For casual fans of the genre, it may look like the hype surrounding folk music has died down a bit in the last two years. With bands like Mumford & Sons and The Lumineers in between album cycles, the rootsy side of music has fallen a bit to the wayside in modern American radio. But, enter Bear's Den, a London based folk trio raised in the same music scene as Mumford.
After years of releasing EPs to critical acclaim, last month Bear's Den released its first full-length album Islands, a rich and harmonious 10-track LP full of reworked old material and heartfelt, lyrically literary new tracks.
During the CMJ Music Marathon in New York, Music Times sat down with the members of Bear's Den to discuss the new album, the unlikely viral success of their tragic "Elysium" music video and the band's intimate new tour.
Music Times: A lot of the songs on your album Islands, such as "Agape," "Above the Clouds of Pompeii" and "Bad Blood" have been around for a while, just in different forms. How did you go about retooling them for the album and why did you decide to re-record them rather than go for the EP versions?
Andrew Davie: Good question. The first version of "Above the Clouds of Pompeii" was recorded by us in Wales. I would like to say it was the most brilliant production job in the world, but that's not entirely accurate. There's like a certain quality to it. But, I think we wanted to explore a different kind of sound. We were very conscious that we were making an album and there were songs that were older but we wanted to show something about the way the songs have grown through touring and the way that's helped us bring things out in a song that weren't there in the original recording sessions.
MT: Your lyrics, especially, "Above the Clouds of Pompeii," "Magdalene" and "Think of England" have a lot of historical references and mentions in them lyrically. What's your lyrical process and inspiration? Are you guys history buffs because there are a lot of little snippets in there...
AD: We're definitely not history buffs. We have a new member of our touring lineup who is a history teacher so I pick his brains a lot. I think it all comes from very strange, very weird places, often a movie or someone will say something to you in a pub and you'll be like, "That's amazing. I need to do something with that." It comes from so many different places. But as far as being historical, something about the old stories whether it's biblical or other things, there's something about it that has a universal truth to it.
MT: Do you have a specific example of "I heard this in a bar and it led to this lyric in this song?"
AD: Yeah, I do. I remember with "Pompeii" someone said - and this is going to sound really pretentious - someone was talking about Nietzsche, and this guy said that he said you should build your home on the slopes of Vesuvius and life your life just as any day that a volcano could just erupt and flow. As soon as he said that, it led to the lyrics "We built our home out on the slopes / Pompeii beneath, she lay above." It felt like a really good way of opening; I knew I wanted to write a song but I just didn't have the first line, and then it was just like, "Yeah." In the pub.
MT: Your music has these really rich harmonies with the instrumentation and your voices all kind of blend together. When you were first getting together, how did you work that out and figure out the depths of your harmonies?
Joey Haynes: We spent a few days at Kev's parents' place ahead of our first recording sessions. We were just there in their living room and we couldn't set up a whole band setup so we were just focusing on the harmonies a whole lot and doing that. We kind of went through the harmonies and figured out "This does work, this doesn't work so well," and "Let's try and change this around here" and "This chord works out well with a three-part harmony and maybe here should just be Davie or one harmony." That's where the "Bad Blood" harmonies really came together.
AD: The thing is, we're still working on it. We're always developing how to sort of mold around each other and build on it. We're always trying to move one step forward. That's the thing about being a three piece for so long. When you're just three, you have to work quite a lot harder to develop those full sounds a lot, when you're not playing bass or drums or whatever. When we're not playing bass, I'll be playing the guitar a bit lower.
Joey's vocals sit a bit above mine and Kev's are a bit below me. It just so happens to be perfect for us to make harmonies where we all are naturally most comfortable singing.
MT: Your music videos for Islands have been really interesting. Both "Elysium" and "Above the Clouds of Pompeii" capture loss and death in different ways, though "Elysium" was by surprise, and they're both really striking to watch. Did you have a lot of creative control over the visuals?
JH: ["Elysium"] was kind of an accidental outcome, in a way. A good friend of ours called Marcus Haney is an awesome photographer and cinematographer had heard the song and was like, "I have a really cool idea for it. I want to film my brother and his friends during their last few days or weeks of university and kind of capture that transition between innocence and not innocence." It was going to be just a look at them having one last hoorah before facing the real world, as it were.
