Crying in the club with musical duo Brijean

“City Lights” producer Jacob Smulian recently sat down with the duo to discuss their new album, the paradox of being alive and, of course, the importance of crying in the club.

More can be found about Brijean on their Instagram, website and Bandcamp.

This interview transcript has been edited for clarity.

I would love to start with what you guys are listening to right now. What are on your playlists? What’s on repeat?

Dougie: I’ve been loving the Jessica Pratt album and can’t stop listening to the Slauson Malone record that came out like fall of last year, and then Mk.Gee, those are a few records that I have been enjoying in their entirety, which is kind of rare these days. 

 What about you, Brijean? 

Brijean: Definitely that Jessica Pratt album. Doug and I just saw her play in Joshua Tree and it was so dreamy and amazing. So that’s the one I would embolden. 

 Do you guys listen to a lot of other people’s music when you’re on tour? Or are you plugged out when you’re not on stage?

Dougie: I’d say I listen to more music on tour than when we’re making stuff. There’s more passive travel time to kind of intake [music]. Whereas sometimes when we’re in create mode, I’m a little like tunnel vision on what we’re making. What about you, Brijean? 

Brijean: Music, podcasts and The Allman Brothers intake goes way up as soon as the wheels hit the road, you know?

 Oh, I love it. The description of your album on Bandcamp says that you’re gonna walk us through the paradox of being alive, and I was hoping I could get a preview of what that means. 

Brijean: You’ve already got the preview. You’re living in 2024. 

 This is the truth. How was the recording of Macro different from your previous albums? How is the album emotionally different?

Dougie: I can speak to the recording. We have a space [that’s] built out to sound nice and more space than we’ve ever had. I think having that space and also a living room that ends up being a more live sounding space kind of informed some of the sonic territory we were covering. 

Half of the album has more live-ish drums, or live sounding drums, whereas our previous records were made in really small spaces. So I think we felt like we had a little more room to spread out and put the mic a few feet away from what we’re recording. 

 Brijean, I’d love to hear about the emotional side, too, because I know you wrote most of the lyrics.

Brijean: Yeah, we did a lot of improvisation and hangs with friends, which was so nice, especially living in LA. now. We have a small budget to make new friends and tell them, “Hey, do you want to come over and we’ll pay you?”

 Oh, that’s so sweet. 

Brijean: Yeah. We got to meet a lot of cool musicians and then sonically to explore a lot of different sides of ourselves within it, so it felt fun to get a little more… freaky on it.

As far as the lyrics, I felt like in each song, I really dipped myself into the tub of the song and thought about what the feeling of the song was. Of course, there are a lot of existential moments within that because my second gear of self is always “Oh wait, what are we doing here?” Like, what is this life on this rock, should we figure that out or are we good? You know? So there’s some of that. There’s more playful stuff. There’s more poetic moments. It was enjoyable and also lengthy. We took our time with writing this album.

 How long did it take you guys to write it? 

Dougie: We started in January of ‘23 and then it was mostly done by July, but we had a few months of kind of like tinkering after that. 

 Going back to what Brijean said about working inside of all the different parts of yourself – I wanted to touch on the album cover because I feel like that’s probably a pretty direct reflection of that. How involved were y’all in the visuals that are attached to this project?

Brijean: I’ve done a lot of the illustration, a lot of the flyers, posters, album covers – I’m an illustrator and a visual artist as well. This album was Bijan at Fisk.  It was so fun to work with him to explore a visual representation of switching the lens from performer to audience, or shifting the perspective of yourself to see your different modalities and vibes and interests in a playful way. I feel like it’s so encouraged nowadays, especially with the flattened kind of 2D sense of self on the internet, to have a brand that fits within a really neat confine and is easily packageable and easily digestible. And we’re so much weirder than that. We’re so much more totally complex and freaky and nuanced and fun and all of these things, as a species!!!

 Are there any rituals that you guys follow as you’re creating music? Or does it happen a little more organically?

Dougie: The one consistent thing was that we would pretty much write daily when we were in the mode of creating. We would take breaks, but just try to let something happen every day, even if it didn’t end up becoming something we were in love with. We tried a few different processes – like historically we’ve always written from drum machine and percussion on some chords but we explored writing with acoustic guitar and voice. We did that for a few songs, which is such an obvious form of songwriting, but we’ve never taken that path. It was super fun to just let ourselves explore different sonic palettes and tempos and feelings that are in so much of the music that we love, but never been a part of what we created together.

Brijean: I feel like Doug was a real good leader in getting us to record. So there would be times where I would kind of like throw fits because I was like, “We need to have fun, man. This isn’t fun. Let’s get out of the room. Let’s go do something to inform this. Let’s have a smoothie, let’s dress up!” 

Okay, so was this an explicitly agreed-upon writing mode or was this naturally the part of life y’all were in? 

Brijean: For me it was, “we’re in writing mode, so it’s time to access your creative side and your inner thoughts” because Doug and I both tour and work so much in other projects, so we’re like, “Okay, we have this time set out. It’s time to show up.” Which can be really hard when you don’t feel like doing it. 

 Does that mean it ended up feeling like work sometimes? 

Dougie: I think so. I think that that’s natural when you’re trying to create a bigger body of work. Occasionally you get a song that just pops out of the ether but I feel like that doesn’t always happen. I think there is an element of just going back to the page every day trying to put some ideas out and not get too attached or judge them too much and take the night and then revisit them the next day.

