Brightest Young Things

Stamen & Pistils have built a sound atypical of what is commonly expected from DC. Acoustic based folk-pop, it is then sent straight into space, filled out with pro-grammed beats and synths form a sort of controlled chaos. Influenced as much by the future as by anachronism, they aim to create something new and sincerely their own: a highly textured sonic pallet of fuzzy deconstructed pop.
If you like WHY? (we do!), Animal Collective (we do!), Devendra (we do!) open your arms wide to their 2007 released second album "Towns"

As they prep to open for the (also extremely wonderful) Beach House and Papercuts at the RNR Hotel this Friday, we sat down with Raul for a little listening party:

1. "Quiet County" -

This album isn't really autobiographical, but I definitely did immerse myself within the songs and interweave some personal experience into the text when writing. This particular song is a prime example of that. A lot of the imagery here comes from passing through some random little towns in West Virginia and Kentucky, where the Quiet County of the title is sort of an amalgamated anytown somewhere between here and there. One of the first songs written for this record, Miguel and I
wrote this together as opposed to our more frequent method of bringing each other drafts that we individually had worked on. This was also the first one we'd written using the 1951 Gibson and 1950s Farfisa Pianorgan, which would become staples for S&P and really do a great job in setting a nice warm mood for this tune. This song is also interesting perhaps because it has the most obvious chorus, which isn't really something we do often. And we were very happy to have the lovely Mikal Evans grace us with her voice as well, so there's definitely something special going on here.

2. "A Death In Ronkonkoma"

Years ago when driving back home from Boston, I took the ferry from New London, CT to Long Island. It was a horribly wet and foggy trip throughout, but while when working on this album years later and recalling some of my road travels, I remembered that day and passing by Ronkonkoma. It seemed as though it might be a good place for our lovers to have been driving through or to—potentially on a dreary day like that one when I passed through—in which for them to come to the realization that continuing their relationship would probably destroy them both. This summer, when talking to Justin Moyer about this particular song, he mentioned to me a bit of mythology I'd been unaware of at the time I wrote the song. There is a legend about "Lady of the Lake," who in different variations of the story drowns either a man or a pair of lovers each year. I thought that made for a pretty fascinating coincidence that perfected the story for me.

3. "Walk On"

I met this guy in Blacksburg, VA once, whilst standing outside of a bar with some friends I was visiting. This guy, stumbles up to us, mumbled some stuff about how his wife had just left him for being drunk again and he'd just driven his truck off of the road. This song was inspired partly by Kris Kristofferson's "Silver-Tongued Devil", but strayed off from that a bit and goes on to mainly follow an embellished scenario extending from that encounter with that random dude in Blacksburg a few years before. The always awesome Carol Bui joined us on this recording, and has sung this on stage with us a couple of times—even on one particularly challenging occasion when I had an ear infection and could not hear myself sing at all. It's become one of our favorite songs to play live.

4. "Possessive Nouns"

We were doing a location scout for a video that never materialized, but came upon Frederick Douglass' house in Anacostia while they were getting ready to start restoring it. Technically, the house was closed, but the Park Service guard gave us a tour of the grounds and the inside. All of the amazing furniture that normally fills the house was in storage, and so at that point it was just a big empty Victorian House on a hill. There was something incredibly fascinating about it all. The history of the house for a start, but walking through this hollow shell then also conjured some thoughts of memory and the reconstruction of the past. This song primarily revolves around how two people might remember a supposed shared experience, and I envisioned it as taking place in setting nearly identical to this. I used a photo I took of this house on that day for the cover of the album; it seemed a good way to cap the record.

all photos: Joel Didriksen

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