Tape recorders, OCD and Bo Burnham: In Conversation With Oscar Lindsey
Despite the six-hour time difference between Nashville and London, I managed to meet with Oscar Lindsey ahead of his upcoming record release. Before Sunshine drops everywhere on the 16th of October, Lindsey reflects on his past albums and how his process and sound have changed from his first uploads.
I was wondering what your experience was with music prior to releasing stuff online, and how has this impacted the way that you work with music now? How did you decide to release music and start it as a career?
I started making music in high school. It started out a little bit as I made some songs that were jokes or funny. Whenever I figured out how to use Distrokid. Whenever I figured out how to put it on Spotify, I just started doing it. I would just make a song in GarageBand, not do anything to it, and get the file and put it on Spotify. I would just rip it, and over the years, I've gotten just way more picky about what I put out, and now it's way more of a thing, and I work on it way harder, and some things make the album, some don't, but back in the day, the way I'd do it [was] just make a song, put it out; I didn't really care. I knew that back then the songs I were making weren't gonna be the best songs ever, I just got to get these out of the way.
And do you think the space and place that you're making music or writing songs in has an impact on your work? Where do you feel the most creative?
For sure. I feel the most creative from a songwriting perspective…Definitely at night. I write a lot of songs in my bed at night, just on acoustic guitar. At 3 AM or something, but I really prefer to record during the day. I like to get in the studio early and start working on stuff. My creativity will be at its best at night. I'm never in the studio at night. I like to have everything completely written out before I get in the studio so I just know what I'm doing.
Do things ever change in the studio, or do you take what you've done before and then work on the music and the production side when you record?
Yeah, things definitely will change. It just depends. I'll have a really good idea of what the song is gonna be like before I even start recording it. But in the studio is where we get the bare bones down. We got down what I was hearing in my head, and then I started experimenting. I'll record with other people. This last record that's coming out, I recorded a ton with other people, and I'd get the drums, bass, and guitar down, and just the bones of the track, and then I would sit in the studio and just do some cool things with piano, or try a weird guitar. That’s when I would experiment a little bit, and that's when a lot of the cool stuff came out of it, on the production side.
I read that you're very influenced by Elliott Smith and Alex G. You can definitely hear their impact on your music. What other artists have impacted your work? And how do you mix in influences while also keeping your own style in your work?
I love Elliott Smith. I love Alex G. I love the Beatles. The Beatles are the blueprint for all the shit. And Elliott Smith there wouldn't be an Elliott Smith without The Beatles. I feel like that's partly why I love him so much. I never consciously think about the balancing out of my influences; it just happens. Sometimes I make a song that sounds a lot like Alex G, or a lot like Elliott Smith. Weirdly, the older I get and the more music I make, the more I get closer to making something that's more my own.
I feel like on my last record, I was super influenced by Alex G, and it's a little bit heavier and crazier, and this record…there's one… Elliott Smith moment, but I get the comparison. The biggest reason that people call that out is [because] I use very similar production techniques of doubling the vocal and the guitar, and I do that partly because I love Elliott Smith, but more just because I like the way it sounds and I've been doing that forever. I definitely love them, but I have a ton of influences that are all over the place, but they blend together in a weird way.
What's the first record or band that you remember really loving, that really resonated with you?
When I was younger, I had no idea what music to listen to at all, and my brothers would listen to music, in pretty formative years from 8 years old to 14 years old, I was only list
ening to dubstep. I had no idea what to listen to. I discovered The Beatles, of course, and then a bunch of 60s and 70s music, Simon & Garfunkel. Ween, I loved a lot. Discovering the Beatles was probably the thing that really got me the most into music, or at least the most excited about music.
Anything at that age when you discover the super big artists, David Bowie or something, it's super inspiring. Honestly, the person that got me into music, to make music, though, was Bo Burnham.
He’s very of the time. His lyricism is so interesting and so relevant.
He's really good. His songs are really good. As I've gotten older, they've aged a little poorly, or a little cringe at moments, but I loved Bo Burnham when I was 13, 14, 15. I got into him before I started listening to The Beatles, and that's part of the reason I started playing piano.
