Kalmia (Kal) Traver joined me and her Rubblebucket bandmate Alex Toth on Zoom in January from their respective homes in New York. She was undercaffeinated and fighting off a cold, and apologized unnecessarily. They’d been tackling rehearsals for Rubblebucket’s winter/spring tour that stops through Nashville on January 31 and will feature climbable scaffolding á la Charli xcx. Toth said they were hoping to use some wireless mics to make the whole production more physical and enjoy the full stage set-up. They credited their Nashville-based artist friends Neil on lighting design and artist-engineer Jen of Paradise MIDI for enhancing this tour. They have oodles of props from recent music videos to bring along on the road, too.
When I remarked that neither of them seem to experience boredom, as clear by their creative output in music and visual art, too, Traver said, “There was a quote about boredom recently that I can’t remember right now. But it’s hard to be bored in the universe. It’s filled with so many interesting things. There are just infinite possibilities to explore.”
The possibilities explored on Year of the Banana, Rubblebucket’s seventh full-length album, are mostly historic, memories of a romance truncated some 10 years ago: theirs. First forming this band as university classmates turned lovers in 2010, Traver and Toth have kept up the commitment to artistic collaboration post-mortem of their romantic partnership. Yet their enduring respect for one another came through in our discussion, replete with playful banter and light ribbing that indicates a deep knowing of the other one. The songs on Year of the Banana were built upon Traver’s poems from their break-up year and with musical direction led by Toth.
Listen to the core of Rubblebucket describe the naming convention for this record, their sharing of tasks to make the project most effective and more musings here and on WNXP’s podcast channel.
“The Sorrow That Comes From Loving You”
After two upbeat tracks to start the record — “Stella the Begonia” and “Moving Without Touching” — the third song stopped me in my tracks, literally, while running listening to Year of the Banana on its October 18 release date. “The Sorrow That Comes from Loving You” is stunning and sad and I had to know more about this one.
Kal Traver: I mean, the poem was really, really short. I don’t know, less than ten lines. And it was just a poem about the inevitable loss that comes with the vulnerability of opening up to someone and that, you know, we’re all going to end up apart at some point in this embodied form—whether if it’s a relationship, you might break up, or if it’s together forever as a family, a long lifetime love, like eventually we’ll die. And then I was thinking about my mom. I think, at the time, I was having big thoughts about love. It’s all a spectrum. I think family love and romantic love and friend love, they’re not separate, discrete categories. They all overlap. It’s like a Venn diagram. So that was the poem. And then Alex set it to music and it really right away just rose to the top of the pile as a a gorgeous, really, really gorgeous piece.
Alex Toth: Of all the songs on the record, from Year of the Banana, the poem-to-song ratio is closer [on “The Sorrow…”]. The poem was kept more intact on that song than in all of the others, I think. And that feels like a very satisfying union and collaboration when the poem is really intact and I’m melodicizing and filling in, I’m writing out a groove and stuff. And then Kal writes this beautiful saxophone part that becomes this counter melody and also the hook in the beginning of the song. So then, yeah, we’re just both contributing to the music development and that was really nice.
Source material and setting boundaries
AT: We have pretty different writing styles. When you listen to our different demos, you can kind of hear if you listen to like a Toth song and a Kal-bell song side-by-side, you really hear these sort of extremes in our process and then rebel. Part of what I was searching for is just like, “What’s the glue here?” And then I was like, “Wow, Kal has my favorite poems ever written all in one book here.” I have a practice of, through the years, whenever I have a bored moment…I’m always writing songs, but if there isn’t some immediate, like a fountain of lyrical information coming from me, I’ll be like, “OK, this moment that I’m writing, I’m going to set a song to The Daodejing or to this poem” or I’ll just I’ll grab a piece of prose and I’ll melodicize it, you know? And often when you are turning a poem or a piece of prose into a song, you have to make adjustments and it might just be a springboard to something else. So it felt like a really accessible thing to do, to draw the material from this really heartfelt body of work that Kal did in 2015.
