As the major labels swept through scenes in the mid-90s and snatched up any bands that were remotely “alternative,” Chicago was a prime location. In the immediate wake of Nirvana’s success, The Smashing Pumpkins signed with Virgin Records and Veruca Salt (Geffen), Triple Fast Action (Capitol), and Fig Dish (A&M) were among the bands who also found a golden ticket. There were a number of bands that, just a few years later, should have also earned the call-up to the big leagues but just as quickly as the majors came to town, they moved onto the next thing leaving bands like Woolworthy, The Cells, and marvelkind behind.
Tamar Berk’s Starball was, in the Chicago press, considered Veruca Salt’s poppy kid sister and while the band made a name for itself in the Windy City (2001’s Superfans album is available to stream on Spotify), the elusive major label deal never materialized leading Berk to form an electra-pop duo, The Countdown, with her husband.
Looking for a new start, Berk moved to Portland in 2008, joined some bands, started some others and then, a decade later, the wanderlust set in again and Berk and family relocated to San Diego where, for the first time in her decades long career, the indie-pop singer/songwriter decided to release music as a solo artist. In quick succession, Berk has released five full-length albums: The Restless Dreams of Youth (2021), Start at the End (2022), Tiny Injuries (2023), Good Times for a Change (2024) and OCD (2025).
As Big Takeover’s Dave Franklin noted in his review of OCD, as a solo artist, Berk isn’t afraid to peel back all the layers of her life. He so astutely notes that this album is Berk’s “most intimate, most revealing, and the most raw and emotionally open to date.”
While I’ve been aware of Berk and some of her music since the late ‘90s, and she contributed a track to a Triple Fast Action album I dreamed of putting out (but still sits on a hard drive), we formally met for the first time a few weeks ago when hopping on a video conference call to discuss not only OCD and what’s currently going on in her life, but also to revisit the past and the path that led to a solo career.
I knew of you from the late ‘90s/early ‘00s Chicago music scene. You’re now in San Diego and I know you were in Portland for a while too. While the solo career is a relatively new thing, you never stopped making music from what I can tell.
TAMAR: I have never stopped. The level of being the front of the band definitely shifted after Chicago. When I moved to Portland, to make a long story short, I was super down because I had a pretty built-in scene in Chicago. I knew where to play, all the bookers knew me, and I played every club imaginable in a lot of different bands. I was in Fig Dish Rick Ness’s band, I was in so many bands in Chicago. I was in Bohb Blair’s band, Bicycle Tricycle. I was in that whole scene. So when I moved to Portland, I was like, “Oh my God, I don’t know anyone. Nobody gives a fuck who I am.”
I had to start over. Nobody knows I’ve been in bands, nobody knows I’ve done all this stuff, and nobody knows I record songs. I worked at the School of Rock Portland, because I had started and helped open the School of Rock Chicago, and I met some musicians through that avenue. But the bigger avenue was that I joined a French pop band, and I played organ. My first instrument was piano. I was like, “Okay, I can learn these songs on this guy’s organ,” this vintage Yamaha. I didn’t have to bring anything to practice, and through that band, because Portland is a very small city, once you’re in this band, you know all the people in all the bands. It all leads back.
At some point, I was in seven bands in Portland, but I released three albums under the band name Paradise. I also released two albums in The Pynnacles and was doing a ton of songwriting on my own that was just in my ProTools library of solo stuff. I said, “One day, I’ll do something with this shit.” A lot of it, I would post on YouTube without any fanfare because Facebook was still fairly new, and Instagram was very new. I was just posting stuff for myself, for posterity. A lot of those now are privatized just so I can remember it, but some of those songs I ended up putting on some of these albums.
I have never stopped. In all the bands in Chicago, I would sing backup and play an instrument. Only on occasion did I sing lead, but within the context of a band, like in Paradise, when I moved to San Diego was the big push for that because once again, I had to start over. It’s extremely depressing because you just start to build a community. I have a lot of friends in Portland. There’s something about Portland, and I don’t know what to explain about it, but it’s a nice music scene, a friendly music scene, not competitive in any way, shape, or form. I came to San Diego, and once again, was like, “What the actual fuck?”
I knew a couple of musicians here through the Pynnacles, which was my garage rock band, and I called those guys and said, “Would you learn some of the songs that I have going? Maybe I’ll actually put a solo record out.” This was 2018. I started playing with those guys in 2019. Guess what happened? COVID! And once again, I was like, “This is never going to happen!”
