Photo by Ebru Yildiz
Activity’s debut album, Unmask Whoever, released about a week into the Covid lockdown, became an ironic yet fitting soundtrack to a world gripped by anxiety and paranoia. Its dark, unsettling sound perfectly mirrored the collective experience. Three years later, Spirit in the Room arrived with Bri DiGlola (bass/vocals) joining Travis Johnson (lead vocals/multi-instrumentalist), Jess Rees (guitar/vocals/keys), and Steven Levine (drums). A palpable grief imbued the album; Johnson’s mother passed during its creation, a sorrow deeply etched into tracks like “Susan Medical City.”
Now on their third album, A Thousand Years in Another Way, Activity continues to weave experimental and electronic sounds into a tapestry of alienation and despair, though glimmers of hope shine through. While Stephen Levine amicably left after recording, replaced by Brian Alvarez (The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Peel Dream Magazine), his contributions remain on the album.
This marks my third conversation with Johnson, each one feeling less like a formal music journalist/artist interview and more like catching up with a long-distance friend. As Activity continues its musical journey, I’ll eagerly anticipate our next chat, keen to learn what new chapters are unfolding in Johnson’s life, both as a musician and personally.
What’s been happening with you personally over the last couple years since we last talked?
TRAVIS: The biggest change would be that our drummer and my best friend Steve is not really playing in the band anymore. We’re still friends and everything’s fine, but that was a very strange thing to process. He’s on the record and everything, but it was just a very strange thing. It’s working out great with our friend Brian, who’s taken over, so everything’s good. But that would be on a musical and personal level, probably the biggest thing.
I think we talked about how you lost your mom last time. Is that what influenced the lyrics on this album or was it other stuff?
TRAVIS: Shortly before our last conversation, in May of 2023, my wife’s best friend was killed in a mass shooting. It was really insane and awful and still is, and she’s still dealing with it. She was maid of honor at our wedding and stuff like that. I don’t know if there’s a song specifically about that or anything like that, but it feeds into this sense—if the last record was more of a personal sense of loss, this is more of just like a “What is going on? The world feels insane” kind of record. That was certainly part of it what inspired these songs, because it happened while we were in the middle of making this record.
So you started making this record two years ago?
TRAVIS: Yeah, we would have been right in the middle of writing it. We had started and were pretty seriously involved in writing a lot of it by the time the last record came out.
You have a small boutique electronics company. How much of your time is Activity versus other activities like running your company?
TRAVIS: It’s kind of always on, but it’s literally minute to minute, almost, sometimes. There’s time that’s set aside like going on tour or going to the practice space to write or work on stuff together. But when I wake up, the day could be like 10 minutes of this electronics company that I have, and then 30 minutes of Activity. My whole life is just kind of scattered. It’s not as well-boundaried as it probably should be. Everything just kind of is on top of itself all the time.
When you rehearse, is it scheduled or more spur of the moment?
TRAVIS: It’s usually pretty scheduled. We have our weekly schedule. But then, because three of us live a 10-minute walk from the practice space, a lot of times I’ll be working on something or somebody will be working on something, and they’ll send a demo, and it’ll be like, “Does anybody want to go work on this right now?” Sometimes it’s late at night, and sometimes it’s early on a Saturday.
Do you hang out with everybody in the band socially?
TRAVIS: I would say we are friends equally as much as being bandmates. For example, Bri’s birthday is Sunday, and we’ll all be there. But we would be even if the band had stopped after the last record. Since Bri and I live really close, and we both go to the same gym, and we have similar schedules, a lot of times it’ll be like, “Hey, I’m going to the gym. Do you want to go?”
In terms of writing this record, do you build from the ground up, or are you taking scraps from other stuff?
TRAVIS: There was one song called “I Came Here to Harm You”—the main guitar part is something I’d come up with years ago and had never figured out a place for. But other than that it was all new, and it was all being worked on in real time. A lot of the electronic stuff, if I sit on it for too long, it gets old and boring. So if it didn’t turn into something from the last record or the record before that, it’s never going to, probably. This was all new from the ground up stuff.
Have you recorded all three records with Jeff Berner (from Psychic TV and Shilpa Ray) in the same studio?
TRAVIS: Yep, which is also in our neighborhood. It’s an embarrassingly provincial band—like a square mile.
Since you’ve known Jeff for a long time, it’s probably a pretty comfortable relationship.
TRAVIS: It’s not only whenever we go in, it’s also pretty continual. As things are getting worked on, especially if it’s an electronic thing that I’m hoping to build something around, I will often send him stuff as we’re working on it to see what he thinks, or if he has any suggestions. With the electronic stuff, if he’s like, “No, you need to re-record that. The idea is good, but that’s a terrible recording and I’m not gonna want to mix it,” he’s involved as things are developing too. He’s pretty familiar with a lot of stuff before we go in the studio.
