Blvck Hippie's Josh Shaw Talks New Album 'Basketball Camp, Memphis Past & Defying Musical Expectations (INTERVIEW)
Like any band, Blvck Hippie had to go through a few phases before landing on the borderless experimental rock band we hear today. What started as a solo Blvck Hippie's Josh Shaw has released his new album, Basketball Camp, which explores the themes of their present-day life and themes of Memphis. The album is heavily influenced by Shaw's hometown, with several tracks including "P&H" and "Chairman Drive". The band's first single was "Streetlights," which has been played live for two years and is a quintet. The band’s breakthrough debut, I Feel Alone At Parties, was released in 2021 and the new album has been finished for two. Glide caught up with Shaw on a Zoom call to discuss the album's development and learning to be okay with yourself.
Publicado : Hace 10 meses por Ryan Dillon en Sports Entertainment
Like any band, Blvck Hippie had to go through a few phases before landing on the borderless experimental rock band we hear today. What started as a solo vehicle for head singer/songwriter Josh Shaw has morphed into a quintet hellbent on blurring the lines between styles and eras. On their new album, Basketball Camp, Shaw dug deep to find the correct words to say. Lyrically, these eleven songs explore living with regret and fear yet still keeping a healthy level of self-esteem. Both an ode to their upbringing and a vulnerable look at their present day, Blvck Hippie created their most ambitious music to date on Basketball Camp.
The album is filled with references to Shaw’s hometown in Memphis, Tennessee. The opening track, “P&H,” is a slow-burning love letter to the new defunct dive bar Shaw began performing at, and “Chairman Drive” is a stunning alt-rock ballad dedicated to the street their childhood church was near. Blvck Hippie is able to make these niche references feel as relevant and worldly as referencing the Olympics. Basketball Camp is a freeing world created by an artist who needed one to express themselves in. The loose sonic direction allows the beautiful chaos of “Cain and Able Fighting” to sound perfectly situated next to the danceable grooves of “Silent Disco.”
Basketball Camp is a long time in the making. The band’s breakthrough debut, I Feel Alone At Parties, was released in 2021, and the new album has been finished for two years. The time has finally arrived for Blvck Hippie’s sophomore effort, and the band is fearlessly marching into uncharted territory with a new sense of confidence and a whole lot of guitar prowess.
Glide hopped on a Zoom call with Josh Shaw to discuss Basketball Camp, their upbringing in Memphis, and learning to be okay with yourself. Check out our full conversation below.
What was it like growing up in Memphis? Did the city’s musical history influence you or what you were listening to at the time?
I listened to a wide range of music growing up; my parents had a pretty eclectic taste. I listened to the usual Funkadelic, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and all that stuff, as well as The Police and Talking Heads, so it was a pretty wide range. When I was around 11, my brother got an MP3 player, so for the first time, I had control over my own music. I was listening to the rap of the time, like T.I. and Lil Wayne, while also listening to Linkin Park. There was this one Japanese rock band called Puffy Amiyumi. They had a show on Cartoon Network and did the theme song for Teen Titans.
The music history of Memphis didn’t have too much influence on me when I was younger. My grandad worked for Stax Records and did a lot of cover art for those guys, including Issac Hayes. He did the Black Moses album art. I feel like I was inspired by his involvement in the musical history, but I didn’t know too much about it until later in high school.
“Streetlights” was the first single from the upcoming album Basketball Camp. How did you decide this song would lead the charge?
It was the second song written for the record. We’ve been playing it [live] for the past two years, so one reason I put it out was the fact we’ve been playing it for so long, and people have liked it. It’s also a pretty quintessential Blvck Hippie song. When I sent the demos out to the rest of the band before we recorded the record, our other guitarist said, “This sounds like Blvck Hippie song,” so we wanted to get it out there first.
The album was all self-recorded. Is your typical process sending the band demos before entering the studio?
I demoed everything at the house. I live with my drummer, so we kind of hashed out everything. I sent what we had to our bandmates. One was living in Clarksville, Tennessee, and the other was in Jackson. I sent it to them, and they sent back their parts so I could send it to the guy who was mixing/mastering it so they could get a taste of what direction we were going in. We all did that within a week or so, maybe ten days. Once I got all the parts, I had a better grasp of what the songs were going to be, so I started writing lyrics and demoing vocals. I sent those off to Greg Giorgio, who is doing the mixing/mastering. A couple of weeks later, everyone came over, and we tracked for five days at my house. We borrowed a bunch of gear from people and hammed it out for five straight days.
Is this the same way you recorded your debut album, If You Feel Alone At Parties? Does this style of recording grant you any more freedom?