Then my friend Matt Thompson, who was the engineer for Dawn of Paradise, which was the rock opera that we released under the band Paradise, worked with Ron Nevison, who engineered Quadrophenia and Physical Graffiti. So Matt was the engineer on that album. I kept in touch with him because something about his gentle nature, I really liked. I’m very intense with the music, but he was very gentle and kind and easygoing, and if I work with people with my music, I really want that vibe because I don’t need somebody else who’s intense. I can’t handle it.
I called him. I was going to have him come up, but we had canceled the studio session because of COVID. I was like, “I don’t know what to do. I have all these songs I was gonna have you help me mix.” He’s like, “Well, don’t you know a lot of musicians that have studios?” And I was like, “Matt Walker.” I worked with Matt Walker for years in this advertising music collective. So okay, real quick, Mark Greenberg, who booked the Lounge Ax in Chicago, contacted me when I was living in Chicago because he knew my band. He knew I wrote pop songs, girl pop songs, and he was like, “Do you want to be part of this advertising music collective that I’m putting together of these musicians around town that kind of fill a void for me? When I get a request for film or TV, everybody writes what they can, uploads it, and I ship them out and see if somebody hits.”
I said, “Sure!” He’s the nicest guy. He was in The Coctails, another well-known Chicago band, and he’s a great musician and a great person. So I started. It was called Mayfair Recordings. Six months later, Mark introduced Matt Walker as part of the collective. I was like, “Matt Walker? He’s in Cupcakes, and Filter, and he’s played with Smashing Pumpkins.” So Matt and I have known each other for a very long time through advertising and film stuff.
Going back to 2019, my friend Matt Thompson said, “Don’t you know drummers or musicians with studios?” I was like, “Matt Walker.” Matt Walker would have normally been on tour with somebody, Garbage, or Smashing Pumpkins, or Morrissey, but he was homebound. I said, “Do you want to do my record with me?” And we had been rehearsing, so we had a lot of recordings of the way the drummer was playing, which I liked, and some of just my demos with me playing drums on them. He’s like, “I’m home, let’s do it!” So the birth of the first solo album, The Restless Dreams of Youth, in 2021, was that way, and we just haven’t stopped since.
It’s great that Matt was available.
TAMAR: It was a wild time, and that’s how we did it. I taught myself how to use Pro Tools from watching people, basically from watching people and trial and error and putting out a lot of stuff for my band The Countdown. I was able to get his files in, get them mixed into what I was creating and recording, and then he told me about Sean O’Keefe, who is in Chicago now. He was in Chicago then, but he was in Texas during COVID. He’s done Fall Out Boy, Plain White T’s, Beach Bunny, and Motion City Soundtrack. Matt said Sean should mix my record, and so we did this kind of little, lo-fi-ish record. I put it out in this new world of Facebook and was finding all these sites and just promoted it and started friending people who I could see were musicians or on the radio, and people really liked it. I was getting interviews, and I was like, “Whoa, this is wild.” You’re in your little world of your silo of songwriting, and you just really don’t know. I’ve been writing songs for so long, and some of the songs on The Restless Dreams of Youth were carried with me from the early ’90s on my 4-track. So it was always the pick and choose of the best of what I was carrying around that fit the theme of what I was doing, and it just went so well.
I’m always writing. I sat down and wrote this other song, and I was like, “Oh, maybe another album is coming. That was really fun last time.” But what happened with that was much more challenging because I started writing a few more songs, and then my father got sick and died very quickly within a week and a half. Everything shifted from there, from my life to my outlook on everything, to music and what it meant to me. Then Start at the End was released in 2022.
There are certain words, certain smells, certain feelings I get, and the trauma of that week because it’s shocking. It’s a shock. I tried to describe this to somebody: I feel like my DNA changed. The cells in my body changed after that day. My father was the most important person in my life. He was my rock. And I just felt like everything changed. I didn’t care about anything at all. I didn’t really care if I didn’t wake up. It wasn’t like I was going to do anything, but I was just like, “What is the point of anything?”
