All December, Radio Milwaukee is paying tribute to our favorite Milwaukee releases of 2020 and speaking with the musicians who made them. This is Milwaukee Music's 20 of 2020, presented by Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin.
On their 2018 debut " We Can Live Here Forever," Barely Civil catalogued the anxieties of recent high school graduates: moving to new cities, starting college, saying goodbye to childhood relationships and wrestling with what you want to do and who you want to be -- concerns that seem tiny in the greater scope of life but monumental in the moment. It was a grounded album that never overstated its very ordinary stakes, so perceptive that its best songs felt like diary entries from a life I'd forgotten I'd lived.
Plenty of others related to it as well. The record was a big deal in the niche corners of the internet that follow independent emo -- which is to say it wasn't all that big of a deal, but it landed on the right ears. The album made Barely Civil one of the marquee acts on their label Take This To Heart, won them fans at Stereogum, and set them up for tours with bands like Mess, The Sonder Bombs and The Future Teens.
With their sophomore album " I'll Figure This Out," the Milwaukee act capitalized on that momentum. Recorded with The World is a Beautiful Place's Chris Teti at his Connecticut studio, it's grander and heavier than its predecessor, yet no less devoted to taking seriously life's most pedestrian quandaries and validating feelings that other songwriters overlook. Turns out that scale flatters this band.
We spoke with frontman Connor Erickson and drummer Isaac Marquardt about "I'll Figure This Out," Barely Civil's inauspicious beginnings as a Green Day cover band, and how Milwaukee left its mark on one of the new album's most personal songs.
Your debut album "We Can Live Here Forever" felt like a record that found its intended audience. It got great reviews and really glowing write-ups from the kind of outlets that care about this kind of music. Did the response to that first album change your approach going forward for the second one?
Connor: I think the response from the first record made us way more confident going into the second one. It was sort of like a green light to do what we wanted to do and to make what we wanted to make without concern for whether or not people were going to be into it. I think with that first record, we didn't really have any expectations of what would happen. But even without expectations, I think it surpassed any expectations we could have had. So it definitely just made us way more confident as a group. I mean, we were young when that record came out.
Isaac: Yeah, we were, what, 18 when we recorded that? Ben had just turned 18, fresh out of high school, and we had just finished our first or second year of college. And we had put out an EP that we recorded when we were in high school earlier that year that didn't get like any kind of response at all from anyone on the internet. So we came into it without any kind of real expectations for press or reception, and it surpassed all of those expectations by a long shot.
When I think of anything I did at age 18, there's like very little that I'm proud of and would want the world to see today. I feel like some bands need a few years in obscurity before anybody hears what they're doing because they're not ready. But now something you wrote as teenagers is part of your permanent record. Do you worry about feeling like in a few years it might not represent you?
Connor: It's one of those things where I'm always going to stand by that record. I think it was a good record. I think it when compared to our new record “I'll Figure This Out,” it definitely sounds like a younger record. It feels like it was written by younger people, but I stand by it. You know, these records are supposed to be sort of representations of where we are in life at that point in time. And “We Can Live Here Forever” is just as much a representation of who we were when we were when we were 18 years old as “I'll Figure This Out” is of us as young adults in our early twenties. And for that reason, I don't think I'll ever feel like “We Can Live Here Forever” doesn’t have a place in our discography.
Isaac: I think the thing about “We Can Live Here Forever” is that even though it's the first thing that we really put anything out into the world, it is the product of having quite a few years to develop because the first draft of this band started when we were like 14 and we were a Green Day cover band, and then we listened to Explosions in the Sky
When you look at the two records, the thread that binds them is they both capture a very distinct and very short period of your life where you go through a lot of change. “We Can Live Here Forever” captures that anxiety of leaving your hometown behind and heading out in the world for college, which is in the scheme of your life really just a blip. And it's the same thing with “I'll Figure This Out,” where there’s the sense of being in college, wondering where you’re going to end up and not feeling rooted. Is that something you deliberately set out to do with this band, try to document these phases?
Connor: It’s not something we sat down and talked about at any point, I think it just came very naturally. I think we're all almost to a fault very sentimental people, and I think when we feel change, we feel it very intensely. And I think because of that being our nature, that became the nature of our music and definitely the nature of me as like a lyric writer. So while it wasn’t something we sort of discussed or came to any conclusions on, it's definitely something that we've been very comfortable with. And I think that the most sincere music that we can make is sort of exploring those big moments, or what feel like big moments in our lives. I think if we weren't talking about that, I don't know what we would be talking about.
