In Scummy Water Tower’s Sequential Listening series, we sit down with artists to examine their albums track by track, exactly as intended. We previously had in-depth chats with Chicago’s MV Wells, alt-rock band ME., and New York-by-way-of-Ireland singer-songwriter Podge Lane. Today, we’re diving into All Inside Aquarium, the recently released album by New York City rockers BODEGA.
You might recall my interview with the band two years ago about their fantastic previous album, Our Brand Could Be Your Life, and Alex’s Singles Spotlight feature on their hardcore persona, NODEGA. On their fourth album, the band—led by singer/guitarist Ben Hozie and singer/percussionist Nikki Belfiglio—decided to shake up both their sound and scenery.
Frequently pigeonholed as a post-punk group, the band wanted to showcase their more eclectic influences this time around. In the album’s press materials, they describe the new direction as a “late ‘80s/early ‘90s Stone Roses-meets-Jane’s Addiction thing, with more riffing and guitar solos.”
“Let’s go back to melodic tunes, let’s be more of a proper rock band,” Hozie explains via press release.
Drummer Adam Shumski and bassist Adam See further helped them achieve this shift.
To further step outside of their comfort zone, the quartet traveled to Leeds, England, to record with producer Matt Peel (Yard Act, Honesty, Divorce) at The Nave—his studio setup inside a deconsecrated church. Mixed in Brighton by Theo Verney (English Teacher, Lime Garden), All Inside Aquarium marks the first time the band has recorded outside of New York City.
For the band’s core songwriting duo, creativity extends far beyond music. Hozie has written and directed four films, including his most recent feature-length project, Jack London Calling. His 2020 film PVT Chat featured Julia Fox (Uncut Gems) and Peter Vack (Mozart in the Jungle). Meanwhile, Belfiglio has directed many of the band’s music videos and designed much of their artwork. This includes the visual for the album’s title-track, which she directed with the assistance of local artists, featuring the band literally dropped inside the album’s cover art.
It has already been an eventful year for BODEGA, including a massive show at Central Park Summerstage alongside Spoon and Ratboys. The band will spend the rest of the year touring Europe before returning to the States next year to support a major artist (still TBA).
SWT caught up with Hozie and Belfiglio to discuss the making of the record and dig deep into each of the album’s dozen tracks.
The album was released earlier this month. What do you think of the response to it so far?
Ben Hozie: It’s been good. It’s always hard to tell. I mean, I always think that you have no idea what’s going on in the mind of people listening. It’s the same thing as a show. You can look out and think, “Wow, these people must be having a really poor time. No one’s saying anything.” But inside, they may be having the most incredible experience. So, you just don’t know.
Nikki Belfiglio: We did a good album, and we did some good art for it, so I’m happy.
The band’s had an eventful year with some big gigs. What are some of your favorite stories?
Hozie: We played Tenerife recently, which do you know where that is? It’s part of the Canary Island, which that’s one of the most amazing things about being in a band. You get to go to places like that. I never even knew that existed before.
Belfiglio: I knew that Canary Islands existed but never thought I’d go there. And I found out that it’s not anything to do with canary birds. I think it’s because there’s in Italy or Spain, dog is canary or something, so it’s called Isle of Dogs. So that was cool.
You also got to play a show with Spoon and some other big bands. What was that like?
Belfiglio: Yeah, that was awesome. At the Central Park show, Britt Daniel [of Spoon] came on stage with us at the end and we did a cover of one of his songs.
Hozie: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Spoon’s been kind of a mentor band to us in many ways, so it’s always cool to play with him. There’s one thing on our record, called “Literary World” that starts with a drum machine, and then it kind of does that Smashing Pumpkins 1979 thing where the drum machine becomes a real drum set halfway through the verse. And that was Britt’s idea actually because I sent him a demo. We were trading demos back and forth, and I sent him a demo with just a drum machine. And he’s like, “I love the sound of the drum machine. You should do that 1979 thing where the real drums come in.” So, when we went to the studio, I was like, “Guys, Britt said we got to do this, so we got to do it.” It worked out well.
Are you hoping he’ll eventually produce a song or album?
Hozie: Yeah, we talked about it before. Maybe something will happen one day.
Belfiglio: It’d be cool if he could produce a song or an album or something.
For this album, the band decided to shake up its sound. What prompted the band to shake things up?
Hozie: Yeah, our first three records we have jokingly called a trilogy that Our Brand Could Be Your Life is the prequel and Broken Equipment is the sequel. They all sort of thematically deal with a similar thing and they have their own unique vibe, each one, but they’re very much of a piece.
So, we talked about let’s do something different. I think now that the band’s been together about 10 years, we’re just very different people. And I actually think the new record is kind of closer to what our musical taste actually is right now at this moment by being more melodic and having a lot more riffs in it and stuff like that. It’s funny, I always talk about how music often happens in dialectics. So, way back in 2013 when the band started, we were called Bodega Bay then, but the big rage in all of Brooklyn was the captured tracks kind of sound, Mac DeMarco, Beach Fossils kind of thing where everyone’s doing really hazy, kind of chilled out daydreaming music.
And I actually like all those bands, but I just want to do the exact opposite. So post-punk attracted me for how much it foregrounds the lyrics and how much sort of aggression, but not metal-ly aggression, more like art school aggression could be channeled into music. So, it felt like an exciting new thing that was in opposition to everybody around it. But funny enough, flash forward 10 years, now there’s a million bands that sound like that. There are far more post-punk bands than dream pop bands in Brooklyn now.
Now I find myself saying, “Wow, there’s so many bands that sound like this and they all sound the same, and let’s make a melodic pop record. Let’s make an alt rock record.” You always want to be whatever you’re not.
With having so much experience, I imagine you feel more comfortable with taking that leap?