This is a newer approach. It gives me complete creative control, and I’m a massive control freak. I feel like I like to be involved in every single step of everything as much as I can, just so I don’t lose it. The last record we recorded with a friend down at Magnetic Studios in Memphis, so every Blvck Hippie record had been done in a studio. Other than our first two singles, which were recorded between the house of our drummer at the time and the apartment I was living in at the time. The last time I recorded a full record at my house was in 2017, when I was going by a different name right out of college, so it felt like I was going back to my roots. That really spiced up the creativity. It felt like there were no rules I had to follow. It felt really great. I don’t think I’ll go back to not recording things myself, at least for the time being. How much freedom it comes with feels really great. We also don’t have a lot of money, so I don’t have to pay anyone to record at my house. We had to re-track a few things on Basketball Camp, and we didn’t have to shell out a bunch of money for studio time.
You’re very vulnerable in your writing, and the album touches on a lot of styles and genres. How can you tell an instrumental is right to address some of the heavier topics you write about?
I feel like sometimes it’s not a conscious choice. It just kind of comes out that way. In other ways, especially on this record, there are songs where I know I want to talk about specific topics. Then, it’s all about how I can portray what I want to in the most efficient way possible. When I know exactly what I want to talk about, those are the songs that take the longest to write. There are streams of consciousness where I can write a song in 15 minutes, and it’s perfect. Songs where I know exactly where I’m going, there are a million rewrites. I do an initial writing of it, get the themes and narratives right, and then I rehash it a bunch of times until I feel like I picked the perfect words to say what I need to say.
You never want to be too obvious; some things need to be left up to interpretation. At the same time, I wanted to be very vulnerable on this record, so I feel like I let a lot of that slide in ways where I normally don’t. I wanted to be like, “Sometimes it is exactly what I’m saying, and there’s no deeper meaning.” I also just wanted to be more myself. I feel like I’m a sad person a lot, so I feel like that helped me present things in the way I did.
Where do you find the courage to be so honest in your writing? Is there a song Basketball Camp that is particularly vulnerable?
When I started writing around 2015, I was going through a lot. I didn’t have any way to cope, so the only way I could talk about anything I was going through was through writing music. So early on, I didn’t really have a choice; I just had to have the courage. I feel like “Chairman Drive” is one of my favorites off the record. It’s very vulnerable. I grew up as a preacher’s kid, and the church was off of Chairman Drive. I was being pretty deep on there, like pulling out deeper-cut references to the things I experienced and was around. I’m glad I decided to go as vulnerable as I did because I feel like it needed to happen. I feel like if I can dive deeper and deeper into my past and all its weirdness, I’ll just keep writing better records as it goes.
I really like the lyrics on “Basketball Camp” too. That’s about my relationship with my dad and how it translates to the relationship I want to have with my kid.
Can you tell us about that time when songwriting came into the picture?
It technically started my sophomore year. I took a songwriting class, and it went really bad. We had to demo the song, and it was not a good experience at all. It technically started then. I remember calling my college girlfriend after, and everyone listened to the song, and I was like, “My professor hates my stuff; I’m so embarrassed.” I didn’t really start writing seriously until my first semester of junior year. That summer, I had a friend die, and my Grandma died, and I went through a breakup. All in a succession of months, like April, May, and June. I was really going through it, and I was sober at the time. I didn’t know what to do, so I decided to start writing songs again, and that’s when I also started playing guitar. I still have all these demos on my phone of these two-chord songs with all these capos. When I went back to school in the fall, I would write five songs a day. I would finish my classes and find a private place outside with a pen and paper and my guitar. I would just write and write until I was decently good at it. I also spent that summer studying all of The Strokes’ lyrics. That’s my favorite band, so I wanted to see how Julian Casablancas writes. I also studied Julian Baker’s stuff a lot that year.
Where did the name Basketball Camp come from?
I played basketball in high school. I was a homeschooled kid, but I started playing for teams and stuff like that around then. My dad and I were relatively close, but we got closer when I started playing because he would drive me to practice. We would have a lot more one-on-one time than we did when I was growing up because he was doing church stuff all the time. I consider that my coming of age and becoming who I am now.
The first song written for the record was “Basketball Camp.” I started writing it and thought of the name because I thought of it as my coming-of-age story. I would relate everything from high school through the lens of playing sports and how it grew me up a lot, and I learned a lot. I mean, it stunk. I got bullied, and it wasn’t fun at the time, but I learned a lot through it. I can’t write a coming-of-age record without placing it in the context of those four years where I was going to practice with my dad every other day and just talking about life. In a way, I was learning more about and with him. It created the close relationship we have now. The record is about being okay with how you turned out, and what better way to do that than to go to the past and reference that kind of stuff?
