The Civilians’ third full-length album, ‘Lush and Tumble’ will be released in August 2022. Their upcoming album consists of original songs that are a creative weave of straight-up rock & roll, power pop, psychedelia, folk, punk, and country.

‘Lush and Tumble’ was recorded in Seattle’s Earwig Studios and produced by renowned engineer Don Farwell and Civilians’ singer/songwriter Chris Livesay. The album features guest artist Steve Nieve, Elvis Costello’s longtime keyboardist, on the song ‘Harder Than The Truth’.

The Civilians sound like a bunch of friends having fun playing what they like without any restrictions… Was the band born as a fun project or am I completely missing something?

Chris Livesay: We’re a group of friends who go way back. (Guitarist) Kam Gurol and I have been best friends since we were 10 years old listening to our parents’ record collection. All of us have played together in various combinations over the years, but this is the first time we’ve all played together as a unit. And, yeah, it did start out with us just getting together and playing anything we liked—me, Kam, our drummer Jim (Jeffreys), and Doug (Schwartz), who plays guitar and keyboards. Our bass player Jerry (Cohen) came along later; he literally knocked on Kam’s door one day when we were playing and said, “You guys are good, but it sounds like you need a bass player.” Perfect stranger. Lived up the street. Talk about good luck.

I’d been in a number of bands, and I wasn’t really looking to form a new one at that time, because I had two young daughters to raise. The guys kept pushing to turn what we were doing into a “real” band. And that’s where the “no restrictions” thing kind of ended. Because the only way I was going to do that was if we played original material. Even though I enjoyed getting together with the guys and bashing out any number of songs by artists we loved just for the love of it, I had absolutely no interest in being in a cover band. So, in that sense, I immediately imposed what I would call a good restriction on what we were doing. To my surprise, they agreed! The timing turned out to be good, because I was coming out of a fallow period and writing a lot of new material, most of which ended up on our debut album (2019’s ‘Over the Bar’). To our happy surprise, the songs on that album got good radio play on Seattle’s indie stations and we were getting enthusiastic audiences at our shows. So, we just kept at it.

The “no restrictions” thing though? The last two years of the pandemic imposed a lot of restrictions on us—just like any other band. It took us two years to get the new album done instead of one. Gigs canceled. Practice schedule, very hit and miss. There were times when the only way we could practice was to do it outside. Fortunately, we had very supportive neighbors. When it was full lockdown and all the clubs were closed, people were happy to hear live music in the neighborhood, as long as we kept the volume fairly reasonable. We had neighbors and passersby who would form these spontaneous audiences and cheer us on. That forced us to stay on our toes when we were practicing, knowing people were listening.

You’re all coming from Seattle, are you influenced by the city? How do you see the current alternative scene in Seattle?

Definitely. But it’s hard to know exactly how because wherever you live, that’s what’s normal to you. The thing about Seattle is—and it’s a bit of a cliché by now, but it’s still true—it’s a dark and rainy place for 6-7 months out of the year. Beautiful and green, for sure; but pissing rain and dark a lot of the time. So, it’s conducive to indoor activities like songwriting, playing, band practice, recording. We’re not toe gazers, but a lot of our music is pretty dark and moody. Who knows how much of that is Seattle and how much is the disturbing times we’ve been living through when we made the first three Civilians’ albums?

As for the alternate scene in Seattle… I mean, everything seems like it’s just starting to come out of hibernation right now. Indie stations like KEXP helped keep things afloat for the past couple of years during COVID, playing the local bands. There’s still lots of great indie music in Seattle, though the club scene is nothing compared to what it was in the 90s. A lot of the great venues are gone. And it feels more like an established music town now with a lot of different indie scenes. It used to be a much smaller and more cohesive scene. But, you know, Seattle used to be a cheap city to live in, too, which helped incubate an incredible music scene. It’s crazy-expensive now. People who could afford to rent entire houses thirty years ago are living in tents under I-5. Things change. Even so, there’s still a lot of great music here: The Black Tones, Thunderpussy. Mudhoney still turns in great shows whenever they decide it’s time to remind everyone that there’s at least one great grunge band left that can still fire up a mosh pit. Going back a bit, The Fleet Foxes. Shabazz Palaces. Ben Gibbard streamed all those great solo At Home shows during the pandemic, keeping people’s spirits up. Seattle’s still a great music town. A hot, overpriced mess, but still a great music town in spite of itself.

