According to Jason Bennett and Adam Carpenter—the musical collaborators behind the Nashville / LA indie pop outfit Baseball Game—their forthcoming debut EP is marked by “nostalgia, sympathy, melancholy, desire, distraction.”
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“We wrote all these songs in a week not planning to even release them at first, let alone release them as an EP,” the duo tells American Songwriter. “But given the fact that they were written in the same space and time, they share similar or overlapping ideas.”
You can hear that blend of nostalgia, sympathy, melancholy, desire, and distraction on Baseball Game’s new single, “See You Tomorrow,” but there’s also a sense of levity in the track—it’s a weightless, guitar- and synth-driven number that sounds something like a Bon Iver remix of Family of the Year’s “Hero.”
“‘See You Tomorrow,’ for me, is a train of thought, not a story,” says Bennett. “The idea of someone not being in your present or future life after being a very important piece to it. It was a song that we needed last year.”
“For me,” Carpenter adds, “[the song] is a story of growth during a time of brokenness and the healing that takes place after time passes, realizing the space that is left when people leave. It starts with someone at their worst and ends with the line ‘I’m curious to see you now,’ revealing the human tendency to recognize that where you are now is different from where you once were, for better or worse.”
“See You Tomorrow” is the third single off Baseball Game’s self-titled debut, which arrives next month via House Arrest. Carpenter and Bennett recorded the track at the end of a week-long writing session at Bennett’s home studio in Nashville. “It came after an entire day of bad ideas and then Jason started randomly playing some chords,” explains Carpenter, who’s based in Los Angeles. “Within a matter of 15 minutes, we had the song.”
Carpenter and Bennett wrote the track as “a coping song,” adding that they hope it will offer listeners “a few minutes of feeling very human.” While Bennett writes at his best when he’s “excited about a demo, a guitar progression, or a synth sound,” Carpenter tends to “bottle up all my ideas and then dedicate an entire day/week to pour out those thoughts,” as was the case with “See You Tomorrow.”
“I also get really inspired in the middle of processing emotions, right in the middle of when something is happening,” says Carpenter. “I try to make the most of them.”
Bennett cites Adrianne Lenker, George Harrison, and Justin Vernon as the songwriters he most admires, while Carpenter cites Jack Antonoff, Leif Vollebeck, and Neil Young. “Antonoff inspires me so much with the way he tells the story of the song,” Carpenter explains. “It always feels like he’s just talking to you and I love that.”
While Bennett and Carpenter are the only members of Baseball Game, they credit House Arrest with helping shape the project so far. “They reached out to us on Instagram after we released a single,” the duo recalls. “After a couple of phone calls, we started working together. Peter [Wiley] and Graham [Hamaker] have taken our dreams for Baseball Game so much farther than we could’ve hoped. They really made us believe in this project and how meaningful it could be.”
“We are very fortunate that we can still write, record, and finish these songs in our homes,” says Bennett, reflecting on Baseball Game’s experience collaborating during the COVID-19 pandemic. “However, Adam and I are a long distance band. So ultimately that has impacted us the hardest, with travel not being a priority at the moment.”
What’s most important for the duo is creating a space to express themselves on their own terms, whether from across the country or across the studio.
“Baseball Game is an outlet for us,” they explain. “We wanted it to be a safe collaboration to write songs about things we don’t normally write about, and make whatever inspires us rather than feeling stuck in a ‘sound.’ We want Baseball Game to represent fitting in places you don’t necessarily ‘belong.’”
Baseball Game is out August 7. You can pre-order it here.
