Post by Misha, photos by Anna Kuo

Shiraz Dhume named his band River Gods after a bar in his college home of Boston. The name was born partly out of affection (it was one of the only bars that didn’t card during his college years) and partly out of nostalgia, as it came to him just before Shiraz was planning to leave Boston to move across the country to LA. 3000 miles away, the name would remain a homage to the band’s formative years in New England. Now, 6 years later and on the eve of River Gods’ sophomore release, Let Me Live, Shiraz reflects on the band’s journey since moving west, a shift which is very much a character in their second album, a sunny and good-natured, albeit angst-filled romp that Shiraz calls a ‘love letter to LA.’

We met up on a Sunday afternoon in Echo Park and found a bench in the sun to soak up one of first really summery days of the year and chat about the new album, as well as the subject that any self-respecting Echo Park conversation must as least touch upon: the state of DIY.

MISHA: What’s it been like becoming an ‘LA band’ and what does that mean to you?

SHIRAZ: I feel like this album specifically is very much a love letter – or just a sort of reaction to living in LA. Just the atmosphere of Los Angeles and the music that I’ve experienced since I’ve been here. And also I think a big thing that I’m sort of coming to terms with is like, so I grew up in New England listening to a lot of rock and pop and pop punk music and I always attribute that music to New England because that’s where I grew up listening to it. And now that I’m living out in LA I’m realizing that no, this is very much an LA soundtrack because when a lot of pop punk bands were getting big they were making LA a home base. And so now I’m recontextualizing a lot of the older music that I really liked in an LA context now that I’ve been out here for 5 or 6 years. And our music is just now reflecting this atmosphere that I’m just finally feeling comfortable in and invested in after a few years of living here.

“i think writing a shorter, poppier, more focused song does kind of open me up as a songwriter to more scrutiny and vulnerability“

MISHA: That’s interesting because we’ve talked about how the new songs are kind of a departure from the older stuff. And with the first single, ‘Stressed Out’, in particular you wrote it without thinking that it was going to be a River Gods song and you’ve said that then it sort of ended up forming the direction of where the rest of the album took – how did that come about?

SHIRAZ: The way that I wrote Stressed Out was really more like an exercise. I was doing a first idea best idea thing where I really just kind of did the first things that came to my mind. Even the lyrics for the most part were gibberish that I was doing to fill space to kind of get a melody going. It has been finessed over time now to what the single is now, but at that point when I was demo-ing it I was really just kind of putting ideas down and throwing paint at the wall. And even when I finished it, it was just super simple, just all of my first draft ideas in one song. I definitely didn’t expect that I would do more songs like that because up to that point I’d been putting a lot more carefully crafted effort into my songwriting. But I just liked how it turned out, it was always stuck in my head. And then at a certain point I thought, I don’t know, maybe I’ll try that again. And I wrote another song on the record that way. I was like, maybe this was a good idea. Maybe this was the way to go. And then it turned out to really work for me.

Now I love writing songs that way, where I put down my first thoughts instead of dwelling over an idea for a really long time When I’m demoing if I don’t like an idea in the first five or ten minutes, if I’m not getting drawn to it, I just drop it and I start another thing. And lyrically I’m kind of doing a similar thing where it’s more of an association thing. So ‘Stressed Out’ has changed my songwriting process in a lot of ways and it’s representing a sort of sound and workflow that I want to continue to emulate.

MISHA: Do you feel like when you write songs that way that they come out more vulnerable?

SHIRAZ: I think writing a shorter, poppier, more focused song does kind of open me up as a songwriter to more scrutiny and vulnerability because when you’ve layered a lot of ideas you’ve scrutinzed a song for a really long time, you don’t – or I don’t – really think of it as an idea that’s stuck in a piece of time. When I listen to my older songs I hear the process. I hear how long that song took to make and what the changes were. But with this I’m just like, this was the idea. This is always what I intended the song to be, and I never looked back. And lyrically too, just kind of only pointing at one emotion or one instant in time is also a really challenging and vulnerable thing because I’m not misrepresenting myself in any way. This is entirely what the song is about. It’s totally on the nose. There’s very little vagueness to it. 

MISHA: Yeah there’s not a lot of metaphor or figurativeness.

SHIRAZ: Everything that’s meant to be there is there. For a lot of songs I got into this challenge with myself of getting every song under two minutes long. If I could pare the song down or lose a lyrical part I was not indulgent in any way. As a songwriter it’s a little more nerve wracking because all the pieces are right there instead of leaving things up for interpretation or hiding behind vagueness, which I probably was guilty of doing at times.

MISHA: And I think also as a listener that makes it really different too because when there’s a song with a lot of metaphor it’s sort of an invitation to, as a listener, put your own story to the melody. And with a song that’s a lot more direct, it’s like no, this is the artist telling you something about them and it’s not so much about you, it’s about them.

SHIRAZ: I kind of prefer that artist/audience relationship when the work is its own world and the audience is just witnessing. That’s what I love the most is when an artist – where I’m just witnessing their situation rather than: I’m totally a part of this and I even identify – I see myself in this. I kind of like to witness artistry more than participate in it.

