Extended online interview
It’s a chilly Friday night in Auckland, and as they did many times in their early days, The Beths are playing in an inner-city basement. Only this one is part of Roundhead Studios, the multi-storey recording complex founded and owned by Neil Finn.
The band is playing the third night of Finn’s midwinter Infinity Sessions event before dozens who have snapped up tickets, with the performances being live-streamed for free. The first night featured Don McGlashan, the second, Finn himself. That The Beths are following that lineage is kind of apt. Because The Beths now might be seen in this part of the world as heirs to Crowded House and The Mutton Birds – a classic, timeless, effortlessly melodic guitar band that is great live and has already won wide appeal.
They are a rare band that can fill the Auckland Town Hall, do a winery tour with Dave Dobbyn and play a left-field festival like Laneways. In an age of the local chart dominance of Six60 and L.A.B., they’ve won the Aotearoa Music Award for best album and best group twice.
Their Roundhead audience looks to stretch from pre-teen daughters and dads to folks in their 60s, to 31-year-old Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick, who has been brought in as MC. Her introduction to the band, though, predictably, is mostly about her being barred from the house for a week by the Speaker Gerry Brownlee for refusing to apologise for her comments implying Government MPs lacked a spine during a debate on sanctions on Israel. But she winds up circling back to the band: “I just also have to say that when it feels like there are no words left, there is art, there is joy, and there is The Beths ... .”
Complete with the false start they’ve left on its recording, The Beths fire into Straight Line Was a Lie, the opening and title track of their new and fourth album. Tonight is something of an unveiling. Just under half of The Beths’ set is from the record that finds frontwoman Liz Stokes’ songwriting stretching out in various ways, and the sound around it getting more spacious and widescreen. That’s whether it’s heartfelt ballads like Mother, Pray For Me (see story below), Mosquitoes, which captures in song a snapshot of the 2023 Auckland Anniversary floods and the aftermath, or big, moody, mysterious rock songs like Ark of the Covenant and Take.
Not that The Beths or Stokes have lost their sense of humour. Live, for the equally funny and emotionally fraught pop-rock track No Joy, guitarist Jonathan Pearce and bassist Ben Sinclair whip out recorders for the instrumental bit that sounds like the tin-whistle bit of Split Enz’s Six Months in a Leaky Boat at higher rpm. And the wry stage banter of Stokes is still very much intact.
“Okay, in this room, it’s heating up. Regretting the vest,” she says at the half-way mark. “Nothing I can do about it now. Hope everyone at home is at a comfortable temperature. Comment below: your current temperature?”
Pearce is also in good form. When introducing Mosquitoes, there’s a tangential discussion with the front row about Winston Peters refusing to wear a hi-viz vest on a visit to the Auckland City Rail Link: “He doesn’t need to because everyone fucking sees him coming.”
The set ploughs on between older anthems such as the title tracks to their previous three albums, 2018’s Future Me, Hates Me, 2020’s Jump Rope Gazers and 2022’s Expert in a Dying Field, and the new songs. It all ends a bit unexpectedly. More to come on that.
The previous week, and the Listener has arrived at The Beths’ headquarters on Karangahape Rd for a chat with partners Stokes and Pearce. Up a set of ancient marble stairs, passing a photo of Beach Boy Brian Wilson on the wall, The Beths’ studio takes up a big windowless room in what was once a jewellery store’s upstairs office and vaults. In the kitchen space, veteran sound engineer Bob Frisbee has a pot of marmalade on the stove, giving a sweet, homely air that replaces the usual studio smell of band jam.
The Beths’ room is a forest of guitars – many with a story to tell, like the 1960s Burns electric 12-string guitar which Pearce had restored from the mouldy state it was in after buying it on TradeMe. It’s now adding extra jangle-factor to new songs like Metal. The equipment, including many square metres of floor covered in guitar effects boxes, is set up for rehearsal later in the day. It’s not just for the Roundhead gig but to get their tour equipment dialled in for touring in the northern hemisphere until the end of this year.
It’s also is where much of the new album and its predecessors were recorded with Pearce at the controls. Stokes jokes that Beths’ albums usually start out with her alone in a room and finish with Pearce alone in this one, putting on the final touches. She adds having their own space, and Pearce’s recording prowess – he’s also produced records by Anthonie Tonnon and Hans Pucket among others – means they can take their time, just like Fleetwood Mac did in the 1970s, only without the horrendous studio bills.
It’s interesting that when talking to The Beths, the bands that come up in conversation all predate them by decades. An hour with Pearce and Stokes comes peppered with references to King Crimson, Steely Dan, The Beatles, The Replacements, The Cars. The Beths are steeped in rock history from a century they knew only as children.
The band formed in 2015, with Stokes, Pearce, Sinclair, and original drummer Ivan Luketina-Johnston having met at the University of Auckland jazz school, deciding to put their respective trumpet, woodwinds and piano aside to form a guitar band.
