Welcome to Adam Green’s Chat With Tchotchke

Adam Green is a singer-songwriter and multidisciplinary artist based in New York; Eva Chambers, Anastasia Sanchez, and Emily Tooraen are the Brooklyn-based pop band Tchotchke. Tchotchke’s latest record, Playin’ Dumb, is out tomorrow, and to celebrate, the trio got on a Zoom call and caught up about it with their friend Adam. 
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music 

Adam Green: Welcome to the chat with Tchotchke. I’m Adam Green, your interviewer and host. 

Eva Chambers: Who decided you were the host? 

Adam: Oh, wait — I thought that I was interviewing you guys.

[All of Tchotchke laughs.]

Eva: We’re interviewing each other, in a way.

Adam: Oh, really? 

Eva: But go for it, let’s do it. 

Adam: OK, so, we are interviewing each other, except I have questions for you. Just so the people are who are reading know, I first met you guys through Jackie Cohen and Foxygen. I toured with Jackie earlier, and I recorded some songs with Jonathan Rado from Foxygen. I met you guys at Ray’s Bar in New York City. You were outside and, Anastasia, I wasn’t sure if you were working there or not.

Anastasia Sanchez: I was working. I wasn’t stalking you.

Adam: You were like, “Do you want a drink?” And I was like, “Uh, I guess? Are you working here?”

Anastasia: [Laughs.] 

Adam: And then we went on tour together! We went on an American West Coast tour, which was really fun. That was a few years ago. Then you continued to make all this awesome music, and you made another album, which is coming out soon, right? It’s called Playin’ Dumb.

Emily Tooraen: Yeah!

Adam: I just learned that the album comes packaged as a board game.

Eva: It sure does.

Anastasia: Designed by Eva.

Adam: Is it a playable game?

Anastasia: We sat down and tried it out. We had a lot of different ideas and versions of it at first.

Eva: There’s 20 different cards that are going to come in the vinyl. In the vinyl, you get a 12 x 12 board game, and then you get another sheet that has the cut out cards, and then little pawns you assemble of the three girls. And then you have the rules and stuff, and all the cards are prompts based off of the songs and the characters.

Adam: I love that. So you guys have played it — who won?

Anastasia: I won. 

Emily: We’ve tried it a few times, and maybe we’ve all won at some point.

Adam: Is it a game of skill, or is it more like a game of chance? 

Eva: It’s a game of playin’ dumb.

Adam: It’s an interesting concept — I was thinking about it from listening to the record, just the idea of “playing dumb,” like in a relationship or anything. I was watching this interview with Marlon Brando, and they were asking him how he acted, and he was like, “Come on. Everyone is acting all the time. This is just something that everyone does every second of the day. There’s no one that doesn’t know how to act.” I mean, I think he’s being really generous, but it did occur to me that there’s this element of role playing in every single interaction that people have. What was the inspiration?

Eva: I think the overall concept of “playing dumb” goes along with just kind of overexaggerating every single thing. The stories are very exaggerated and the feelings are very exaggerated and hyper-femme.

Anastasia: Just, you know, stereotypical female hysteria, disturbance, desperation…

Eva: But also, a lot of fun. 

Anastasia: Yeah. It’s like, that’s us, but we’re making fun of it 

Eva: We’re in on the joke. 

Adam: I like that there is an element of play that is part of your aesthetic. Like the new video that you guys have out from the album, the “Poor Girl” song — that is set in a doll house. 

Emily: Well, kind of…

Adam: You’re like dolls in a doll house.

Emily: Sort of. We are characters, definitely. 

Anastasia: I like that it translates to that, though.

Adam: Maybe I just see that through my own eyes, because I have a doll house… But you do a lot of stuff with videos that’s really distinctive. You’re from California, largely, right? There’s kind of a Day-Glo, almost unnerving suburbia that’s in your videos. I don’t know if it’s almost David Lynch-ian, or some kind of mutated suburban sunshine-ness to it. Does that come from being Californian? I mean, is everyone in LA suburban?

