below.

Tell me about the new Couch Prints EP Waterfall. Where are you coming from, songwriting-wise, with this release?

For better or worse, my mind just always goes to sort of similar concepts. And a big one of those is growing up in the suburbs. I moved around a lot as a kid because my dad was in the Air Force and my parents split up. 

There’s a lot of these very same-y places that were all over the country — strip malls, Chili’s, Cold Stones and Jamba Juices and stuff. Especially when I settled in Colorado, I just spent so much time in these places that at the time seemed kind of sacred and very important. I worked at Jamba Juice for like five years when I was in high school and middle school. I think a lot of people just got this weird attachment to these franchises and I think those years were so formative that all these settings and my time in the suburbs sort of influences everything. 

With Couch Prints the newest record traces the story of a drunk driver and their death and their kind of blasé attitude towards it. I think that I definitely felt, as a teenager, just extremely bored. I went to a good school and it’s not like there was anything particularly wrong, but I feel there’s this very real sense of something lacking in contemporary American society. I wouldn’t necessarily say, you know, “we should all be hunter gatherer types,” but I do think like there’s a certain sense of excitement and danger and whatnot missing.

The Couch Prints record was kind of like working through that boredom that I felt as a kid and that sort of expressed itself in a way of like, doing drugs and putting yourself in more dangerous situations than necessary because it felt like there was not really anything to do.

And that idea kind of came down to: the major violent event in most Americans’ lives is a car crash. It’s something that kind of transcends class lines.

The whole point of the record is examining the American car crash and how it’s just this violent act that is one of the few ways that we feel a real intensity in our life anymore.

Something I’ve admired about you is the kind of drive you have to take up all the different skills and challenges of being a musician. And I remember, from what I understand, you started a lot later than most of the musicians that I know in terms of actually playing and getting into creating music. So, could you tell me a bit about what your relationship was like to music growing up and then when you realized you wanted to actually start making it?

I always really loved music, but again, growing up where I did there was really little creative output, but I always really liked writing poems and little short stories. And I was really into rap and hip hop growing up, so I would write some raps that, you know, will never see light of day. But I was pretty into just writing. I liked the idea of writing songs, but I didn’t play instruments and it just didn’t seem viable — it just seemed like a humongous mystery. I didn’t know where I would even begin to take words and make them a full song.

I think the sort of big renaissance moment was when I went to college. I wanted to do music, but at this point, I knew literally nothing. So I enrolled in the music program in Denver at CU, Denver, and they were like, “yeah, you know, most kids know an instrument or have some background in it, so it will probably take you some time before you can actually even be accepted into the courses in your program.” So I did a semester of General Ed. I was technically in the music program, but wasn’t allowed to take any classes because I didn’t know anything. After a semester I was like, “okay, well, the kids in this program are like jazz guitarists, and  they are just amazing.” They’re actually totally formed musicians and I haven’t even really started. So I switched programs, but the silver lining of it all was that I got put in a dorm with other people that were in the music program. And so my three roommates were all extremely inspiring. 

So much of where this all kind of began was in this moment. I moved in with them and they were all pretty big into making dubstep and metal, which were two genres that I had zero interest in at the time. But just living with them — they had a very DIY ethos. I felt like they were always designing their own album art, and they were DJing shows at this place in Denver that’s pretty big for dubstep.

And they all had, you know, tons of copies of Ableton and — it was just seeing that you can just sort of do it. One of them was a really good drummer, but otherwise they were just kind of dudes producing and just writing on their computers. I guess I was 18, and that was when I got Ableton and I started trying to make beats.

A few years later when I moved to New York, I had like a few songs and my old bandmate, Jake and I, just kind of started the project. When I moved to New York I was really surprised by how people are accepting of being in creative fields or even just trying to be, even if it’s not in a super professional way. It’s definitely something I take for granted now. If there was a pathway to be a musician in Colorado, it definitely felt like you had to be shooting for the fences. Like you’re trying to make a big pop album that’s going to be very lucrative — there were just a few genres that made sense. To imagine trying to make some of the music that I’ve made since I came here, it would’ve been laughable. It’s just a much better atmosphere to create, and I think that’s like where I’m at now.