Funnily enough, for someone who is not one to blow her own trumpet, Stokes can do that very well. She sometimes drags out the instrument she studied at jazz school and which she once taught to high school kids. She’s been in a ring-in player on infrequent shows by the Exploding Rainbow Orchestra, a Fly My Pretties-like psychedelic ensemble cum Kiwi indie supergroup which has also featured bassist Sinclair on clarinet.
The Beths wasn’t Stokes and Pearce’s first guitar group – hers included the busking-born, indie-folk trio Tea Cups with Macleans College schoolmate and best friend Chelsea Jade Metcalf, who has been pursuing an electropop career in Los Angeles. Pearce played guitar in the alt-country-ish Artisan Guns, also from East Auckland, which released two EPs and an album, before he played in Metcalf’s Watercolours.
By late 2018, with their debut out on US label Carpark Records, signing up with an Australian management agency whose other main client is Courtney Barnett, and having recruited current drummer and band resident videographer Tristan Deck, the band had committed to giving it, well, their Beths shot.
Seven years later, with the release of Straight Line they’re now on a bigger US indie label, the Los Angeles-based Anti-, which, as an offshoot of Epitaph Records, has roots in 1990s Californian skate-punk. But these days, it’s also the American home of Billy Bragg and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, and has released records by Kate Bush, Tom Waits, MJ Lenderman and more.
Pearce says they’ve only ever done one-album deals and this is another.
“For three albums, it made total sense to keep working with Carpark and we’ve loved working with them. But I think you just get to a point where artists’ and musicians’ careers are quite short. We didn’t start The Beths when we were 19. We started when we were in our mid-20s. So we’re sort of aware of a bit of a clock ticking, and you get to four albums and it’s like, ‘Oh, are people going to give a shit about this one?’
“So we went looking and, in the end, I think we’ve basically just found a much larger version of Carpark. It’s still completely independent. It’s owned by beautiful weirdos. They’re good at putting it out there.”
What they are putting out is an album of songs that were, at first, a struggle for Stokes, whose mental and physical health struggles have often been diarised on past albums. According to the record label press material, a course of SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) antidepressants have helped in some ways but hindered the writing. “I was kind of dealing with a new brain and I feel like I write very instinctually,” she says. “It was like my instincts were just a little different, but they weren’t as panicky.”
Stokes took up daily freeform writing exercises on a typewriter gifted to her by Sinclair. After a month, she had a folder of stream-of-consciousness material, some of it addressing stuff in her life she’d previously been reluctant to think about. A new set of songs soon emerged.
And no, this isn’t the first Beths album written on drugs. The previous three were on allergy medications, says Stokes good-humouredly. Still, it seems a big part of how Straight Line Was A Lie will be marketed and publicised, with her mental health challenges as a selling point. She doesn’t mind.
“We work in a creative industry where the number of people who are struggling with mental health stuff is much higher, so I feel like it’s just a part of the conversation.
“It doesn’t mean that you have to have it, it doesn’t feel like I’m sharing some private shame or something. It feels more like a kind of transparency about what I have been going through, which is not unique.
“I’ve noticed a real change from when we released our first album, and people would be, ‘So, what is the song about?’ And I would just be like, ‘I don’t know. Shut up. Don’t ask me that.’ But when people keep asking you, and they’re asking you out of a genuine interest to know … I don’t know if it’s good or bad, it’s just something that has kind of happened. When you do a bunch of interviews about your body of work, and when your body of work is based on your life, it just becomes something that you do.
“People kind of develop a parasocial relationship with you and that’s almost what you want, because you want people to feel a connection with you as a person, so that they follow your entire career, which I can understand.”
It goes without saying that the songs on Straight Line was A Lie – the title track itself an ode to self-maintenance over self-improvement – are Stokes’ most personal.
“It becomes more so with every record, right? Because you get positive feedback, I guess, from being vulnerable. The first album, I feel like when there was vulnerability it was often couched as ironic. Which I’m fine with – that was authentic. I feel like I am this person for whom, it’s hard to say anything sincerely without making a joke. But this record, just because of where I was emotionally and with the kind of health journey that I’ve been on, I’ve been really trying to work through a lot of stuff.”
“It’s gone deeper.”
If there’s a central tension that makes The Beths’ music work so well, it’s possibly something to do with how Stokes’ expressions of anxiety are delivered so sweetly and melodically, by a band delivering highly detailed, harmony-laden, fat-free, power-pop. Pearce, for example, is a spectacular, imaginative guitarist but his solos rarely last beyond a couple of bars.
“It’s just like the pursuit of trying to recreate the [Cars’ hit] Just What I Needed solo or something like that every time,” Pearce says with a laugh. “Liz is very concise. Liz will take a big concept and write Future Me, Hates Me. I’m like, ‘Oh, wow. How did you do that?’ [Our playing] is just a reflection of what Liz does.”
“I mean sweet and salty, right? It’s a great flavour combination,” says drummer Deck when the tension theory comes up the following day in a Zoom call with him and Sinclair.
