Evan Patterson is a musician based in Louisville, KY, who fronts the band Young Widows and performs solo as Jaye Jayle; Brian Cook is a Seattle-based musician who plays bass in the bands SUMAC and Russian Circles. Young Widows just released their first record in over a decade, Power Sucker, and SUMAC’s collaborative record with Moor Mother, The Film, will be out April 25. To celebrate, Evan and Brian got on a Zoom call to catch up about it all.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Evan Patterson: Hey, Brian.
Brian Cook: How are you doing?
Evan: Doing well. Drinking a beer and coffee at the same time.
Brian: Oh, nice. Two beverage look. I’m going straight coffee.
Evan: It’s a little earlier for you.
Brian: Yeah. But I did hit my pen earlier, so I am dealing with at least two levels of chemical enhancement.
Evan: Perfect. I’m surprised you’re not on tour.
Brian: I mean, I got home earlier this week, so. We’re trying to figure out when we’re leaving for Europe in a couple of weeks, because we have to rehearse, but when you have one Canadian member rehearsing all that stuff gets kind of complicated. Everyone’s getting slightly nervous about border crossings, on top of the usual nervousness. Shit’s getting weird, man. It’s a weird time.
Evan: It is very strange. But, you know, can’t hold us down, right?
Brian: Yeah.
Evan: Hopefully.
Brian: Well, we were talking about the new Jaye Jayle album, and you were saying that you felt like you needed to write an angry record again. And then Young Widows decided to work on a record.
Evan: Yeah, it worked out pretty seamlessly to go from After Altar into Young Widows, because I was kind of like, Are these just Young Widows songs that I’m making for Jaye Jayle? Is that a strange thing to do? But they’re very different, I feel like, looking back on them.
Brian: I do feel like, between Power Sucker and Easy Pain — not to get too analytical here, but it feels like those were gnarlier records, after the general Young Widow’s trajectory seemed to be more towards tension and restraint. And then you started Jaye Jayle, which is all tension and restraint.
Evan: Yeah, that outlet has been very fulfilled. And I think that’s apparent on the record. On Power Sucker, there’s not really much tension building. There’s a little bit, but it’s pretty against the wall.
Brian: I always feel good when older — not to say you’re old, but, you know, we’re old. [Laughs.]
Evan: [Laughs.] We’re old, yeah.
Brian: I’m happy when older people make abrasive and and gnarly music, especially after demonstrating that they have the capability of also not doing that. It’s a good reassurance that this always came from a very genuine place.
Evan: I felt the same with you doing SUMAC. Not that Russian Circles is not a heavy band, but it’s a completely different beast. The unhinged ferocity of SUMAC compared to Russian Circles is very, very different, you know?
Brian: Yeah. I think there was something similar there, too, because it always felt like the Circles’ trajectory was towards more cinematic or tonally diverse territory until we started working on Gnosis. And then Mike [Sullivan] was very much like, “No, I want to make an all heavy record.”
Evan: It seems like you have a really nice way of balancing your home life and still being able to travel.
Brian: Well, it’s not without its struggles. I think as we get older, you realize that a lot of the things that you’re like, That looks like that operates perfectly and smoothly — you look at other artists who are maybe a little older, who have helped lay some of the groundwork, and you’re like, These people have it figured out — then as you get to know them and see their world, it’s like, Oh, man, you still don’t have this figured out. No one has any of this figured out.
Evan: Yeah. I think enjoying your company, who you’re on tour with and who you’re playing music with, is key. I feel like I’m always seeing bands who are playing with or opening for other bands that I’m not that close with and I’m like, Are these guys friends? It’s kind of the only reason why I’m still able to keep touring the way I am and playing music the way I am.
Brian: I mean, I remember when you did that three month tour back in 2019 — I was just like, “Oh, man, I hope Evan survives through all this.”
Evan: I almost didn’t. The cap at the end of it was — I made a song about it — that time when someone pulled an Uzi out on us on the highway. I felt like I had a mental breakdown after that point. I was like, What am I doing? I shouldn’t be here in the van, driving around. I need to be creating art and not just sitting in vans and venues and playing shows for an hour every day.