Anastasia: I grew up in Eagle Rock, which is sort of an LA suburb. But I think it’s just very…

Eva: Growing up in LA in the sunshine — also, Anastasia and I went to an arts high school. But I think at this point in our lives, maybe we have a high tolerance for things that are cute or catchy. So with this album, we were like, “Let’s make it as cute and colorful and fun and crazy as possible!”

Adam: Yeah. But there is something always a little unnerving about your portrayal of it, which kind of makes it surreal. Have you ever heard that Scott Walker song “Plastic Palace People”?

Emily: I think I have.

Adam: That feeling of it — I mean, not the music, just the lyrics of it — just this sort of melting, smiling, suburban… I don’t know, it’s something I feel with your visual presentation.

Anastasia: I think there is a lot of parallels. 

Eva: I think it’s also, a lot of the visuals that were done, we kind of came up with as we were writing the album. 

Adam: So while you guys are writing a song, you’re like, “I see this picture.” 

Eva: Yeah. 

Adam: It’s actually really cool that you’re able to connect it all. And it’s funny because I think a lot about doing total artwork in my own life. Like, I made this Aladdin movie where I designed all these rooms and sets and made the soundtrack and am acting sort of as myself, in a world that’s of my own artificial design, but that’s representative of my interior landscape. I feel like you have a real totality of yourselves as also kind of avatars of your own Tchotchke landscape. There’s like a constructed universe that you guys are part of. And it almost in a way reminds me of tableau, because the staging is so theatrical.

Emily: Totally. What was really cool, too, about creating the challenges for the game — because that’s a big part of the game, you land on a spot and then you pick a card, and then you do a challenge that’s based on a song. 

Adam: What’s an example of a challenge? 

Emily: There’s a song called “Kisses,” so one of the challenges is, “Put on lipstick and give a kiss on the cheek to the player to your left.” Some of them are more difficult than others, but just actions you act out. There’s a prank call one.

Eva: But they’re all dumb.

Emily: Yeah, they’re all very silly. They really play into the whole idea of the game, and they’re very close to the song lyrics and the characters. 

Adam: There’s sort of a sleepover party atmosphere to that. It actually reminded me of — are you familiar with the band The Raincoats? 

Eva: Yeah.

Adam: There’s a Kurt Cobain quote about The Raincoats, where he said, “When I listen to The Raincoats, I feel as if I’m a stowaway in an attic, violating and in the dark. Rather than listening to them, I feel like I’m listening in on them. We’re together in the same old house and have to be completely still, or they will hear me spying from above. And if I get caught, everything will be ruined because it’s their thing. They’re playing their music for themselves. It’s not as sacred as wiretapping a Buddhist monk’s telephone or something, because if The Raincoats really did catch me, they would probably just ask me if I wanted some tea.”

Emily: Oh, I love that.

Adam: It does feel like when you listen to Tchotchke, you’re at your slumber party and you’re kind of a voyeur. It’s cool. It feels very intimate.

Eva: We want it to feel inviting and like everyone can join in, and be very relatable, hopefully. 

Anastasia: And even if it’s not relatable, something outlandish or adorable that lures you in. 

Adam: Yeah. That’s the kind of hypnotic magic, in a way, that reminds you of a feeling that you remember that you had. But even if you never had it before, maybe you just see Tchotchke and you’re like, Oh, I remember what that’s like. I myself have never been to, like, a girl slumber party.

Anastasia: Now you have!

Adam: [Laughs.] But I feel like I remember what it was like. It’s a good quality. But I also feel like something about your sound evokes a lot of the classic girl groups of the ‘60s, like The Crystals or The Ronettes.

Anastasia: I mean, they’re all hugely influential.

Adam: Lesley Gore, stuff like that. And some of the staging reminds me of a movie like Bye Bye Birdie. It seems like you have a classical and baroque approach to songwriting.

Eva: We definitely put a lot of time into that. And I think for this album, we really leaned into the girl group feel. I think just being in an all-female band for so long in general, there was kind of like, “I don’t wanna be a girl group! Why does it have to be a girl group?” And then getting older we realized there’s so much power in that. Like, we play our own instruments, we write our own songs, and we make our own artwork.

Adam: Yeah. You just realize that you just have to remove all the blocks that are preventing you from just having a good experience. So, you’re all contributing to this vision of what the band feels like, what it looks like. And more and more, you’ve been collaborative in terms of the writing process as well, right?

