"The process of crafting a song connects me to the world." (An Interview With Ashley Eriksson of LAKE)
From the monotony to the soaring colors laced through the everyday, Half Mystic delights in music that accompanies us through every permanence and transparency, every love and grief, every mundane magic. LAKE is a band we’ve long admired, offering music that mirrors the moments we too easily forget—the moments that nonetheless build a life. Please join us in welcoming Ashley Eriksson of LAKE to the blog!
HM: LAKE was founded over 15 years ago, in 2005. What are some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned over that time, both personally and artistically?
AE: We chose LAKE as a name 14 years ago, and from that point we just started making and never stopped. Eli [Moore] and I write most of LAKE’s lyrics; we’re the remaining founding members. Andrew [Dorsett] joined in 2006, so he’s also been with us since almost the very beginning. I was in a band with him before LAKE, actually! Personally, I think we’re able to keep this band concept alive as the world changes around us because Eli and I have been a couple for 13 years. Artistically, we’ve found a system that works. It can grow dull to play only old material, so we try to mix in new songs, work we’re still excited about. We ride that excitement as much as we can while still honoring the music we need to play to promote or record an album.
You began in Olympia, Washington. How has the Pacific Northwest impacted your voice?
Olympia is an excellent place to start making music—every house I ever visited for band practice regularly hosted several other bands, too. There’s a huge house show culture in Olympia, which translates to the removal of barriers that come from playing shows in venues that are required to make money. We felt incredibly supported to explore our artistry, and there were so many places to gather and celebrate music. It was our beginning and the place we return to.
Several of your songs have been featured on Cartoon Network’s hit television series Adventure Time, including the wildly popular “Christmas Island”, which is the end credits theme for the show. Tell us about your experience being part of such a huge cultural phenomenon.
I’m extraordinarily grateful to have written a song that so many seem to love—and on the flip side, I do sometimes wish the band could reach folks beyond the world of that one song, and invite them to explore more of LAKE! But ultimately, it doesn’t serve me to value my songs, or to judge them by their popularity. I have to judge them by my own pride in them. I don’t believe “Christmas Island” is better or more special than any of LAKE’s other work, though sometimes it’s easy to fall into that trap. And, as for the cultural phenomenon that is Adventure Time, we are just so, so immensely lucky to have been a tiny part of such a creative and brilliant show.
LAKE defies genre across the span of your work, weaving in elements of indie, rock, pop, jazz, folk, and experimental noise. What about the creation process for an album draws you to a particular sound?
I would name three phases to determining the sound we create on an album—the songwriting phase, the band phase, and the recording phase. The song has its own influences. Eli and I might be writing music in a style typical to us, or we might try a new approach we’ve been thinking about. Next we bring the work-in-progress to the rest of LAKE and, depending on who is in the band at the time, we divide up the various parts and compose ideas for presenting the song live. Finally, we record the song in the way we’d played it all together, adding any extra beats or rhythms we’re craving when listening back in the control room or our bedroom.
But the question of what draws us to any particular sound is a harder one. I think in a way we are always trying to outdo ourselves, and so in each album we push for something a little different from, a little juxtaposed to what came before. With Giving & Receiving, we realized there was a kind of adult contemporary sound we had yet to explore, so we leaned into that newness. With Roundelay, our most recent album release, we were a 3-piece for the first time in the history of the band—so the recordings are spun out of live tracks consisting solely of Andrew on drums, Eli on guitar, and me on bass.
“She Plays One Chord” is one of the most popular songs you’ve ever released; did you expect it to be such a fan favorite, or did its universal appeal surprise you?
“She Plays One Chord” is a rhythmically driven song, and I’m not surprised that that immediacy draws a listener in. Andrew wrote the percussion even before Eli and I added chords and lyrics, which is unusual for us. I do also believe the somewhat vague refrain of “she plays one chord” might resonate for the questions that it raises: who is this “she”? What’s the significance of the single chord?
How has working in a collective band dynamic influenced you individually?
