Dynamic Indie Folk mainstays The Ballroom Thieves released their fifth studio album, Sundust, in April via Nettwerk, and are out playing in May and June. For this collection, they launched more fully into recording at home via detailed demos, building on some experimentation with that method when it came to previous release, Clouds, but also working closely with a number of former collaborators, co-Producer Dan Cardinal and drummer Cody Iwasiuk.
While the recording was close to home, so were the ideas behind the songs that came to the fore, taking a deep dive into our closest relationships and how they shape us, past, present, and possibly future. The Ballroom Thieves, consisting of Callie Peters and Martin Earley, also fine-tuned a sound that complemented this emotional trajectory, building songs up from spare, sparse communications to more ethereal layers that reflect on internal states. The clear-eyed look at difficult subjects, alongside an earnestness that often gives way to hope, makes Sundust a very mature collection handled with a lot of intention. I spoke with Callie Peters and Martin Earley about taking the reins for Sundust and proceeding with caution when handling tricky topics like generational trauma.
Hannah Means-Shannon: I know that on your previous album, Clouds, you had dabbled in recording at home. Is that an experience that you built on for Sundust?
Callie Peters: It was fun to do that little bit on Clouds. It’s just so much more control. You can set your own schedule and make all your own choices, and we loved that. We’ve definitely learned a lot from this one, and I think we’ll carry that on to the next one.
What sort of approach did you take with writing and recording things? Was it pretty fluid?
Martin Earley: It was a much more fluid operation than it has been in the past. When you go to a studio and pay a pretty hefty day rate, and you’re paying an engineer and a Producer, and for any additional musicians, it gets really expensive really quickly. There isn’t that much room for creative exploration or for just sitting on something for a little bit to see how it feels after a couple of days. That was something where we were able to free ourselves up. We did so much at home at the beginning of the project that we were able to take our time. We were able to feel good about everything and give it enough time to become itself. We also saved a lot of money in the process!
Callie: Also, recently, we’ve discovered how important demos are to the band. We try to do demos for each song across the album, but we really had to do that with Clouds because we didn’t have the time in the studio to mess around with new ideas. We knew we needed to get concrete ideas down in a demo, and you learn a lot through that. You can see what’s not working. So we thought it would be fun to go directly from demos to basics, where you go from a non-version of a song directly to the core instruments of the track. That was something that we definitely needed the freedom and time to explore. That would have been too expensive in a studio.
Did that mean that you could be a little more nonchalant about discarding things that weren’t working and try something else? I think studio time can be so precious that it’s hard to throw things away.
Callie: Definitely. You can try something at home, hear it back, and decide that it’s so stupid, so discard it. In a studio, because you spent money and time on it, you might think, “Well, this is the thing we have. Let’s massage it and see if we can make it work.” That can be cool, but it can also take a song that you love and turn it into something you can’t really stand behind anymore.
Martin: Something that’s cool about being in a studio is that it’s a creative atmosphere, so people can come up with ideas, and everyone sort of runs with that idea, but you might not notice until later on that might never have done that otherwise. Sometimes it’s really cool to have that input, but in this case, we said, “Enough with other peoples’ input. Let’s just make something that we really want to make.” We still worked with other people and co-produced it with Dan Cardinal, our friend. But it was fun to take the reins and find out what we’d sound like if we took all that control back.
Callie: Even though that’s all true, the way that Dan Produced and engineered so much later on is stuff that we could not have done at home. Our engineering and Production talents stop at a point. We needed his glue to fuse it all and make it sound like a song and not a demo with fancy bells and whistles. It was a team effort, absolutely.
Martin: He has that technical experience. We can figure out how to record ourselves, but there are a lot of tricks that you can only learn by years and years of experience. We noticed, too, in the couple days that we spent in the studio with him, we’d do things in half an hour that, if we’d done them at home, they’d have taken four hours. There’s something to that, too!
What’s great about that is that Dan had worked on albums previously with you. So he could have a sense of what you were thinking. Nevertheless, there are things about the sound on this album that are different. Did you talk about that?
Martin: I think he just picked up on that. We hadn’t worked with him for a few years. We figured we should work with Dan again because he does know us as people and artists, and while we’ve been progressing as artists, he’s also been progressing as an engineer. It was really cool to see his progression in that way, parallel to our own progression.
Callie: We picked him exactly for the reason that you’re saying, and that goes for every single creative person who worked on this album with us. We worked with a lot of people who we’d worked with before and we wanted them, specifically, because we felt we were ready for them again. We wanted to see where we had all landed in the past five to ten years.
