As we wait in anticipation for Varsity’s next album, Fine Forever coming May 29th, the lead singles “Reason to Run” and “Runaway” have been on my heavy rotation. The songs have the glistening synths, reedy vocals, and catchy hooks that we love from Varsity. But they have a different quality from their previous recordings. They have a raw feeling, exciting in the way the band is when they play live. Is there really something different here, or is it just the shine of a new song lighting up my life in these dark times? I was chuffed to get to chat with a couple members of the band, so they could enlighten me us to the recording process of the new album. 

-Tina Mead

 PREORDER Varisity’s new record Fine Forever.

SS: Stef Smith, vocalist/keyboardist
DW: Dylan Weschler, guitarist

You guys have been in the Chicago music scene for a minute, but could you remind us how and when the band formed?

SS: I think we formed in 2015, Dylan is that the year? I can’t remember the year.
DW: It was 2013, actually
SS: No it wasn’t! 
DW: Yeah, summer 2013.
SS: Are you serious? 
DW: Yup.
SS: Oh. Ok. 2013...maybe Dylan should tell this story..[laughing]
DW: I’m only better with the dates, Stef you’re better with literally everything else, so [laughs]
SS: Yeah, that’s true. So we, me, Dylan, and Pat, we all know each other. Kind of from college, we were friends, and I had a salon night at my house which was just anybody could bring any talent or art or anything they wanted to do. Just like a talent show. 
Dylan and Pat played, I believe the spoon song together, and I was like, oh ok, I want to play with these guys. Then, we were already friends, so we just started jamming, and I think we practiced in my living room. Paul and Jake are brothers. I went to high school with both of them. So actually first, my brother [Spencer Smith] was the drummer and Paul was our bass player and then my brother moved away and then Jake swooped in. And they swapped. Wait. Is that how it happened Dylan?
DW: Yeah, I think you’ve got it
SS: Spencer was the drummer and Jake was the bass player and then... I think I'm fuzzy on the details... And then okay, what happened was that Jake played drums and then Paul swooped in to play bass. So we’ve had one lineup change. Dylan do you remember what year that was?
DW: That, I think, was 2015, so we’ve been this lineup since 2015.
SS: Ok that makes sense. Maybe that’s why I had that year in my head. So yeah, we were all friends before. So it felt really natural, but for some reason we had never jammed before that. But that is when it clicked. At the salon night.

And is that when you started writing the songs that are what we now call The Basement Takes?

DW: Yeah, pretty much
SS: Really, Dylan you think?
DW: Yeah, I didn’t really think about it, but Paul officially became a member of 2015 in the summer and then I think that we had kind of started, we had written “Cult of Personality” and “So Sad.” We recorded that with your brother, with Spencer, but then Paul came in in the summertime and we pretty much wrote the rest of The Basement Takes songs for the next like year and a half or so. And we just put them out as the singles.
SS: Yeah because some of them had Spencer on the drums and some of them had Jake.

I’m so glad you released them as an album. When there is a new band that you love on the scene it is exciting every time they release a song, but it's even better to be able to have them as an album.

SS: Yeah, that’s good to hear! Yeah releasing them digitally was definitely the way to go at the time and then yeah, but then we kept hearing, cause people really like those songs but they didn't exist physically. So it felt like a fun thing to do and it was also our first time putting something out with Run for Cover [Records]. So that was a really nice test run to see how it was to work with them and put something out with them. And create a physical, a vinyl with them. And we really like how it turned out.

Since those 2015 recordings, how do you feel you've evolved as a band?

DW: I feel like we’ve evolved in every way possible. Except we’re still playing a similar genre of music, but, that’s kind of a broad answer. But, you know what I mean?
SS: Yeah, I think that we are better musicians and songwriters and I think better band members and friends. I think we take things in stride, too. In every way the band is more functional.

More emotional maturity? 

SS: Ah, yes, the only thing that hasn’t matured is our sense of humor, but I do think we are more emotionally mature, for sure. 
DW: Yeah I think that’s digressed. I don’t think I’m as funny as I used to be, so. 
SS: Regressed?
DW: Yeah
[laughing]

What is your songwriting process?

DW: Pretty much every album we’ve put out, we’ve had a slightly different writing approach. Before this record, it was that one of us would have an idea, anywhere from 20% to 60% of the song, and then we kind of work together and flesh that out. This time around it was a little bit different, a lot more collaborative. There were definitely still the ideas, but they’d be more in that 5 to 10% range and then we would all kind of work together to push these songs out into their final form and that was definitely an easier and harder way to work. [laughs] Cause you can rely on each other more, but there’s also times when we all have to be the same brain coming to the same conclusion and sometimes that’s a little challenging.