What song would you guys say was the most challenging to work on from this album?

Brijean: The hardest song to write, as it turned out, started the easiest. It’s a song for my friend Roxy, one of my oldest and best friends. She’s a plant scientist and she studies trees and climate science and how clouds connect with trees and what’s going to happen with our future. What she does is so deeply inspiring. 

So, a couple of years ago, we were sitting and having coffee and she told me that she got this grant to plant this forest and then study them over the next 40 years. She told me, “I play your music for the little saplings all the time and I have data that they really like it.” And oh my God, that’s so meaningful, so deep and so sweet. I can’t even imagine a world in which that would happen. And so I was like, “you get a song, girl.”

When I sat down to write the lyrics, it was probably the fastest song I’ve ever written. I love the lyrics. I felt so connected to our childhood together, her experience and in nature. 

But at the end of the writing process, when we were finishing the vocals, her partner, Gabriel Trujillo, was murdered on a scientific trip in Mexico, studying plants. He went missing and she had to find him. It was very traumatic, very horrifying. We’re still grieving his loss; I couldn’t speak for a week after he died. But we had to finish the album and finish the song. So that was definitely the hardest song to complete, but also the most intimate.

That’s intimate and sad and heartbreaking and beautiful. Thank you for sharing. 

Dougie: It’s not linear, navigating grief. I think we’ve both had a lot of experience with that in the last few years and I think that’s the thing we keep arriving at. You make so much progress and acceptance and acknowledgement and then, drop of a hat, you’re just right back to day one.

 How do you guys handle creative disagreements? 

Dougie: I mean, thankfully, we don’t have too many. Which is amazing because I’ve been in bands where it’s just so hard to make a song. Everybody’s got good ideas and nobody wants to let go of them. We definitely have creative disagreements, but I think we’re just rarely so attached to our idea that we can’t find the middle ground.  

Can you think of a song? 

Brijean: Maybe Counting Sheep – we had made a version of Counting Sheep that was completely different than what’s on the record. Hmm. And we both still love the song, but couldn’t figure out how it fit into the album. 

Dougie: One late night, I just kind of scrapped everything except for the vocal and a couple of guitar parts and remixed it – 

Brijean: Which very rarely happens in our process. Doug, I don’t, how do I say this? I’m joking while I say this, but like… you unsupervised with the stems late at night, remixing a song that we’ve worked on for a month? So dangerous. [Laughter]

It’s such a collaborative process. I love and support Doug’s exploration, but I’m always like, did you save the original file?

Is it a possible b-side for the future? 

Dougie: Yeah. I feel like there was a moment though the next day when I showed it to you and you were unsure because it sounded so different. 

Brijean: It was so different.The song is about insomnia and heartbreak, but it’s in the club and it’s sexy. I heard it fitting in with the album better, but I didn’t necessarily connect with it more emotionally. You can cry in a club.

It’s important to cry in the club! All of the emotions are part of the spectrum. You can’t have one without the other, which sucks and also just is.  

Brijean: Back to the clean boxy compartmentalization of our modernity. Sometimes you gotta cry and sometimes you gotta let it out and feel like a little animal on the dance floor, you know? Just get it out. Get it in, get it out, do what you gotta do, you know? 

Dougie: Don’t be afraid to contradict yourself, you know? You can celebrate and cry in the same night.

Absolutely. Do you feel the pressure to not contradict yourself with the music that you put out and the potential to alienate fans who might not necessarily agree with a new direction that you’re taking? I’m sure you see it, but do you really feel that pressure to conform to whatever the demand is? 

Brijean: I think that this album was an exploration in challenging whatever or boxes we fit into in a lot of ways. And it might feel subtle to the listener but it felt more radical to me in the writing process to say, “hey, let’s hire a lap steel player” or, you know, “let’s write a song on guitar.”  That felt like a departure and an exploration of these different sides of myself.

Did that make you nervous?

Brijean: It made me feel more exposed and ungrounded in a way that was a nice free fall; I think I landed in a cool place, but I’m not really sure, you know? But ultimately, I think I love the islands that we landed on and I’m proud of them.  

Great. I love that. What classic house do you guys listen to or have you guys listened to that’s been inspirational to your music? 

Dougie: Mr. Fingers, Moodymann, Larry Heard, probably Larry Levant. I mean, not quite house, but getting in there. 

Brijean: Candido. His disco stuff. 

Are there any particular Projects or collaborations that you’re dreaming of for the future? This doesn’t have to be realistic, they could be totally in the realm of imagination. 

Dougie: This is hopefully a grounded one, but I’d love to do something with Reyna Tropical. I saw Bobby play in a few bands like over the years when we’re in the bay, I just think that would be super fun. If Moodymann ever did a remix I would just die. 

Brijean: I’d love to have a live band for Paul Cherry’s On Top. Get the string section and just honor the record that way. Most likely video it too. 2025, I really want to do that.

Doug, is there anything on the way from Dougie Stu? 

Dougie: Yes! I don’t have a date or a finished record, but it is very close. It’s harder to find the time, but Brijean’s been gone a bunch this year, touring with Mitski and I’ve had lots of time to do writing and recording. So it’s developed and it doesn’t have a home yet so if there’s a record label that needs a good fall release…