Brooklyn based band BODEGA – which takes its name partially from bodega buildings in New York City – has been described by many fans as a cinematic band. With a wide-ranging eclectic sound that jumps from indie rock subgenres such as dance-punk, shoegaze, slacker rock, and psychedelic rock, the band is able to shift moods in the same way a film can.
For the band’s sound also reminds vocalist Nikki Belfiglio of the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books that were published between 1979 and 1998.
“Our band is a bit like a ‘choose your own adventure’ book,” says Belfiglio. “You pick anyone playing at any time while we’re on stage and they’re going to be doing something very different. We don’t really look down at our feet. We look directly into the audience a lot, and people have said that that’s made them feel more present, but also uncomfortable. We’re a confrontational project.”
It’s something that’s continued on the band’s third album Our Brand Could Be YR Life, which will be released Friday, April 12 on Chrysalis Records. The album’s title is a play on the 2001 Michael Azerrad’s 2001 book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981–1991, with the band presenting its own critique of counterculture. Specifically, the band – which also features guitarist and vocalist Ben Hozie, lead guitarist Dan Ryan, bassist Adam See and drummer Adam Shumski – addresses the brandification of pretty much everything.
Much of the album is a partial rework of material primary songwriters Hozie and Belfiglio recorded in their apartment on a laptop eight years ago when they were performing as BODEGA BAY.
Scummy Water Tower caught up with Hozie and Belfiglio to discuss their journey revisiting their earliest material, how they hope to subvert expectations with their sound and lyrical themes, and what’s next for the group.
How would you describe the band’s sound and chemistry? What makes it unique and stand out?
Hozie: As opposed to a lot of other groups now that are solo projects with backing bands, we’re a very bandy band where everyone has their own personality. So, not only do you have two songwriters, us two, but then Dan [Ryan], our lead guitar player, brings his own personality to it. Adam Shumsky, our drummer, plays standup drums, which gives us our own unique sound. I think one thing we’re really trying to do, especially with this new record, is not be beholden to any one genre.
I like that you switch off on vocals, that gives a nice dynamic.
Hozie: I feel like a lot of classic bands that have two songwriters, sometimes they fall into the trap of like, “Okay, it’s just this guy’s song, or it’s just this person’s song.” But we try to, even if one of us is the main songwriter on the song, we try to give parts to each other, so it’s like we’re utilizing the strengths of the band, ping ponging vocals more.
The press release describes the band as “post-punk cultural commentators.” What do you think of that description?
Hozie: The term post-punk, I have a love-hate relationship with, I guess you could say. Certainly inspired by all the classic post-punk bands, and I think it would be pretty facetious to say we’re not sort of post-punk in a way. But one of the goals of this record is to try to really move away from traditional post-punk. There’s a lot of songs that I wouldn’t call post-punk. I don’t know how you feel, but I think it’s an overcrowded lane now, especially in England. There’s so many new bands that do the fall talk-y vocals. And yeah, part of what we’re trying to do with this record is to show that that’s not all we do or want to do. I think it’s tough because I think a lot of bands get lumped in with post-punk as long as they’re just vaguely arty. It’s like a new way to describe just art rock that’s not prog rock or something like that.
So I get it, but maybe there needs to be a better term than post-punk. Some savvy journalists or something should come up with a new word that describes basically 21st century arty indie rock bands that’s not post punk because it’s not.
One of the things that we had talked about recently is that all the classic American indie rock bands, like your Pavements or your Replacements and stuff or Dinosaur Jrs, they all came from a hardcore punk background, but what you have now is new bands that, instead of coming from a hardcore punk background, they come from… We grew up listening to Replacements, Wilco, Pavement, Kurt Vile, whatever. So there’s nothing punk about it anymore.
The band formed about eight years ago. What brought the two of you together to form the band?