I was writing a lot of lyrics, and they were very dark, but I thought, “Okay, how am I going to get through this?” I have a daughter. I can’t be not wanting to wake up. I can’t present that to her. She’s still in high school. You don’t need to show your child this side of you. You can be sad, but they don’t want to see you like that. It’s too much for them. You need to be strong and show them that you’re going to make it through. So all the lyrics in Start at the End were my way of working hard on that album to present a sort of grief journey with hope. It was one of the hardest albums, or just years of my life, in so many ways. At the time, music was actually the only thing that helped. I did go to grief therapy. Some things came out of it, but it was just more like, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
The few sessions I went to therapy didn’t do it, but when I would write lyrics and read them back, I’d be like, “Holy shit. This is very telling about what I’m going through.” It also kind of helped the people around me see what I was feeling, my daughter and my husband. I don’t like to share the really deep, dark places that my mind goes. I can’t. It’s just too weird, and I’m so spirally with my OCD that it’s too much for people. But when I can focus it into lyrics of songs and I’m good at conveying an idea within a song, so it’s not a mishmash of a million things or very cliche, I really try to focus on what the song is about. I think it helped a lot of people that I love also be like, “Whoa, Mom, this is intense.” And it’s a talking point, too. “Are you okay, Mom? What’s going on?” I’m like, “Yeah, I actually feel better that I wrote this song.”
Let’s use the song “Permanent Vacation” from Tiny Injuries as an example. We went on a trip to Costa Rica, and I would have been fine if something would have happened. I mean that sincerely. I didn’t really care, but I enjoyed the beauty of Costa Rica. I could have stayed there forever and also died there. And that song was saying, “I don’t know what’s gonna happen, hold my hand when we take off. Is this a permanent vacation?”
A lot of the songs on that album were exploring how I feel now that I’m settled into the idea that this person isn’t in my life anymore. And then Good Times for a Change came around, where I was like, “Okay, Tamar, I’m sick of myself. Let’s write some pop rock songs that have my usual weird lyrics that are not fully happy, but they might sound a little bit more peppy.” It was a joy doing that record.
Do you feel like your albums are chapters in a book, they all contribute to the big story, or do you consider them to be their own standalone albums?
TAMAR: I think they are standalone albums. But for me, the thing with my brain, which is what this last album is about, is I’m a very linear person. Everything moves forward in a line for me, the way that I see and walk through the world. I see it as there are things along the line that I need to do, but I’m not very good at multitasking anymore. It’s like I have to check off boxes as I go in my head so that things work that way.
When I’m looking at my albums, it’s very clear to me that there are chapters in my life. I think I wrote somewhere that every song is a sentence in a bigger paragraph of that album. I could probably sum up each album pretty easily. On my website, I summed up each album. I haven’t done this one yet, but this one was hard because I wrote a song called “OCD,” and I was like, “Oh, do I really want to release a song called ‘OCD’? That’s pretty intense.” But I also was like, “I don’t care!” If you like my songs and you’re interested in me already after four albums, this might be just another layer of me, and also, maybe other people have this and don’t realize it.
It’s not a typical OCD where you check the doorknob ten times or you make sure the gas is off on the stove. It’s different. It’s a constant dialogue and obsessive-compulsive thoughts in my head. That is a different thing that sometimes people don’t talk about, a lot of anxiety and worry. It started to happen a lot more after my dad died and just escalated. But now, I look back at my childhood and how I was as a kid, and a lot of it makes sense. I had to do things over and over, like listening to music obsessively, and looking at pictures, and reading the same books over and over again. I would do similar things in the same way because it felt safe and good. My audio memory calmed me down.
One of the things about writing music that I’ve discovered over these last five years that I didn’t realize is that when I’m writing songs, it’s something in my brain that I need to hear to calm me down. So then I write it that way. It’s almost like my brain is making me have to write it this way to hear it, and so the song has to be created so that I can hear it. Matt Walker and I would laugh about it because I would say, “Well, I hope people like it.” He’s like, “Tamar, you’re gonna be the one who’s gonna listen to it the most. Is it good? Do you like it?” I’m like, “Yeah.” I listen to every album still because there’s a certain sense of calm that it brings. Whereas when I listen to old Starball albums, I’m like, “Oh my God, that song!” I can’t listen to them. The youthful exuberance is great, but the earnestness isn’t there, the honesty, and the really pulling from a deep place. I wasn’t mature enough to do that. I wasn’t ready to do that. Now when I listen to the songs, it feels comforting. It’s like a warm hug. My brain feels good hearing those melodies and how I produce them, and so it has a whole other meaning to my brain now.
