Smile Machine (Jordyn Blakely)
Photography by Adam Kolodny. Interview by Heather Hawke.
Jordyn Blakely’s new musical endeavor Smile Machine is not her first foray in music, but this reintroduction to her by way of her first solo project has her beaming into the spotlight. While she’s known for being one of Brooklyn’s most in-demand drummers, and has contributed to songwriting in other bands before, Bye For Now (released on July 16th via Exploding In Sound Records) is an album that is entirely her own and one that she merges past experiences in her own vision.
While the bones of the EP (as far as production went) started as a team effort alongside Dan Francia (The Feelies, Stove, Flagland) before the pandemic, once the lockdowns began it was up to Jordyn to complete the tracking with the occasional help of some friends, who allowed her the ability to focus on the performances. She says that Bye For Now took “a bit of a Frankenstein [approach] because the drums were recorded onto tape, then most everything else was recorded directly into different [computer] programs.”
Bye For Now was written during a two year stretch as a way for Jordyn to find her way through mourning, guilt, crises of identity, and frustration that involved the end of a toxic relationship as well as the loss of her father. The EP is comprised of blown out pop music that features a fuzzed out lo-fi sensibility that’s smothered with sentimentality. Bye For Now is the sound of healing in motion. With themes of pushing oneself to see things through to the finish line, the EP questions everything from relationships, to finding that space for oneself where you feel the most self-assured. It’s a liberation of built-up tension that throws the unhealthy patterns of mental anguish behind. On lead single “Shit Apple,” Jordyn says she took inspiration from a (very much out of context) Trailer Park Boys quote that made her think about how “if you’re not healthy on the inside, emotionally or mentally, it eventually spews out onto other parts of your life and people around you if you aren’t taking care of yourself and your mental health.”
Jordyn’s / Smile Machine’s web/socials: Bandcamp – Soundcloud – Instagram – Twitter
Hi! So, this past year has been pretty chaotic due to various reasons including the pandemic…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?
I think it’s hard to tell because it feels like we’ve all been forced to just move along. Change, especially sudden change, is hard but I think I learned how to enjoy spending time alone, how to remain patient and soothe myself, and became more independent and self-reliant. One aspect of the pandemic that was difficult and still shocks me was witnessing and feeling the effects of people in positions of power being so unforgiving and insatiably greedy. I feel resentful and angry towards those who were given the responsibility to lead and care for us, watching the president hold press conferences every day and not offer any condolences regarding the dead or acknowledge our suffering was just making me feel infuriated and hopeless. Coming out of everything though I feel grateful because there’s a larger awareness and effort towards community mutual aid and people took care of each other when they could.
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 Maryland, mostly in Frederick, Rockville, and outside of Annapolis. My mom was a single mom raising me and my younger brother while getting her teaching degree and working. I always loved to read, color, draw, write, took dance classes and did choir, and some musical theater. I took piano lessons a couple of times but never got seriously into it because I found the material to be so boring, like “Hot Cross Buns” and songs like that. I was kind of a weird kid, like I preferred to be alone with a book and the radio for several hours. My dad coached lacrosse, soccer and wrestling, so I tried a lot of sports- lacrosse, soccer, basketball, fencing, tennis, swimming- but never really stuck with any of them or had a huge interest. It’s funny how I ended up focusing my life around something so physically active like drumming.
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?
Growing up my mom listened to a lot of Madonna, Billy Idol, ABBA, Prince, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, Gypsy Kings, Michael Jackson, The Specials and soundtracks like ‘Cats’, ‘Chicago’, ‘Phantom of the Opera’, and took us to see a lot of musicals. She took me to see Cirque Du Soleil “Nouvelle Experience” and I was really into that soundtrack on cassette. My dad loved Fleetwood Mac, Donovan, Bob Marley, The Supremes, Bee Gees, U2, The Beatles, and The Police. As a kid I was obsessed with the radio and always had my Walkman or radio on. This was in the late 90’s so there was a lot of No Doubt, The Cranberries, Sheryl Crow, Paula Cole, Vengaboys, Sugar Ray, Goo Goo Dolls, Dave Matthews Band, Destiny’s Child, Eminem, and TLC. I also loved all the house music that was on hit radio back then like Bizarre Inc, Sonique, Crystal Waters, Black Box, Opus III, and La Bouche. I had a few cassettes of my own like Britney Spears, NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, and tapes I recorded from the radio. Music was really important to me growing up but it never occurred to me to play an instrument until later. In eighth grade I became friends with some girls who introduced me to Green Day, Nirvana, The Hives, Rancid, Blink 182, Korn, AFI, NOFX, Weezer, and it made me want to start playing guitar. My stepdad Hop had a music room in the garage with guitars and showed me how to play “About a Girl” by Nirvana, that was the first thing I ever learned on guitar. We also had a little kid drum kit that I would mess around with, and got a regular sized drum kit the next year for Christmas. Drums felt more natural to me and I wanted to learn everything- I was really fascinated by drummers like Mitch Mitchell, Bill Ward, John Bonham, Tre Cool, Travis Barker, Scott Raynor, and bands like Thursday, Interpol, Joy Division, Rancid, Bloc Party, Hot Hot Heat, and would just play along with CDs. Hop passed away about six months after he got us the drums and I think that was a pivotal moment for me as far as playing music just for fun versus playing it as a need or to cope. I just became immersed. Thankfully my mom loves music and didn’t mind the noise.