Hozie: We met at a Of Montreal show. They’re one of our favorite bands. The day before, there was a marathon screening in Manhattan of a French film. So there’s this guy, Joe, who is a frequent collaborator, although he’s not in BODEGA, he was in BODEGA BAY, our band before this, and when that screening started, there were like 30 people, but at the end there was just me, him and another woman. So we didn’t even talk, but we made eye contact like, “oh, cool, you stayed through the whole thing. And then the next day we bumped into each other again at the of Montreal show. So we’re like, “wow, you like a Montreal and French cinema, so we should probably be friends.” And Nikki happened to be there as well. So the three of us really started hanging out a lot, and I already had a band called BODEGA BAY then, and I invited them, both of them to join. And then when that band broke up, me and Nikki decided to do BODEGA, which is basically, we played all the same repertoire as BODEGA BAY.
Endless Scroll, the first BODEGA album from 2018, those were almost all songs written during BODEGA BAY, so they’re like the same band. It’s just different members and we presented ourselves in a sort of different way. In the beginning of BODEGA, we were very consciously being like, “let’s project a post punk thing where BODEGA BAY didn’t do that.” But yeah, it’s all part of the same project. It’s just different permutations of it.
What’s the story behind the band’s name?
Hozie: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. We’re all cinephiles, and in Hitchcock’s The Birds, it’s all set in BODEGA BAY, which that’s why we started calling the band BODEGA BAY. And also because in New York we call our corner stores bodegas. It’s this double reference. It’s like New York, but it’s also this movie thing. But then I realized that the way people call the Rolling Stones, the Stones, you shorten it. I feel like people always do that with their favorite bands. The Velvet Underground is just The Velvets. So people just started saying “you’re going to the BODEGA show, even when we were back as BODEGA BAY. But then when we started BODEGA, it was this idea of going with the post-punk thing.
Belfiglio: People thought just by looking at our name, that we were a surf rock band by the BODEGA BAY, which we clearly we’re not a surf rock band. I think you might relate to being in the journalism field. Some people can be pretty lazy in the way that they want to, they have a quota to fill, so they’ll just take whatever they can online. And we didn’t really want to be related to surf rock.
I really dig the title of the band’s new album with its nod to the past and current times. How did you come up with that title?
Hozie: Our Band Could Be Your Life, the Michael Azerrad book was a super big deal to me. I read it at just the right time in my life when I had just finished school and was like, “what should I do with my life?” And I read that book and I was like, “I have to take music more seriously and make a record that summer.” It set me on my path, and I feel like it’s bigger than just music. There’s something about that book that I feel like taps into the American character, if I may even say it has this Huckleberry, Finn, Emerson, Walden, or Moby Dick. There’s something about that book that’s like the Black Flag, Minutemen, Minor Threat thing of “let’s get in a van and drive 3000 miles and through our own protestant work ethic create our whole own scene.”
That really spoke to me, but as I really started trying to make a scene happen or partake in the scene in Brooklyn when BODEGA BAY was starting, I was super disillusioned with the music scene. I thought a lot of it was mimicking mainstream corporate practices when I thought maybe we should be doing things differently. But also that word “personal brand” started seeping into every conversation I was having. And I think it’s only exacerbated as time has gone on with Instagram.
We’re just in our early thirties. So I think we have a unique perspective of where we grew up with almost like a Gen X mindset maybe, at least speaking for myself. But yet we’re millennials, but yet most of our peers are Zoomers now. We’re an embodiment of people who are experiencing these clashes in generational values. The idea of selling out isn’t even a concept to [younger people]. It’s like, “what do you mean there’s nothing to sell out? Rock music is not even a real thing. Nobody cares about it. What do you mean selling out?”
One of the big themes of the album is about the brandification of everything. Can you talk a little bit about that and why it’s important to challenge some of the norms?
Hozie: That’s why we use the ATM on the cover. We’ve been calling it “the ATM theory,” which is the lyrics of the title track, and it’s not the title track actually. It’s this idea where you treat other people not as an end in and of themselves, but as a resource. What can I get from you? And everything is a transaction, which I think if you think of yourself as a business or a brand, then naturally that’s the logical extension of how people are going to act.