I interviewed someone once who said, jokingly, that he wished he had started his band when he was in his 40s because he has a lot more wisdom and experience than he did when he was in his 20s. He said he’s making the best music of his life.”
TAMAR: It is true. I’ll argue another side of that: sometimes people who do start again try to do the same thing again. And I feel that’s like, if you’ve been out of the picture for that long and you walk back in and do the same kind of sound you did back in the day, there’s no progress there. A lot of people do that. I’m not putting that down, but I also feel like it’s hard when you want to experiment as an artist, and your fans don’t want to go there with you. That’s one side of it. The other side is you’re so comfortable in this place that you’ve been, and then you’re going to start a new band and do the same thing. Then what have you really done? Maybe you just missed the act of being in a band, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
I realized one thing: I don’t love being in a band. The most favorite band I’ve ever been in was the one with my husband. You know why? Because it was just me and him. I didn’t have to deal with a million personalities. We planned it all out, and we booked the shows that we wanted to book. There were rarely any negotiations. It was just, “Do you want to do this? Do you not want to do this? Do you want to wear this?” But every other band was a lot more energy because everybody’s got their personalities. So, for your friend, on one hand, I get what he’s saying about maturity. But on the other hand, everybody’s busy. And nobody can rehearse. Everybody’s got kids, and everybody’s got jobs. So, it’s like, yes, you can start a band again, but you want to be original, and you also want to have time to rehearse, and nobody can do that.
He also has a full-time gig and recording is the thing that brings him the most pleasure, not touring. He’s done that. He makes music for himself and if people like it, great, but he’s not hoping to get another chance at being a world famous rock star.
TAMAR: That’s kind of how I am. People ask me all the time, “Are you gonna tour? Are you gonna play shows?” I want to pull out the Lana Del Rey quote that I love pulling out. She’s like, “I’m really just a studio musician, and you just don’t expect too much from my live show.” That’s what I say. I love being in the studio; it’s my most fun. With live shows, once I hit the first chord of the first song, I’m good. Up until the show, I’m anxious. There are so many things that could go wrong. “Are people gonna come? Am I gonna sound like shit? Is my string gonna break?” I’m just so worried. I’m almost feeling burned out on that feeling, but I will say this, which is a paradox: I have enjoyed playing, once I’m on stage, the show itself more than I ever have. We just played a show here as part of the International Pop Overthrow Festival, and we jumped on it at the last minute because I wanted to play a show before we went to Chicago. And I just really enjoyed singing my songs. I wrote them, and I was just feeling like I like the songs that are on the setlist. I didn’t put a setlist together that I wanted to hear and play. It was great because I enjoyed that.
I think I really stressed out a lot when I was younger because I was looking for approval more than anything. You’re young and in a band, and you want to be cool. We were in Chicago, following in the footsteps of Veruca Salt, who were just the coolest girls on the block. They had so much support, and they were the thing. It was hard to be compared to them in a lot of ways. Some people thought we were too poppy. We were more poppy, I would say. We just weren’t on a label. It was kind of a weird time, but I think my idea of music, I think I was more interested in being signed back then. I wanted to be signed, and now I could give two fucks.
Back then, I couldn’t get my stuff out in the world without a label. So, there wasn’t any option. You made copies of your CD and handed them to people, or if you were lucky, you made a GeoCities site. Or at your shows, you sold them. So Starball played a lot of shows to sell our CD. We made a thousand CDs. I have one left. It’s a big feat.
But today… and, you know, people complain about social media and how many bands are released on Spotify every fucking day. It’s thousands, up to 10,000 a day. But I will say that… something’s gonna change soon because it’s just too much music. I don’t know what, but I have a theory. But I am so grateful. I am more than grateful because I could never in my fucking life do this. I have people who like and follow me and buy my vinyl and my CDs. People who share articles about me, just as you will be doing, and posting it, and people see it, and then they go hit my YouTube video. I am grateful beyond. Yes, it takes a lot of energy, but what else do I have to do? I have my job, I have my dog, I have a husband, I have my kid. I’m making art, and you need to promote it any way you can. I’m just so lucky that I can take a couple of hours every day, make some social posts, be creative.