And do the lyrics come with the music, are they a part of that process? 

SS: Yeah. Part of the collaborative writing process is usually we play a song over and over again. Every practice we will pick it back up and work on it. So, some of the lyrics happen during that process. Like a phrase, or something gets stuck and maybe might make it into the last version of the song, but generally most of the lyrics come after the song is fully finished. And some of the lyrics in the song actually came after the song was fully recorded. Which I was feeling a little like, ugh I’m such a procrastinator. I was feeling kind of shity about it but then I read this Cate Le Bon interview where she talked about how she kind of has the same kind of process. It is kind of part of the process because sometimes you need to hear the whole song. Sometimes I need to hear the song fully formed in its recorded form to get to understand the true meaning of the song. To understand what it's trying to say. So I’ve stopped feeling bad about that and realized sometimes it's going to come down to me writing down the lyrics right before I record them. That’s actually what happened for “Reason to Run” and I'm really happy with the lyrics. So it can work out.
DD: Yeah, you were upstairs in the studio as we were getting ready for the vocal takes. And you were like, “OK, five more minutes, ten more minutes! I just gotta do this last verse!” [laughing]
SS: I had parts of the songs already written, but I didn’t know how it was gonna come together.
DD: Yeah. It’s an exciting thing to observe as a member of the band, to kinda watch. It happened with another song, I can’t remember which one it was, where you had kind of, where I had not heard the lyrics until you were recording them. It is just really exciting, especially because I kind of, as you know, I’m a huge fan of your lyrics, so whenever you turn a phrase, or if there’s something there that I haven’t heard, and I get to hear with the full live take and you’re recording it in real time, its just, that’s one of my favorite parts about being in the studio with you, is just, like, that excitement. In real time. Ya know?
SS: Aw. I know what song, I think I know what song, it was either Memphis group, or was it…?
DW: No, it was “Heaven Sent”
SS: Oh yeah
DW: Is that the name of the song?
SS: Yeah, I think that’s what we decided to call it.
DW: Yeah, that song hasn’t been released yet, it’s one of the last songs on the album.

Do you have a favorite lyric from either that song or “Reason to Run”?

DW: Oh man, there are so many. What's the one? It’s in “Reason to Run,” “You take what you can get and you take the worst part of me.”
SS: Oh, yeah its, “You take what you can get, You miss the better part of me”
DW: Yeah, yeah.
SS: You told me you like that lyric. It makes me happy when you tell me you like my lyrics. 
[laughing] I don't think I can vote on my favorite lyric, cause it just feels, like, [laughing] narcissistic.

Speaking of “Reason to Run” you released it as a double single with “Runaway.” Obviously they both have run in their titles, and I was curious is it a coincidence, or are the stories of the songs connected?

SS: Yeah, the stories of the song they are sort of, like, part of a pair. The first song, “Runaway” is told from the perspective of a person in a situation who is begging, or asking someone to stay and then “Reason to Run” has the flipside. It's told from the perspective of the person who’s leaving. So they are, like, two sides of the same coin. So we wanted to release them back to back so they could tell that story. Yeah, and It’s fun to write that way, too. Not just to have the story of the song and just stay there. It's a kind of a nice writing exercise for me. So when I was writing “Reason to Run,” I had material to work off of from “Runaway.” So it was a challenge, yes, but also a kind of fun to figure out what the other half of that story would be, if you told it from the other side.

We are pretty hyped that you have a new album, Fine Forever coming out May 29th. Are you expecting to go ahead with that release?

DW: Yup
SS: Yeah. I think we had a small conversation before, being like, do we do this, is it appropriate? 
But I’ve just been thrilled with how, like, the music world is responding and adapting and still consuming music and supporting each other. I think we considered not going ahead for a second, but then after that, I don’t know, we realized that, now is the time that people need to hear stuff; people are consuming stuff and are really interacting with each other around music, so I think we are gonna go ahead.

I get really bummed out when somebody decides to delay, it feels, like, why are you doing this to me?

[laughing]
SS: Obviously it's a weird time to release music. We would have loved to release and then toured right away on it, but I think that withholding it just doesn't feel right. To us.
DW: Definitely, like, I think the folks that are delaying, it’s usually, it probably is because of the touring cycle side of it. Or they just kind of feel awkward releasing during these times. But I think right now, at least for musicians like us, I think that, we’re not selling out arenas, or anything like that. We’re just kind of wanting to share the thing that we’ve been working on for so long. And our fan base and other bands that we’re friends with, we’re all in the same sort of boat. I think wanting to get the music out, and obviously wanting to tour, but gotta wait on the touring side for sure.

