For their third studio recording Other Desert Cities, Bay Station sought inspiration amid the stark, natural beauty of the Mojave Desert. While their first two releases, Your Own Reaction (2014 as KCDC) and Go Out and Make Some (2016) reflected the coastal landscape of their home in Alameda, California, the 10 songs on Other Desert Cities were written by Bay Station co-founders Deborah Crooks and Kwame Copeland during several week-long writing retreats in Joshua Tree. Their experiences and impressions of the desert town adjacent to its namesake National Park inform the recording, which details the strange, poetic, and distinctly American stories of desert denizens, both animal and human.
In this interview spotlight, I chat with Bay Station about their latest project, challenges, motivations and more.
Full Q&A along with links and music below.
Where are you from and what style of music do you create? (In your own words, not necessarily in marketing terms or by popular genre classifications.)
Most of us now call Alameda, CA, home. Two of us are California natives. Steve is from Philadelphia and Kwame grew up in Laramie, Wyoming; and our co-producer/mixing engineer and drummer on the record, Mike Stevens, is originally from Connecticut. Everyone has been playing a while, have broad musical tastes, and share a deep appreciation for songs, period. And there’s a lot of love for the guitar in this project, especially in the case of Steve and Kwame. Everyone has a lot of musical and creative curiosity and has built music-making into their everyday lives. Steve, Kwame and I have deep roots in the singer-songwriter tradition. Kwame has taken up the dobro in the past five years; Chris has often plays mandolin when he’s not on bass duty.We call the sum of our parts “West Coast Americana.”
What led you down this path of music and what motivates you to keep going?
All of us were introduced to the power and joy of live music early in our lives. We’ve all been writing songs or playing for years, and have generated a fair amount of solo material. Kwame and started writing together as kind of a dare to see if we could collaborate, and liked what we were coming up with together enough to make a band out of it.
I think the joy creating something new and the challenge of bettering ourselves — to improve, to be present, to evolve creatively and push one’s edge — is what keeps us all going. Performing live is always, minimally, an adventure, and ideally and ultimately, a means to connect with other humans. Seeing people take meaning from a song, or start to dance and feel the music is hugely satisfying and motivates us to keep going.
How is this new release different than previous ones? Were you trying to accomplish anything specific?
This is our first themed record. Kwame and I wrote the material on several extended trips to Joshua Tree, CA. So the material is drawn from lives lived in a desert landscape, both real and imagines, as well as traveling through a desert landscape (we did a cross-country tour in 2016 that found us in So Cal, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas for a good deal of time). Since we wrote the songs in the desert, we took the band back to Joshua Tree (Gatos Trail) to record most it there as well. A kind of 180-degree turn from our usual San Francisco Bay-centric lives.
Name one or two challenges you face as an indie musician in this oversaturated, digital music age? How has technology helped you (since we know it does help)?
Yes, oversaturation is both a blessing and a curse. The bonus is having all this music at one’s fingertips give people chance to really choose for themselves and find anything — and us! — with a quick search, not just what might be coming on the corporate-run radio. We can make music in California and have listeners in places we’ve never set foot. That’s amazing and a huge boon to all indie artists.
And conversely, there’s so much content, people can get numb to, or otherwise undervalue quality content. So yes, cutting through the volume and finding willing ears can seem like an overwhelming prospect. And then of course, some people don’t think to actually buy the music and support the artist, and realize real support is what will keep the music alive.
Where is the best place to connect with you online and discover more music?
All of Bay Station’s music can be heard on Bandcamp , as well as Spotify, Amazon, Apple, etc. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram for the latest news, live clips and information on where we’re playing next. We’re about to do a fun sailing and music ‘mini-tour’ around the San Francisco Bay and plan to do some live video posts from the boat! And we love if you sign up for our mailing list via our site http://baystationband.com/.
