Pinegrove
EQUALLY MORE GROUNDED, INTIMATE AND BOLD, PINEGROVE REINVENT THEMSELVES FOR THEIR CAREER-DEFINING FOURTH ALBUM.
Listening to Marigold – the fourth album from New Jersey alt-country titans Pinegrove – elicits a certain feeling of warmth; comfort; an affirmation that you’re not alone in whatever personal storms you’re currently weathering. The band achieve this by minimising the distance between us and frontman Evan Hall. On previous records, the outfit would revel in the breadth and looseness of a lo-fi mix – Hall says that 2018’s Skylight, for example, “was supposed to sound like you’re just in the room with us rehearsing” – which made them fun to listen to, but difficult to connect with. But on Marigold, Hall’s vocals are emphatically more distinct; it’s as if he’s singing directly to us, the instrumental backings merely a bed for us to lie on together as he does.
“We were aiming for something more emotionally direct than
Skylight,” Hall says of Pinegrove’s more contained approach to recording Marigold. “Introspection is certainly a theme throughout all of my songwriting, but with Skylight, it was a pretty conceptual project. There’s a lot about exploring the fourth wall, and performance, and that sort of thing. We had this whole making-of documentary series,
Command+S, which basically allowed everyone to look in through the window and see our process. But with this record, we imagined something a bit more buttoned-up that we could just hand to the Pinenuts out there and say, ‘I hope you like this.’ And with that, too, I think you’ll hear a more sonically direct approach.”
Hall explains that each new Pinegrove record is, in a multitude of ways, a response to its predecessors. There’s an overarching visual metaphor
that he unravels – in the case of 2016’s Cardinal, he envisioned “a bright bird landing in the branches of a tree, or the spirit of creativity visiting your brain.”
Skylight expands on that concept of welcoming and visitation – it’s a midnight jam session in which the listener is a fly on the wall – but Marigold grounds it. It’s a wake-up call to the morning after the jam, when all the other strangers have left and all that remains is yourself, Pinegrove, and your collective hangovers. Thematically, Hall links it to the album’s titular flower.
“The marigold is something that you go to,” he says. “You visit the flower, which is stationary – it has roots. And there are different phases to it: sometimes it’s beautiful and bright, and sometimes it’s nothing; it’s in hibernation. That was what initially drew me to the marigold – exploring the liminal space between hibernation and being brightly in bloom. I thought that was a nice way to explore the dualities that every person has – whether you’re feeling social or feeling private, whether you’re feeling up or down, or whether you’re horizontal because you’re sleeping or dead, or you’re energetic and running around, vertical.”
On a technical wavelength, the hi-fi sound of
Marigold is testament to how much Pinegrove have matured in all aspects of their operation. The LP was self-recorded at Amperland – a rural farmhouse in upstate New York that Hall and drummer Zack Levine rent out – where the band would spend weeks on end tinkering with their sound, living and breathing with the record as it took shape on its own accord. And as Pinegrove continue to rack up years of experience in DIY production, their approach to certain techniques has evolved and been reshaped.
“I think we’ve absolutely gotten better at capturing the sounds in our heads,” Hall attests, “And at the same time, our vision is sort of shifting too. When I recorded MixtapeOne in 2010, I was like, ‘Y’know what? This is it. This really scratches the itch for me.’ And I can listen back on that and think, ‘Yeah, this is what I wanted to hear ten years ago, but it’s not what I want to hear anymore.’ I think we’ve grown a little bit with each effort – not just in terms of our skill, either, but also the precision of our vision… No rhyme intended.”
The band initially rented what they would dub Amperland – in tribute to the humble ampersand, a key element of Pinegrove’s imagery – solely to record Skylight and be able to document the process more fluidly. But after finding immediate success in ditching the traditional studio recording process, the house became a central part of Pinegrove’s ongoing operations. They live there while they work, meaning the songs don’t just exist as extensions of their creativity, but become exact reflections of who they are in the moments they choose to embrace those songs. Hall doesn’t see Pinegrove ditching Amperland anytime soon… It just doesn’t make sense to.
“When you’re given an album advance,” he says, “You can go to a studio and use their mics and consoles and equipment, and you leave with an album in your hands. But you’ve got maybe a week or two to make it work, and then that’s it. Or, we figured, we could just buy a bunch of microphones, pay rent for a year and do it ourselves. And then you’re not limited by the hours of operation of the studio, or the lack of space, or anything else. We moved to a place where we don’t have any neighbours to bother, so if we want to do some drum takes at 1:00am, that’s not a problem. We can work more patiently and more spontaneously when we’re doing it on our own schedules – and so far that’s worked for us.”
Having the freedom to work on their own terms has rubbed off creatively on Pinegrove, too. “I think that we’ve built our own sort of insular language,” Hall says, “As far as our recording techniques and arrangements go. If you’ve heard Pinegrove before, you’ll notice that we like to switch tempos, and we’re very sensitive to dynamic trajectories and stuff like that – and perhaps rejecting more traditional song structures when it doesn’t suit us. None of that feels abnormal to us because we’ve been playing together for so long; that’s just how we do it.”
One pivotal idiosyncrasy that sets Pinegrove apart from their peers is the fact their lineup is constantly in flux. Hall and Levine are the only two “permanent” members in the band, with a revolving cast of friends and colleagues dipping in and out at will. There are five guitarists that pop up on Marigold – Hall, Levine’s brothers Nick and Michael, Josh Marré and Sam Skimmer – all of whom have their own wholly unique setups and skillsets. His main duties remaining behind the mic, Hall keeps things relatively simple. “The other players in the band all do have a bit of a taste for pedals,” he admits, “But honestly for me, on my pedalboard you’ll find a tuner, a boost pedal, a volume pedal, and an EQ pedal for when I put acoustic guitar through.”
His guitarsenal on Marigold included some nondescript Stratocasters and the occasional Gibson hollowbody. He admits that he’s not too precious about what winds up in his hands when it comes time to lay down a lick, but there is one guitar that he holds near and dear: a one-of-itskind Larrivée acoustic that Hall has quite literally lived with his entire life.
“My dad bought this particular guitar the week I was born,” he says wistfully. “This is the guitar I remember him playing when I was a child – there were all these times where if he wasn’t paying enough attention to me or something, I would just go over and detune his pegs while he was playing. And not that he was planning on doing this when he bought it, either, but he gave it to me as a gift for my 18th birthday. So that’s the one I had in college and started writing Pinegrove songs on, and there’s a lot of personal attachment there. I think we got some great sounds out of it [on Marigold], too!”