The Lulls

Photography by Evan Schell

 

For two people who’ve been friends since second grade, Rutger Ansley Rosenborg and Ryan S. Miller, the two that comprise the core of the LA / NYC band The Lulls, have widely different backgrounds.

Rutger was born with brunette hair and brown-eyes to a Swedish father and a Salvadoran mother on a lake in Guatemala. As someone who moved to the States as a kid, he’s never really felt entirely American so, naturally, he’s drawn to the cities that might make him feel like he is.

Ryan was born with blonde hair and blue-eyes to an all-American family in Southern California. Wanting to grasp more culture than what America provides he’s traveled the world from Bali to Panama.

The two have been playing music together from the age of eight on, but only formed The Lulls back in 2015. After releasing their debut album “Island of Daughters” on vinyl in 2016, they headed out on a two-month national tour. Last year they spent a week in the Idyllwild mountains demoing new songs which in turn three of those were recorded in a cabin in upstate Connecticut earlier this year before heading back west for SXSW.

Their goal as a band is to encompass the entirely of America—black to white, dark to bright—through poignant, irreverent, and empathic storytelling.

Their first single “’Good Night America’ was released on June 1 and for it they imagined the Midwestern date gone wrong as a metaphor for America. Their newest single “Not Bad” was released two months later.

 

I want to start from the beginning. What was your childhood like growing up, Rutger in Guatemala and Ryan in California? Was creativity a big part of your childhood?  

Ryan: I’d say my household growing up was creative, yeah.  My dad could frequently be found strumming his guitar out on the porch, and we always had one room set up as a rehearsal space in our homes as kids.  Rutger and I met at a young age, so we both grew up practicing together in my parent’s different houses over the years.

Rutger: I moved to the states at a young age for medical treatment, but from what I understand — and from what few memories I can piece together — where I spent my early years in Guatemala — namely, Lake Atitlán — was pretty idyllic.

“Lake Como, it seems to me, touches on the limit of permissibly picturesque, but Atitlán is Como with additional embellishments of several immense volcanoes. It really is too much of a good thing,” according to Aldous Huxley.

Some of my American and European friends have visited, but I have yet to make it back for a number of personal reasons.

Creativity was a pretty large part of my life growing up. My dad owned a ceramics business that he started with the help of my grandmother (a very free-spirited painter and bead-maker herself). Though he sort of abandoned the business once we settled in the U.S., art and music always stayed pretty present in my life, thanks to him.

After I met Ryan in second grade and we decided we wanted to be in a band a year or two later, my dad taught me guitar (he once had dreams of being a musician as well).

Tell me about your musical upbringing. When did you first become aware that music was going to be a part of your life?

Ryan: For me, probably in 2nd grade, after I met Rutger and started playing the drums.  I was really into buying and collecting CD’s at a younger age, but I don’t think I realized that playing music would be a part of my life until I was about 8.

Rutger: Some part of me knew from the start, I think. Thanks to my dad, I always had Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, plenty of Mexican boleros, Santana, Gipsy Kings, Buena Vista Social Club, and Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” in my periphery. As much as I got into pop-punk and skate-punk while developing my guitar skills, I’ve realized that my more foundational influences came from the music still echoing in my baby brain.

What was your formal / not formal music education like growing up?

Ryan: I’ve had a few music teachers during different stages of my life, focusing on technique and learning how to read basic charts, but a lot of my education has come from playing live with a band, and spending time writing/recording our own songs.

Rutger: Non-existent, really. I took one formal guitar lesson and said, “Nope, not playing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ 20 times in a row.”Aside from the foundational pointers I got from my dad, everything else was just listening and learning on my own. Looking back, I regret that decision somewhat, but I think it’s always important to remember, historically speaking, that music came first and theory followed as a way to rationalize it…. Of course, the irony of all of that is the fact that I was a music instructor for three years of my life.

When did you start writing songs? Do you remember the first song / piece of music you wrote?