Anastasia: Yeah, this time around.

Adam: I was talking with Emily about how many characters there are in your songs, and I was thinking about that strain — you know, songs that with each verse introduce the listener to a new fictional character. In your song “Poor Girl,” you have Doe-Eyed Dolly and Crying Crissy and Susie Slicker, and it reminded me of these German musicals like Threepenny Opera, “Mack the Knife,” where they have all these characters. Or in a Tom Waits song — which is pretty much influenced by German musicals — or “Long Tall Sally” by Little Richard or “Run, Run, Run” by Velvet Underground. Even Highway 61 era Bob Dylan. Just things where these kind of crazy, cartoony images of these devious or naughty characters are entering into your landscape. Can you speak on that a little bit?

Anastasia: I mean, it is just very silly and it’s telling a story of spoiled brats. And as we were writing that song, we started to fit ourselves into these characters. We just thought it would be funny—

Eva: To make the worst versions of ourselves. At first, we were just gonna make it about one “poor girl,” but then it was really hard, like, “How do we choose…?” 

Adam: Oh, I see. So there’s three verses, three poor girls, and three Tchotchkes. I love that.

Eva: It was difficult to write. 

Anastasia: It was a journey, for sure. And the whole song overall musically is just a nod to the Beach Boys.

Adam: Speaking of the sunshine-ness of California, I was thinking of the Beach Boys in the way that you have oftentimes that sort of downbeat piano kind of thing. It’s very sunshine-y. I was going to say that the song “Come On, Sean” also is another really weird character, and the video enhances that. You really feel like there’s this character.

Emily: Yeah. And what’s been really cool about the videos, too, is even with the poor girls, even though their verse is really short, we still were able to build out the characters with the videos. A lot of our videos have included the characters like, “Come On, Sean,” we got to cast that with friends of ours. 

Adam: That song is really, really weird.

Emily: Yeah, it’s a wacky one. [Laughs.] 

Adam: And the video really enhances it. It’s really neat. 

So, besides touring with me, you toured with Ian Svenonius, right? 

Anastasia: Yeah, last year. 

Adam: You toured with the Lemon Twigs, you toured with The Gossip… Besides my tour, which was the best?

Eva: That was the best tour! Actually, when we were on tour with you, we almost hit a bear in the car.

Adam: No way. Oh, my god.

Eva: Have you had anything like that happen on tour?

Adam: I mean, probably the craziest tour thing that happened to me was — and this is a much longer story than this interview could have — I slept-walked off my tour bus and I had to hitchhike through Belgium in the middle of the night.

Anastasia: [Laughs.] That’s scary. That’s, like, the most Adam Green shit I’ve ever heard.

Adam: I hitchhiked from Belgium to Lyon, France.

Emily: Well, that must have been fun, in a way.

Adam: Yeah, it was pretty wild. I just kind of blacked out and ended up leaving the bus. And they didn’t know I was gone, so I woke up on the highway with my pajamas on.

Eva: Is that when you wrote “Blackout”?

Anastasia: I was literally about to say!

Adam: No, it was in my 20s. But, in a way, it made me stronger. 

Emily: Of course.

Adam: Now I know that if I’m ever in my pajamas in a gas station in Belgium, I can get to France. 

Anastasia: I wish we could do stuff like that. We would be kidnapped.

Adam: Yeah, hopefully you don’t have to.

Eva: We read an interview that you did probably around then, because I think you were in your late 20s — which is our age — and you said, “I haven’t done anything close to what I ever wanted to do yet, and it’s horrifying.”

Adam: Oh, yeah.

Eva: We’ve definitely had that feeling of impending doom. So at this point now, do you feel like you’ve made something you’re really proud of completely?

