Interview What’s Going On With… Cherry Glazerr

Hi Clem - how are things with you?
Kind of weird, cos it’s been slightly normal? We had a show a few weeks ago at the Greek Theatre [in LA], and that’s my favourite venue ever. I was like, oh man, I think I might have forgotten how to play guitar. But you just fall back into it when you start playing the show, like muscle memory.

Your new music has a slightly more electronic skew compared to your older stuff – how did it feel playing live?
I think it actually pairs really well with the old material, because it’s just as heavy and very sonically aligned with stuff that I’ve done in the past, but it’s very different production-wise. It’s given the show a nice variation that I actually feel like it was lacking before, now that I’m thinking about it… We played a bunch [of material] that isn’t even released yet, and one of the tracks I’ve been doing with Four Tet went over really well.

Four Tet! Exciting – what else can we expect from your new sound?
I was listening to a lot of alternative house and techno; weird alt-pop, lots of beats-based music, and I just couldn’t help but incorporate that into the new sound. I have a philosophy to trust my audience, and if I wanna make changes they’ll be ready for those changes. I just tried to really follow my muses, and not worry about everything around ‘changing your sound’. I’m having fun with it, it feels really true to my spirit right now – last night I was up until 3am recording a crazy, like, Deftones rock song!

It’s kind of nerdy but I’ve been watching a lot of movies then running to the studio with whatever feelings have come up. I’ve written songs borne from watching Mysterious Skin, which is this early ‘00s movie with Joseph Gordon Levitt. It’s really heavy but it’s amazing, still really fun and stylized.

What are the red threads that connect your current music to old Cherry Glazerr?
For some reason, no matter what, it always sounds like me - even when I try to do something very different! As an artist, you always think you’re doing something so different when really it’s just more of you. I do have this sense of melody and harmony that’s very specific to me, that’s what the north star is across my music. I think I’ve set a precedent for being the type of artist who is a bit unexpected – I’m always exploring different types of sounds, and I think I’ve guided people to expect that.

You trust your fans and they trust you - does that make it easier to challenge yourself, and them?
That makes me wanna cry because it’s really sweet! I feel there’s a real symbiosis between my fans and I. I think that challenging myself often comes from being as open as I can in collaborations; I can get very specific and tunnel vision about what I want the music to be, so collaboration is where I challenge myself and where a lot of really great stuff comes from. Probably my best stuff. I went through a lot of personal changes that were really necessary for myself recently, and I feel like that’s really opened my music up in a huge way! A lot of it is different, it has a new spirit because that’s just what happens when you change.

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