Ryan: Rutger and I started writing songs together, in our first childhood project – I’m not sure what our first song with that band was, but I’d bet it was something that sounded similar to a Blink 182 jam.
Rutger: I started writing chord progressions and melodies when I was 10 or so, but it wasn’t until about 14 that I started writing lyrics. I remember the first songs I wrote in a collaborative sense (around age 10 in a band that Ryan, I, and another childhood friend started), but the first complete song that I wrote on my own was probably a whiny, acoustic finger-picking ballad that we (Numskul, our band was called) released when we were 16 or something.

What’s the biggest hardship that’s helped inspire your writing? Did you feel any sort of limitations when writing or recording?

Ryan: Hmm…oddly enough, the biggest hardships that have inspired my playing have usually been when a project I’m playing in has dismembered or come to an end.  It takes commitment and drive to want to start another band after one doesn’t work out.

Rutger: I was a pretty shy kid growing up, and considering the fact that I had alienated myself from my first language (Spanish) at a very early age, I’ve always felt like I’ve had to work harder to get words out. I’ll spend hours, days, weeks on the same line. Melodies? No problem. But language? Language is such an arduous process for me.

I interviewed The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman (one of the best songwriters out there right now, in my opinion) a year or so ago, and something she said has always stuck with me, because it’s exactly how I feel about my songwriting: “I think there’s some strength in not being good at something because you can wind up in this swamp over it. I think in part because I’m not good at it, I work so hard at it. Maybe I’ve become good at it because I’m bad at it.”

What’s the writing process like? Is it an individual thing that comes together over time, or is it a group effort? Did you see it shift since your debut album, Island of Daughters?

Ryan: The main lyrics and guitar melodies are almost always brought to the table by Rutger, and then the song comes together musically over time together.  Lately, we’ve been fortunate to have some input on the production side of things from our manager, Ross, as well.

Rutger: It’s shifted somewhat since “Island of Daughters” considering we’re down a member, but it generally happens that I’ll come in with a song (lyrics, chord progression, and structure) and then we’ll refine the structure and produce it so it’s ready for the studio.

In 2017, you went up to the Idyllwild mountains for a week to demo new songs and then this year, you recorded them – three new singles – in a cabin in upstate Connecticut. How’d that go? Do you think the places had any impact on the feeling of the music / lyrics? 

Ryan: Yeah, I’d say the cabin we rented in Idylwild had an influence on the sound… I think I remember writing “Good Night America” in the morning hours…it was spring time, there was fresh energy around.  It was just inspiring to be secluded and in a new place with fresh energy.

Rutger: I think the varying geography had quite a bit of an influence on the spirit of the singles. We wrote and recorded a lot of the musical themes and ideas in Idyllwild (seven or eight compositions we scrapped pretty much entirely), and the songs themselves I wrote over the following months. We had come off of a national tour six months before going to Idyllwild, so the American landscape was definitely on my mind. I wanted to tell stories that channeled different aspects of the American consciousness, from nihilistic impulses to despairing attempts at glory and, at the end of the day, glimmers of hope.

When you first start writing a piece of music, is writing something you enjoy doing? 

Ryan: Yeah, one of my favorite feelings is when you’re jamming and something great just sort of appears out of thin air.

Rutger: Writing is definitely enjoyable if it’s going well, but pretty excruciating if it’s going poorly. We’ve gotten pretty good at learning how to manage our time so we get the best out of writing sessions, though.

For your new single “’Good Night America’ you imagined the Midwestern date gone wrong as a metaphor for America. Who thought of this idea and how long did the creation process take from initial concept to demo?

Ryan: Bruddah Rutger!

Rutger: The demo sort of came first, actually. While we were in Idyllwild, I came up with this chord progression and melody one night while everyone else had gone out on the balcony to look at the stars or something. Initially, the lyrics were pretty simple, but I fleshed them out for about six months, trying to tell a darkly comical story of a guy going to meet a girl at a bar for a date. It’s really the nihilism of Western dating that serves as a stand-in for a self-serving “love affair” with America.After that, it took another six months to produce it to completion.