How do you think your sound has changed from when you started releasing music? I know you've got your newest album coming out. How do you think that's changed from Look I Caught a Fish or your earlier stuff?
Big time. That first album, Look I Caught A Fish, I was making music to make music. I consciously understood this isn't gonna be amazing, because I've never made an album before, so I made it sound weird, like Ween stuff, on an old tape machine. I made it sound lo-fi on purpose, so it would mask the way that…I just didn't know what I was doing. All my older stuff was on tape machines. This new album will be my fifth album that I've made. Going through all those albums, it shows I slowly learned how to record on a computer. The first record is all on tape. The second record is mostly on tape and some was on the computer, and the third one,I started recording on the computer a good bit. Some of it's on tape, and the one that came out last year, Glitter, is completely on the computer except for one song, and then this new one is completely on the computer, so that's the biggest thing that's changed. My process of writing and making music has gotten so much better, because I understand how it works a lot better now. I understand myself a lot more and have a pretty good flow of making music, and I know how to make something pretty good, but still working at it. It's a weird thing, where you want to never meet where you're at, but you're always chasing something better. It's like a never-ending journey.
I guess that's the nice thing about being able to see all your music on Spotify. You can see the evolution, see where you want it to go.
People bring that up a lot. I think it's cool, because it shows growth. I've definitely thought of taking stuff off because there is a bunch of stuff that I just don't like, but I already have taken a ton of music off Spotify, but I've stopped doing it because every time I do it, people will get upset and they're like, ‘Where'd it go?’. So I don't do it anymore. It's cool for people to be able to go back…see the growth for sure.
There are a couple singles out from Sunshine. I was wondering what ‘Painting the Walls’ is about, because the lyrics really resonated. It feels like a lot about anxious thoughts and having a lot of indecision.
You hit the nail on the head. It's some of the most straightforward lyrics I've ever written. It's exactly what you said: anxious thoughts and indecision and OCD. It's just something new that I was struggling with pretty bad this past year. The idea of writing a song about it could be cringe. was just really in the thick of it with all that stuff, and then I just sat down one day, and that song just came out.
Maybe this is a good thing to put out because even if it has a chance of helping somebody else a little bit, the way that it helped me in writing it. It was a therapy session, me writing it, or journaling, because it's just saying what's going on. It's super literal. I've gotten a good amount of messages from people who say that they relate to this song a lot. I think it's so cool. It’s eye-opening to see something that you struggle with that a bunch of other people also struggle with. It puts things in perspective and makes it a little easier to deal with.
I can't really remember hearing another song that's so explicit about that OCD feeling.
Yeah, I agree. It's one of a kind. I don't know if there really is another OCD song. The chorus is a little more nuanced… You wouldn't really know, but in context with the verses.
‘Metal Through Her Lips’ is one of my favourite recent songs. What was your inspiration behind this one and for the production as well?
I wrote it in probably early February, January. I'd just gone through a breakup. The metal through her lips is the part that sticks out the most, but I don't really know where that came from. I was in Nashville, we had this ice storm, and my power was out at my house for a long time, so we were staying in this hotel. I was in the lobby of this hotel. I had my guitar right here. It's my classical Spanish guitar. A gut string is what they call it. I tuned the guitar down a little bit, and I was playing with this new tuning. I played a D chord, and then I accidentally played this chord…I was like, oh, that's cool as hell, I should write something like that. I pretty much wrote the whole song in this hotel lobby. All the words I pretty much just said right off the bat, I didn't really try to write it at all.
I remember I made a TikTok with it, which I usually didn't do back then, but I was trying to get into. I posted it, and it got 50 likes. Whatever, back to the grindstone. I had no reason to believe it was any different from any of the other songs, so I didn't really prioritize it that much, and then I got in the studio to record it. It just came together. I remember I worked on it with my friend Hudson, and he played some guitar on it, and he played upright bass on it, bowed, kind of like cello. We started recording it, and we tried, we started it 3 times, and then gave up. We went to lunch, then we came back. I got the drum part right, and we put the guitars together, and it started feeling really good. After we got the bare bones, I spent the next couple of days just flushing it out by myself, got all the instrumental stuff, and then got the song together, got my friends to play some trumpet on it, which was cool, and then put piano on it, and… that's as far as production goes. Came together really quick.
