Proud Father (Brendan Chamberlain-Simon)

Photography by Maya Wali Richardson. Interview by Heather Hawke.

Brendan Chamberlain-Simon has written and recorded music as Proud Father for almost a decade, but his debut album — The View of Earth From Mars — (out July 16 via Massif Records) is his first project to incorporate themes from his career in space exploration. 

The concept of this release, which follows the unique vantage point of a man on Mars looking back at Earth, came about shortly after realizing his lifelong dream of working at NASA, where he’s been for the past 5 years driving the Curiosity Rover across the Martian surface and is currently part of NASA’s team attempting to fly the first-ever helicopter on Mars. 

Brendan’s experience of graduating college and then moving cities for this dream job, where he begun to spend a majority of his time working on another planet, led to him feeling deflated about his sense of pride and accomplishment about not having a specific goal to accomplish anymore. It was then that Brendan had a conversation with his college mentor, astronaut Mike Massimino who made him realize that the emotional journey of what an astronaut has to go through being a useful device for unpacking his own experience. The result is The View of Earth From Mars — a story about the first man to go Mars that approaches cosmic-looking wonder and inward-looking reflection in equal measure.  

The first single and title track from the album, “The View of Earth From Mars,” was accompanied by reprocessed footage from the International Space Station and the Kaguya Lunar Orbiter footage. While the second single, “Yaw/Pitch/Roll,” is a towering centerpiece track that follows the narrator’s entry into the Martian atmosphere, thrust back into sensations of gravity and meaning after nearly a year floating in void. 

The The View of Earth From Mars artwork pits the base of Mount Sharp (home for the Curiosity Rover) against a bust of Janus (the Roman God of beginnings, endings, transitions, and duality). 

Brooklyn-based producer Sahil Ansari (Margaux, Slow Dakota) mixed The View of Earth From Mars and assisted Brendan on additional production, while the legendary Greg Calbi (David Bowie, Talking Heads, Tame Impala) mastered. 

Brendan’s web/socials: Website – Instagram  

Hi! So, things are pretty unsettling in the world due to the pandemic, civil rights issues, government upheaval, climate change, the list goes on… Before we began, how are you doing with everything? How has this last year been for you and how are you feeling? How have you been coping with everything? 

It feels a bit like I’ve lived a dozen lifetimes in the past fourteen months. Some aspects have been very difficult, but there has also been a lot of space for reflection and growth. I think I walked every street in Northeast Los Angeles in April of 2020 alone. I’m feeling really attuned to my environment and my senses. 

It’s been strange to have a year that is both so emotionally dense and significant, yet also so limited and isolating. I’ve emerged with a lot of admiration for my peers, who have confronted the many challenges this year has brought with grit and compassion. I’m also tremendously grateful to have had a project like this to lean on as a source of comfort and joy in the midst of everything. 

Going back to the beginning. Where did you grow up? What was your childhood like growing up there? Did creativity/music/art play a big part of your childhood?  

I grew up in Illinois, just north of Chicago. Sort of John Hughes-ville, USA. I lived in this small town of about 4,000 people next to the bigger town where the schools were, so I always felt a bit like I was on the outside looking in. A lot of my foundational music exploration was alone in my 2001 Honda CR-V, driving to and from the town next door where everybody and everything was. I’ve written a lot of songs about that car. 

Tell me about your musical upbringing. What music did you grow up listening to? When did you first become aware that music was going to be a part of your life? What was your formal / not formal music education like growing up? 

Music has always been a big part of my life. I started taking piano lessons early on, and by the time I was in high school I was playing pretty much any instrument I could get my hands on. I played in the concert band, jazz band, and orchestra, and starting throwing together a few projects with friends. 

My closest relationship with music is as a listener. I remember doing as many chores as I could to save up enough money to buy a 1^stgeneration iPod nano. That was a big deal to me. I heard Kid A for the first time when I was 14, and that felt like the first big domino to fall in my now life-long obsession with music. I explored music mostly on my own, through blogs and record labels and create-digging. I grew up in sort of the golden era of Pitchfork, and was listening to pretty much everything they were reviewing. 

I showed up to Columbia University when I was 18, wearing billowing cargo shorts, delighted to find incredible friends who had the same music obsession that I did. And, best of all – I had a lot of catching up to do. The cargo shorts didn’t last long. 

Let’s talk about your formative years.  Did you play any sports / go to summer camps? Were there posers on your wall when you were growing up? What was the very first concert you attended?

Chicago is a big sports town. There was nothing cooler you could be than to be good at sports. I was not good at sports. I did try – I played on the travel baseball team & soccer team, and really enjoyed getting dinners after the games. Despite living very deep in Chicago Cubs territory, I grew up in a family of die-hard White Sox fans. That was definitely a source of individualism for me, and I had many many White Sox posters on my wall. It’s always very funny to visit my childhood bedroom, because I have long since moved on from sports fandom of really any kind, but my shrine to the Chicago White Sox lives on in my absence. 