One of the tracks that seems particularly important to the album, and which also received a very cool video, is “Everything is Everything.” That was not a simple video to make, clearly, but it really conveys so much.
Callie: We worked with our good friend Megan Lovallo, a filmmaker in LA. She came up with a concept, we tweaked a few things together, and we shot it all in one day! It was exhausting but a lot of fun. So many little things happened that changed the course of things, but we went with the flow. She did an amazing job.
It is really emotive. What makes that song so special for you?
Martin: For me, that’s the song on the record that really encapsulates the theme of the whole album. I mean that lyrically and thematically, but I also mean it musically. It was a good way to start the record because it shows you what we’re going to be doing for the rest of the record.
Callie: We had all these songs and had narrowed them down. When we went through, we realized that there needed to be one more. Something was incomplete. So this was the last song written, and because it was, I think that we said everything that we had already said, but in a simpler or more all-encompassing way. It was like we finished wrapping the present and then put a little bow on it. It said everything but in the most global way. We love that one.
That song reminds me of storytelling, where the opening drops you into the middle of the story, “in media res.” Usually, the first thing you have to do in that case is ask, “What’s the problem of this story that causes its drama?” And the song seems to say, “Yes, there is a problem.” I did hear that some of the ideas behind this album were inspired by working out generational trauma and realizing the underlying causes of conflict in families. It’s a tricky subject.
Callie: It’s very tricky to think about, and it’s heavy. It was hard to talk about. I feel like it was easier to make these little songs about it than go on someone’s podcast and get in there about it. We’ve never had an intense and detailed conversation about family with a friend or a stranger, for instance.
Martin: It’s such a personal topic and it’s different for everyone. It’s hard because you don’t want to isolate anyone, and you don’t want to tell people how they should feel about certain things, especially when it comes to family.
Callie: People get so defensive over that stuff because, I think, we see things in black and white way too much, especially older generations. They were taught one way of thinking, and if all these kids come along and say, “This is a problem.,” then they think, “My whole childhood is shattered because this means I had terrible parents. What does that mean for me, and my parenting?” You can’t talk about it. We find that a lot since, of course, we are always trying to talk about this.
Martin: It’s much easier to just write a song about it! We’ve been having conversations in interviews about this topic, and then we were out to dinner with my parents last week. My dad had read some of the interviews, and he said to me, “Son, if I’ve ever caused you trauma, just know that was not my intention.” It was such a sweet moment. I wasn’t necessarily pointing a finger at him, by any means, but more talking about trauma in general. It was really sweet that he had not only listened to the album, but read the interviews and internalized some of the things that we were talking about. I was impressed!
I’m very impressed! I’ve heard from many songwriters who feel that they have to be very careful what they write because it will be scrutinized by their families who probably would take offense. I love this story. It’s so positive. I can definitely relate to a generational push-back on trying to talk about these things. It seems like people find empathy scary, but that may be because it involves getting close.
Callie: Yes, I think people are terrified of being vulnerable. It makes sense. When you put yourself out there, you can get very hurt, but if you don’t put yourself out there, you can’t connect either. People are so scared that they’d rather not connect, or lose a connection, than risk getting hurt. That I cannot understand. I can have empathy for it…but I can’t do it myself.
What you’re saying about rewriting history is part of that, too, because it’s pulling a thread of someone’s past and reframing their experiences in a new light. That can feel very invasive and scary, almost like a life-and-death situation when it comes to identity. We think we know our own pasts and we mythologize our childhoods as being mainly good.
Martin: That’s why it can sometimes be so hard for people to acknowledge—that the things they’ve based themselves on for so many years might be something that isn’t true. If you can’t acknowledge that to yourself, you’ll never be able to acknowledge that to someone else.
Callie: Yes, people have to want to do this on their own, to sort through their childhood. They can’t be told to.
Do you think that developments in therapy and social discussions have helped create more of a language for talking about these things than in previous generations? I saw a book about “emotional maturity” recently, and the book was pretty eye-opening and damning about the lack of emotional maturity that parents might have. Do you find those kinds of terms helpful?
Callie: I definitely think it’s very important and really helpful. I do think, though, that the more words that we have to describe this sort of stuff, the more people who are closed-off to it can roll their eyes and take those words the wrong way. I think these words are real, accurate, and helpful, but can also be a tool that divides us. They can say, “generational trauma, I don’t believe in it.” But it’s not new age, it’s not anything silly, they are just helpful describing words.
Martin: I think that, in an ideal world, over time that kind of language will just become a bigger part of the mainstream and it’ll be accepted more broadly than it is right now.