That’s the other thing: I don’t have a label telling me what I need to post. I post whatever the hell I want. Some of them hit, some of them are stupid, some of them are funny, some of them I look like an idiot, but it’s all me. And I’m very grateful for social media. Do I hate sometimes what I see in the algorithmic feeds? Yes. I don’t look at my use of social media for my art in the same way. It’s like two different worlds. It’s like the evil, yucky thing and the fact that I’m an artist and really can use it to my benefit.
I get 40 emails a day from publicists promoting an album, a single, a tour. There’s so much music out there, as you mentioned, but it’s great that I have so many options.
TAMAR: I’m sure you’re weeding through stuff. I get that because I also feel like I’m one of those naggy people that email people. I try to have an angle, but also, one of the things I do is I communicate with them, not just when I’m trying to share shit. I like their posts, I chat with them, I say, “I saw your article, I read that article you wrote on that band.” I mean, it’s still about relationships. I’ve managed to be in some really good situations and get some coverage. But I’ve also… I guess one of my things… I listened to a podcast, I think it was 2020 or 2021, called The Hidden Brain. It’s about the psychology of our brains, and it was talking about why some people are successful. There was a formula. They were talking about Taylor Swift, and I was like, “Okay, they’re analyzing how Taylor Swift is successful. Are her songs really that great?” You could argue some of them are great. But is it also just that she has so much out there in the world that, mathematically speaking, the amount that she puts out and tours and releases is alone going to get her name out there exponentially? Something struck me on my four-mile walk, and I’m like, “I just need to put shit out constantly. And just keep putting out stuff that I like.” Because I am a nobody. I am not signed. I’m technically no one. But the more I put out, the more people will write about it. It’s like that MLM marketing firm. It’s like that’s how I see it. It’s like this pyramid of one release gets this many reviews, gets these many fans. The next release gets this many reviews, these many fans, and I’m just gonna keep putting shit out and keep spreading the word. By this one, we’ll see, you know?
When I was a kid, I never dreamed an artist would have any idea who I am or interact with me. With social media, I can post something and have someone I’ve been a fan of for years like or comment. It’s really cool that those walls have broken down.
TAMAR: Marian Gold [from the German band Alphaville and the hit “Forever Young’] bought all of my albums! He reached out to me via Bandcamp. I’m like, “Is this really you?” He said, “Yes, I love your albums, I love your music.” He’s still touring! The song is still on TikTok. It’s still a played song, and I was like, “Wow, that’s how random and cool it is.” So I find that to be really interesting. And there are other players that find me through Facebook groups and power pop feeds that have been in bands like The Romantics and other bands that like my stuff. I’m like, “That’s really cool.”
When I hear songs like “OCD” and “Time Zone,” I picture a scene from a Netflix show or something where people are walking across a college campus. I would definitely Shazam songs that sound like these to see who the artist is.
TAMAR: So many of my songs belong in so many TV shows and films. They’re built for it. These songs are so current. I’m trying to work with a couple of people now to give them the library of these last solo albums and be like, “Please, make this money. I’m in debt. I’ve been using my credit card on this record.” But yeah, I’m really proud of those songs, for sure.
“Time Zone” uses a lot of different time signatures. It was inspired by real-life events, but also, it’s a musical mixture in my head of Missing Persons meets “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen. In my mind, I was like, “Can I make a song that’s like Missing Persons meets Carly Rae Jepsen in the fact that it’s catchy but also weird?” And I did it!
My goal with “OCD” was, “Can I write a slow-groove pop song?” I always tend to go toward the eighth note. That’s just where I go. I was like, “I want to write a pop song that has a very groovy, cool beat and is very minimal, with some synth hooks and really emotive vocals.” I was really proud of both songs. I’m really proud of this album in a big way.
“I Had a Dream I Was Lost in an Auditorium” has sort of an early rock-and-roll drum start. I picture a diner scene from a ’50s movie. There are horns in it, right?
TAMAR: Yes, there are trumpets and flugelhorns.
Did that song start with those elements, or did you go into that song saying you’ve got this vibe in your head and you want to make music that fits that vibe? You want it to have this older sound and this newer sound, and this ’70s sound with horns.
TAMAR: Oh my God, I love that you’re saying that! That song was torture. It did not start that way. It started with my typical thing that I go to. But sometimes I use that to write the melody. I was like, “I don’t want to do my typical thing on this song.” So the only thing I had planned out on that one was that I wanted it to be a story where I’m sitting there in a conversation with my partner, it could be whoever, but I’m distracted by these anxious thoughts that I’m having about myself. I just can’t shake them. I just want to be normal, but I can’t.