So it’s a very dark thing where it’s no longer I have friends but I have a network. And these tech companies, I think, whether accidentally or by design, have created this paradigm shift in people’s minds of how they interact with their peers and stuff like that, which is pretty insidious, I think. And obviously it’s way bigger than just music. I feel like everyone sees themself as a brand. I mean, obviously bands have always been brands, and I don’t even mean that necessarily as a critique. Like Pink Floyd had an amazing brand, their imagery spoke for itself. Black Flag, amazing brand or whatever.
Belfiglio: It’s just the way that we interact with these brands have changed so much. Like Pink Floyd, you would have a visceral physical experience. You’d buy the record, the art would be in your hands. You would be having the texture and the quality, something that you can have almost a personal relationship to where all of this is digital mainly. And it’s like you’re not able to have that, it’s the idea of our brand can be your life is literally like we are in your brain waves. You’re seeing this between your pictures of your mom and maybe your friend partying. You’re seeing our tour dates come up in between that on your social media.
Hozie: The record is what advertises your brand online. Because that content creation is way more valuable to the tech industries or whatever. They need you to pump out new content every day. And by content, it doesn’t even matter what it is. It’s just something that will get people clicking and giving them more data. It’s not about getting more clicks so they can get more advertisers. It’s literally they just want your data because that’s their biggest resource. And so whether it’s music or whether it’s just a picture of us hanging out with our cat, they just need new content every day.
It’s like David Bowie did this pretty prophetic interview. I don’t know if you ever saw it, but in 1999, he said, “if I was a kid now in 1999, I wouldn’t be a musician. I would work for a tech company.” He may be being satirical, but he’s basically just saying, “my goal has always been to have the most influence over culture as possible.” And I think for him, music was just a tool, and he is right. It’s like art and music don’t exist anymore. Content does. I’m being a little facetious, but I mean that’s how the tech companies want you to think about it.
Much of the album is a reworking of many of your oldest songs. How did you decide to revisit them?
Hozie: It’s just something we’ve always wanted to do. When we first wrote The Scroll, the first BODEGA record, we were thinking of it as a sequel to Our Brand Could Yr Life. So now I guess it’s the prequel because I think outside of our small scene in Brooklyn, nobody ever really heard that first record. So we can go on tour and share those songs. And as a music fan, I know people go to a show, they don’t want to see songs they don’t know, so you got to hit them with a record. But also the themes are still relevant. And I feel like that’s where me personally, at least, I feel like I found my songwriting voice back then. So those songs still mean a lot to me. So there’s an archival project to this too, but also those are great songs and some of them are better than our new song. So it’s like why not have them in the repertoire?
Belfiglio: And we feel like the lyrics and the kind of things that we were talking about then are just as important, if not even more important now.
Hozie: And we didn’t just straight up redo them too. We heavily adapted a lot of them, rewrote the riffs, even rewrote the lyrics.
Belfiglio: Some of the songs that were once two songs, are now one song. We mash them together.
Hozie: Some of the songs are brand new, the first song is brand new. The last song, “City’s Taken” is brand new, but they fit into the same thematic framework.
What was the inspiration for “City Is Taken”?
Belfiglio: It’s about my last decade really since moving to New York City in 2010 and experiencing gentrification and my own part in it. Started off watching, funny enough, an Adam Curtis documentary, which featured Patty Smith. I had read this book at the same time, talking about Bob Dylan. They’re kind of places as revolutionary figures, but then them dropping out really of any kind of moniker of that. And I remember writing the song being critical of that. And then Ben was like, “well, your own experience in New York City is very similar.” So then I thought about my experience here and how basically real estate developers and other kind of businesses as parasitic, these creatures on my back and wherever I would go, it’s a bit of a spotlight because just because of my skin color of being like, “oh, okay, now this neighborhood and being an artist, now this neighborhood is viable for us to move in and raise the rents and bring in brands and whatnot, whatever, displacing communities that have been there.” So a three minute song tackling my experience of gentrification, it’s only in one part of it, but I tried.
