Handsome Ghost – Tim Noyes & Eddie Byun
The Massachusetts pop duo, Handsome Ghost is gearing up to release their second full length album – Some Still Morning. They’ve released two singles from the album, Massachusetts and Vampires. The former was accompanied by a video that features Sadie Wilking and Gabe Katz, executing their roles perfectly. The video, much like the song, tells a story and it’s hard to avoid losing yourself in either.
The video follows Wilking as she seems to be reliving moments that she’s had with Katz in the past. The visual (and song) has a somber but inviting touch to it. Director Nick Noyes brings to life, the story the song lays out. It really is great work from everyone involved.
Massachusetts has a haunting feel to it and is a beautiful piece of music. I had the opportunity to speak with Tim and Eddie to talk about this song and the album as well. Like all great pieces of art, the outcome is left up to interpretation and I was eager to find out what the writer was thinking when he wrote this. Tim tells Sound Vapors, “I don’t really see it personally, as a sad song. I lived in New York for a good long while and I was in this relationship. Pretty serious. Intense, all the good stuff – all the bad stuff. And we ended up splitting up, as is bound to happen. Since then, I’ve moved back to Massachusetts which is where I grew up. Eddie and I both live there now. We actually both grew up there as well.”
Tim continues, “It’s about looking back on that relationship but this time with time and space and I guess looking back with fresh eyes. That was a long time ago and my life is so different now. Like literally, I don’t live in the city anymore. There’s a somberness to it but I don’t think it’s meant to celebrate what it was. Even if it was difficult. Even if it didn’t end well. It was still really unique and really important. I guess it’s kind of meant to celebrate the somberness – if that makes sense at all.” Thing is, it makes total sense and maybe that’s why people connect with the song so much. It’s like the things we all feel but don’t know how to express. They have done just that, on this track.
When previewing songs from the album I noticed there was an almost stripped back, organic feel to the record. Moreso than their last release, 2018’s Welcome Back. Being a fan of that album and the way it sounded sonically – almost glossy, I was thrown a bit when I first sat down to listen to these songs. But then I sort of started connecting in a different way this time around. I was still amazed by the instrumentation and production but I seemed to attach myself with the songs from a lyrical standpoint. Not that I didn’t fully on the last record – But I mean seriously, go listen to Shallow City and try not getting lost in that mix, musically.
I asked them how the band got here, to this point, with these songs. Tim says, “It’s definitely, in my opinion, the most intimate and delicate of our releases to this point. I wrote a lot of the songs with just an acoustic guitar and they’re pretty simple and stripped back. I think when we dove into the actual recording, we made an effort to maintain that kind of intimate feel. They’re not acoustic, per se, but I think the production that we settled on is really meant to support the songs, supports the lyrics and kind of maintain that closeness that we had in the early sketches.”
Eddie expands further on the writing process and says, “When we first started working on the record, we took the acoustic demos that Tim had done and started to try and make them consistent with our past – with Welcome Back and previous releases and kind of shift it. That ended up being a really arduous and messy process. We just couldn’t get the songs to sound right. I think we were trying to make the sound be something that was more like, intellectual, more than honest if that makes sense. It was trying to take into account all of these different.. you know, just some things that were effecting the process.”
Eddie goes deeper and talks about whether or not this album would actually happen. He says, “I think it got to a point where we were like, should we just not do this record? It just felt that bad and I think when we got to stripping it back and like Tim said, maintaining the feel of intimacy and making it sound.. it’s called Some Still Morning, it’s songs kind of for the morning. Once we decided on that sound, everything started to flow more. We definitely made a conscious shift from the previous sound that we had going with Welcome Back. It wasn’t completely starting over because I think in music you always learn and take from your past but it was as close as you can get I think, within a project.”
These guys might be two of the most cerebral songwriters I’ve ever met. The key thing is, I think, is that they don’t overthink the project too much. Once they get set on a path, they project all of their thoughts, energy and talents on that journey. This is exactly what they’ve done on Some Still Morning.
You can hear my entire conversation with Handsome Ghost by clicking on the link to your favorite place to listen to podcasts or by watching the video version on YouTube.
-Tommy Marz
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