“I think the further you juxtapose ideas and the stronger the contrast, the more air there is in between … I guess it’s one of those things where, is it better to identify it and acknowledge it as something to aim for? Or is it just always inherent? I don’t know.”
“I don’t think Liz writes real mopey songs,” adds Sinclair. “I think the beauty is that there’s that juxtaposition and why so many people kind of relate to it. Maybe you want to listen to something fast and that is highly energetic and emotional, but what is also dealing with the complexities of life in this age.”
Please evacuate the building!” As The Beths finish their set with Take, one of the new album’s most muscular, guitar-scorched tracks, Roundhead’s fire alarm, with its recorded instruction to get out, goes off. There’s no fire. It seems The Beths and their audience have generated enough natural exuberance to set it off. Everyone files out to the street where the band cool off chatting to fans and friends.
Once back inside, there’s a chance for them to see the recorded livestream, then it’s back down the hill to K Rd to climb those staris and drop off the gear for another week of rehearsals for a 57-date American, UK, Ireland and European tour that will last until Christmas. First stop, The Bowery Ballroom, New York. The band has been playing in the US annually – apart from the height of the pandemic – since 2018 and racked up more than 200 shows there, and almost the same number in the UK, Ireland and Europe.
No, touring isn’t as much fun as it was back when they were getting on planes for the first time, says Sinclair, who is responsible for the band’s amusing, cuisine-oriented Breakfast and Travel Updates tour blog.
“But exploring new towns and meeting new people, that’s the game for me, as I love discovering cultures and learning about the places that we’re going through and trying to develop a relationship there.”
At home, among the Auckland guitar bands releasing their first or second albums – Soft Bait, Ringlets, among others – filling venues on Karangahape Rd, the Beths are now the older cousins that have outgrown the neighbourhood.
“There is a generational gap there,“ says Stokes, ”but we still feel very connected to the Auckland music scene. We still live here. We still participate but we’re a bit older, and so we’re not as tight with [the bands coming through]. But we want them to have things that we had. We want them to have the music venues still open. We want them to have funding opportunities which are kind of like always getting whittled away and the arts funding and the support that they need to do what they need to do. It’s a very different landscape to being a musician starting out now.”
This year marks the band’s 10th birthday, one they will spend continuing to be one of our hardest-working, most frequent-flying bands.
“We work really hard at it,” says Stokes. “And there has been a feedback loop of us working hard and having good results. If we were toiling and toiling and nothing was happening, obviously, I don’t think we would be breaking our backs quite as much.”
The new Beths song that brings people to tears – including the Beths
Half a dozen songs into their rousing Roundhead performance, Liz Stokes introduces Mother, Pray for Me, a song that, live, is just her voice, chiming guitar, and quite a lot of unburdening.
“Now that everyone’s excited, let’s play a sad song,” she quips before correcting herself. “It’s not sad, it’s just complicated.” And off she goes on the plaintive ballad, which leaves many in the room, who are all hearing it for the first time, misty-eyed.
The song traverses her relationship with her mother, who shifted to Auckland from her native Indonesia when her Jakarta-born daughter was very young. The title is a reference to Stokes’ mother’s Catholicism, which gave Stokes a grounding in The Bible as a literary reference. But as the lyrics suggest, there has been a mother-daughter divergence in their views of the world over the years, and Stokes sounds apologetic for the hurt she’s caused.
“It’s a song I didn’t expect to write,” Stokes tells the Listener. “But it was genuinely an effort to process all of the feelings that you have about something that are kind of swirling around and explain what it is that you’re feeling.
“Your relationship with your parents, or with your mum, even just scratching the surface, feels kind of tender and kind of hard to look at, so it was hard to write.”
Stokes wrote the song then put it away to incubate. She brought it out again and shared it with Pearce.
“He texted me when he first listened to it on the bus, saying he had teared up. I was like, ‘Okay, maybe it’s not just me crying about this song.”
Her other bandmates had similar reactions. Sinclair: “It felt like Liz was taking a massive step in terms of not toying around with obscure metaphors and just being vulnerable in a way that I guess hadn’t really been seen in her songwriting before.”
The quartet recorded a band version before opting for a solo arrangement with guitar and a touch of Crowded House-ish organ.
“We had to treat it a bit carefully,” says Pearce.
That’s the version Stokes played to her mum recently.
“Yeah, after me stressing about it and having many therapy sessions. She’s very supportive but there is a language barrier and obviously she doesn’t understand the intricacies of the alternative music scene, but she listened to the sound of it and liked it. Maybe as time goes on, she’ll kind of dig into the meaning and we might have to have some more conversations about it.”
It’s a song that is likely to inspire lumps in throats at Beths’ gigs for some time to come.
“There are songs that I’ve listened to by artists where I can’t listen to them without crying. They feel kind of a sacred thing because you can’t put them on all the time or the magic goes away. It felt special to feel that maybe I had managed to write one of those.”
The Beths’ Straight Line Was A Lie is released on August 28.