Your upcoming third full-length album, ‘Lush and Tumble’ will be released on August 5, and features guest artist Steve Nieve, Elvis Costello’s longtime keyboardist, on the single ‘Harder than the Truth’. How was it to work with Nieve?

Wonderful. He’s a lovely, gracious guy. Totally down-to-earth. And obviously, a brilliant musician. We love what he contributed to ‘Harder Than The Truth’. All of us in the band—to a man—have been huge fans of his since we were teenagers. So, it was a dream come true, him playing on our album. Our friends were, like, “How did that happen?!”

Well…

To give credit where it’s due, because of our bass player Jerry Cohen. Jerry had established a friendly email correspondence with Steve over the past few years, just talking music. As we were gearing up to make ‘Lush and Tumble’, Jerry asked Steve if he might be interested in playing on a track. We didn’t actually think it would happen, but we figured it couldn’t hurt to ask. To our surprise, Steve said he’d consider it if he liked the band—which, up to that point, he hadn’t heard of us. So, Jerry sent him the first two albums. And… Nothing happened. We thought, “Oh, well”. I mean, it seemed like a real long shot anyway. But a few weeks later Steve emailed saying, “I love the Civilians” and that he’d be happy to play on the album. That was a big moment for us.

The only problem was that, while I’d written most of the songs for the album by that time, nothing had been recorded, because Seattle was in deep COVID lockdown. I called up our engineer Don Farwell, who runs Earwig Studio where we record. I told him what was going on and his attitude was, we’ve got to make this happen. Which, yes, we felt the same way. Long story short, I ended up going into the studio alone and recording the stem track isolated in a glassed-in vocal booth while Don worked in the control room on the other side of the studio. We recorded the vocals, my guitar parts, a basic piano track (which, of course, we wiped after Steve added his parts), and a simple programmed drumbeat, hoping that would be enough to get the idea across. We immediately sent the stem track to Steve and held our breath. Incredibly, he emailed us back in less than an hour saying he loved the song and wanted to play on it. That’s when it hit me that this thing was actually going to happen.

A couple of weeks later, Steve sent us a fleshed-out recording, with perfectly intertwined piano, Vox organ, and Mellotron parts. Just… beautiful stuff. Up until this point all of our interactions with him had been emailing and uploading tracks—us in Seattle, Steve in France. But when it came time to record the piano solo, he reached out and said he wanted to work directly with me, the songwriter, and could we jump on a video conference call with me and Jerry and talk through ideas and takes as he was recording the solo?

On the day of the session, we clicked on the link and… There’s Steve sitting at the piano, introducing himself, telling us how much he likes the song. We were so excited to meet him, of course, but also very conscious of not wanting to go all fanboy on him. He was very, very nice but it was clear he wanted to interact with us musicians, not as super fans. And that was just fine with us.

For the next hour or so, he ran through one solo idea after another. All his takes were really good but, as Jerry said later, “Somewhere around take four it was like he suddenly hit the Steve Nieve button and went into orbit”. Which was true. You really could see him, you know, just achieve lift off when he’d dialed in on exactly what he wanted to do. He’d do a take and we’d think, that’s a keeper. Then he’d say, “If you guys have time, there’s another idea I’d like to try”. Are you kidding me? Yes, we have time. He was completely cool to work with, very generous with his time and his ideas. When the session ended, Jerry and I were looking at each other, like, did that actually just happen”?

Anyway, what you hear on the album is my original stem track with all Steve’s parts nicely dialed in and the rest of the band overdubbed later. A very COVID-style approach, but I think it turned out great. And what an amazing experience.

“My best songs are always the result of discovery not dictation”

How do you usually approach songwriting and what was the creative process particularly for ‘Lush and Tumble’?

My best songs are always the result of discovery not dictation. So, I try to write songs from my subconscious as much as possible. In practical terms, that means that when an idea comes, I get as much of it down as quickly as possible and worry later about editing and exact meaning. I always end up doing a lot of fine tuning after the fact, but if I try to dictate the narrative to a new song as it comes to me, the whole thing goes right into the ditch.