When you were old enough to start seeking out music, where did you regularly find yourself (a certain record store / internet site / getting recommendations from a certain friend)? Who were some of the artists you first found and then were always on the lookout for?
A lot of my friends in high school introduced me to so much music I hadn’t heard before. My friend Thomas made me a mix CD with his favorite Sebadoh songs, which is still one of my favorite CDs. He showed me Dinosaur Jr, My Bloody Valentine, Galaxy 500, Guided By Voices, and a lot of poetry. Our friends Jon and Tommy showed me a lot of music too like Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, The Who, Dead Kennedys, Operation Ivy. My friend Sofia showed me a lot of different stuff too like the Libertines, the Dandy Warhols, Modest Mouse, Arctic Monkeys. I went to a lot of shows at the Black Cat in DC and the 9:30 Club, spent a lot of time at the Tower Records in Rockville, and liked to read Spin, NME, and Rolling Stone. I also worked at a used CD store called CD/Game Exchange and pretty much spent my whole paycheck on CDs and DVDs from there. I really miss the Myspace era though because I would go to a band’s Top 8 friends list, listen to their Top 8 bands, then go to THEIR Top 8 and check out those bands.
Talking a little bit about your formative years… What was the very first concert you attended? Did you play any sports / go to summer camps? When was the first time you felt super inspired by music? Were there posers on your wall when you were growing up?
I did go to a few summer camps, one called DayJams and one called the National Guitar Workshop, where I met a friend who was also from the DC area. They brought me to a Polar and Mass Movement of the Moth show, and it was eye opening in that it was one of the first times I became aware of a more local scene and a community of musicians playing shows together. Another time I was at NGW, Archaeopteryx (with Ben Greenberg of Zs, Pygmy Shrews) played a show and it was amazing. The first two times I went to NGW I studied guitar but went for drums one year and just felt like, this is what I want to do, I want to play drums all day with different people, learn about them, and be around other musicians all the time. The first ‘concert’ concert I went to was MXPX opening for Brand New. There were so many posters and magazine cutouts on my wall it was completely covered, I wish I had kept some of those.
You’ve been one of Brooklyn’s most in-demand drummers for well over a decade at this point and while those experiences allowed for you to have a hand in the songwriting, this solo project is entirely your own. What’s been your favorite thing about doing all this stuff solely by yourself for your Smile Machine project?
I think my favorite aspect has been just discovering and expanding what I’m capable of doing, overcoming those thoughts that tell you can’t do something and proving to yourself that you can. Usually, I’m just thinking about what I need to do on drums but with this I had to think about what every instrument was doing and how it all fit. Writing bass parts was really fun and challenging, I wanted to think of parts that a more experienced bass player would write but I think what I ended up doing shaped the mood in a more personal way and made the songs feel more concise. Trying out different pedals, amps, and effects was really fun too. With drums you have the one set up and you use your body to achieve different dynamics, feels or sounds, but with guitar there are so many different options you can access all at the same time and just change the entire mood with one switch of a knob. It was fun to explore that and feel out what sounds right for different moments.
Despite Bye For Now being your solo debut you’re certainly not a newcomer. You’ve played in a myriad of bands from Night Manager, Butter The Children, and Jackal Onasis to Stove, Maneka and most recently as part of the all-star line-up for Bartees Strange’s band.Can you talk a little bit about the how/when/why’s of how these musical collaborations and projects came about?
