Photo via Summerfest
Ever since they started performing professionally a decade ago, New York-based sibling duo Jocelyn and Chris have been joined at the hip when it comes to music. Every song they’ve written has been with each other, with each challenging them to new ways to build onto that chemistry.
That unwavering bond has gotten the attention of many, including the “Today Show,” which had the band perform at their studio in 2019. Some fans and press have compared Jocelyn’s vocals to the likes of Janis Joplin and Grace Slick and Chris’ guitar work to Jimi Hendrix and David Gilmour.
But if you ask them, they’re distinctly themselves.
“We have always written music based on what we like and how we feel,” says Jocelyn during a recent interview. “If I'm honest, honestly, it’s gotten us into trouble sometimes because you get that classic question, ‘Give us your elevator pitch. What does your music sound like?’ I guess if you had to pick one word, it would be rock. But picking one word to describe our music is so challenging. I feel like, basically, we've stopped thinking about it that way.
“It’s become, ‘This is the song we're writing right now. Let’s just make this song how we want it to be and let’s make it the best we think it could be regardless of what direction that takes us.’… I guess you could say pop rock or something, but it’s just us. We’re comfortable with who we are as songwriters. We're just going to do us.”
That’s evident again on the band’s latest album Favorite Ghosts, which came out last month.
“Favorite Ghosts is exactly how Chris and I wrote it on the record and there's nothing added, it’s just us playing the song,” says Jocelyn. “Or it could be something like ‘Runaway’ where we wrote it on acoustic guitar and vocal, and then we bring it into the studio and we're like, ‘This needs some a bit nineties inspired, a gazillion layers of guitar. We want to just let loose in the bridge, but then it needs that synth baseline to really keep the verses going.’”
The band is excited to be back on the road and, is looking forward to, as Jocelyn puts it “a really cathartic summer.”
The Shepherd Express caught up with the siblings prior to their Summerfest performance July 1 at 6:45 pm at the Johnson Controls World Stage about their latest release.
The band originally planned to release the album a couple of years ago, but the pandemic halted those plans.
Joceylyn Arndt: Yeah. It was going into 2020, basically the summer of 2020, and we just played on “The Today Show” and we were riding high. We had the album almost done at that point.
Chris Arndt: We booked our biggest tour ever that summer.
JA: Yep. You know how that went. We got to play a few shows luckily, which I think it’s more than a lot of people, so not complaining. But it was definitely a bit of a “I guess we have to reevaluate things for a second,” but all good because it’s coming out now, which is exciting. It let us really focus in on things and make sure everything was exactly how we wanted to make it because we honestly didn't have a lot of other stuff to do anyway. It really good. We got to live with the songs a lot and that really helped us out as far as making this album what it is.
CA: A silver lighting, I guess. All in all, it was pretty horrible to not be able to play shows, and obviously there were many other things that went horrible. But one of the silver linings is that it really did give us much time to live with the tunes.
We played them on live streams just the two of us. We played them for a year and a half before we actually finished recording any of them. We started most of them and they were all pretty much done, and then we basically couldn't do anything for such a long time. We just got to reimagine them and think about how they might be with different orchestration and different arrangements and stuff like that. It gave us the time we needed to really play around. The album has some of our best songs ever, for sure. I think our songwriting has grown in every album and I think this one, it continues to grow. Also, I think that amount of time, it let us really nail down the best versions of them that we could, which was pretty cool.
What was one song that especially benefited from the extra time?
CA: Definitely “Runaway.”
JA: We just released that one, it's our current single. Man, we actually all had to step back from that song for a while. I feel like we wrote it a certain way, we wrote it one way. It sounded good, just the two of us and then you bring it into the studio and it's like, “What next? What do we want to add? What actually adds to the song? What serves the core of the song?” We really got in our head with that one. I remember that was going to be one of the main challenges for our initial timeline, was honestly figuring out what we wanted to do with that song. You listen to something way too many times, and then all of a sudden, you're like, “What if none of it sounds good? What if it’s horrible?”
CA: Yes, we lost the perspective.
JA: It just sounds like nonsense now. But we took a breath because we had time to take a breath and we went back into the studio after a few weeks and we were like, “we can save this song. It’s not lost because it’s actually good, we just need to work on it.” We got some good clarity and ended up restructuring part of the entire song and rewriting the chorus.
It's funny. You would never know how the song started versus how it is now. But we do so for a while, we were like, “Oh my gosh. Is it improving? Or is it just more changes?” But then we took another break, and we were like, “Yes, we're in the right direction.” This song went on quite a studio journey, and, luckily, we had the time to indulge ourselves and make sure that it was finally what we wanted to put out into the world. I’m so proud of it now. For a while I was like, “Oh my god, ‘Runaway.’ We got to work on Runaway again, we have to fix this thing.”
CA: It’s like our albatross.
JA: Now, it’s our lead single right now. That was cool to see that come full circle.
The band worked with a few collaborators on this album. What was that experience like?
CA: David is our drummer on tour. He’s also our producer and our manager. He has a long history of getting us some cool special guests on our records. Actually, we had a couple of pretty cool special guests on this one. One is we took on a co-producer for the first time. We've worked with David for a decade now. Our process with him is super smooth and we just know each other’s styles and each other’s quirks and all that stuff really well. That made it pretty easy and awesome to bring on a co-producer. We brought on Joel Moss; I think he's got seven Grammys. He's mostly retired now, and he just does what he wants and what he wanted to do was go through our record, which was really, really awesome.
I feel like he was pretty stellar with the vocal. It was really cool. He took a lot of the lead on producing some of the vocal stuff. We worked with Byron Isaacs, who is The Lumineers bass player. Basically summer 2020, nobody was doing anything as far as touring is concerned. We've known Byron for a while, but every time we ask him to play with us in the studio, he is always like, “I would love to, but we’re in Tokyo next week. Then we’re going to do our South American leg.” He’s always just insanely busy. One of the few benefits of 2020 was that all of our various music friends that are usually busy ended up not having anything to do. We were like, “You want to play bass on some tracks?” He was like, “Yeah.” He played bass on, I think, “Popcorn” and “So Far to Fly.”
The theme of the new album is about embracing the good and bad of oneself and one’s favorite ghosts. What did you wanted to convey with that theme?
JA: Exactly what you said. We write about a lot of different things. We draw inspiration from a lot of different areas of our life, personal and otherwise. Whether it’s some random conversation we had with someone at the coffee shop this morning or an episode of TV, or something, a movie that we just watched or something that we’re actually experiencing. Not like we're experts on human nature at this point.
I feel we have more to learn than we know. But I feel like there's always this idea of these challenges you face in your life even if they're not things that you would’ve wanted to come up against, they end up changing you in a way that can be really profound and really, in the end, positive. Coming out of a challenge and being a different person, I think that sometimes that’s a really good thing. The challenges you face end up making you who you are, at least I think so. For some, I feel like the general overarching songwriting theme is those problems we face, those challenges, that sadness. Whatever it is, they make us who we are, and they also haunt us in that way. I like the idea of haunting not always being bad.
