Paper Route has been busy. Since the first part of this session released, the band has played a dizzying amount of shows while criss-crossing the country. Now the band is back in Nashville, writing and recording a new album. This isn't surprising of course. If anything, hard work seems to be the undercurrent of this band and the foundation on which they build their music, their band, their craft...

Ryan Booth caught up with JT and Gavin, on a break from recording in their "Joy Mansion" and chatted a bit about working hard, putting yourself out there, and building songs through healthy competition:


R: Do you feel like you guys are really trying to build something with not just your music, but the band as a unit? Something more than a collection of songs, played in a car stereo or a dark venue? If so, what are trying to invite people into?

G: I believe we are, but most of the time I don't feel it's a conscious effort. Most of our collective time is spent working on music, constructing and deconstructing songs, trying to be one step ahead of ourselves. So anything outside of the music we release or shows we play that is built is just a natural side-effect. We want to create something real, and that's most important to us. Be it in the lyrics, or the fact that JT does the majority of our artwork, or the songwriting process, we just don't want fake. People see through fake. There's enough fake pop musicians in existence already.

SerialBox Presents: PAPER ROUTE - "Carousel" from The Serial Box on Vimeo.

R: Now, rumor is that you guys are in the studio again. What does the writing process look like for you guys? How do you craft songs as a band? Is it a process to enjoy or a hurdle to leap in order to get back in front of people?

G: We are currently in the studio working on our second album. We rented this 200 year old mansion built in the war of 1812 in East Nashville, and it's been really inspiring for us. Joy Mansion. It does seem that songwriting for us is quite tricky compared to more traditional Nashville artists. If Chad, for example, writes an original idea with vocals, drums, guitars, etc, we all try to beat the parts he wrote. So the song gets passed around between us, and takes many different shapes before we abandon it, or finish it.

JT: We all tend to have our stations. We're all given tasks, but mainly there is the main camp which is Chad's room. Then there is the B room on the second floor, which is my room. I'll lean over the edge of the stairs and hear what he's working on and I know that I have to outdo him today. I'll try to outdo him and then he'll sneak by my door and listen to what I'm doing and be like, "I have to beat him today." That's kind of how we work. Cause, mostly, I love being surprised. You know, that's why I love being in a band. I don't want to do this by myself. I want to go downstairs, sit down, and hear something that would be an impossiblity if I had been there. Then I want to add my colors to it. Or add nothing at all. That, sometimes, is my color. Just to say, "this is done." It's a healthy challenge, a healthy competition that is happening.

R: Tell me a little more about Joy Mansion. What is it like for you guys to have a place of your own, a mothership so to speak, that you can really come back to and really have space to create.

JT: A huge part of this band has always been the houses that we've been in. When I listen to our first EP, I hear and see the apartment. The sound was greatly affected by the environment. Now we've found this place and I feel like this is the best of all the worlds that we've had before. We all have our own stations. We have a Joy Division room, a Flannery O'Connor room. All the rooms are named and there is just a vibe in each room that has been specifically designed and executed to deliver that thing that it has hidden away. It's kind of reminds me of this Jeff Tweedy story. He said that whenever he sees a horrible guitar, he buys it and has his engineer fix it up because he feels like there is X amount of songs in every guitar. So even though everyone just walks by that guitar because it's stupid looking or cheesy, he's looking at it and thinking, "there's still thirty songs left in this thing." He's grabbing it and mining that resource like a well. I think that for us, we've always found that in these houses that we've been in. This room has fifteen songs inside of it and we just need to crawl around and find them.

SerialBox Presents: PAPER ROUTE - "Be Healed" from The Serial Box on Vimeo.

R: This sounds kind of like an all-consuming place that you guys are in when you are studio mode. Is that true? Do you guys feel like you have very distinct spheres of your band life? When you're in studio mode, that's all you do and then when you're in touring mode you guys are wholly in those different moments?