I met Night Manager through a band I was in called Life Size Maps, and we played a lot of shows together at Monster Island, Big Snow Buffalo Lodge, Shea Stadium and 285 Kent. I filled in on drums with Night Manager one night at Big Snow and then just started playing with them more regularly. We played a lot with a band called Heaven’s Gate who introduced me to Butter The Children, a new band with ex-members of Sweetbulbs. We played a couple shows with Ovlov which is how I met Steve Hartlett, but I had already been a fan of Ovlov through Julian Fader and Carlos Hernandez of Ava Luna, who worked on an early Ovlov album and recorded the last Night Manager album. Steve asked if I would sub with Ovlov when they had shows in New York because their drummer was finishing up college and there’s a Butter The Children song called “Rochelle Rochelle” that has an almost identical drum part to this Ovlov song “The Well”. Jackal Onasis was a recording project between me and Alex Molini, who was living in L.A. and would email me songs to record drums over and sometimes vocals. When he relocated to Brooklyn in 2015 we both joined Stove on drums and bass. Eventually Jackal Onasis broke up and I started playing with Sharkmuffin and also Maneka, which is how I met Bartees [Strange], as he and Devin are old friends. I became more familiar with his work through his bandmate Graham Richman, who played bass with Maneka for a while, and both our bands played a show together at Alphaville at some point. Though we were internet friends, Bartees and I didn’t officially meet in person until around 2018 at a Sharkmuffin show at SXSW. We had talked about playing together but it didn’t happen until earlier this year (2021) when he emailed me and asked if I would be interested in playing with the band. I feel really grateful to have gotten to play with so many different people and to have learned so much from them.
I read that Bye For Now was written primarily during a two year stretch that involved the end of a toxic relationship and the loss of your father, and you used these Smile Machine’s songs to work through mourning, guilt, crises of identity, and frustration. What was your songwriting/creative process like for these deeply personal songs? Was there an event or a specific timeframe where a large chunk of the lyricism came out for these tracks? Where were you at physically, mentally when you wrote the lyrics/music for this? What was your songwriting/creative process like for Bye For Now? How long was the writing/recording process of? Was there an event or a specific timeframe where a large chunk of the lyricism came out?
The oldest song on the EP is “Snail S(h)ell” which was written in early 2017 after we recorded Stove’s “Favorite Friend”, and “Shit Apple” was written later that year when Jackal Onasis broke up. For most of that time I was in a dark place because there was a lot of fighting in my relationship, so I was feeling really confused and struggling with self-worth. I think an event will usually inspire the lyrics because I don’t always know what I want to write about until I’m in a place where I need to process something. At the time I felt confused about how to identify and understand my own emotions, let alone communicate them so this was my way of teaching myself how to do that. The lyrics for “Bone To Pick” were inspired by a dream that I had about my dad, but I think I had already processed a lot of that experience by then, it just left me in a vulnerable and self-destructive place after the fact.
When I was writing the earlier songs, I would often demo out my ideas with Alex and would sometimes use my songs for Stove, so I think Alex and Steve’s influence certainly shows through in some of my music since we wrote and played together for so many years and some of my earlier songwriting experience was with those bands. Later on, I started being more independent with making demos and figuring out ideas, which I’m really proud of.
Do 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?
I’ll usually have some ideas hanging around and I have to sit myself down to figure out where it’s going to go or how to further develop it. With some songs I’ll have a section or melody stuck in my head for weeks or months before another part or some lyrics feel right for it. Other songs sort of poured out all at once, but I’m not sure why or how that happens. I try to take advantage of when I feel inspired and try to push myself to play for fun or learn other people’s music when I feel stuck. Sometimes with writing and recording I felt limited by what I could play on guitar in terms of experience and technique. There were ideas I was hearing in my head but couldn’t physically play them, or more interesting chords I was hearing that I could have used but didn’t know what they were or how to play them. I don’t always know what chords I’m playing because I try ideas by ear or memorize certain chord shapes and try them out in different places. Playing drums was the easiest because I was the most confident on that instrument and felt like I had the most control. I think about drum parts a lot when I’m writing because it sets up the whole mood of the song, where the melody and chords fit, and I try to write something that would be fun to play on drums.
I found it difficult to record vocals because it feels awkward just standing and singing, especially with anyone else around, it feels vulnerable and naked to not have a guitar while you’re singing. We tried tracking vocals for “Bone To Pick” and I couldn’t do it because it felt too weird, I wanted to be somewhere by myself or in a different setting where I could play guitar while tracking them. I ended up having to track them during quarantine so did some takes while my roommates were at the store so nobody could hear me, then edited all of the different takes into one in Garageband, deciding where certain lines should hit in which places. I’m proud of that one because it almost feels sneaky like it shouldn’t even be a song, it doesn’t even have a real melody, it’s just chaos.