What is the significance of P&H? I saw it was a dive bar.
It was one of the oldest dive bars we had in Memphis. When I got into college, I didn’t really know what I was going to do with my life. I was a music major, so I got a music degree, but I was like, “I don’t know what the fuck to do with this.” I went to Tronto with my brother for a week and spent that time thinking about what I wanted to do. I decided I really wanted to do this music thing and put my all into it. When we flew back into Nashville, on the drive back to Memphis, I was on my phone and thought the best way to get into a scene was to play open mics. I googled “Open mics in Memphis,” and Monday night was open mic night at P&H. I decided I was going to start going every week, and this was how I would cut my teeth. You could do three songs, so I would write throughout the week. I kept up with them on the whiteboard in my parent’s kitchen. It’s still up there with all the songs written on it. I would go every Monday, and it’s where I learned how to perform because I didn’t get much experience in college. Sometimes, I would go up there with chord progression and no lyrics. I would just sing lyrics that came to me, really trying to challenge myself. We played our first full band show there, too. I can’t think about my musical journey without attaching it to this really cool dive bar. We played one of the last shows there before the Pandemic shut down. I had no idea that was going to be the last time I ever stepped foot in there because we lost it to the Pandemic and gentrification and all that. Now it’s a hookah bar or something stupid like that.
It was a bar my aunt used to go to, and she would take my mom there sometimes. It had such a rich history, and I feel like I couldn’t tell the story of being okay with how you turned out without starting at the beginning of what I consider what became my music career. That place is just extremely essential to it; it was just such a vibe. They didn’t serve liquor, only beer. There were pool tables, and the bathroom stalls in the men’s bathroom didn’t have doors. It was awesome.
Is that when you started going by Blvck Hippie?
I went by Saint John when I first started releasing music on platforms. That was around when I was graduating college. When I was playing at P&H, I would write my name as Saint John. When we played our first full band show there, it was under that name. We kept getting confused on Spotify with this metal band. Someone came up and told us we had a crazy amount of streams, and we were like, “No, we don’t.” He showed us, and I decided we had to change the name. When I first started writing music, I actually went by Blvck Hippie. I did one EP during the first semester of my junior year in college. It was based around a recording class I was in. I recorded five weird songs in my dorm room. It went from Blvck Hippie to Vacant House and then Saint John. When we decided to change the name, I figured it was between Blvck Hippie and Vacant House since those were the only other names I went by. I liked Blvck Hippie because that was a nickname my mom gave me because I was a weird kid. I did a poll on my personal Facebook page, and Blvck Hippie won. So I kept it. We did that in like 2018.
What is the significance of replacing the “A” with a “V”?
I did that in my junior year of college. It just looked cool on Instagram. I was a big Tumblr aesthetic kid. I’m glad I did so people don’t confuse us with the Kendrick Lamar rap group. It happens every once in a while. People will ask if I stole their name. There are so many black hippies. One time at a solo show, someone was like, “You’re not Kendrick Lamar.” I just told them to shut up and kept playing. It was a looping guitar set, too, so it was already weird in a crowded bar like that. He got kicked out about twenty minutes later. He had to walk home without a jacket, so he got his justice.
When you’re doing the demos, are you playing multiple instruments?
I am; I was a classical piano player going into college. I picked up guitar in my sophomore year because we had to pick up another instrument. I also play bass. I taught myself a little bass for demo purposes. I’ll fill in for bass players on a rare occasion.
How many demos are you making before sending them out to the band?
It depends. Sometimes, there will be six versions of a song. The title track from the last record had like seven versions. I demo like a mad person. I’ll demo a song a bunch of different times until I feel like it reaches it. I’m not one of those people who write twenty songs for a ten-song album. I’ve done it once, and it was in 2017. I wrote about twenty songs and dwindled it down to nine. Normally, I just write however many songs we want the album to have. Now that I’m thinking about it, we made a lot of changes to the demos for Basketball Camp. The point of the demo is to get the bones and figure out what the focus of every part should be. When it gets to the actual recording of it, I’m thinking about what would make the song cooler and what would make other things stand out.
I focus a lot on seeing what I can pull out of the other musicians when I’m demoing. I might know a song will end up being more punk rock, but I might play it softer to pull something more interesting from the other players. Once it gets to the end goal, a band member approaches the song with the demo mindset, which will make the song stand out more. It keeps the songs from being too generic. Everyone in the band has varying musical tastes and experiences, so the demo part is extremely important. What you first give them can bring out so many cooler ideas that they wouldn’t have brought had it already been fully cooked.
