When Miles and Becca, real-life spouses who moonlight together creatively as the duo Drug Couple, collaborate musically, they strike a balance between their artistic selves and the married couple that fell in love beyond songwriting. And while that magic is apparent on their recently-released EP Choose Your Own Apocalypse, even they admit to having off days.
“No better way to ruin a studio day than getting in a couple’s fight with your songwriting partner,” Miles said in an exclusive interview with TrunkSpace.
We recently sat down with the couple to discuss soothsaying in song, escaping to Vermont, and releasing music into a void.
TrunkSpace: Couples don’t always see eye-to-eye on day-to-day stuff, so how do you manage your creative relationship together? Do you keep a clear separation between who you are together as songwriters and who you are together as significant others?
Miles: I think the only dissonance stems from the fact that I’ve been in bands for a long time, work in studio recording professionally so I can, at times, be more terse in the studio or rehearsal than I normally would be in the confines of a loving romantic relationship. So, every now and then, I have to distinguish or draw a distinction between those two things. It’s hard though, because we also originally formed our interpersonal relationship in the studio, but Becca’s band was paying me to make them a record and I pamper clients a bit more than other collaborators. It’s honestly not much of an issue though on that level, though. That’s the subtle and complex part. The far worse thing and the one that seems more insurmountable is when we’ve just had a stupid fight and are being pissy with each other before we get to/go into work. No better way to ruin a studio day than getting in a couple’s fight with your songwriting partner.
Becca: Yes and no. In general, we work really well together, both creatively and on day-to-day stuff… that’s not to say that we never disagree, but we tend to be really collaborative, and to respect each other’s input. I’ll also say that Miles is being way too hard on himself and he is an incredibly nurturing bandmate. It’s more like, sometimes we’re in the studio and he’s like, “Bec, I need you to set up the mics before you eat dinner” and then I get huffy in a way that I maybe wouldn’t if he wasn’t my significant other. We do try to put relationship dynamics aside and relate to each other as artists when we’re working – that said, Drug Couple is fundamentally us, and it’s us together as partners, so it’s impossible to separate that completely… and I wouldn’t want to because it’s part of what makes it all work.
TrunkSpace: Your new EP, Choose Your Own Apocalypse, has an overarching theme about falling in love during the darkest of times. You started putting these songs together in 2016, but here we are in 2020 and the middle of a pandemic, and we can’t help but think that many of them have become more relevant than when you first started writing. Have they taken on new meaning for you now given everything that’s happening in the present?
Miles: Songwriting can often feel prophetic, and I think that’s because when you’re writing a song you’re hopefully tapping into deeper truths and excavating the ether of human experience. It’s not like our current predicament came out of nowhere… it’s a confluence of events that were fully identifiable and perceivable four years ago.
Becca: I wouldn’t necessarily say that the songs took on new meaning, but I did feel that it was slightly uncanny just how prescient they turned out to be. “2027” is about NYC turning into a ghost-town after a 2020 apocalypse. “Ain’t that Heavy” and “Missing 2 Mars” both have a narrative element about fleeing town in the wake of disaster (which we literally did when we left NYC in March and waited everything out in Vermont). So, they’ve had a bit of new life for me these past few months.
TrunkSpace: Choose Your Own Apocalypse dropped on August 14. What emotions do you juggle with upon releasing new material into the world and what is the experience like given the other emotional hurdles of the times – the pandemic, social unrest, etc.?
Miles: I juggle emotions of ambivalence and indifference. Releasing something is when it stops being yours, and often for me, it just creates a huge distance between myself and the material. It stops being personally meaningful – that’s been the only healthy way to navigate that exchange for me. But, then again, I’m someone who once had to tour an album that used my own, traumatic experience of September 11th as a metaphor for my recently-failed relationship for a year and a half.
Becca: In the past I’ve felt more emotional about releasing music. This time around, not so much. I think that’s partially because these songs are so old and we’ve been sitting on them for so long, and partially because of the nature of this moment and that life looks so different right now. We’re out in the middle of the countryside in Vermont, living this very pastoral life; not playing shows in Brooklyn, which is what we would ordinarily be doing surrounding an EP release. So I do feel a bit disconnected from it, but I also think that’s okay. Like Miles said, when you release music, it stops being yours and starts belonging to whoever is listening, and weirdly feeling so far away from it all makes me more at peace with that.
TrunkSpace: Normally you would tour or gig out to support a new release, but that isn’t entirely possibly right now. How has the promotion of the album changed as it relates to what you had originally planned to coincide with its release?
Miles: I would say that in the digital era, in the streaming era, releasing an album has become a very abstract thing. It just goes from being on only your computer and phone to being on everybody’s computer and phone. It’s not the same as when you would receive a pressed copy of your album, which had a certain thrill to it…[a weight, a gravity, a sense of import]…and at this time it feels even more removed. It feels like nothing. And talking to other artists who’ve had the same experience, it just feels like birthing something into a void. There’s a duality in art where you make stuff purely for yourself, but often there’s an expectation in the back of your mind of sharing it. Like things don’t feel real or complete until you give them away, and it’s even harder to tap into that sense of giving it away. So instead of an act of giving it feels like an act of forgetting… forgetting the old so you can imagine the new.
TrunkSpace: Outside of the finished product itself, what do you think is going to be the most memorable part of giving Choose Your Own Apocalypse life? Twenty years down the road, what will you think back on with the biggest smile?
Miles: It documents the beginning of our relationship. And we just got married. So it exists as a nice little time capsule for us.
Becca: Absolutely.
TrunkSpace: If someone sat down to listen to Choose You Own Apocalypse front to back, what would he or she learn about you both as songwriters and as people?
Miles: Nothing? I don’t know, ask our therapists…
Becca: (Laughter)
Miles: She’s a little bit country, I’m a little bit rock and roll.
TrunkSpace: What do you both get out of writing with each other that you can’t achieve writing alone? Where do you inspire each other most?
Becca: To put it simply, I genuinely believe that everything I do is elevated by working with Miles. I think that the way that we inspire each other is mostly through this creative mind-meld that happens when we’re working together: where we‘re in the moment, building off of each other’s ideas, articulating the other’s thoughts as they simultaneously reach the tips of our tongues. I gotta say, after all these years, it still feels like magic.
Miles: I have found the removal of the deep stench of solitary, narcissistic ego from the songs I write to be incredibly liberating. The magic thing Becca mentioned is real too. We can just kinda plug in and get to a place and it’s just kinda been what I was looking for with music my entire life until we got together.
TrunkSpace: We have all been in some form of lockdown for the majority of 2020. How much of your time spent social distancing has also been spent creating? Have you experienced a creative jolt during this period – and will it lead to another album?
Becca: Yes. We’re recording on our next album in our studio, Freelandia, that we set up out here in Vermont. I think it’s the best work we’ve ever done.
Miles: Very much yes. We bunkered up and got to work as soon as everything shut down. It took a few months to fully put the studio together, which occupied most of my time, and then we just dove into recording.
TrunkSpace: Time machine question. If you could jump ahead 10 years and get a glimpse of what your career looks like a decade from now, would you take that journey? If not, why?
Becca: If we could time travel I feel like we’d end up in some sort of Umbrella Academy situation where we’re jumping around trying to prevent the Apocalypse, so I don’t think we’d waste time navel gazing.
Miles: It’s not the destination, it’s the journey, man. We’ll find out sooner or later anyways, so no. I’m definitely more of a travel into the past to fix things type. I’m not super curious about the future. I just more dread it due to humanity’s apparent inability to ever deal with the task at hand.
Choose Your Own Apocalypse is available now via PaperCup Music.