Adam: Yeah. I mean, I think I’m not as hard on myself about things anymore. But, of course, there’s the little version of yourself and the big version of yourself. The little version of myself is like, “Wow, it’s so neat I got to do all these different projects and albums and it’s so fun. I really got to excavate so much of myself and put it in the outside world.” Then I can have moments where I’m like, “Yeah, that’s completely useless.” Maybe you have this as a songwriter where sometimes you’re writing a melody and it’s cool and you’re like, “That’s good.” And then you might even be like, “I could do better.” And then probably there’s a point where you’d be like, “That is good enough.” But then somehow, there is always somebody in you that’s like, “Yeah, you could have pushed it further. A really, really, really, really smart person would have been able to reach a little bit further.” You know what I mean? Like, how do you write “God Only Knows”? The melody to that is very, very expansive. He could have just had it be the beginning of the melody and been like, “That’s good enough.” But he kept going to get that really long, great melody… Of course, in life you don’t always reach as far as you can, but sometimes you do. That’s what’s cool about just making up a lot of stuff. Because I like to make a lot of things, and I think sometimes I get a really good thing, and then sometimes I just get something that’s cool for me for right now. 

And if you want a psychological profile experiment of how not to behave to yourself, it’s me in my 20s. I was really terrible to myself. I mean, I was not so great to other people, and I was not good to myself. I was a drug addict, you know? I think it’s good to not become a hater of your own productions. Because you make them for yourself — that’s the first and foremost thing. I was almost thinking of it recently like it’s like kind of like tai chi. It’s like a meditation, but it’s also a martial art. A lot of times, we make art and it’s just for our meditation, for ourselves. And then sometimes it’s for other people — it’s framed, it’s produced, it’s manufactured, it’s distributed. So I enjoy that idea that, regardless of whether or not I had a really good idea or just an OK one, it’s part of a lifelong constant exercise and meditation, world-building, just being creative every day.

Emily: Completely. I feel like you’ve definitely created a very distinguishable world. Just seeing a lot of your artwork and seeing Aladdin, I feel like you’re definitely someone who has perfected that. 

Adam: Emily, you mentioned that the song “Davide” — and tell me if I’m wrong — it’s like a waltz written from the perspective of a pill?

Eva: Yes.

Adam: How do you guys come up with the pill-perspective song idea?

Eva: That one, my Uncle Beaver, who is a genius — literally, he’s part of Mensa — he’s also an opera singer — over the years, I’ve asked him for little prompts or ideas for songs, because he’s super creative, and one of them was, “Go out and just make up an entire story up about someone you don’t know.” And then I saw this bartender in a loose white shirt and we were like, “Davide.” And I just wrote. But then we switched it to, “Let’s have the pill singing to him and seducing him.” We have so many love songs so we were like, “OK, how do you not make it romantic?”

Anastasia: We love love. 

Adam: That’s important, though, because it’s important to take something classic like romance and then balance it with something unexpected. I mean, if you’re sensitive to that it’s a contrived idea, it just rolls off. It’s like toilet paper, honestly. It just goes out the other — or, it’s worse than toilet paper.

Anastasia: It’s like food-to-poop.

Eva: This album was really food-to-poop.

Emily: Stop!

Eva: [Laughs.] We set up a thing where, even if we were writing, we were like, “We’re not gonna go for more than four hours,” because your brain is just fried at that point.

Adam: Smart… My wife Yasmin saw a concert of a Japanese pop star called Hatsune Miku, which is a hologram, and the fans write the songs. So it’s like being in an arena watching a hologram, and then the community has written the songs. It’s crazy. Do you see a possibility that Tchotchke could have its own integration with the metaverse? Like, you guys could be avatars in a metaverse holographic presentation?

Eva: The Tchotchke-verse. 

Adam: You guys are pretty analog.

Eva: Yeah, we’ve got our paper board games…

Emily: The album was recorded on tape. 

Eva: A computer did not touch the album. We mastered that shit from the tape to the vinyl. 

Adam: I think it’s probably a happier way to go.

Anastasia: What about you? You are so easy to make as an avatar, with the hat and the striped shirt.

Eva: Yeah, talk about character building. 

Adam: You know, what’s crazy is, I bought this hat from this place called Greenpoint Sailor Company or something, in our neighborhood. I was kind of expecting to see a bunch of people dressed like me walking around the neighborhood now that there’s a store that started selling my outfit to people…

Anastasia: We’ve talked about being you for Halloween before. All three of us.

Adam: Please! [Laughs.] Well, I love your baroque commitment to analog. I think that’s beautiful, and definitely will bring you more happiness than the other way around.