It’s funny because I'm in my thirties, so you’re writing about this phase of life that's already quite distant for me. You’re writing from a perspective of being in the moment and wondering how everything is going to work out, but as a listener, I’m hearing these songs like, “I know exactly how this works out” because I’ve already been down that road. Listening to these songs, it’s almost like I have a foresight that you don’t.
Connor: I think that's why “I’ll Figure This Out” has had sort of the momentum it has. It’s because I feel like there is sort of this appeal to people in our position and people who have been in our position. And I take a lot of pride in that. I think it's one of those things where again, like if we weren't talking about real lives and what we're really experiencing, I don't know what we'd be talking about. And honestly, we’re not particularly extraordinary people. We’re not living unique lives by any means. Our experiences are sort of universal experiences and we're just talking about that and sort of trying to like create a dialogue with people who are also experiencing those things and trying to comfort those feelings.
I feel like you write about periods in your life that nobody warns you are going to suck
Connor: Absolutely. Feeling that sort of torrential downpour of responsibility and genuine fear for what’s to come is definitely something that we were hit by, and it wasn't something that we anticipated and it wasn't something that we had any room to prepare for. When it hit, it hit really hard. And so I think writing this record, it came very naturally. This record was definitely for me easier than writing our first record. I think that this one just felt like everything I had wanted to say and everything I was thinking, and it came very naturally, primarily because everything just kind of hit us all at once, and I think a lot of people are experiencing that, especially right now with the world how it is. Even people that aren't just fresh out of college are feeling a lot of uncertainty right now, which is scary, but I guess it sort of works out for us.
The album title, “I’ll Figure This Out,” is that meant to be an optimistic sentiment? That's how I read it. Like you're dealing with this period of great uncertainty and all these unknowns and you don't know what the answer is, but you'll figure it out, because that’s just what you do.
Connor: Absolutely. The album title came about after we finished the record.
Isaac: Yeah, it was on the drive back to Wisconsin from the studio in Connecticut.
Connor: We were sort of just like discussing what we wanted to call the record. And we were thinking about the music itself and what that music represented, and I don't think that the music on the record poses any answers. But I think what every song contributes is meditation and consideration on all these topics that are sort of me as a lyricist and us as a band working through these issues. And so I think the album title is definitely is an optimistic sort of sentiment and it's something that we all sort of needed at the time.
Now that a little bit of time has passed, do you feel like you have figured any of this out?
Connor: No
Can you guys talk a little bit about your relationship with Milwaukee? You’re here now, but you’re not from the city. What is your relationship with the city like?
Connor: So we grew up three hours north of here in a town called Wausau and I came to Milwaukee for school immediately after graduating. Isaac joined me here after graduating, so in a very tumultuous time, but Milwaukee has been such a massive part of who I consider myself to be. I remember growing up and Chicago was too far away, so if I wanted to go see a show, it was Milwaukee. I was coming here. This is where I really started learning about art and music and what you could create. And I think I've always seen Milwaukee as that. I think Milwaukee has this beautiful way of fostering, tremendous art and tremendous music. You know, I went to school at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee for film, and I really fell in love with the way that the city cares for its artists and, and how easy it is to find fellow artists and relate to other artists. And I think as musicians, we really hit our stride in Milwaukee. And I think we owe a lot to the Milwaukee scene for even keeping us around as a band. You know, when we were fresh out of high school…
Isaac: ...we assumed the band was going to break up.
Connor: Yeah, we made “We Can Live Here Forever” and we just kind of assumed, okay, we're going to put this out and that's cool and nobody's going to care about it, and then we’ll just taper off and stop. But it was Milwaukee's music scene and their DIY scene that really like kept us going.
Isaac: People just kept asking us to play shows, and so we did.
Connor: And people kept giving a shit, or caring. And that’s what matters. There’s a really strong sense of care in Milwaukee's artist scene and it's a really beautiful thing. And I think right now it's just Isaac and I in Milwaukee, but I think soon enough Barely Civil will be a full Milwaukee group.
You also named “North Newhall” on the album after the Milwaukee street. What is the significance of that street?
Connor: I would say out of all the street names we’ve given to songs, “North Newhall” is the most direct. “North Newhall” is where I lived in my early college years. It's where I was first paying my own rent off of campus. It’s where I would go for walks and I would spend a lot of time considering my place in life and wonder if I was doing all right, living with some roommates that probably didn't really like living with me. I felt oddly uncomfortable, and I didn't feel like I was really like at home in that space until I started thinking about the position I was in in life and whether or not it was really that place that I didn't feel comfortable in or just life that I didn't feel comfortable in. I think about that house that I lived on Newhall a lot. That was a place of really big growth for me, and a lot of consideration of who I am and who I want to show myself as. “North Newhall” is easily one of my favorite songs on the record, and it's also one of the most meaningful song titles for me.