The very first concert I ever went to was Blondie & The Cars. That is probably a cooler start than I deserve to claim – thanks Mom & Dad. 

Let’s talk about your upcoming release The View of Earth From Mars. What was your songwriting/creative process like for this? Was there a specific moment when work on this new music began or does the line between writing for your past Proud Father lyrics/music sort of blur?

This record was born out of a specific experience that I went through, so it occupies a very distinct space in my arc as a songwriter. Typically, when I make music it’s for the love of the process as an act of self-expression. In other words, I know how I’m feeling and what I’m trying to communicate. For this project however, I was leaning on the songwriting process as a method of teasing out truths in the way that I was feeling. It was a very confusing time in my life. This album is much more grounded in self-exploration than in self-expression. This is the most vulnerable I’ve ever been as a songwriter; it almost feels like releasing tapes from a conversation with a therapist. 

Where were you at physically, mentally when you wrote the lyrics/music for this?

Not in a great place! I conceived of this record shortly after being hired by NASA to drive Curiosity, the rover on Mars. I had wanted to work at NASA for practically my entire life and had worked very singularly towards that goal. I naively assumed that if I ever got hired by NASA, I would forever feel like the streets were paved with gold. In reality, the biggest thing that changed was that, by virtue of having achieved it, I didn’t have a goal anymore. I’d had the same goal for 20 years, and then it was gone. I had also just graduated from college and moved to a new city. I was spending a majority of my time living on another planet (mentally, at least). I was feeling very… lost. I was starting to believe that I would never have a goal again. And this very profound sense of existential dread was creeping in. 

How long was the writing/recording process of The View of Earth From Mars? Was there an event or a specific timeframe where a large chunk of the lyricism came out? 

I wrote and recorded this album over the course of 5 years. The first song that I wrote was the title track, way back in 2016. After writing and recording that song, I realized I had a lot more to explore and a lot more to say, so I decided I would pursue writing a full-length. There was a lot of emotional work happening behind the scenes, so the writing pace started out fairly slow. Over the course of writing the record, however, I ended up finding a new goal — the record itself. This album about purposelessness ironically ended up being my cure for purposelessness. So, I actually wrote the album mostly in reverse — the later tracks, where the narrator is feeling swallowed by dread, were written at the beginning of the project. The first tracks, which portray the narrator as driven & idealistic, were written last. I was exploring my own drive that led me to NASA, but I was connecting to it through the drive I felt to finish the record. Once I started to rediscover my sense of purpose, I would work days for NASA and then come home and work on the album for 5 hours almost every night. 

Did you find it helpful to be intentional when it comes to writing the lyrics / music? Like “I’m going to sit down and work on a song.” Or is it more ephemeral, like you’ve been kicking something around in your head for days, weeks, months, and then suddenly it comes spilling out? Or is it a mixture of both?

Most of the creative work on this record came from a very particular headspace. I’m not sure I could describe it, but I always know when I’m in the zone. Everything around me has a certain glow to it. There’s definitely an ephemeral aspect – I can’t predict when it’s going to be or how long it’s going to last. So whenever I do feel genuinely inspired, I drop everything and get to a notebook or a guitar. 

I think, given that, I have two jobs as a songwriter. The first is to do my best to give that inspiration space to flourish. When I feel it, to allow myself to submit to it. To approach those moments with faith and with vulnerability. This is like a songwriting muscle – the more I work at it, the deeper I can sink into the zone and the longer I can stay there. The second job is to do the work while I’m in the zone that makes the musical ideas accessible when I’m out of the zone. Sort of like emotional breadcrumbs. I probably spent thousands of hours working on this record in aggregate, and I absolutely was not in the zone for all of those hours. There’s a lot of time-consuming work to do where I very much need to be wearing my technical hat. A big part of my songwriting process is identifying how these emotionally driven ideas should sound like to someone who has been staring at the computer surgically EQ’ing a track for four hours. 

What mindset did you have going into the creating / recording process of The View of Earth From Mars? Did you feel any sort of limitations when writing or recording this album? Are there any interesting stories about the writing/recordings of the lyrics/music?   

I was actually really hesitant to write an album with space exploration as a major theme. I was worried it would seem too on-the-nose, or that I would feel boxed-in as a songwriter. Once I started though, I actually found the space backdrop to be quite liberating – it was a useful anchor for exploring big ideas without drifting into melodrama. Likewise, I found a lot of clarity in self-exploration through allegory, and especially from the lens of someone experiencing something so monumental. That gave me the freedom to process my emotions in superlatives, and to avoid my Midwestern urge to downplay how I was feeling. 