When you're able to play together again, is there a song that you're excited to pick up and play live?

SS: I wanna play “Runaway.”
DW: Yeah, so do I.
SS: Have we played that live? I don’t think we’ve played it live yet.
DW: We’ve never played it live, it's actually really hard. So we will have to relearn it.
[laughing]
SS: Yeah, I’m so excited to play that song live. We are going to have to relearn that song, but I think it will be so fun and there’s harmonies. Yeah, the sax solo. We had our friend Spencer [Ouellette] sit in and play at our release show for The Basement Takes. It’s just so fun to have another instrumentalist up there that we don’t typically play with. Yeah, I think “Runaway” will be really fun to play.

 Awesome, so you're definitely going to need that sax for your record release?

SS: Yeah, definitely the sax, and probably even more. That was something about this album, we used a lot of different new instrumentation like sax and layered aux percussion and layers. So our live show is going to be different from what we did before. You know we were working on that before the stay at home orders and I’m really excited to pick that back up again. Cause that’s sort of a new thing for us, playing with different people and adding different instruments. I was getting really excited, I’m still really excited for that.

Did you have those people playing on the albums or was that just in rehearsals?

SS: Just in rehearsal. Well, actually, the saxophone player, [Barclay Moffat], he’s not in our band, he sat in, he was from Bloomington, Indiana. Yeah, so we were kind of like getting our live show together with instrumentalists from Chicago.

As we said, this isn't your first, but you mentioned this was your first recorded album with Run for Cover records. What was different about making this album?

DW: The writing process was a lot more collaborative, the recording process too. More than the previous album we put out, Parallel Person, We recorded that pretty much in one week. A few days in a row that we booked in one studio. In this case, for the new record we basically, we recorded it over four or five weekends last year. We went down to Bloomington for a weekend in February, and May and July and October or something like that. Kind of just spread it out. Like literally over the entire course of last year, which was definitely fun because it gave us a lot of perspective to the songs that were already recorded, and I think informed the writing process for some of the songs that were going to go in to record too. I guess Run for Cover being involved didn’t really change anything much as far as the recording process. It was just really different than what we did before. Pretty much like everything we did on this album, from the writing to the recording to what we’re doing now is pretty much different, so this is all new territory for us, which is exciting.
SS: Something else that was new is that the songs were probably like 90% finished, but we left room for there to be experimentation in the studio, for additional parts to be added. We let ourselves, because we weren’t rushed, trying to fit it all within a week, we let ourselves experiment and try different things, and scrap them if they weren’t working, or do some stuff live. I think it adds kind of a raw quality to the album and it’s more fun, I would say it’s not as technically...I think something we really worried about last time was whether it was technically perfect, or things sounding exactly like how they were in our demos and I think this album has a lot more of a live quality. 
DW: Yeah, there’s a lot more dynamics, and that’s because we recorded it live, ya know, instead of doing it in parts, like oh, just bass and drums and then overdubbing stuff. 
SS: Yeah it was important for us, that the songs felt like how they did when we practiced them, ya know, so that they felt like how we set out to do.

Was that something you wanted, as opposed to the producer’s influence?

SS: Yeah, that's something we were intentional about, definitely. Because I think it's great to have a lot of control over your songs but honestly for us, it was not the way to go for us. I think that when we loosened our grip and didn’t try to control the outcome, yeah, it was better. So it was an intentional choice. And our producer Ben [Lumsdaine] leaned into that a lot, and definitely embraced the experimentation and had ideas. Yeah, he was on board for that, too.

Any final thoughts for our readers?

SS: I don’t know...we're just excited to play again, my gosh. We are really thrilled with all the online support and all the comments, and all the well-wishes, and we're just really excited to see people in person and play again in Chicago and have a release show, so whenever that happens, our plan is to bring it. I don't know. I don't know what else to say. It’s just a really bittersweet time. But you know, we’ll be back, one day.

I think the Chicago music scene is really special and musicians in the Chicago scene are going to come back even stronger. What do you guys think?

SS: Yeah, I mean I see Chicago musicians going ahead with releasing music and I can think of at least three different albums that have been released during quarantine that are going to just blow people away once they can finally be performed live. I do think the Chicago music scene is really special, and part of that is the collaboration, and I think once things are back up, we'll see the product of people really itching to be live again. I think it could inspire some really cool collaborations in the live shows or re-imagining what performances could be.

(this conversation was edited for clarity and length)