MISHA: The sound really reminds me of early to mid-2000s pop punk, even the lyrical style recalls that genre – always very simple and very direct. Did you have any specific influences as you were writing?

SHIRAZ: Weirdly, I’ve been watching the OC these past few months for the first time – like I had seen some episodes on TV but I was like very heavily watching it – and it ended up having a huge impact on me. Like, I love that show. The long and short of it is that this kid Ryan comes from a tough home in Chino and he kind of gets into some trouble with some brother and he ends up going to jail. And this lawyer from the OC who just does pro bono cases picks up his case and brings him to his home in the OC and kind of adopts him. So it’s just about Ryan, this kid from Chino, growing up in a much more affluent neighborhood but still grappling with his past. I am in no way an analogue to Ryan in this situation but I relate to it in that it’s this nature vs. nurture thing. The feeling of acclimating to Los Angeles in this last year and kind of feeling like I’ve upgraded in some ways, but also still dealing with the same shit that I’ve always dealt with. And also the show itself is very much tied into pop punk and alternative and indie music from the early 2000s which ended up having a big influence on the record.

MISHA: In ‘Stressed Out’ you have this lyric that’s like, “stressed out because all my dreams are coming true.” That feels like it’s related to what you’re talking about here.

SHIRAZ: Yeah, I think it’s just a dichotomy of your life improving, or making strides forward in life but still worrying about the same things you’ve always been worried about. Sometimes it feels like you’re destined to struggle with the same things throughout your whole life. There’s an idea that as you grow up you become more in control in things and you determine things for yourself, but maybe when we’re middle aged we’ll still be struggling with the same things that we’ve been struggling with and maybe it’ll never… change.

MISHA: I think that’s a very real possibility. I was just talking to my mom about that actually. It was a kind of… depressing conversation. In a more positive vein, though, things have obviously been changing for you personally, but also changing for the band. You guys just signed to a new record label. Can you talk about that, and what signing to the label represents as the band moves forward?

“i’m recontextualizing diy as a learning process“

SHIRAZ: The way we’ve worked with labels I think is a little atypical where we kind of frontloaded all of the work of recording the music, shooting the vidoes, kind of creating everything we wanted for the record and kind of letting it be its own encapsulated project and then we’ve worked with a lot of DIY and smaller labels just to get it out and help us with the areas that we’re not so good with. I think the DIY idea is that any aspect of being in a band you can do yourself and maybe do it best if you do it yourself. And that’s an idea that I’ve always kind of kept with me because I’ve recorded and released tons of music independently. But for example, our last record [Moodboard] we actually tried to record the entire thing ourselves twice, and both times just did a really poor job and ended up making a lot of mistakes. We finally just bit the bullet and went to a studio and recorded with an engineer. And it was just worlds different and it gave us more agency actually – to learn from that and then do more ourselves.

And the lesson I’m learning with the label is that we’re not generally inclined to, like PR and marketing and advertising. These are things that I’m not knowledgeable about and I would like to learn more about. And Dadstache is an amazing label. JT has curated such a good collection of artists. And now I’m learning, through him and through the label, these lessons of what you do post production for an album. And I’m kind of learning that the DIY process is not so much about, we can do it all ourselves and do it best and we need to handle every aspect of this. I’m kind of feeling like DIY is more a learning process. It’s like, this is what I’m good at and this is what I’m not good at and, who can we work with to make this the best thing that it needs to be, and what are the things we need to learn about? I’m recontextualizing DIY as a learning process.

MISHA: That’s awesome. I definitely feel like DIY is a little bit of a misnomer. And I don’t know if it’s just that it’s changing over the years but I feel like it’s really less about ‘yourself’ and more a community – 

SHIRAZ: Ourselves.

MISHA: Yeah. A community of people who believe in the same thing and who aren’t as concerned with like, music from a commodity standpoint. And who are willing to kind of fill in the gaps for each other when there’s differing skillsets.

“i’m just making music to make friends, basically“

SHIRAZ: I think in the past because we were trying to do everything ourselves and trying to get everything perfect before we put things out I ended up getting fatigued with the records over time. It was a tough release schedule because I felt like all the pressure was on us. But because we’re doing this with friends and working with JT and the label and working with people to book this tour, I kind of feel like this is a group effort and I’m feeling a lot better about everything about the record. This is all also a batch of new songs, which is new for us. With every record before this I’ve been going back in to the archives and pulling out old stuff and creating a record from that, but this is all entirely new songs that I’ve written starting from Stressed Out, so I’m not fatigued on these songs, I’m genuinely really really excited. In the next few months we’ll be doing the tour, getting the singles out, doing the show at the Hi Hat. This summer is just going to be huge for us.

MISHA: It’s gotta feel really good having a community behind the music.

SHIRAZ: I’ve always viewed the success of any creative project I’ve done as having a group of likeminded peers. So having other artists that are interested in what we’re doing, that’s been the biggest shift for us over time. As we’ve been growing and working more on different music, just having more people involved and having our camp get bigger – that’s been the biggest thing. I’m just making music to make friends, basically.

Let Me Live will be out July 26th on Dadstache Records. Pre-order it here. River Gods just kicked off their West Coast tour, dates and tickets here.