Past to Present: The evolution of Anacortes' rising stars, The Lonely Forest.
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They've been known as: The Lucid, Squarewave, John Van Deusen and The Lonely Forest and finally THE LONELY FOREST
Interview with John Van Deusen
Interview by Jacquee
May 18th 2010
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It was six years ago, almost exactly. June 19th 2004 I found myself at Common Ground coffee shop in Burlington Washington being pleasantly surprised by a 15 year old kid with a huge voice and unusually mature lyrics. This was the beginning.
I met with John at the place where we first met, Common Ground. We wandered around the space for a bit- in awe of how things have changed for us both since that first show. We sat down and reminisced about the performance from 2004, where John used a mixture of electric guitar, acoustic, piano and a loops station. Fresh out of his high school band, he was still adjusting to his newfound identity as a solo musician.
John started as a solo artist and gradually over the years, we have come to know him as the front man of The Lonely Forest; but why the slow transition?
The pace of which I transitioned from a solo artist to being in a band was very reflective of where I was at as a person. I think it was just such an important time for me developmentally, but it kind of made sense for it to be a slow transition. The other thing to remember was that I was playing solo shows simultaneously while playing The Lucid shows. So they were actually happening at the same time. And what was happening was, my solo shows were well received in the like… girls definitely liked it a lot more and people who were more interested in accessible, pop music would come to those shows. And then Lucid/Squarewave shows were much older crowds. I would observe the difference of the crowds and that was really motivating because I wanted to combine both of them. I really loved that people who listen pop music would come to see me and then I really love that people who listen to the music I listen to would come too.
Every band has a turning point, where some pivotal event(s) happens that solidifies or changes the path of the band and their future. John recalls when that was for The Lonely Forest.
I think soundoff changed things too because that was kind of right at the peak of… I was playing solo stuff but I had a band playing with me. I was transitioning towards always playing with a band. And I remember seeing some of the footage of us playing the semi finals from soundoff and thinking ‘I don’t like this at all. I don’t like our music. We’re good at what we do but I’m kind of embarrassed of it.’
And I think that’s one of the biggest reasons I wanted to focus on something like The Lucid because I wasn’t embarrassed of it. I spent a lot of time considering how it would sound if we blended my more traditional approach to song writing with the spacey sounds and really loud drumming that Braydn would play and the guitar stuff that Tony would do and that was kind of the beginning of The Lonely Forest, I would say. Its kind of fun to think about this because the record we just did we’ve actually looked at each other multiple times and said ‘This reminds me a lot of Squarewave’. But its like if Squarewave was older and got some good grades and ran the treadmill a little bit and then learned how to write songs. It’s interesting because you can look back- 2004 was when I was playing Squarewave shows and playing solo shows with a band and to think that’s its 2010 and TLF is releasing our 3rd full length record and actually just now finally sounds the way Squarewave should have sounded. And not to mention the way my solo stuff should have sounded.
John continued to talk about the ways that TLF’s last album and coming album ‘Arrows’ has come back around to what he was doing back in 2004 with his solo stuff as well as in The Lucid/Squarewave.
The first song on the new record is an acoustic song with strings, so there’s kind of this dichotomy between how I sounded when I was by myself and how Squarewave was. There’s lots of crazy noise, I yell. We re-recorded ‘we sing in time’ and at the end of that song I scream. And the yell I do on this version is, in my opinion the best yell I’ve ever done. And its cool because we didn’t double a bunch of vocals, its just one vocal line and then Braydn’s background vocals and then I yell and it’s the coolest thing ever.
It’s so funny, it was kind of like a whirlwind because, like I said my musical tastes were changing so quickly that I would write a song and 6 months later I wouldn’t like it because I was listening to different music. When I was playing in Last Man Standing I was listening to… probably the only good bands I would listen to at that point were the Foo Fighters and Nirvana. Those are two bands I would say I still listen to. Besides that, I was right in the middle of the popular, what we would have called ‘screamo world.’ I think I was the perfect age when that became popular- so that hit me where I was at. So once I started to get away from that, the music started to change really quickly.
After winning the EMP Soundoff, The Lonely Forest’s line-up changed into John, Eric, Baydn and Tony. To us, it was more cohesive and made more sense. John shared with me how he felt after that transition was made.
Honestly, I was scared. I was really worried because we hadn’t yet tried to combine the two. What we had done at Soundoff and what we had done with the Lucid. We kind of reworked some of the solo material. And that was scary for me because I was afraid people wouldn’t like it. I still wanted it to be accessible, but I wanted it to be creative and original and all the things I always wanted my music to be. At first you had Squarewave fans really excited ‘Yes, this is so cool’, then you had ‘John Van Deusen and The Lonely Forest’ fans really worried because they would come to a Lonely Forest show and it wasn’t me on my acoustic guitar. It was us playing really loudly. A lot of people were first exposed to The Lonely Forest at that bumbershoot we played. The last time they had seen us was at Soundoff. And it was very friendly. If you look at some of the bumbershoot footage, we started with God is Dead. And it was completely different from Soundoff. It’s loud and I’m yelling. It’s so much cooler. And I remember people saying ‘ I want you to play by yourself, I don’t like this.’ The thing is, with the Regicide EP and the Nuclear Winter and the Body Electric record, all three in a row, you can see how lost I was. Not in a philosophical way, but in a musical way. You can just tell I was having this musical crisis. I didn’t really know what I wanted to be. I listen to the Regicide EP and I think ‘there are some really good ideas, but I hate it’. And I listen to the Nuclear Winter CD and there are also some really good ideas but it makes my stomach hurt. We sing the body electric is a mess, from a production standpoint and if you listen to the way we recorded the songs- it’s a total mess. And that’s kind of what I think is great about it. And even the new record we’re recording, it’s more focused, but it’s totally a mess. I mean we’re still getting there.