How did you first connect with the band members?
Our drummer has been in our band the longest. He’s been here since 2018 and did drumline with our old drummer. Our old drummer quit the band, and I was also playing in his band at the time. He brought Casey, our drummer, to one of the shows and said he was a fan of the stuff. Our old drummer texted us and said Casey wanted to play with us. We texted back, but they didn’t respond for a week and a half. We wanted to play shows so bad. Finally, we heard back, and we did a rehearsal and instantly clicked. He’s like my favorite person to write with. I met my bass player when I was in college; he’s the youngest member of the band. He was 16 when I was 21. He was from the city I went to school in, Jackson, Tennesee. I saw him at the show and was like, “Oh, cool, another black guy,” and I forgot he existed. I ran into him in the summer of 2021. We were playing a show in his college town. Our bass player at the time couldn’t make the tour, so we needed someone to fill in for six weeks. I asked him, “Hey, do you want to disappear for six weeks?” We had one rehearsal and knew we had to keep this guy.
Our other guitarist, Joe, and I went to music school together. I’ve known him since I was 19, so we’ve known each other for a decade. He’s played bass on my older stuff and all but one song on If You Feel Alone At Parties. He was pretty familiar with the stuff, and he had filled in on different instruments before. He’s only officially been in the band since 2022.
There is a song on the album called “For Scott,” a nod to Kid Cudi. What does he and his music mean to you?
I have two Kid Cudi tattoos. He was the first black person I ever saw talk about mental health in a public space. I started listening to him right before my sophomore year of high school, and that year sucked. I realized I had really bad depression that year. That was around “Pursuit of Happiness,” which is a sad song. From the jump, he was a huge inspiration to me to be myself and understand my mental health. Fast forward to my junior year when I started writing songs, and I realized I needed to start recording all these songs I was writing. I didn’t want to do it, and then Cudi dropped Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven. It was this grunge album where he played guitar and bass and sang. If he can pivot from hip-hop and write and play on all these songs, I can do that, too. If it weren’t for that album, Blvck Hippie would never exist.
I wanted to write and record my songs, but I couldn’t do it in a way that people would expect me to express myself musically. At the time, I didn’t know about TV on the Radio or anything like that. I had no exposure to black rockers besides Bad Brains and Jimi Hendrix. I wasn’t as good as a guitarist as Hendrix, and I wasn’t that punk at the time. I didn’t have anyone to look to until Cudi dropped that record. I was working a desk shift at my school, and I remember listening to Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven, thinking, “I can do this.” I always say that if I ever become hyper-famous, in my acceptance speech, I’m going to thank him for that album. That album was not popular and didn’t do well. I just want to meet him once to tell him that I owe a lot to him.
You’re heading out on tour for Basketball Camp. What are you most looking forward to?
This will be our first big tour of the year. We toured a bunch last year, including Europe, for the first time. We’ve been touring heavily for the past three years, but this is our first tour after a four—or five-month rest. Last year, we ran ourselves crazy on the road, and it was the same as the year before. This year, after we got off tour in December, we decided to chill for a bit and recoup. I’m really excited about it. We’ve played some of these songs on the road, but we’ll be playing pretty much everything. Which is funny because we recorded this album two years ago, so we all have to remember what we played. I’m really stoked to be on the road again and play new music. I feel like we toured the mess out of If You Feel Alone At Parties, so it’s exciting to start touring another record.
What song from the album that you haven’t performed are you most excited to?
It’s probably a tie between “Freeform Locs” and “Chairman Drive.” With “Freeform Locs,” I just love that song. I love the middle part, even though I’m still trying to figure out how to play the polyrhythm while singing. “Chairman Drive” is great because I miss having a slow song to play in the middle of the set.
What do you hope people take away from Basketball Camp? Is there a sense of relief now that it’s finally coming out?
I want it to be a coming-of-age emo record for black kids. I feel like there aren’t a lot of them, so I want the takeaway to be, “It’s okay how you turned out, and it’s okay that you’re different and weird.” The weirdest people are the most impactful. With it being done for so long, there is a massive sense of relief. For me, the creative process is, I love it, I’m tired of it, I absolutely hate it, and then I love it again. With Parties, it was done four or five months before it came out. When we were working on the album artwork and visuals for that record, I was still in the love phase. Basketball Camp was different because it had been done for so long. We were coming up with artwork for the album, but I hated it. Luckily, I’ve come around, and I love the record again. There is a sense of relief and excitement. I feel like I never want to take this long to put out another record again. Album 3 is going to come out a lot sooner.
Temas: Basketball, Music