Brian: I mean, I love touring and I do love playing live, and the idea of making music and not playing live doesn’t seem nearly as fulfilling. I do like that real time thing where you’re making the thing happen, and there’s the possibility of it going wrong, and the song takes on its own one-time magic. But there’s also the trade off when you only tour; it’s like having a shitty Christmas every day, where I get to do the thing I want to do, but it’s diminishing returns after a certain point.
Evan: Yeah. The exciting aspect — you know, there’ll be times when I’m like, “We haven’t messed up a song in three weeks!” And then we have a part where something goes wrong, and I’m like, “That was incredible.” Like, I felt nervous and scared and we had to figure out how to make it work again. It’s made me think about over-rehearsing. It’s kind of been nice because, just as an example, this Young Widows tour, we’re going to be playing the new album and we’ve been rehearsing it. But none of the songs I sang and played guitar when we wrote them — I just sang on it after we recorded. So four weeks ago was the first time I was playing four or five of these songs. So I’m going into this and it’s a little loose. Three shows in, then I’m sure I’ll be fine. But it’s more exciting that way to not be totally programmed going into this tour. There’s a bit of, Am I going to mess this up? I don’t know. It would probably be fun if I mess it up a little bit.
Brian: That shit always makes me think of the Rush thing, how they still play “Tom Sawyer” at every concert, and they’re like, “The best thing about ‘Tom Sawyer’ is we still fuck it up, like, 80% of the time.” So it’s still a challenge and they’re still figuring it out.
Evan: I’m not a Rush fan, but that doc is fantastic.
Brian: I’ve always been a casual Rush fan, and I remember watching that and being like, “I fucking love Rush. When is Rush on tour again?” I looked online and I was like, “Oh, shit, they’re playing in Seattle in like two weeks. Who do I know that has a connection to Rush?” And I found someone, like, six degrees of separation from Rush that could get me in. So I was like, “I’m gonna go see Rush, it’s gonna be awesome.” And then it was, you know, two-and-a-half hours.
Evan: Yeah, more than an hour of a band anymore, I feel like I’m just exhausted. I’ve been at more shows than most people, but it’s these two-and-a-half hour sets…
Brian: It’s gotta be seated at that point.
Evan: Yeah. I went to see Steely Dan once, and I didn’t like it at all. At a certain point I was like, “I’m not really getting into this at all. Let’s just leave.” But a $140 ticket and I’m going to leave halfway through?
Brian: Steely Dan would be another tough one, because that’s another sort of Rush thing where there’s parts of that catalog that I really enjoy, but if you just did a total Russian roulette of the Steely Dan or Rush discography, the odds are it’s like, “Yeah, this isn’t my jam.”
Evan: Yeah. There was a bunch of hot dog drum solo things happening, and I was like, “This is a little too much.” Just stick to the songs, guys. [Laughs.]
Brian: I just watched a yacht rock documentary on the way home from this tour last week, and I have a definite soft spot for a lot of that music, even though a lot of it to me is really just designed to be background music. But it’s a struggle for me listening to someone talk at length about Steely Dan. I get that they’re phenomenal musicians and that these are once-in-a-lifetime takes, and the amount of scrutiny that these musicians were under, and the level of discipline and the malleability — I get that these are peak performances by peak musicians, and that should make it something that we all put on a pedestal. But also, that hasn’t been my M.O. since I was, like, 12.
Evan: [Laughs.] It was never my M.O. It’s a confusing thing, [when] a normal kind of civilian person that wants to talk to me about playing guitar. My partner has been with me a couple times, and she’s just like, “Evan doesn’t play normal guitar.” I just never had interest in it. I never had interest of playing cover songs or just doing the major chord structures. To me, as soon as I started doing that, I was like, “This is extremely boring.”
Brian: Yeah.