Shortly after The Lonely Forest got, what seemed like its final line-up Tony quit the band. Many fans and friends were confused about the sudden drop out. Few knew why The Lonely Forest was suddenly a 3-piece. Even I didn’t know exactly why until John and I sat down for this interview.
Tony got sick and had to quit. He didn’t tell us why he was quitting. Which was really confusing. Tony leaving the band had a huge impact on where we went musically. The week after Tony quit we were remodeling the garage where we were practicing so we couldn’t practice there. The only place we could play was Braydn’s mom’s church. We were playing all the old Lonely Forest songs and they didn’t feel good so we pretty much wrote Nuclear Winter pretty much that week. If there is any angst in Nuclear Winter, if there’s any confusion or any sorrow or whatever you want to call it, it’s because what had happened the week before and Tony had left. In our opinion Tony was a really essential part of our band. It would have been really easy to get discouraged and quit. But we had this really fuck it mentality, we’re still a band, we’re still 3 guys wanting to play together, we’re in a church- lets make music. That’s where Nuclear Winter came from.
Interestingly enough, We Sing the Body Electric we were wanting to add another member again, and when we started to record I was writing guitar parts so that when the 4th member came in they’d have something to play. And pretty much when we finished recording Tony was like ‘I want to play again’. And so he came and practiced and it sounded so good. And it was like ‘wow, this is meant to be’. It felt right.
At what point did the band find out why Tony left?
We were playing Neumos, we had released Nuclear Winter but we were playing the Body Electric songs live- so we were in-between records. We had finished the show and Eric got a phone call from Tony saying ‘I’m in the hospital; the doctors just gave me a week. I had to call you guys to say I’m sorry. He pretty much spilled his guts. Saying ‘I don’t know why I haven’t told you guys’. Eric’s face looked like he had seen a ghost and he hung up then told us what had happened. We were all really, kind of in shell shock. And that’s when Tony started coming to the garage, even just hanging out again. He wasn’t even playing with us- he’d just hang out. That was when he finally told me.
That was really nice to hear, it wasn’t nice to hear that he was sick. I didn’t want that for him. It was nice to hear that the reason why he quit the band was because he was terrified of his health- he was kind of in one of those places where he didn’t really know what would happen, and not because he couldn’t work with us artistically or didn’t like us. It’s so great to have him back in the band. Tony serves as a creative filter for me. When it was Eric, Braydn and I- we’d just be like ‘Let’s just try this’. Now it’s like’ Guys, what if we try this?’ and Tony’s like- ‘no John, that’s a bad idea. Let’s focus’. It’s good to have him back.
*Tony is doing well now and is as healthy as he can be. We are thankful he’s doing well and back in the band!
What lies ahead? What’s the future like for The Lonely Forest?
We’ll continue to play music and tour and hopefully release records. I think a lot will be determined by how our record does. If our record does ok and Chris feels like releasing another one of our records, then it will happen. If it does really bad and nobody likes it and all the reviews are terrible then the chances of us releasing another one on Trans is not as likely.
Do you feel a lot of pressure to do well?
I do feel pressure. I feel a little nervous because there is money being put into our project. But at the same time I’m really thankful that we have this opportunity.
The Lonely Forest has an interesting, but practical vision for their career path. When their career starts to dwindle, they’ll just die.
We’ve decided that we want to be one of those bands that quits while we’re ahead. If we go into the studio to record our 4th record and its not working, we don’t want to release it. We want to figure out a way to just die. Like, we’re done. Because the last thing we want to do is start releasing terrible records because we’ve ran out of material. And I really like that that’s our approach and I hope we keep it that way. I don’t want to take a shit on our legacy, if we do indeed create a legacy.
Where will fans be able to find the new album, Arrows once its released?
I think the idea is just to put it in independent record stores. As a grassroots approach, they don’t want to thrust us into the world of top 40- because I don’t think we’d survive. I don’t think our band is what most of the general public is looking for. Part of me would like to think it would be really great if people started to listen to rock music again. There’s some faith because people were buying Kings of Leon, MGMT, Vampire Weekend. So there is still a little bit of hope.
Thank you to John Van Deusen for taking the time to sit down with me for this feature. The interview was actually an hour long but as I was sorting through the audio file I found that about half of it was John and I talking about food, fake bands or other random things. It was fun!
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