I love working in a band because there’s never a dry spell or fallow period. To know that you can bring a composition to a group of trusted musicians and dream a new thing into existence—or that you can simply be together with those musicians in a room and improvise something beautiful—is priceless! It’s also a wonderful balance for me of writing on my own and with others, so I never feel suffocated or isolated. But I should say that Eli gets all the credit for being the best possible organizer. I doubt we’d ever have come this far without his patience in rallying the band when we forget to rally ourselves.
Your lyrics are often deeply poignant, verging on poetry while still maintaining a sense of humor. How do you balance that vulnerability and whimsy? What, in your mind, makes a great lyric?
While I can’t answer for Eli, I can speak for myself that as a non-religious person, songwriting is the closest thing I have to a spiritual practice. The process of crafting a song—with lyrics, voice, melody—connects me to the world.
And I can’t say that without admitting that songwriting can at the same time be hectic, fumbling, and ridiculous! It can put me in a delightfully absurd mood, and I think that’s where part of the humor in LAKE’s lyrics comes from. You can’t take yourself too seriously when you’re in a room mumbling nonsense to yourself. Sometimes I wish I were writing more dance songs, because dance music is the most fun to perform—I don’t always like performing uncomfortably contemplative songs in front of an audience that’s just come to party! But lacing joy into LAKE’s music helps bridge that gap. I believe the greatest lyrics have both.
What music do you listen to? What inspires you to create?
LAKE finds inspiration across so much both of art and life. We of course are music lovers, but we have diverse genre and lyric tastes—on tour, we’ll all bring some music we think everyone would like, and then stuff just to listen to ourselves. The cross-section for Andrew, Eli, and me tends to be ‘80s and ‘90s songs, and we all listen to and enjoy Prefab Sprout and Stephen Steinbrink. On my own, I really like Greek folk songs, disco, and ‘60s music.
LAKE has a rich history of collaboration with fellow musicians—most notably, Karl Blau. How do artists like Karl influence and reverberate through your musical process?
From the beginning of LAKE, Karl Blau was one of our most important mentors. The first letter I received in Washington State was actually from Karl to Eli’s house in Olympia, and that became my proof of residency before I had even found a place to live!
Karl recorded our first LAKE album. At the time, we were all really tapped into the idea of recording as being half music, half field recording. When I say “field recording”, I mean less “walking around town recording” and more that in the studio we captured every sound, every breath. When we overdubbed, we would overdub several things or people at once, which also added to this living, becoming feeling in the recordings. Karl loved productions from Lee Scratch Perry and Maher Shalal Hash Baz, and he often quoted Allen Ginsberg’s expression, first-thought-best-thought.
Over the years we’ve played in different ensembles for Karl’s bands—I’ve played drums on two different tours! On our first tour with him he would write a song in the car as we drove from venue to venue, and we would perform that song as our opener at the next show. Every night was a completely different one-off song for a one-off performance. Sometimes I feel stuck, playing the same songs in the same style, having the same conversations with audiences every night. In a way, the exercise was a treatment for this redundancy. That is what’s so fun about working with Karl—he is creatively supple, never hardening in his beliefs and style, always experimenting.
Your newest album, Roundelay, came out last April. How have you celebrated the release given the constraints of 2020? What’s next for LAKE?
We were lucky enough to get in one West Coast tour for Roundelay before the pandemic hit. It was magnificent to hear fans’ feedback as they came to know the album, and we’ve felt beyond grateful for having created and released it with Off Tempo. We also released another album, Practice Space, while we were on that West Coast tour. Right now it’s only available on cassette at Human Sounds Records, but we do hope to bring it to digital soon!
LAKE formed 15 years ago in Olympia, WA. Their song “Christmas Island” is the ending credits theme in popular Cartoon Network show, Adventure Time. Over the years LAKE has collaborated with Northwest native Karl Blau extensively in the studio and on the road as his back-up band. They released records for historic indie label K (Beat Happening, the Microphones) for 6 years before jumping to German pop and experimental label Tapete/Bureau B for their latest release Forever or Never (2017). On April 24, 2020 LAKE released their latest album Roundelay with Seattle label Off Tempo. Explore more: Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify | Bandcamp