Easy Beach - ‘Easy Beach’ Album Track-by-Track
Easy Beach recently released their debut self-titled album. Ian Cruz shared more about each track with us. Check it out below and the new album here.
01. Demons
The intro track, gotta have an intro track. At least that’s what I’ve always thought a “perfect” album would start with, and I am in no way saying our album is perfect. It just seemed like all my favorite albums start with some sort of instrumental song. When I wrote the riff, I always envisioned it having vocals and a chorus. But as we began jamming it, it sounded more like an intro to something better. So it became the intro to “Catbath”.
We showed this song to our friend a couple years ago while writing it, and he said “You should call it “Ian’s Demons” and we ran with it. When it came to the final track listing for the record, I didn’t want to have my name in the title. We already have enough songs titles with real people’s names in them.
02. Catbath
I’ve talked about this song a lot, and I’m not sure how embarrassed I should be when I say this song is probably 10 years old. It started as a little ditty our first band used to play, but it sounded nothing like it does today. There was no finger tapping, or pull offs. It was a straight minute long, and strummed through with no vocals except at the beginning (“I’ve been lyin’ on my stomach for days!”).
We originally wanted this song to end the record, and extend the jam out another eight minutes. Once we got it recorded and sent to Pat [Sheufelt, I/O Detroit Studios], it became clear that the song needed to end somewhere sooner. I had this voicemail from a wrong number on my phone from the beginning of the pandemic, and Pat threw it on the end. It worked perfectly! Bummed we didn’t get our friend Finn Formica [Flamingo Vintage, Detroit] to play the congas on it, though.
03. Elliott Spliff
This is one of my personal favorites on the record. It came together really quick, and we tried to add more parts to it, but it felt better as a quick song. All bands have that one song that’s about missing home when you’re on tour, and that’s what this song is. It’s about loving being on the road, but feeling guilty because my family is back at home and not having as good of a time as me. I can never fully enjoy playing shows because I feel unbelievably guilty, like I am being selfish because I’m playing music with my friends. Maybe I should grow up, and give up. I feel bad for Sean [Tarolli, drums] and Dave [Laginess, bass], because those dudes want to play shows. They want to tour. I’m holding them back because of this guilt, and I hold back the band since I am always leading with one foot out the door.
04. Everbong
I wrote this riff a few years ago when I was playing a lot of solo shows. I hadn’t started the band yet, but I was constantly writing. The song is called “Everbong” because the chorus is the same chord progression as “Everlong”, and I’ve always thought it would be really fun to play “Everlong” right before going straight into “Everbong”. We have a blast playing this one live, and I think the audience digs it too. We always get ‘em clapping at the break before the bridge. We finished writing this one before we started to really play shows. I can’t believe how long a lot of these songs have been around.
05. Blurry
OK, this is the first Easy Beach song. No, it wasn’t “Boxes” or “Pretty Alright” - it was “Blurry”. This was a riff I played on my acoustic back in 2018, and it started from learning an Algernon Cadwallader song (“Pitfall”). I had always wanted to write a midwest emo song, but back then I don’t remember calling this shit midwest emo. I always thought it was called “twinkle daddy”. Obviously, this doesn’t really twinkle or have any of the tapping, open tuning we are saturated with today. I think people liken this song to sounding like an intro to an anime. I brought the riff to a jam session with my homies Dave Woodward and Joshua Thorington, but it we played it with some weird tropical, easy listening vibe. I dug it, but I couldn’t be in a band like that. I really needed it to rip. I needed to start the emo/punk band of my dreams. So I sought some other people to play with, and that began the Beach as we know it today.
06. Selena Gomez (Took the Name of this Song)
What hasn’t been said about this song? It was the first song I brought to Sean that we jammed together when he joined Easy Beach, and was originally titled “Forget Forever”. Upon Googling the song title, I found out that Selena Gomez already had a song with the same title. Thus, Selena Gomez took the name of this song. This one is about a dog named Bruce that I used to have, but had to re-home when my partner and I found out we were going to become parents. It was around Thanksgiving, and a couple months later we recorded the song and it premiered on BrooklynVegan.
This is our easy song to play live, when we don’t want to put out too much energy. I like when the pit opens up for this one, and our friend Spencer [Rogers, Hail Alien/No Experience] steals the mic from me and sings his own lyrics.
07. Dual Jewel
“Dual Jewel” was a quick one to write, like most of our songs. It’s about the relationship I have with my mother, to be honest. A little too personal, but this one was our set opener for a while. Really set the tone.
08. Coffee Break
Sean and I knew we wanted to a spacey, synth driven instrumental somewhere on the record. I always told him that my biggest inspiration for this record was the WAVVES x Cloud Nothings album that came out years ago, and that album kinda became the blueprints for Easy Beach. Those songs have so much air around them, gloomy, but short and sweet at the same time. I think there’s about eight songs on that record, and 3 of the songs are instrumental interludes. That’s what we wanted “Coffee Break” to be.
The voicemail at the end is a throwback to our first band, Penpals with the President. We used it on our one and only EP for a song called “Playing Soccer in the Dark”. The band decided to put my phone number and photo on Craigslist Men Seeking Men, and my phone was blowing up with these guys calling me. I got this voicemail that said “If there’s anything you want to do, anything you want to talk about… But I guess you’re not taking blocked calls. So this is goodbye”, or something along those lines. It always stuck with me, and I wondered who the hell that dude was. It had to be on the record.
09. Sleep
The last song on the record wasn’t supposed to be “Sleep”, but after hearing how hard it went with that sax part… it didn’t make sense to end the record any other way. I actually used to hate this song. There wasn’t much going on besides the same lyrics over and over, and the bridge was missing something to it. I knew from the beginning that I wanted sax, but I didn’t know how to play one. My brother mailed me his from Wisconsin, and I recorded a couple takes, but Pat said my playing wasn’t up to par with the rest of the song. So he invited his neighbor Fred over, who is a trained musician, and offered him some weed to play sax on the song. It really pulled the whole thing together, and has since become a top tier Beach song for me. I’m not sure how I feel about the screaming vocals after the bridge, but the rest is fun and kinda groovy. I couldn’t even tell you what the song is about, because I wrote this song for my first drummer. He was into hardcore, and I felt I owed it to him to write something angrier than what I was writing at the time. Who’d have known that I’d end up writing more angry songs after he left the band?
Closing Thoughts
I’m very proud of this record. It took us a long time to piece this thing together - about two years of writing, recording, breaking up, getting back together, two drummers, three bass players, and the birth of my son. It’s exactly the kind of record I would listen to if I wasn’t the one writing it. The fun songs are fun, and the rest is sad and pissed off. I was at a very low point in my life when I wrote this record; working a shit job, going through relationship issues, and constantly feeling insecure because I was in a band at the age of thirty when everyone we played gigs with was in their early twenties. I’m not sure if anyone will listen to this record, or will care about it. But I care about it, so I guess that’s all that matters. I’m just happy to finally have it out, because it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do with my life. Quick shoutout to my family, my friends, Pat, We’re Trying & Sleepy Clown, and my band for sticking it out and seeing it through. I couldn’t have done it without any of them.
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