Bodega
Photography by Mert Gafuroglu. Artwork by Nikki Belfiglio. Interview by Heather Hawke.
Interview with Ben Hozie
Brooklyn’s Bodega is comprised of Ben Hozie (voice, guitar), Trix Belfiglio (samples, voice, percussion, art), Montana Simone (drums), Madison Velding-Vandam (guitar), and Heather Elle (bass), some of whom formed the previous band Bodega Bay. They’ve signed with What’s Yr Rupture? and released their debut album Endless Scroll (July 2018) which was produced by Austin Brown of Parquet Courts and mixed and mastered by Jonathan Schenke (Eaters, producer of Parquet Courts’ Light Up Gold).
Ben has been writing songs for nearly twenty years and says that the first was a “terrible pop rock number” called ‘Our Time’ with the exquisite couplet ‘I wish we could go back to a time / when you were always mine.’ “Of course, that was written before I had ever so much as held hands with anybody,” he says. His first exposure to the excitement of pop and rock music was when MTV played a Korn music video (‘Make Me Bad’) and the band is in this futuristic hospital in the mountains, rocking out for space doctors. “The combination of science fiction and rap metal exploded my sixth-grade brain.”
Fast forward to 2015, the day after Bodega Bay had their album release party, Ben remembers waking up and thinking “…well that was nice but now I need to do something new. Let’s start today. Doesn’t have to be good.” Five minutes later he had the first track “Warhol” pinned down, which he says, is just a “little Minutemen-esque syllogism,” but that song kept coming back into his head as something special. “Sometimes when you try hard, you die hard.” The band started really workshopping these songs in the summer of 2016, but some of the material dates back further; the chorus of ‘Bookmarks’ was something he had floating around in 2013.
Most of the lyrics for Endless Scroll came at a monumental time of change; “My old band Bodega Bay had just broken up. I lost touch with some very close friends. A four-year relationship ended. At the same time, a new one started: I fell in love.” Oddly enough, Ben says, most of that new relationship blossomed over the sterile screens of Facebook chat. “I was already writing songs about life in the digital realm and began to see the irony…. I was falling in love on the internet (?!).” The elections of 2016 also hung over the band like a cloud as well. Their first single that was released from this album, ‘How Did This Happen?!’, was actually the last song written for the record and it came after they set in stone recording dates with Austin and felt they were missing a good intro-track that could address the political moment.
Just a week before heading into the studio with Austin, Ben’s mom passed away. He says that the record helped him to cope with the devastation. “Thinking about minutiae such as proper BPM’s and guitar tones was a good distraction and singing some of the songs was very cathartic.” They did all of the tracking live in four days in the Parquet Courts practice room on the same Tascam 388 tape deck they recorded ‘Light up Gold’ on several years prior. Since it’s one of Ben’s favorite records he was “over-the-moon” being able to share a physical history with it. “Both Austin and Jonathan have a ‘less-is-more’ recording philosophy, which worked out well for us since Endless Scrollis an experiment in rock-minimalism (in terms of the instrumentation). J’s real talent (in my mind) lies in how he mixes the rhythm sections on his records. Austin was very good at getting good vocal performances from me and Nikki.” In that way, he says, Austin was like a director of a documentary, “trying to mine the most dramatic effects out of materials that were already there.” They have a song called ‘Jack in Titanic’ which Ben was singing in an ironic snotty fashion until Austin suggested he sing the melody with absolute earnestness. “He saw that there was an earnestness hidden in the tune and pushed me to get to a place where I was no longer didactic but embodying the character from the inside. That helped me understand the song and turned what could have been a novelty track into one of the pillars of the LP.”
He says some of the tracks appeared fully finished out of nowhere but others, like “Truth Is Not Punishment”, took quite a bit of labor. “I had up to eight verses at one point and thought it was going to be a surreal epic Dylan-esque thing that could go on forever.” They were playing a live version with four of those verses for a bit, but when Montana and Madison told Ben the lyrics were too obscure to relate to, he worked really hard to be a good storyteller and re-work the images into concrete scenes. “The final version only has three verses and they are each addressed to somebody specific (my mom, a friend, a lover). I had to let go of some very good lines but I’m not precious. As Eno says the best tool in the studio is the delete button.”
While his bandmates are really into voice memos and more sophisticated kinds of compositing when writing, Ben’s very traditional and writes ninety percent of his songs on acoustic guitar and likes to pen the words out in journals. “I find it hard to be creative sitting in front of a computer. I spend the most time on the lyrics. I like to write in a specific meter and often the words suggest a melody.” He says that part of the magic of BODEGA is that he can bring songs written in this singer-songwriter mode and then the others begin the process of deconstructing them. “Madison in particular is very good at this phase-two/arrangement aspect of songwriting.”
Ben says that he’s currently found himself amongst some good friend / music circles and that sometimes he gets nostalgic for 2009, “when everybody had an Avey Tare or a fox in their band,” but he’s glad the Captured Tracks-inspired nu-gaze moment seemed to pass. “There were some nice groups from that time but it got a little monotonous. Bands in 2018 seem to be getting more urgent, which is good.”