I would show it to people, and it would definitely elicit a different reaction for sure. People specifically were talking about that song and really liked it a lot, and then I posted some video on Instagram with just it in the background. I had reels blow up for comedy, I've always been doing that thing, and YouTube, but I'd never had something work from music before.
I posted something, and it did pretty well. I kept posting stuff, and every time I posted, it would do better. It got to the peak moment where me and my friend Parker were playing it, and she was playing it on the omnichord, that was a dope moment, and then just a couple other ones of me playing with my band blew up. It was just great positive reinforcement, and people really loved the song. People just love that song. I love it too. I think I understand why it did so well, but I don't. I guess it just has a quality to it, a little bit of magic that I accidentally tapped into. So grateful that I wrote it, and that it came out the time that it did.
It’s a great start for a new musical journey I've been on. [It’s] really opened a lot of doors for me, so I'm really so grateful for it and excited for stuff to come.
I also heard the song off of TikTok. What's your opinion on using TikTok and how TikTok has transformed the way we discover music? It used to be YouTube, or people would post on YouTube, but now you can see 100 different people's videos in 2 minutes.
I think it's a good thing. The only time I can see it being bad is when people are making music for the algorithm or with TikTok in mind. I think that's weird, but I think it's incredible. It launched my whole career a little bit, being able to make a song and just put a video of it on this app, and then people love it. I think it's great. There's downsides to everything, and there's TikTok and Instagram. There are cool things about it, and there are really whack things about it. I think the bad thing about it is that when stuff doesn't work…It's pretty bad for your mental health at times, but it's an incredible tool if you can just use it and turn your mind off and don't let it decide how you feel about your self-esteem. It's a great tool, and I think it's so amazing… I'm on a label now, but you really don't need to be on a label. You can do so much by yourself now, which is awesome.
Do you have any favourite places you like to perform, or specific events, whether it's a festival or smaller shows? What's your favourite place to perform?
I love playing house shows; they're always great. I love Nashville, but I've loved every time we've played in Chicago; the fan base there, I guess you could say, or, like, my fans there are so dope. The last tour I did with my friend James Eichmann, we played New York, Chicago, and LA. New York and LA were awesome and there were tons of people there, and there's a great energy, but Chicago, it was the same amount of people, but double the energy. They were just so hyped. For me, it is all about the energy of the people in the crowd, and if they give you something to work off of.
We're booking a tour in Europe right now, in the UK. I'm so excited to go.
I've had so many people in the past, like, ask me to come play…now I'm finally gonna do it, so I'm so excited. It's gonna be really fun.
What are you listening to at the moment? What's your go-to playlist or artist that you're listening to at the moment?
I've been listening to The Police a lot. Been listening to a lot of John Lennon solo stuff. I've been listening to a lot of Mac DeMarco. Emma Ogier, she has a bunch of stuff coming out, Renny Conti has an album that's about to come out. My homie James just dropped an album, too: James Eichmann. So a bunch of my friends have a bunch of new music, and I've been listening to that a lot too.
If you could soundtrack any TV show or movie, what would it be?
The dream would be to do a soundtrack for a coming-of-age film. I really love those movies: Dead Poets Society or Good Will Hunting or Juno. Anything like that would be so awesome. And I love movies; I just watched that movie Bottle Rocket by Wes Anderson. That would be a dope movie to do. I love coming-of-age movies. I don't watch a ton of TV, but TV would be cool too. It's a better experience watching a movie, in my opinion, because a great movie will just change the way you think. TV shows just don't stop; it's almost designed to just be a time sucker. You know what I mean? There's no better feeling than just watching a great movie. It just is so much more inspiring to me than a TV show.
Sunshine is out everywhere on 16th October!
Edited by Eva Lau-Johnston, Co-Music Editor
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