You recruited Brooklyn-based producer Sahil Ansari (Margaux, Slow Dakota) for mixing and additional production and the legendary Greg Calbi (David Bowie, Talking Heads, Tame Impala) mastered. What was it like having those two help out on this album? 

Working with Sahil was a fantastic experience – he’s a friend from college, and a big part of the Massif family. I was very precious about the record and wanted it to feel a particular way, but knew I needed to lean on Sahil’s expertise to make those ideas as crisp as they could be. From the first conversation we had about the album, I knew I was in good hands – Sahil and I relate to music in very similar ways, and I felt like he genuinely understood what I was trying to communicate at a very deep level. 

Greg is a total legend! It was very fun and legitimizing to work with him. He’s very fast, so I got the masters back all at once shortly after sending him the mixes. I got them fairly late in the evening, so I went for a late-night drive along Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles to listen to the mastered album for the first time. That was a very incredible moment. I had worked on this thing for 5 years, and then finally it was here, and very real. I felt (and continue to feel!) enormous pride.  

What was your favorite part about the writing / album creation process? Which songs were the easiest / most difficult to create? What are two or three songs you are most proud of on this record? Why?

There are some moments, both in the songwriting and the creation process, where things fall into place in a very sudden way. You add one chord change, or one lyric, or one synth line, and all of a sudden, the song changes from something you hear to something you experience. Those moments are extremely gratifying.  

Gosh, “Autopilot” and “Victoria Crater” both took me so long to figure out. I knew what was behind the door but just could not for the life of me find the key. Those took a lot of crumpled pages and a lot of walks around the block before the final pieces finally clicked into place. I’m not sure any of the songs came truly easily to me, but “Yaw/Pitch/Roll” feels like the one where things clicked the most densely. A think a lot of separate ideas came together really well on that song. 

By that token, I’m definitely very proud of “Yaw/Pitch/Roll.” I think that song is a real centerpiece from a songwriting perspective. I’m also really proud of “Victoria Crater” and “Perigee,” because those were the songs that required the deepest plunge into the subject matter. They also came early in the project, so were the launching point for a lot of the sonic through-lines of the record. 

When and how did the album title The View of Earth From Mars come about in the album creation process? What is the significance of the title? 

The album title was one of the first things I thought of – I had this idea of the first man to go Mars who, against his better judgement, finds himself spending most of his time looking back at Earth. There’s a lyric in the album closer, “Perigee,” that goes: “I don’t miss home/ I miss what it used to be”. There’s something really lonely in that: the acknowledgement that even if you were to return home, it would never feel the same as the version of home that you missed. “Perigee” is when planets are as close as they’ll ever get to each other, and the song is about the narrator growing to anticipate perigee as a way of feeling close to the people of Earth. He decides that he’ll send a message to Earth right at perigee. But when the moment comes, and he sends the message, he is confronted with the reality that he has to wait 8 minutes to hear if anyone’s listening, and all the while he is now drifting further away. 

The album art features a bust of the Roman God Janus, who sits alongside Mars in the archaic Roman pantheon. Janus is the God of beginnings, endings, transitions, and duality, and is said to have one face looking to the past and one looking to the future. The first song on the album is “The View of Mars from Earth”, and the penultimate track is “The View of Earth From Mars”. The record explores the duality of existing in two places at once, just as I felt living on earth and working on Mars. 

How much energy do you put into the visuals (music videos, press images, artwork) that accompany your music? Do you feel like the art that accompanies one’s music is more / less important than it used to be? How do you feel like social media impacts the intention behind all of this?

One of my favorite things about working on the visuals is that I get to employ my very talented friends. I have so many friends who work in creative fields, and it’s been such a treat to get to see them in their element and to work with them as creative peers. Visuals are not my primary focus, but it’s really important to me that they don’t betray the sound of the record. I actually struggled with this quite a bit because I wanted to use a lot of Mars imagery, but the reddish-orange color palette of Mars feels like it clashes with the sound of the record. 

I’ll be frank – I am not keen on social media. I don’t like the extent to which it has shifted art (and more) in the direction of instant gratification. Everyone is trying to sell something. Not everything (or worse, everyone) has to be brand! A concept record about the first man to go to Mars is a rather longform endeavor, and I’m aware it’s a bit incompatible with the social media landscape. But, if anyone has read this far, perhaps I’m in good company. 

I’ll be frank – I am not keen on social media. I don’t like the extent to which it has shifted art (and more) in the direction of instant gratification. Everyone is trying to sell something. Not everything (or worse, everyone) has to be brand! A concept record about the first man to go to Mars is a rather longform endeavor, and I’m aware it’s a bit incompatible with the social media landscape. But, if anyone has read this far, perhaps I’m in good company.