Over time I’ve learned to capture however much of the song comes to me as soon as it comes. Sometimes it’s a little, sometimes it’s a lot. But even if it’s just one good line that seems like it could be the start of a much bigger idea, or a cool lick or catchy chord progression … whatever … write it down. Record it on Voice Memo. Take what comes. And see what happens next. Sometimes it’s a surprisingly fast and easy process, sometimes it’s frustratingly slow.

Something that’s worked for me many times when I’ve been stuck is to deliberately shake things up by using different open tunings or switching over to the piano to break away from the patterns I fall into on guitar. Throwing yourself into the deep end of the pool and having to play chord fingerings other than tried-and-true favorites is a great way to play something unexpected and useful. Deliberately disorienting yourself and having to find your way can lead to good things.

That’s the basic approach I’ve taken to writing all our albums. But one big thing that changed for ‘Lush and Tumble’ is that I wrote nearly half the album on piano. The upside of being in lockdown with a piano! It helped me to write in new ways and break out of my guitar ruts. Then when I’d jump back to the guitar, it felt a lot fresher. Even the songs I wrote on guitar, I’d teach myself how to play on piano, just for the fun of it. It was inspiring to mix things up like that.

How’s this last year under lockdown been for you? Have you found the isolation creatively challenging or freeing?

Both, for sure. It was freeing as a songwriter, spending more time at home with the guitars and the piano. I got a lot of very focused writing time during the lockdown, and the songs were coming to me. Overall, I had more time to read and listen to music, which helps refill the creative tank. For me, playing and writing music didn’t feel like a chore; it was a saving grace in the middle of a scary, claustrophobic time.

And of course, one of the reasons Steve Nieve was able to play on the album was that he was in lockdown too and had time to do some beautiful, in-depth work on the song ‘Harder Than The Truth’ over the period of several weeks.

The challenging side? Nothing that every band in the world hasn’t gone through in the last two years. Trying to hold a group together and get an album done in the middle of a pandemic was very, very difficult. Fortunately, there were a number of things that helped us to keep going: First, though it was taking longer than we liked, we believed in the album we were making. Then when Steve Nieve turned up, that was a big morale boost. And we continued to get played on Seattle’s indie radio stations. Somehow things held together despite the craziness of the times. So, here we are—finally—with a new album.

How would you compare it to your previous album, ‘Straight In/Straight Out’ or your debut album, ‘Over the Bar’? What are some of the main changes?

As the songwriter, that’s hard for me to answer in some ways, because all the songs feel more or less like a continuum of my own experience. Even though we were slowed down by the pandemic making this last record, for me, there wasn’t any significant break in writing and recording over the last five years of making the first three Civilians’ albums.

But, as I mentioned earlier, one significant change on the new record is that I play piano on four of the songs, and don’t play any guitar at all on three of those four. Up until now, I’d played guitar on all our songs. Though I’m a guitar player first, I found it helpful to write more on the piano this time around. It made me approach songs in new ways. It helped me sing in new ways.

The band embraced that flexibility, too. We all have our primary roles, but Doug, Jerry, and Kam also play multiple instruments. So, Kam and Jerry swapped out on the song ‘Darling’, with Jerry playing some very tasty guitar and Kam holding down the fort on bass (Kam is a super solid bass player in his own right). Meanwhile, Doug divided his time between his usual guitar duties and playing more keyboards. I think that flexibility helped to diversify our sound and keep things fresh. It wasn’t rigorously planned out or anything; we just instinctively configured our parts based on what worked best for any given song. And since we weren’t playing live, we weren’t that concerned about how to make it all work on stage. (Now that we’re finally able to play shows again we’re sorting all that out.)

‘Lush and Tumble’ is also the first of our albums where I overdubbed nearly all the lead vocals, recording over my guide vocals. Our engineer Don Farwell and I also recorded the vocals working one-on-one for the first time ever with nobody else in the studio. Initially we had to work that way because of COVID restrictions, but I was already keen to be more focused about the process. No disrespect to the guys, but by the third album I was ready to remove myself out of the fishbowl of recording vocals with four bandmates looking on from the control room. I think that change helped me to stretch as a singer. I’m a confident singer, but even so it made me less self-conscious not having a roomful of people there.