Evan: And there’s no way for me to possibly explain it to you if you’re just now learning how to play guitar. It’s such a wild instrument, though. I’m still having fun playing it.
Brian: I remember talking with Nick [Sadler] from Daughters at one point, and he was like, “I just feel like I’ve figured out guitar. Like, I’ve mastered it, there’s nowhere else to go with it.” Part of me just had to chuckle. And I also know Nick well enough to understand what he was really trying to say. But I think for me at age 47, with my instrument, I’m so untrained that there’s still so much that I could improve upon or learn. And every so often, it’ll be like, “I’m tired of playing guitar this way, I should probably learn something about Travis picking,” because I think Travis picking sounds really cool. Or it’s like, “Now I really like tremolo picking on guitar, I should probably learn how people actually do that shit.”
Evan: I mean, that was that was the thing with Jaye Jayle. I think the only reason it started is because I decided I wanted to stop using a pick. That was the whole thing: “I don’t want to use a pick anymore, I’m just going to write some finger claw hammer style, whatever.” I don’t even know what I’m doing, I’m also completely untrained. I still have a hard time even being like, “Which note? Where is it?” Some days, it’s not quick, and other days I can look at my guitar and see every single pattern perfectly. But it’s not a trained aspect at all. And learning how to finger pick and be able to use drone notes in a way that you can’t do with a guitar pick is super exciting. It changes things.
This is something I was thinking about to ask you: I feel we have a similarity in that our interest in music is not purely in hardcore, punk rock or metal or country or folk or experimental music or electronic music. If you were solely the songwriter of a band — I mean, it seems to me it would be clearly more along the lines of Torment & Glory [Brian’s solo project].
Brian: Well, there’s probably a parallel with Jaye Jayle, but I think a lot of the Torment & Glory record is just that if I’m going to play guitar, it’s like, “Do I want to set up my pedalboard and my amp?” I’ve always lived in apartments, and there’s a certain immediacy to an acoustic guitar where you just pick it up and you play it. And I love how once you have an acoustic guitar and a voice, then you can have a full song — which is a lot harder to do on a bass guitar, or at least to make it compelling.
And now you see a lot of people with modular synths, or laptop artists, where they’re able to compose these worlds with these newer technologies. But with modular stuff, it still seems so like you’re wrestling with the machine. Which is cool, but also sometimes the machine’s going to win. The level of intent that you put into it isn’t necessarily going to help yield certain results. And a lot of electronic music — from a compositional standpoint it’s really cool, but from an actual real time performance thing, it just doesn’t seem quite as gratifying as being immediately responsible for every sound.
Evan: I agree. And while there’s a performance aspect to it, the triggering and everything else, there’s something about seeing someone playing an instrument that I’ve always liked.
Brian: I think another thing, too: there’s a certain amount of mystery that I really like in music, where it’s like, “Oh, shit, how are they doing this thing? How did they write this? How are they performing it?” Versus music that’s so outside of the realm of my interest or expertise, that’s just kind of like, “I don’t know how this is happening, but there’s not enough there to actually pique my interest.” Like, I can listen to Aphex Twin and I’m fully aware that this guy is a fucking mastermind and a genius. But I don’t listen to Aphex Twin and then want to go pick up an instrument, because it’s just a totally different tool set. It’s so outside of my realm of music-making and how that process works, that I don’t feel like I walk away from it with inspiration at all.
Evan: Yeah. It’s funny, I’d never messed around with electronic music until the Prisyn album. And since then, I do it mostly when I’m traveling. I sit in the van and makes songs, and I really enjoy it. Last year at some point, it was like nine days of not being able to do anything, and I just sat with my headphones and made a bunch of songs. I’m making another electronic album. I’ve kind of found it really gratifying making the drum beats. It’s such an enjoyable process. It would be so difficult to explain to a drummer, “This is the drum beat that I’m thinking of.” Instead, I can just program it and be like, “Here’s a drum beat that would take me three sessions with a drummer to get to a place where I would like it to be.” I don’t know if you have messed around with doing any of that, on Pro Tools or GarageBand or anything.