You’re three records in now. Do you look back and think, “Wow, we actually have a discography”?
TRAVIS: I’m bummed about that in a way, because it’s so exciting to put out a first record. This will be the third record, so if we put out another one, that’s the fourth record—that’s a lot. So it is cool to see it not just be like a project, but be a band. It’s still exciting. To me, this is the best record yet, and I know that if we had only made one or two records, and my contributions to this record had been with another band, it would not have come out like I would have wanted.
Tell me about the album title, A Thousand Years in Another Way. Does it come from something specific?
TRAVIS: I can’t remember exactly how I stumbled onto it. There’s a reference a little bit to the idea of a millennial respite from evil, which is some Christian eschatology. It’s not specifically a reference to that, but it’s like being exhausted with how evil and terrible and scary the world is—what if there were a thousand straight years of it being another way? I’m more of an evoker in terms of my goal as a writer or lyricist than I am a “meaner.” It doesn’t have to mean anything to me specifically or to anybody else. I want to feel a certain feeling when I read lyrics by other people, and I want to feel certain things when I sing or write lyrics. I want people to feel curious about something the way it hits them in a specific way.
Are you a fan of The National? I ask because I saw an interview where Matt Berninger has baseballs all around—he buys used baseballs and instead of a notebook, he just writes on them. Then he color codes them, and when he’s ready to put together a record, he starts looking at all the balls sitting around his room. I look on Reddit, and people are trying to make connections in his lyrics, trying to dive into what story he’s telling. But maybe the lyrics aren’t a story—maybe they’re just snippets of thoughts he had, and there is no connection..
TRAVIS: I know “Mistaken for Strangers” and I like that song a lot. I haven’t listened to the records much. That baseball thing is interesting though – David Berman said something like, “I try to write 20 lines a day. They don’t have to be going anywhere. They don’t have to cohere with each other at all. It’s just 20 lines a day.” Then at some point when you’re getting serious about making a new work, you have all of these things that you can use as jumping off points. You can look back through and be like, “Okay, well, now seven months later, what would be the next line?” That can send you off in all these different directions.
Most of the songs are from a perspective, but it’s not usually a very well-defined perspective. It might be so defined that it’s meaningless, like a person who just embezzled money from his corporate job and now has to face the consequences. Some weird dynamic that I’m like, “Oh, what if I just drop into this headspace and write from there?” That’s more fun to me.
A lot of people will ask you about the “Who will marry me now”? All the good husbands have drowned” line in “In Another Way.”
TRAVIS: That whole song has a back and forth between something really sweet or kind or welcoming up against something pretty negative or scary. The line about who will marry me now, all the good husbands having drowned, it’s thinking about different kinds of relationships, different kinds of healthy dynamics, things that are easily mistaken for love, things that are actually good and kind versus manipulative or abusive. Right now the world seems so dark and weird, and most people don’t want to think, “Oh, there’s just not a good person that we can latch onto that’s gonna be our anti-Trump.”
Like Bernie is 97 years old at this point. Who do we go with? There’s all these people who are constantly trying to manipulate us into thinking that they care about us, or that they’re our champion. Trump is nothing if not good at branding himself as the avenger for a certain type of person. What happens to one of those people if the scales ever fall from their eyes, and they realize that this is just a viper who was conning them? My dad is a lifelong, fairly conservative guy who can’t stand Donald Trump, and there’s no option for a guy like that.
I interviewed Angelo Moore from Fishbone last week, and he said, “Donald Trump is a phenomenal entertainer, but he should always be in our television set, he should never come out of it. He’s come out of it, and that’s where reality has broken for many Americans.” I’m in my 50s and I keep thinking I don’t know that I have enough years left in my life to see things swing back around after all the damage that has been caused this year.
TRAVIS: It’s pretty wild. Absent a further breakdown, which I’m not rooting for, I don’t know that it would be possible, given the tools and structures that we have, to rebuild what’s already been blown up anytime soon. Even if at this point, let’s say he’s convicted of something, we get somebody good back in office, you’d still be contending with 45-ish percent of the population who are some combination of actually they know what he’s about and they like it, or are completely conned by him into thinking that he has their interests at heart. I just don’t even know what to do with that. What do you do when our brains have been turned to oatmeal by social media, reality TV, and both of those things becoming the President?
Do you think your music would have sounded this way had we not gone through all of this stuff—if Bernie had been elected President, if we hadn’t gone through COVID?
TRAVIS: I remember in 2016, thinking if it’s not Bernie, Trump will win, because it was obvious to me we were at some kind of inflection point or breaking point where people were starting to think, “I’m being lied to all the time.” The stage was set—we weren’t gonna go back to business as usual. I think a lot of the stuff that was making me feel really ill at ease would have still been there. Once I became aware of the underground rage that was just seething, that infected the first two albums with the anxiety and stuff like that.