I think ‘Lush and Tumble’ is our best album yet, but the other albums more than hold their own. These first three albums feel like a trilogy to me—not in any sort of concept album way—but as a cohesive body of work that progresses very naturally from one to the next.

What was the studio process like for you? Who was the producer?

I love the recording studio. I can’t get enough of it. It’s a place where you can create the world you want to live in—at least sonically. It’s kind of the ultimate creative sanctuary. The studio process was a bit different this time because, unlike the first album and most of the second album, we couldn’t always record the basic tracks live as a unit. With the pandemic, we sometimes had to work in smaller combinations of players and layer tracks up. When the lockdown eased up a bit last fall, we went back in as a full ensemble and recorded a bunch of the songs again live—kind of like an A/B test. Ultimately, we recorded a lot of the songs twice between the two different approaches. It wasn’t exactly efficient or inexpensive, but we ended up with a lot of good stuff to choose from. So, we basically cherry picked the best sounding takes from both approaches. Not at all the way we planned to make the album originally, but we did what we had to do to keep working and developing the record despite the pandemic.

Producer: The album was produced by Don Farwell and me at Earwig Studios in Seattle. Don has engineered all three Civilians’ albums to date. Over the course of five years and three albums, he and I have developed an increasingly collaborative working relationship in the studio—and he works well with everyone in the band. Don’s a great engineer and an excellent musician. So, you can collaborate with him on a lot of levels.

As the songwriter, I’m completely obsessed with the details of production, and very hands-on when it comes to mixing tracks. Don and I are pretty much connected at the elbow throughout the mixing process. I’ve got good ears, but I don’t have his technical chops. I do other stuff, like wrangle all the scheduling logistics with the band and the session dates and put together detailed production sheets for each session, so everyone knows what we’re doing—or at least what we’re trying to do. So, we make a good team.

It’s incredibly important to work with someone like Don who can talk to anyone in the band and be straight with them about what’s working and what’s not (including me). We’re all old friends and that’s one of the band’s great strengths, but The Civilians can sometimes be like working with your brothers—for good and for ill. So, it’s helpful to work with a guy like Don who’s close to the band but still outside the group, and who everybody listens to and respects.

What’s next for you? Are you planning to play some gigs?

Yes. We’ve just started playing out live again in Seattle and have shows booked for spring and summer to support the new album, including an album release show in August. We love playing live and have missed it a lot the last couple of years, where we’ve only been able to do streaming shows (which we did for the release of our second album ‘Straight In / Straight Out’) and a few outdoor gigs. It’s been great to get back at it. We sold out our first show of 2022 a week before the gig. Smaller venue, but still!

Let’s end this interview with some of your favorite albums. Have you found something new lately you would like to recommend to our readers?

Oh, man. So many to choose from! I want to do something new, but I want to start with something re-discovered. I recently finished reading the Neil Young biography Shakey, which reanimated my eternal love of Neil Young, particularly those incredible 70s albums with Crazy Horse (‘Tonight’s the Night’, ‘On the Beach’, ‘Zuma’, ‘Rust Never Sleeps’). Those are albums I’ll never fall out of love with. Rough around the edges, brilliant songs, great musical chemistry. So, I’ve been diving back into them for the first time in years and discovering all sorts of new things. Most of the great 60s bands were either broken up or petering out creatively by the early/mid 70s. Somehow Neil Young kept the great work coming throughout that decade.

More current stuff: The Black Tones new Sub Pop single ‘The End of Everything’ is astonishingly good, just a barnburner, piss-ripper of a song. And while it’s not brand-brand-new, their debut album ‘Cobain & Cornbread’ is one of the best records to come out of Seattle in recent years. It was my go-to, morale-boost album during the COVID lockdown when Seattle was a scary ghost town. And man, can they bring it live. If you get a chance to see them, don’t miss it.

Thank you for taking your time. Last word is yours.

Thank you, Klemen. My bandmates and I are very happy to be in It’s Psychedelic Baby. We love the way your magazine honors both older music and new music and understands the connections. Whether it’s something that’s come before or something brand new, there’s always great music waiting to be discovered. You guys get that, and it’s a beautiful thing. Cheers from Seattle!

Klemen Breznikar

Headline photo: Mackenzie Glisson

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