Hozie: Well, I don’t know if you know this, but in Williamsburg, which is not where we live, but close enough, and it’s where we used to play all of our shows and stuff. They used to have this neighborhood rule that there could be no chain stores in the neighborhood, and it kept it very local, and mom and pop stores and things like that. But then somewhere around 2012, there was, I think it was either Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks, and then they’re like, all right, we’ll allow one. And then there was a Dwayne Reed chain store, and they’re like, all right, we’ll allow two. And fast forward 10 years, there’s not a single store that isn’t a chain in the whole thing. It’s like Whole Foods, Apple Store, blah, blah, blah. And because that was the indie rock mecca, it’s very clear that it was because of people like us going to shows there and good bands coming from there that people wanted to move there. And then all of a sudden, the rich people, they don’t want to eat somewhere that isn’t a chain store.
So yeah, also for my relationship with the song, I mean, the only lyrics I wrote was the outro, but Patty Smith dropped a quote sometime recently, I forget when, but she basically said, “if you were a 21-year-old person trying to make art or music in New York, you should leave and you should go to Detroit.”
Belfiglio: New York has been taken from me.
Hozie: And I remember feeling not too, I was conflicted by that because I had been, if you go to the Strand Bookstore in New York where Patty Smith used to work, she’s got her whole little section of basically nostalgia books of, remember how cool New York was in the seventies? And it is its own industry to sell you this idea of how authentic and interesting New York was, but it’s not authentic anymore. And part of my thinking was like, “well, part of the reason why New York isn’t cool anymore is because you keep pumping out this nostalgia factory to us.” And I had seen her live fairly around that time too, and she did this whole thing where it’s like, “remember how cool the sixties were?” And they were doing Jimi Hendrix covers and stuff, which it’s fine. Jimi Hendrix was great, and I’m here for that.
But it’s like, part of the problem with rock music now is there’s, we live in a remaster cycle where it’s hard for new bands to get any attention because there’s always a new remaster that they’re competing with.
Belfiglio: If you look at festival headliners, it’s all bands from 20, 30, 40 years ago.
Hozie: I mean, that makes sense. They’re like the elders, so that’s fine. But it’s like, I’m really just thinking about the way magazines are. I don’t know, maybe print magazines aren’t even a thing, but it’s like you’ve got to compete with the 50 years of Bob Dylan or the 50 Years of James Brown or whatever.
Belfiglio: Well, there’s no counterculture in the same way.
Hozie: Yeah, we can’t really move forward until we get out of this, let’s recycle the past mindset thing.
Belfiglio: I don’t think we can get forward until we can break the cultural choke hold that I guess companies and brands have with us.
I like with this album that it has little bits of dialogue throughout it. It feels a bit mixtape-y in a way.
Belfiglio: Yeah. We’re operating a lot of different genres, song by song, and then having the rap inspired skits in between.
Hozie: That’s something we try to do on all of our records, but I think we’re getting better at it.
What are you most looking forward to in the year ahead?
Belfiglio: We have a ton of touring dates.
Hozie: Yeah. For me personally, we’ve been working on an EP that’s meant to complement this. It’s called Nodega, and it’s hardcore and skate punk music. When I reread Our Band Could Be Your Life working on this record I was struck by what I said earlier about how all the classic American bands started as a hardcore punk band. So I was like, it’d be fun to make our version of hardcore music. And we’ve been playing the songs live, and they’re really fun. So I don’t know when that will come out, but we’re almost done recording it. So to me, the most interesting thing is making new stuff.
You can follow BODEGA at Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
Joshua is co-founder of Scummy Water Tower. He’s freelanced for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including: Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Guitar World, MTV News, Grammy.com, Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, A.V. Club, SPIN, Alternative Press, Under the Radar, Paste, PopMatters, American Songwriter, and Relix. You can email him at josh@scummywatertower.com.