My idea was that I was going to build a song, and in my head, I would build it with a verse going into this chorus that felt like a big release. The chorus was totally different on the first version of that song. Everything was different. I played it for some trusting friends, and they were like, “I just don’t get this chorus. It’s not really going anywhere.” It was a much more laid-back chorus. It was more vague. It started the same: “I had a dream I was lost in an auditorium, trying to get to the show, and I knew it was a waste of time.” But after that, it had different lyrics. So they were like, “It just doesn’t go anywhere.” A friend of mine helped me kind of be like, “You need to push yourself. The chorus needs to go somewhere.”
But the other thing is I had a friend play guitar on it, and he came back with this beautiful acoustic guitar that was just going at the beginning, and I was like, “Oh, why am I feeling like a ’50s thing?” You know, like girl groups from the ’60s.
That’s what I was thinking, for sure. It’s like a little bit of “Leader of the Pack.”
TAMAR: Sometimes that happens. A musician will come with their idea and it will shift the song for me. I’m like, “Wow.” So then suddenly, I program new MIDI drums and added a big tambourine. I was like, “This is cool, because it starts out kind of old-fashioned, turns into more of a modern rock song, and then has the ’70s rock vibe with the horns, and then the bridge is like Beach Boys.” So I was like, “This song is insane!” Matt Walker beautifully just gelled it all together, because when you have a good drummer, you got it all.
I was curious if you have a standard songwriting process.
TAMAR: There are lots of different ways I write. Sometimes, I just turn on my voice memo, pick up my acoustic guitar, play some chords, sing a melody line, and be like, “Oh, that’s kind of cool.” I’ll save it and move on. Other times, I’ll go to a bar, have some drinks, have my notebook, and I’m just subconsciously writing lyrics. Then I’m like, “There’s a rhythm to that.” Later, I’ll put a rhythmic beat to the lyrics that feel like they have a rhythm. I will say, this is one of the first albums where I had much more intention about specific songs.
The first song, “Stay Close By,” was the last song I wrote. And I wrote that with the intention of having this song be slow and be an invitation into my album. I wrote it that way. I didn’t have any lyrics. I didn’t know what I was going to do, and it just came. When that happens, it’s pretty magical, whereas, like, “Auditorium” was sleepless months on that song, so I’m glad you brought that one up.
Other ways: a song like “You Ruined This City for Me.” I had a line. The line, “You ruined the city for me,” is a powerful line, and it is a very true story about a specific city and a specific person. I thought, “My goal for this song is to have the chorus be a chorus, but that line is the last line of the chorus.” So I had specific goals, and that’s, again, with my OCD. I said it out loud: “I want to do a song like this, where that line is literally the chorus.” I wanted it to be uptempo, and I also didn’t want it to be a standard 4/4. So I had these goals!
With “My Turn Will Come,” it was a very sad and difficult song for me to put out and write. But I knew I wanted cello in it, and I knew I wanted it to feel like Lana Del Rey in the fact that I’m kind of laying it all out there. I wanted it to feel very emotional and very bearing of my soul, in a way. In my head, I know what I wanted the feeling to be like. And sometimes, when you know the feeling, then you know the instrumentation. So, to answer your question, this was the first album where there was some serious intention behind it. But there’s never an exact way. I always remember Paul McCartney saying, “I usually start with a chord.” Sometimes that happens, but not really. It’s always different.
That song really stuck out to me as well.
TAMAR: My father is a big part of that. The song is about trying not to beat myself up for the mistakes that I make, whether that’s drinking too much, or saying too much, or not being kind or nice. Not being my best self to the people I love sometimes. It’s really hard to admit that and talk about it.
The whole song was like, “Dad, you loved life. I want to keep that in mind. Life is very short and moves fast, and then it’s done.” That reminder to me is that every day is a new beginning. If you weren’t your best self today, try, try again tomorrow. So thank you for acknowledging that song. That was a tough one to put on there.
The last song I wanted to talk about is also the last song on the record, “Ghost Stories”. The guitars are amazing in that song.
TAMAR: Oh, Isaiah Mitchell. I wrote that on a rainy, cold, awful day in Portland when we were there for Thanksgiving. It was awful because we were in a really kind of gross Airbnb that overlooked an alley that had garbage containers that people were going through and eating stuff. I’m like, “Where am I? This is why I loved Portland. I still love Portland, but this is why I left.”