Brian: I have. I started on Logic and did a whole instructional course with it and got to the point where I was like, “I feel like I have my head wrapped around this.” And then when I was actually trying to impose my will into recording on it, I just felt like I was constantly reverting to YouTube to try to figure things out. And this part of the process just isn’t me. I don’t like the technical process of it. And then I switched over to GarageBand, and for whatever reason, I found that more difficult to wrangle. So now I’m back to using Logic. But even then, I finally just bought a fucking Tascam 424 old school four-track, because it’s like, “This is just how my brain works.”
Evan: I have a Tascam four-track also that someone recently gave me, and I’m just like, “What should I do with this?” I’m trying to figure it out.
Also, what you said about the acoustic guitar — I’ve had friends that told me, “You know, I just don’t play the guitar as much as I used to.” And I’m like, “Do you keep your guitar out all the time?” And they’re just like, “No, I always put in the case.” I’m like, “You can’t have a guitar in a case and then go to pull it out of the case and play it and put it back in the case.” You’re not going to do anything productive. Just that process alone, being able to grab an acoustic guitar — I have this arch top that I really love, and it’s like, just grab it and play. And honestly, just playing for 15 minutes, so many things happen. It’s such a wonderful thing to have an instrument there that sounds good that you can play and write and make music with.
Brian: I think that’s a big thing with just even picking out an instrument. I look at the rumble room in a Guitar Center, and it’s just like, “Dude, this is so depressing.” I can’t imagine seeing any of these basses on my guitar rack and being compelled to pick it up. But the random stuff I do have, it’s just always there like, “You can play me anytime!” It’s always enticing. So I think that’s a big part of it. And I never schedule two hours to sit down and play an instrument. It’s usually just like, “I’m not ready to make dinner yet.”
Evan: Yeah. Pulling it out would take away a little bit of that creativity magic. To me, that’s what getting together as a band is for, and writing at home is just spontaneous.
Brian: With Widows, I’ve always assumed that it’s a group endeavor, but it seems like there’s at least a creative center where someone is like, “Hey, it would be really cool if I did this, and you did this and you did this.” And so on some level, that seems like a harder thing to wrangle when you go into a practice and you’re just bouncing ideas off of each other.
Evan: Yeah. I mean, Widows early on — and especially In and Out of Lightness, I was a real stickler of a songwriter for that one. But with Easy Pain and Power Sucker it was kind of like, “Write a drum beat, come to practice with it, and we’ll write something to that. Honestly, it was a lot of just jamming, which was exciting. I don’t think any of it was really preconceived before we were in a room together. Actually, there was one song — “Exit Slowly” was a song Nick had made as an electronic song, kind of. He was like, “I have this bassline,” and we kind of based it off of that. But pretty much every other song was just jammed in the space, which was fun. We ended up writing three songs in the studio as well, which we had never done. And I hadn’t really done that with any band, so that was fun to do.
There’s a funny little Easter egg on the album where the last song and the first song of the album are kind of the same song. The last song we wrote first, and I was like, “This is too slow. Let’s double time, speed it up.” And that’s the first song. And then we weren’t even going to record the last song, but we decided to record it.
Brian: I love that.
Evan: What’s your next tour?
Brian: SUMAC goes to Europe in a couple weeks, for Roadburn, and we’re doing a couple shows with Moor Mother. And then we’re doing The Healer in full, and it’s going to be intense. It’s going to require learning, like, two-and-a-half hours worth of music. But I know you know how that is, because you’ve done the double duties.
Evan: Yeah, the double duties. There’s actually times where I’m like, “I think I know how to play 150 songs that are all originals.” And that’s a fun thing, to feel you know how to play hundreds of songs.
Brian: But I’m also realizing — they say you can only remember eight phone numbers, and once you learn a new phone number, one of them has to go. I feel like it’s that with songs. I have to relearn most things before tour. [Laughs.]
(Photo Credit: right, AF Cortez; right, Reno Tripiano)