While the bones of Bye For Now were recorded together with Dan Francia (The Feelies, Stove, Flagland) before the pandemic, you’ve said the EP took “a bit of a Frankenstein [approach] because the drums were recorded onto tape, then most everything else was recorded directly into different [computer] programs.” What started out as a team effort as far as production went, once the lockdowns began it was up to you to complete the tracking on your own (with the help of some friends in spots, allowing you the ability to focus on the performances). What was it like recording with Dan Francia? With the closeness and confidence of the themes/lyrics, do you think it helped to record what was left of the EP during the pandemic, when there wasn’t really a “rush” for anything else happening?
Working with Dan was great because we’ve played together in various bands over the years, he’s done sound at Shea Stadium for me a lot in the past and I love the way he makes everything sound. We share similar taste in music, and he understood what I was going for, so it helps to work with someone you trust. He helped me a lot in terms of finding good tones, since he knew what direction I wanted. Before the pandemic we had most everything finished except guitar leads, keys and some vocals. We tracked the drums onto tape at a practice space then the rest at his apartment. Having no real rush was helpful and I think it did end up working out but communicating where you want a certain edit to happen in a song or what you want something to sound like was difficult over email, whereas in person you can just show someone what you want and do it in a few minutes. Lining up all of the different takes remotely and making sure everything is in the right placement was tricky sometimes, especially since I was tracking guitar leads in different sections of the song, as opposed to full takes from the beginning of the song. I tracked most guitar leads by myself, some at my friend Devin’s house later in the summer, then redid one of the solos with another friend in the fall. Over the pandemic I had time to practice guitar and prepare the parts more, so I think it worked out that I gained that extra time to work on it and think more about what I wanted to play.
When and how did the album title Bye For Now come about in the album creation process? What is the significance of the title?
I like how it sounds; it has a nice rhythm to it. I’m not exactly sure why it kept coming to mind as a title, it just feels optimistic, to imply that when you depart from someone, hopefully, you’ll see them again.
How hands on are you with the making of / direction of the visuals (music videos, press images, artwork) that accompanies the 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?
The artwork was drawn by my friend Steve Hartlett, then I used watercolor to paint it. I was inspired by this artist Shanna Van Maurik who creates vividly watercolor paintings of animals, insects and nature. I asked Steve to draw a moth or butterfly in a setting with some element of nature like water, trees, or flowers, and I think what he ended up doing is perfect. The butterfly is symbolic of inner growth and transformation but still having a long way or distance to go. With the pictures I tried to wear clothes that I felt were ‘me’ but wore roller skates because it was a favorite hobby of mine as a kid and I wanted to bring more color and playfulness to the setting. Adam Kolodny who shot the photos was really creative in terms of location, such as the colorful basketball court, and our friend Jim was helpful in terms of suggesting outfits and different poses, like lying down on the red and blue court with the leather jacket tassels spread out everywhere. The concept and direction for the music video for “Pretty Today” was mostly just me but Brant Louck, who shot the video, added a lot of fun elements to it like the different lenses and angles, and he gives direction very well. I think the art and visuals behind the music is as important as one wants it to be. For the video I wanted to make something cute and funny that didn’t take itself too seriously but also creates a story and gives more dimension to the song; I have this fun day of activities with a stuffed bear but at the end of the day it isn’t with me, implying that maybe it was all a dream or an imaginary friend. Beginning and ending the video with the same shot of the bed was sort of a nod to the “Blank” video by Stove, because I wanted it to seem like there’s a story that keeps continuing either in the same universe or a new one. Making videos is one of my favorite things to do because you have to let go of so many aspects of control, like weather, timing, props, and setting. You can plan and conceptualize as much as you want but the final product just ends up being what it wants to be, and is often much different than you originally imagined, almost like it creates itself. As far as social media goes, I try not to put too much intention behind it and just use it promotionally and as a way to communicate with people. It’s odd how anxious and exposed using social media makes me feel, yet creating music and videos and photos is even more vulnerable but I still choose to do that.
How do you recalibrate before getting on stage and at the end of the day? How do you get in the correct mindset?
I try to not drink or smoke too much, do my vocal warmups, do yoga early in the day if I have time, and make sure I eat not too close or too early before the show. Drumming is so physically demanding, I find by the middle or end of the set I feel warmed up and really adrenaline fueled, but with fronting a band I’ve noticed it feels better to not overdo it before the set as far as practicing goes.