Looking at titles, I was telling some friends—it’s sort of like vampire music. Just titles alone, like “I Came Here to Harm You,” “Where We’re Not Wanted”—even having never heard your music, I’d look at those titles and be like, “Oh, this is kind of like a scary movie soundtrack.”
TRAVIS: I wouldn’t say that it’s intentional—vampire or vampiric—though I do watch a lot of horror stuff. So much of it’s just driven by thinking about these really unpleasant characters that are in our world and shoved down our throats every day. A lot of it’s just thinking about what is it like in their head? That’s where a lot of it comes from.
Musically, “I Came Here to Harm You” has an almost James Bond feel to it.
TRAVIS: Whenever we finish playing it at practice, Brian always goes “James Bond chord” or something. My mom six or seven years ago was like, “You know what no one really does? No one really messes around enough with spy/James Bond-type music and then goes and does something cool with that, the way that Stereolab does lounge music.” She was like, “You should try and work on that.” I don’t know if that’s where that song came from, but that’s always been in my brain.
“Heavy Breathing” feels different from some of the other songs.
TRAVIS: That wasn’t specifically intentional, but I was going for a Depeche Mode type thing, and weirdly a very specific Duran Duran song, “Come Undone.” It’s the same beat, or very similar beat, but it’s way faster. I wrote that on acoustic guitar as a very simple, sparse thing that was going to be a very lonesome sounding thing, and I remember telling a friend, “I can’t decide if I should take this song in a more shoegaze direction or Duran Duran,” and he was like, “Duran Duran. Nobody’s doing Duran Duran. Do that.”
That song was one of my early obsessions as a kid. I was absolutely obsessed with it. All my earliest loves musically were things like that, and house music that would get on the radio. As I got older and got into experimental stuff, that impulse never left. So it was fun to finally have an outlet for that kind of almost dance pop thing.
Jess sings on “Scissors.” Does she sing all the female lead vocal songs?
TRAVIS: No, she sings “Scissors” and “Piece of Mirror,” and then Bri sings “Good Memory” and “Her Alphabet.” Jess has the more sing-songy voice, it’s kind of poppier.
Bri can go in more of a Beth Gibbons/Portishead type direction. She’s the best technical singer of all of us, by far.
So you’re planning stuff for the fall. Would that be just you headlining or are you thinking about going out with somebody else?
TRAVIS: The stuff we’re planning right now will be just us. But hopefully there’s some stuff in the works for later down the line that would be with others. My favorite thing is opening for a friend’s band who is bigger. I love that so much more than going out and headlining our own thing. A friend in a bigger band is the best setup.
What don’t you get asked about? Is there something that you love to talk about that you never get a chance to talk about in interviews?
TRAVIS: I’m definitely a book nerd and a record collecting nerd, and I really love absolutely nerdy left-wing political stuff. Whenever I come across somebody else who’s read Marx or something like that, it’s always a thrill to me. That way I’m not in the van on tour reading something and trying to talk about it, and everybody’s like “Shut up.” They agree with it overall, so they don’t need to know the guts as much. But to me the guts are really fascinating, with leftist history or theory.
Was that something you were interested in when you were a kid in school?
TRAVIS: I think I was always a history person, and pretty early on, before I knew any of the terms for it, even as a 14, 15, 16-year-old, just feeling like capitalism did not really make sense to me. I was raised going to kind of middle-of-the-road, politically speaking, church, and those two things together, I was always like “I don’t understand why capitalism is presented as the economic structure of good religious folks.” It just never made sense to me. Then I studied history in college—that was my major. It’s always been there.
So you grew up in Texas and went to the University of Oklahoma. How do you end up in New York?
TRAVIS: When I was 18, my mom had a trip to New York for her business, and she asked me if I wanted to come because she thought I’d like New York. I just fell in love, and so spent the next four years of college planning on moving to New York the second I could.
How did you make it when you moved there?
TRAVIS: Temp jobs. I moved with not a ton of money, and not wealthy parents to help out. I think the most important thing was that I knew that if I didn’t make it work, it was gonna be very difficult and annoying to move back home. That 1,500-mile barrier kind of forced me to be able to make it work. I was really into the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s lore of New York and did not realize as a 22-year-old how much that had all just been bulldozed by condos. But I found temp work until I found other ways, started making effects pedals. That was the next period of time. Met my wife playing shows, and having a teammate is really helpful.
And now you can’t imagine living anywhere else.
TRAVIS: Kind of. I can’t really imagine living anywhere else. But if I did, I would want it to be somewhere pretty different. I think if I moved I would never want to live in LA or something—it’s so the opposite of New York while still being a big city that it feels very strange to me whenever I’m there. I think I would feel much more normal if it was like Richmond, Virginia, or even the woods—something that would be ridiculous to even compare to New York because it’s not trying to be the same kind of thing.
