Around the release of Joshua Speers’ debut EP, Human Now, earlier this year, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter revealed that he plucked the EP’s title from the following lines of a W. H. Auden poem: “To discover how to be human now / Is the reason we follow this star.” “That always stood out to me as just a great reason to follow anything,” Speers told an interviewer in May, adding that “the process of these songs was to explore how to be human.”
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Four months later, the Delaware-raised poet and musician is back with another EP, Summerland, that sees the Warner Records signee continuing his journey of self-discovery over four wistful, searching tracks. “Never been myself / Wouldn’t know what to do,” he sings in the EP’s closing number, “Other People.” “Never been myself / Can I be that with you.”
“I think of Summerland as a deeper exploration of self,” Speers tells American Songwriter over email. “It picks up on many of the themes from my last EP Human Now—heartbreak, who am I and where am I going, things falling apart—but it looks at them from new angles. The title is both a place and a timeframe—a real and physical destination but also a more abstract window of time and season of feelings. In my mind it’s a small town carnival—you go to escape and be happy but if you start to look closer you can see all the grit and pain. Summerland is optimism just barely holding off a breakdown.”
We invited Speers to walk us through each track on his new EP. Check out his responses and listen to Summerland below.
“Get What You Need”
This was the first song that Tommy English and I wrote together and I think it’s lived about nine lives. We cut it open and ripped it apart so many times and finally landed on the right version. I think this song kind of set the tone for all the others—I knew if we could get this one right all the others would fall into place. It covers a lot of ground in a short amount of time and I spent a long time getting the lyrics right, trying to say exactly what I was feeling. In a weird way I hear all the other songs on the EP in this one, like all the sounds and themes are represented here. The arrangement is sort of strange and very dynamic—I remember the song really clicked when we changed the piano part that comes in the middle of the first verse. I recorded it as a counter melody to sit in the background but I liked it more than the main part so we cut the other one. To me that’s the emotional core of the whole song, almost like if you listen to that part and nothing else you will still understand the song.
We couldn’t get the outro to sit right so we made that whole section 3 or 4bpm slower than the rest of the song—I think we could have pushed it even slower. The dog sample in the beginning is from an old voice memo—I was walking up to my friend’s 5th floor apartment in Brooklyn and his neighbor’s dog was so loud. The stairwell had such a good natural reverb too! I’ve used that sample layered with the snare drum in other songs. Serious punch!
“Manic. Magic. Messed Up.”
This song is about being a bit unhinged and emotionally reckless. With the way my brain works it can be really hard to stay balanced—adrenaline is very intoxicating and I thrive on it but am left horribly depleted afterwards. When I was younger I didn’t quite know how to calibrate like I do now, how to prepare for the surge and steady myself through the crash. But sometimes I miss the excitement of the rollercoaster. I wouldn’t go back but there were fun times. I wrote this song while staying at a friend’s apartment. He’s a bass player so I wrote it on one of the basses laying around—the bass part really carries most of the weight in this song. The guitar tone in the bridge is also one of my favorite parts of the whole EP. When we were tracking in this beautiful studio north of San Francisco I found this amp that was really just a speaker screwed into a peach crate and it sounded like trash in the best possible way. I fought everyone for that tone. I think that amp was really made to be more of a science experiment but I loved it.
“Thunder Blanket”
I wrote this song with Dan Wilson. Dan is one of my heroes and I was so excited to write with him but a bit nervous. That first day we spent so much time not writing a song—talking about books, our literary idols, stories from touring, making art in other mediums, having a really long lunch—and somehow this song still happened. Rob Moose wrote and played the string arrangement. I am usually pretty critical of my own songs but when Rob sent back his first pass I couldn’t believe it and couldn’t stop listening. It was like listening to someone else’s song! I loved it. I think it’s easier to love your own work when you collaborate and invite others into each step of the process. Then it feels bigger than just you.
We recorded the vocals late one night in the studio. I remember turning the lights way down and really going for it. I think we did two takes and used the first one.
“Other People”
I started this song when I first moved to LA. I was sleeping on my friend’s couch in an apartment over a guitar store and across the street from an industrial rail yard. All day the walls would shake when people cranked the amplifiers downstairs and every night the whole building would shake when the trains came through. I didn’t get a lot of sleep. I had spent the last three years on tour playing in other people’s bands and sleeping on floors and in my car in rest stops coming back from shows, but now I was finally starting to get settled and finally able to put myself first. That was a scary and overwhelming feeling. I think in this song I was trying to synthesize all the time on the road and suddenly being my own boss. I went back home to shoot the music video and it might be the video I’m most proud of. I love the challenge of making something as simply as possible, really dumbing it down to the core elements. That video is me just walking around the fields and barns I grew up in.
Summerland is out now via Warner Records.