I was really thinking about the people in my life that have come and gone and how we often don’t talk about them anymore, whether it’s because we are not close with them anymore or it’s too painful. And what is all of that? What are the ghosts in our lives that leave marks, but we either choose not to talk about it? That song made me cry. I was tearing up writing it. I left it. I only recorded a verse and a chorus. I came back here, and I was like, “Is this even something I want to pursue?” I didn’t have the idea of “Ghost Story.” It wasn’t called “Ghost Story” at all. It might have even been called, “If Somebody Asks,” because it’s the first line: “If somebody asks, what should I say?”
I started to think about what I wanted to say in the chorus, and they say, “Heartbreak lies in the stories we tell of our lives.” A lot of people might relate to this because we’ve all had relationships, people, jobs, and cities that have come and gone. Everything’s a ghost story in our lives, and as we get older, we just collect more ghosts.
The other aspect of that song, Chip, is that everybody remembers things differently. Something really struck me once: when you talk to somebody and say, “Remember we hung out that time? We talked about this, and we had lunch,” and that person says, “No, that’s not how I remember it.” So, I started to think about my life, my ghost stories. Nobody could take that away from me, even if they remember it a different way. These are my ghost stories, and my own story that I’ll take to my grave because at the end of the day, it’s our own experience on this planet, our own lives that we embody and walk through these experiences with. Nobody’s going to experience it the same way. That friendship, that family member, that divorce, or whatever you go through, they’re going to remember it differently. They’re not going to have the same memory, or thoughts, or anything about it. I wrote that song for me. I’m putting this out there that I really do feel like everything that we do and walk through is a story of our lives. Everything we say, everything we do.
I discovered Isaiah Mitchell. He’s in this band called Earthless, who is based out of San Diego. They’re very heavy. They just play; there aren’t many vocals in it. This guy, Ben Moore, who is the head producer and engineer at a wonderful studio here in town called The Singing Serpent, has helped me locate a lot of wonderful local musicians.
I called Ben Moore, and I said, “I need a guitar player, like a wailing, crazy person who’s going to do something that I’m not used to.” He said, “Oh, you have to call Isaiah Mitchell.” I’m like, “Who’s Isaiah?” “He’s from Earthless.” I said, “I know Earthless!” He could not have been a nicer guy. He’s also played with big bands, like Black Crowes and other people. He’s a total pro, a savant. I would sing the things over the phone that I heard in my head, and what came back was astonishing. He played on a lot of songs on this album. But because of the slower tempo and the openness of the chords, I just said, “Do whatever you want. Just make it sing, make it wild.” I put a bunch of reverb, and he has a bunch of pedals, too. He’s a real true artist. I was just like, “This is incredible.” It’s such a good song. I almost didn’t want to put it last, but it had to go last. It has to. I think when people are putting albums together, it’s like, “This is such a good song, nobody’s going to get to it.” But I suppose if somebody is your fan, they’ll get to it.
Can you tell me about a song that takes you back to a very specific time in your life?
TAMAR: There are many. “Changes” by Bowie is one of them because I heard that when I was very little. My babysitter was a huge Bowie fan. He was obsessed. I was this tiny little thing thinking, “This is crazy and weird and cool. What am I listening to?” But I loved it! “Changes” transports me.
This is going to sound really weird, but the classic Disney songs give me the most nostalgic, warm vibes because I was completely obsessed with all of those albums. Then there are albums like Captain Fantastic by Elton John, which triggers a lot of those memories of me as this tiny little thing looking at the album cover, which was a wild album cover. It transports me right back to trying to study that album painting.
“Smells Like Teen Spirit,” in a way, does bring me back to that moment where, you know, something just shifted in all of us in Gen X. You kind of remember it. It’s almost like my parents’ generation, they remember where they were when John F. Kennedy was shot. We remember where we were when we first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
If you could rub a genie bottle and get a wish for this album, what would it be?
TAMAR: I would love for Matador to be like, “We’re going to put all your albums out. Get a band together and go on tour and we’ll support that.” That’s it. I know my albums would sell if I did a tour. They’re already selling, but they’re selling with what I can do on social media, you know? Labels really do have the first dibs on all the Spotify playlists and stuff like that. That’s tough. I’m not putting it down; it just is what it is. It’s always been that way. So, that would be the ultimate.
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