I know America as a whole and what it means to be American places a big part of both of your, Rutger and Ryan, lives. As the band aims to encompass the whole of America – with all its diversity – through your music, when you first started to write music together did you know this country would play such a big part of who the band is?

Ryan: No, I didn’t imagine it being a focal point initially, but I think as we’re growing up, paying more attention to social issues, and have seen so much of the country while on tour, it’s naturally made its way in to the scope of our project at the moment.

Rutger: Not at all, no. We weren’t really operating in any grandiose or overtly conceptual mode, but geography has become important for us over the years — especially considering the frequency with which we find ourselves traveling from coast to coast and how contrasted our upbringings were. My childhood was odd, actually, because although my dad was born in Stockholm, he grew up predominantly in Mexico, so he’s culturally more Mexican than anything. Suffice it to say, cultural identity has always been rather confusing for me, a half-indigenous Salvadoran, half-Swedish, Guatemalan-born, (culturally) Mexican-raised Southern Californian city slicker looking East. I’m sure a lot of people feel that way and have similarly eclectic upbringings, but it’s hard to talk about because you just want to fit in. That’s all I wanted to do growing up. Celebrating the opposite — i.e., not giving in to a mono-culture — is important right now, though, for obvious reasons. A lot of people probably feel like they’re faking their way through this country, and that’s okay, as long as we realize that we’re all faking it together.

What was your favorite part about the writing / creation process of these new songs? 

Ryan: We had a fun period where we were playing shows semi regularly, testing out this material…. a lot of it wasn’t finished yet, and sometimes didn’t have lyrics, but we’d just play our latest version and see how the room reacted to it.

Rutger: Idyllwild was pretty magical when it came to igniting the spark for these songs, but Connecticut is where they really came together as polished and cohesive wholes.

With your artwork, how did you interact with the artist/designer? Did you contribute ideas or remain hands-off? Was there a revision process?

Ryan: Actually, Rutger and I designed the latest single art.  We dug up a 35mm photo I had taken in NYC, and tried out a bunch of ideas with the central theme of a flower.  Our manager, Ross, was a big help in being a sounding board for us as we went through the process.

Rutger: It was a process of back and forth between the two of us and our manager. I came up with an initial design idea for the flower and the deconstruction of the American flag, and then, to infuse it with a bit more gravitas, we used a beautiful photo that Ryan took in Central Park for the background.

How important is it to you for the art that accompanies your music to represent the sound and the lyrics? Do you aim for a conversation between the two, or are you more interested in an aesthetically cool package?

Ryan: Our latest approach to artwork has been definitely focused on making sure there’s a visual connection to the sound/lyrics, but also trying to keep it relevant to the current moment and what sort of visual stuff we’re drawn to.

Rutger: I think it’s a little bit of all of that. A lot of the time, we trust our gut instinct and the connections and narratives and network of meaningful associations emanate out from there.

What is your perspective on how you want to be represented throughout your band’s visuals (press photos, music videos, album artwork)?

Ryan: We’re lucky to have friend/documenter Evan Schell on tour with us a lot of the time, so we have him to thank for a lot of our press photos and video content.  We try to make it a cohesive look across the board, but also really aim to have all the visual stuff come organically, as a reflection of our actual lifestyles.

Rutger: That’s something that’s progressed a lot as our music has evolved. With our more art-pop oriented stuff, we were pretty abstract with our visuals, but as we’ve humanized our music more (privileged the voice and the song), our visuals have followed suit.

Have you had any mentors along the way?

Rutger: Our parents a little bit when we were younger. They were really instrumental when it came to encouraging our creative endeavors. That’s rare in a lot of situations, so we were very lucky to have grown up with that support.