CG: I’m fascinated by the process and also just anybody that’s been working together for as long as you two have and what you just said, you know, it’s like credit where credit’s due to the creative skill of another. But then it can’t be so easy always, right, to form two visions together to the Rubblebucket sound? So how have you honed that process over time or has it developed organically? Has it been tough in spots to decide how to meld visions?
KT: Yeah, I mean, we’ve definitely worked really hard at it. My parents have shared that they went through this big, hard time in their relationship. And one of the things that helped them the most coming out of it was in creating roles and boundaries. Just having better boundaries with how they relate. For example, in gardening, they used to just share everything and they would always fight. But now they have a thing where my mom does the vegetables and my dad does the flowers and it’s very separate. They can help each other and they can ask for help. But it’s like a primary responsibility.
Alex and I have tried all kinds of things to keep being able to do Rubblebucket. But I think for this record more than ever, we kind of separated out like, you know, Alex does music direction and Kal does the art direction. And that doesn’t mean that we don’t obviously collaborate in both of those areas and each have opinions and ideas. But it’s being able to kind of surrender, to just have an area where we’re committed to surrendering over and over again to let the other person have final say. This is one of the practices that we’ve been doing.
Identity in horns
CG: I’m glad you brought up saxophone. It’s one of the my favorite things about your band is the use of wind instruments. It can be funky and it can also add moments of heart, you know, where something would just be fun. Can you just opine a little bit on the use of those instruments and your dedication to them? And also having a bigger band on the road when there might be pressure sometimes to scale back. It seems like you really want everybody involved in the live production of Rubblebucket songs.
KT: Well, Alex and I definitely connected first over being horn players. We would always bike by each other on UVM campus and we would each be like on a bike, I would have my sax case and he would have his trumpet case like bungeed to the back. But, I don’t know, the theory of horn-ness in the world. It’s just such a beautiful extension of the voice, I think. The voice comes through tubes and holes. And I think the best horn players are projecting the emotion from the body, like out into the room. We’ve always been a horn-fronted band. I think that’s always set us apart and it’s fun.
AT: It’s like, songs are great. Just as any indie, funky, whatever genre band, we’re singing and stuff. But I feel like the rare thing is just that, like, identity-wise, we both spent a lot of time in life identifying as horn players, especially me. I never thought of myself as a singer for many, many years. And so it’s like even though we’ve shifted very much into more of like indie songwriting, pop, all this stuff, we have this identity to horns. That was my focus for many years, we were both really focused on jazz and stuff. So it feels like a requisite in Rubblebucket to keep that alive.
KT: When we think about the planning for the live show and we always do a parade at the end of every show, almost always. It’s one of our little traditions. Horns are a portable instrument, so you can be loud anywhere you want.
Last-minute revisions to “Moving Without Touching”
KT: With “Moving Without Touching,” we were chipping away at that top line, like, back and forth a ton and kind of like, like changing one word here and there. And then we thought we had it and it was done — the album was done and it was going to be mastered.
AT: And lyric wise, the lyric was the album cover. The lyric was…say what the line was, Kal.
KT: Well, it’s “Shadow puppets on the wall in a white box floating on the ocean, bobbing on the ocean, floating with an open top, and the sun’s pouring in.” It was the drawing of the front cover, which came to me in a dream. It came to me in a vision when I was working on that song, it was like a poem I wrote. It was a feeling of isolation from the pandemic and just like being in my room, my safe little room, but on this scary big ocean.
AT: And I thought that those words were beautiful and it tickled me that there was a song version of it. But when it was sung, I’m like, “…what?” [Laughs.] It wasn’t hitting me when sung as a lyric. And so we tweaked the lyric in the song, but we’d already mixed it. Kal was in Vermont, not at our studio. And so she went to Mike Calabrese’s — the drummer from Lake Street Drive lives in Kal’s parents town in Vermont, and he has a recording studio. So she re-tracked the vocals with Mike up there in Vermont.
CG: So you wanted to make it make sense? You’re like, “I love this, BUT…”
KT: I mean, it was living more in the Kate Bush space and we wanted it to be more in the, like, Miley Cyrus space.
AT: I don’t know about that. I think it was in more, like, outer space. And we wanted it to be more in the Kate Bush space.