JT: We kind of feel like we are recording all of the time. Even when we tour, we (Chad and I) are always bringing our stations with us. When we get to our green room, we set it up immediately and then we are just tinkering around. One of the main themes of this album is that in a lot of places, we are really sampling ourselves. Where a lot of artists might be sampling other sounds and bringing it in. I'm going through Chad's catelog and going through like 50 songs that he might feel are horrible. I'm slowing them down and speeding them up, cutting up intstruments. It's kind of like finding a whole catelog of these sounds and samples that I can use. But that's recording. Making an album, an actual thought, it's definitely, a completely different world. I don't quite know how to explain it. I am frantically pacing the floor and nervous about what it is and how much of me I'm going to actually let people know. And then I put that in the song and then the other world of Paper Route is me actually going on stage and trying to mean it every night.

R: How do those two worlds connect in your mind? Is that practice?

JT: Absolutely. It's, in a lot of ways, the tactic of it. You strategize ways to mean it and you strategize ways to fool myself into thinking that when I say this line, I'm going to be ok when some reviewer says "poor JT." But if I feel like it's what I am supposed to say, and it works and people connect to it because they relate to it, then that's fine. We have to do it. And I won't panic anymore.


R: How much of a progression do these songs go through once you guys, as a band, have decided "ok, we're going to tackle this one…this is an idea worth pursuing." Is there often a large distance that song has to go before you guys feel like it's ready?

G: If you could only hear some songs in their infancy. A very few end up similar to the final version, most of them are like awkward distant cousins, if that makes sense. The first demo of Carousel is one of my favorites, it's completely unrecognizable.

JT: Absolutely. It's very song specific. Last Time, I think, had something like thirty versions. Which that is the second most of any of our songs. I felt like it just made sense that it took so much work. The song in a lot of ways started off as Chad's. He called it an "8 Bit Symphony." He used only one keyboard and composed all of the parts including the drums. It really was fascinating the first time I heard it. Then we kind of pulled things apart and added other things. It's always different for each song.

R: Does that feel like a pushing and pulling, painful process to move a song along the path or does it feel like a natural one-thing-leads-to-another-and-all-of-a-sudden-here-we-are type of event?

JT: For this song, it was a little painful. We always wanted it to feel a very specific way and it took so long for us to find the balance between that surge of chaos while still keeping a sense of sentiment in the song...this longing... All the hooks that are in the song happen really fast and they are all almost happy accidents, so you feel like the song is just a mess. But there is also a longing to the lyric, a longing to the melody and it took us forever to find that balance.

SerialBox Presents: PAPER ROUTE - "Last Time" from The Serial Box on Vimeo.

R: As a band, you guys are able to fill so many different roles that are typically divided and sub-divided and contracted and sub-contracted out. Just from engineering, design, and direction, it seems you guys steer your own ship.

JT: One of the most frequent questions anyone gets asked who even remotely does this as a profession is "How did you do that? How did you get there? What did you do to be discovered?" And honestly, we never really know how to answer that. Because I feel like the best way to even really dissect what has gotten us here is just figuring out how to do everything yourself instead of waiting for someone else to do it. I think that's just the entire mentality of the band. No one is going to be as passionate about this song as we are. No one is going to understand where my head's at when I'm singing this line. I think we have just pushed ourselves, cause no one is going to do it for us.

G: And that's part of the thrill of doing this. We're competing with all the bands that we grew up listening to, and still listen to. We have to push to create something that makes someone move past what they're currently into.

JT: Yeah, no one is going to do it for you. You don't really have an option. I think in a lot of ways, we're just a couple of guys that dream really big and work even harder. That's just how we've gotten where we are, you know?



CREDITS:

Paper Route is:
Chad Howat
JT Daly
Gavin McDonald
Andy Smith
with Josh Orr

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VISUALS:
Cameras:
Cody Bess
Micah Bickham
Ryan Booth
Trae Stanley
Scott Brignac

Edited by: Ryan Booth & Micah Bickham
Graded by: Ryan Booth & Cody Bess
Titles by: Micah Bickham
Photos by: Ryan Booth & Zach McNair

AUDIO:
Engineered by: Chase Jenkins
Mixed by: Harold Rubens at Red Tree Recording Studio

Production Assistants:
Neil Sandoz
Brian Yarbrough

Illustration by: Andrew Shepherd

Photographic Manipulation/Design by: Zach McNair