After you got to New York, when did Couch Prints start to take shape? What were you trying to accomplish when you started to put that together?

I had written a few of the songs while I was still in Colorado and we were just like sending them back and forth to each other. Then I moved to New York and Jake came and stayed with me for a month.

We rented this studio in Greenpoint and I got my rocket fives and my Minilogue and SM-57 and we just started to record some of the songs, but realized we needed a singer. 

We pretty quickly texted everyone we knew, which was not a long list. Jake had met Jayanna back in Paris and so she came in. Pretty much the first day we worked with her we spent like 12 hours just recording “Tell You”. It just sounded really nice and we were like, “Okay, this is a perfect little fit.” 

We first put out an EP on SoundCloud that we took down pretty quickly. It was called Tony Lambo. It was supposed to be this story of this Coke dealer from Miami who ends up in some really small rural town in Utah and is just kind of going through life — not actually a part of this town and not really feeling of it, but still going through the sort of human experiences like falling in love and trials and tribulations. 

It was this story I wanted to tell because I think it mirrored how I felt moving to New York. I didn’t really feel of this place, but I was still being human and living through it.

Was there an influence musically that inspired the way the sound of the band took shape? Or was it more just what came out of that collaboration and what started to feel right?

I have always been really into crystalline ethereal synth textures. Like probably my biggest inference is The Knife album, Silent Shout, but also Björk’s Vespertine, even Beach House. This very cold, icy synthetic sound.

That was the type of music I’d kind of always made. Then when Jake and I started making music together, he was really into guitar. I really didn’t listen to any rock canon for the most part growing up, not even contemporary indie rock — I was not on Mac DeMarco, I never listened to The Strokes growing up — but Jake was really into that, so he turned me onto a ton of bands from that era.

There was The Drums and Alvvays and Men I Trust. Porches was obviously a big influence. There was a lot of indie being made around 2016 that I feel like was super influential at the time.

And that was combining with the other influences you’d already been drawing from with your production?

Yeah, exactly. A lot of that music felt very bright and sunny. I think it  was just a desire to make that music but with cooler tones.

Right. And what was the sort of journey that you started, from your first releases up until now?

We got pretty lucky from the beginning. Our first couple of songs got a lot of blog play and we were on some Spotify playlists. So when we put out our first two songs, we kind of hit the ground running and we got a deal with this imprint of Fat Possum called Luminelle.

And so that happened and we were very excited. But we really only played I think four or five shows at this point. None of us had ever been in a band and I had certainly never played any instrument live. Kind of as things started kicking off, Covid happened and we were bummed like everyone else, but we just finished the collection of songs that we were working on around that period and put them out that summer in 2020. Admittedly it didn’t stream that well, so we were not asked to do our second project Luminelle.

After that, we still had an album written that we wanted to finish. So started working on that and then did a tour run to South by Southwest and around the US. That was just to support the EP and now we are in the final stages of releasing that EP — the full thing comes out September 23rd 2022.

That will kind of mark the end of that project chapter, which will be pretty nice to have.

Going off of that, what does the future look like right now?

Yeah, it’s tough. I think there’s something very draining about the release process. What I’ve seen is kind of the indie rock template — promote through blogs, get your press photos done, you do some marketing online. The you kind of have to be on social media pretty frequently. 

You have like three singles and then you drop a project, and hopefully have a music video attached to it. There’s just a ton of auxiliary stuff that isn’t making music that I think can be fun, but when you’re on this strict timeline it just sort of drags out and gets pretty draining. 

I think with Couch Prints, I want to take a step back for a little while, maybe keep playing a few shows here and there, but just really rest on that front. Probably going to be a bit of a relaxation hiatus moment and regroup. But as far as personal stuff, there’s a few different things I want to do. 

I really want to start a death metal ambient project — something that can be really heavy and sort of cathartic. I found with Couch Prints, while we were working at the set, we ended up gravitating towards heavier and heavier ways of performing the songs and I’ve always just been really interested in mixing electronic with guitar-based music. I love playing live, so that’s a project I’d like to do.

Follow Brandon Tong and Couch Prints on Instagram

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