Then obviously while they were filming, there was a school shooting at their university, and so in a very tragic and kind of eerie way, the real world was very much imposed upon them while they were filming. That's obviously not any sort of thing that you can plan or have any control over. So, we just got a short message from Marcus, saying, "Listen, there was just a school shooting and we don't know what's going to happen." We were just hoping that everyone was safe and basically wrote the music video off. We thought there was no way that it was really important right now. We'll find some other way to make a video for it.
Then, a day or two later, we got another message from Marcus saying that all the students and kids in the video wanted it to be finished and be almost an homage to their friend, Paul Lee, who died in the shooting.
It was kind of taken out of our hands a little bit because the whole focus became their way of honoring his memory. It became something more than just a music video. When we were sent over the first edit, we all kind of just went to watch it. It's obviously very, very emotional and a powerful kind of video. We all just knew it was sort of amazing in a sad and tragic kind of way. But the fact that they felt very strongly about wanting to do it and that we were also told that Paul Lee's family looked positively on it. It was sort of a nice way of showing how people deal with loss and grief and that sort of thing. It wasn't just a music video anymore, it became something bigger and something more than about us or that song. The end result is really, really powerful.
MT: What about the music video for "Above the Clouds of Pompeii?" That one is very sad too.
AD: Once you're in that situation, people sort of reach out and let you know that they want to do a music video for your song. With that music video, it was a bit different from what we thought and were told it was going to be, but yeah, it was really special and the guys on it were amazing. It was a really sad music video but also strong in the end, and there were a lot of people working really hard on it.
MT: Your live shows are pretty intimate. At your Bowery Ballroom show a few months ago, you went into the audience to perform "Bad Blood" acoustic. But, as your profile is rising and as you go about this tour, how do you plan on keeping that intimacy? How important is that to you?
Kev Jones: It's really important for us to do that. Even when you're not having that much of a good show - sometimes things don't go your way in a band, strings break, something can go wrong out there - it's really nice to know that you can strip away everything of it and do that. It's more tangible.
JH: It's nice to be able to take away the barriers of you playing the song and the audience hearing the song.
AD: For us, sometimes it's just like, "Thank God we don't have to stand up here and play anymore." It feels like we're really doing something. There's no sort of manipulation to us. It's really nice. When the room is so quiet that you can hear a pin drop. We did a show at the Tabernacle in London the other day, and you could hear just this door swinging. That's all you could hear in the room because it was so quiet. I remember thinking, "That damn door!" but it's just amazing.
MT: Kev, when you play live you'll oftentimes have one arm on the drum and another on a different instrument. It's quite impressive. How did you develop that skill?
KJ: If you want to hear something, then you're going to make it happen. The less you think about it, the smarter your brain is about actually going to execute it. Even now at the London show, I freaked out on "The Writing's On The Wall," which has keyboards here and drums here. I can usually play the song find but as soon as I start thinking about it, I f**k it up. So the whole thing is focusing on not what I'm doing
JH: It's quite funny to watch him when we're starting a song.
AD: It's amazing; it makes the band sound not so small. Visually, when you see Kev do bass and play drums full beat. Looking back at someone doing that gives you such a buzz.
MT: Also live, you guys do the Drake cover of "Hold On, We're Going Home." It's not funny, per se, but it's a little interesting. How did you develop that cover?
AD: We have an appreciation for the heart of hip-hop. But also, as far as Drake's "Hold On, We're Going Home," our tour manager was playing that song in the van on a daily basis for like two months straight going across America. It just totally got stuck in our heads and it's such a good song. I don't think any of us are that precious about the genre or whatever. But a good song is a good song. It was really fun doing our own version.
MT: You have to love covers like that. Glen Hansard does an amazing "Everytime" by Britney Spears.
Bear's Den (collectively): Why don't pop stars do covers of folk songs? I would love to see Britney Spears do a Glen Hansard song. That's what the world needs!
Imagine if Drake did a Bear's Den song. Yeah, if you're reading this, Drake! Do our songs!
Bear's Den's new album Islands it out now via Communion Records. The band is also on a North American tour in support of the album. Check out a full list of tour dates here.
