A Band You Should Know: Deeper
Portraits courtesy of Sub Pop
It’s difficult to write about Deeper and know them at the same time.
As I write this, I find myself wanting to explain with some seriousness that their music sounds like diligent people who learned to play guitar together in the wrong-but-best way, fusing sparse agitation with danceability, and sporting lyrics that pack more substance than their contemporaries would provide or their genre would demand, but I also want to talk about their immaculate ability to do a midwestern accent and riff for several minutes on the most minuscule and niche of bits (Chex Mix marketing meetings, or the names of trending cocktails at millennial bars). They are talented, strange, funny people making art that moves and allures without crowding the head space.
Perhaps owing in some part to their being from Chicago - a city built on industry and frost and unyielding people - Nic Gohl, Shiraz Bhatti, Drew McBride, and Kevin Fairbairn inject bitterness, persistence, and confidence into Deeper’s arpeggiating rhythm and punchy delivery. Something like a band you saw in a basement as a kid and never forgot, Deeper are impactful and precise, but organic and personal.
With their new album, Careful! only a month (ish) away, I reminisced to singer/guitarist Nic Gohl about that fateful field in Salt Lake City where we first did impressions at each other.
I don’t know if you remember, but I met you in Salt Lake City.
Yeah, I was like, ‘damn, this name sounds so familiar. Good to see you again.’
You too! When I met you, you were doing a lot of impressions…
We do a lot of impressions- a lot of bits.
A lot of bits. But then I listen to your music and it isn’t very bitty. It doesn’t square exactly with your personalities and I’m curious about that dichotomy.
I mean, I think that some of the darkest people are comedians. I don’t consider myself to be very dark, and I think that the kind of music that I make is a conversation with myself about my mental woes. It’s my escape to be a little pretty but also be honest. Being funny is a way for me to skirt that honesty and try to make people feel more comfortable around me, and me around people.
But you’re also having to perform these songs and put yourself out there in that way. Where has that compulsion come from?
I always put myself in these situations where I’m like- maybe five minutes before a show, I’m thinking to myself, ‘why the fuck did I do this to myself?’. I’m confident in my voice, but when I hear it back, I hate it. I guess I’m a masochist in a way where I get myself to do a lot of things that I don’t want to but I also like to be out of my comfort zone. I don’t know. I’ve always been a motormouth class clown.
How’s this going? How’s being in a band?
It’s hard! It’s super hard. We’ve been together for maybe seven years, which I think is a long time. We’ve grown with each other. I’m very happy that we have such a solid friendship between us and it keeps getting better. We’re about to leave on the Careful! tour and I can’t wait to be in a van with them for two months. Maybe I’ll hate them by the end of it.
Two months?!
It’s a full US tour, and then we have a few days off, and then we leave for Europe for three or four weeks. It’s about eight weeks or so, and then we’re off for a while.
“maybe five minutes before a show, I’m thinking to myself, ‘why the fuck did I do this to myself?’”
What’s your van thing? I know that some bands watch the Sopranos, some like to play games, do you have a thing?
I mean, bits. Bits are something that we get obsessed with. We don’t really have any games but I was thinking of bringing Monopoly Deal.
Monopoly Deal?
It’s a card game version of Monopoly. Me and my wife have become obsessed with it. We make cocktails and play it after dinner, so I’m going to steal our deck of cards and bring it on tour. We don’t really have any pastimes, though, we are good at just talking to each other. Kevin is the driver and I’m the copilot for the most part, so it’s a lot of bullshiting for hours. We used to be in a Toyota Sienna which was so packed. You’d see the van drive down the freeway and it would be bottoming out under the weight. It was dangerous. But we recently got a Chevy Express, extended cab, 2011, you know. Pretty comfortable now.
2011?!
Hey it’s only got 50,000 miles, man.
We keep using the term bits, which is a sort of ongoing joke that a group can build on and do voices for and what not. Can you explain some of those bits?
A personal favorite of mine that we do is Clint Eastwood ordering Millennial drinks. So you do a Clint voice, and he’s asking for, like, a Fernet Branca and a cute little straw.
That thing that the girl from Game of Thrones said she liked and it became a viral drink?
Yeah, that’s a good one for that. There’s this restaurant in Chicago called Parsons that has a Negroni slushy and it was perfect for a Clint Eastwood voice, so that was where that bit came from. Or like Clint asking to see a natural wine list.
You made that one?
Kevin made that one, mine is a Cajun man in witness protection, and he just can’t stop going into stuff from Louisiana and he has the accent and speaks french patois, but he’s supposed to be from Wyoming and he’s a cowboy.
Oh man, it’s so stupid but so funny.
You know what I mean? When you’re on the road for a certain amount of time, your brain melts a little bit. You have a collective mind where you’re all so tired and working toward the same thing- being stupid is almost a defense mechanism. My whole thing is to try and not remember what day it is because if I start counting the days, I get all overwhelmed, so allowing it to be fluid has helped. It’s almost like being on a two week bender. Things blend together.
Album to album, how do you think you’ve evolved sonically, and the second half of the question is: how do you think you’ve remained friends and not killed each other?
As far as the evolution, I think that on the first record, we were trying to learn to play with each other. One of the original members, Mike, we grew up together, and our whole philosophy was to not play chords but instead play arpeggios that form chords with each other. Very Deerhunter, Women - those were our bands. Playing that way, for a bass player or a drummer, it’s hard to find your way in. I think we were trying to figure out how to work together to make a song from the things we had on loopers or whatever. We did that for maybe a year and a half and our producer Dave would come in and help us turn things into songs.
Our second album, that one we knew what we wanted to go for. Honestly, after every record, I am so sick of it and ready to move on. That one, I fucking hated it and thought we failed, and the pandemic happened right after the release. All of our shows got canceled, so I took a break from it. Later on, I began to enjoy the album more after having taken a break. With Careful!, the newest record, we knew how to play and are good at working with each other. A lot was done remotely where I’d write parts and send it to the guys and they’d send it back. It felt a little less like a full band, which was weird, and then we went into a studio for two weeks and hashed it all out, so it feels good now. I think that learning and adapting is something that we’ve gotten really good at. We’ve become adults together, and that’s what gives us such a good band dynamic.
Do you think that with Careful!, you’ve accomplished what you set out to? Have your goals changed?
I definitely think that the goals have changed a lot for us. With our first record, all we wanted was to be able to go on a real tour. Prior to that we were just doing DIY shows. As we’ve progressed, we’ve accomplished larger and larger things. Being from Chicago, I always wanted to play Pitchfork, and we got to play it this year. Now, I wonder what the next thing is. I don’t know exactly what I want out of my career. I know that I want to be able to provide with my music and to live off of it- making money always makes you feel like you’re accomplishing something, but that doesn’t necessarily make you happy. I will say that we really want to be a band that is able to adapt - sort of genreless.
The way that you talk about your music, it seems you have a lot of intention. With this new album, what intent do you have for your audience? What would you like a listener to receive from you?
With the last album, it was really dark and hard to play and conceptualize. It was a lot about mental health. During that time, our guitar player took his life. The songs were written before he had done that, but they were all about my interactions with him, my personal problems with myself, so when that shit went from something we were writing about to something that was happening to us, it was really fucking painful. It sounds funny but it was almost like I shot myself in the foot; I wrote something about mental health and then something really impactful and sad happened, and I had to talk about it. Well, I didn’t have to, but I felt like I needed to, I didn't want to hide from it. Then the pandemic hit right after. When I started writing songs for Careful!, it was me trying to forgive myself and forgive Mike, and be okay with where I was at in my life. That’s where the title comes from: taking care of yourself. I want people to be able to listen to this record and the emotional content and feel it, but have it feel good. I also want people to dance to it. A feel good record that you can dance to, in a deeper way.
In a Deeper way.
Oh, perfect. There you go.