Hozie: Yeah, I mean, it’s weird. I mean, I think you have to really make music for yourself. It’s not exactly what you’re asking, but yeah, you just have to follow your own gut, and this is where our gut led us this time. We’ve gotten definitely better as a band that we can do things. If we had tried to make this record even five years ago, we wouldn’t have been able to do it.
It would’ve been different. I mean, we spent a lot of time in the studio figuring that out. I personally spent a lot of time with the guitar. I feel like I’m twice as good at guitar now, probably more than that than when the band started. Partially because once we started getting a lot of buzz in 2018, I was like, “Man, I really should take music more seriously.” I always thought of myself as kind of a filmmaker who had a band, and now I think it’s kind of I’m a band guy that happens to make films, so it’s like maybe my relationship will swing on a pole or whatever, but I’ve been really studying music. Yeah, it’s hard to say. Do you remember, Nikki, our early conversations about this album?
Belfiglio: Yeah, they’re more like arguments.
Hozie: Yeah.
Belfiglio: Ben wanted to do more melodic softer songs, and I wanted to do more bigger anthemic songs, so I feel like we kind of met in the middle.
Hozie: Yeah. I had been writing a concept album, which hopefully will still come to fruition, but about the nature of time and memory. And I guess two songs on our album, both “Olivia” and “Astro Nightride” could have fit on that album. And in fact, I thought of them as fitting on that album, but I’m kind of glad it didn’t work out that way because I’ve had more time to work on it. And Nikki was like, “We always do concept albums. Why don’t we do an album with no concept? It’s more like a musical concept.” I was like, “Okay, I like the challenge of that.”
You’ve both used your creativity in ways beyond music with music videos and films. How does being creative in different ways help you with the music and being in this band?
Hozie: I actually think it’s better to have influences for music that aren’t other bands, because if all your influences are bands, you’re just going to end up sounding like other bands. Especially in the beginning, all my biggest influences were filmmakers. I would say if you really spent a lot of time with the movies, you would understand BODEGA pretty well, at least the worldview of Bodega and some of the way the music flows.
Belfiglio: And you also could just get really too wrapped up and overwhelmed when you just focus on one medium. You lose the plot quicker, you get burnt out quicker. Maybe you feel that in music journalism, but it’s kind of good to have something else. The different mediums have different pressures and different needs and different ways of approaching them, making stuff. So, it’s great to be creative, but switch the pressures a little bit here and there.
Hozie: Yeah, I find that when I’m working on a film, I find myself longing to write a song and vice versa. When I’m working on music, I’m like, “Man, it’d be great to be on set doing a film today.” So yeah, it makes your life feel longer because you’re not so absorbed with one thing. I read this book recently. It was a kind of corny airport book. Have you heard of it? It’s called Range: [Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein]. And it was basically making the argument that it’s better to be a jack of all trades and a master of none than it is to be… It went through all these weird fields, everything from science to Olympic athletes to famous musicians. And you would’ve thought, especially with the athletes, that the one person who just played, I don’t know, pick your sport, hockey every day for 30 years is the best hockey player.
But they actually found that athletes that had a wide variety of sports that they tried before they settled on their one were actually better, fascinatingly. So, diversity is actually better for the brain.
Belfiglio: Diversity’s better? Shocking.
Ben, how did your film premiere go?
Hozie: Oh, it was cool. We showed a bunch of shorts from… There’s a couple of documentaries that are being made what we showed. And then yeah, I ended up showing a film that I made 15 years ago, which is the first serious art thing I ever did, a film I made when I was 22. But it was cool to re-watch it with an audience.
Belfiglio: There’s a lot of Occupy Wall Street stuff.
Hozie: Yeah. A bunch of people are talking about it. It’s the 15th anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, and I think they’re going to go back to Zuccotti Park and try to revive it in some way.
Belfiglio: That’d be great.
Hozie: Yeah. And my film was made 15 years ago, and a chunk of the movie is at Occupy Wall Street. I was like, “Wow, let’s dig up that film and see what it has to say.” And of course, it’s still relevant.
Another big change for this album is that the band recorded in England. What drew you to want to record there?
Hozie: Yeah, there’s this guy named Matt Peel who produced the record, and the reason we went there is just to be with him. But he has his own studio that’s in this deconsecrated church called The Nave. If you look at our album cover, Nikki made a little miniature Nave. It’s the church that’s the loading station for the roller coaster. It was a cool experience. We never really done anything like that where the whole band lived in an Airbnb together and were just literally breathing the album for several weeks at a time. I liked it.
What was it like getting out of your comfort zone after recording all the past records over here?
Hozie: It was cool. When you make a record in New York, I’ve actually heard you say this before, Nikki, so I’m kind of paraphrasing you, but when you’re at the studio all day and you come home to your apartment, you can kind of check out because now you’re back in your apartment and you can, so to speak, clock off and read a book or watch film or do whatever and feel like it’s a normal day. But even when you, so to speak, clock off and you go home from the studio, if you’re in a place that you’ve never been before, it’s like you’re on tour or something. Something changes in your brain where you never clock off, which is actually kind of cool because then you just live and breathe the record the whole time you’re there.
It’s definitely intense. I think sometimes it helps to have the separation, so that when you come back the next day, you’ve been sort of refreshed. But it’s also cool to just be fully in it. The other thing that was cool is we got to take our time with this record because all the past records were on a much smaller budget. It was like, “okay, we got to record every drum and bass part in the next 12 hours. Okay, we got to do all the rhythm guitars in the next four hours. Okay, we got to do all the leads in this one day.” You know what I mean? Everything happens really fast and you don’t have much time to second guess. Whereas this album, we did it where we could only do one song a day by design. That was Matt Peel’s idea, and we had enough time to do that.
So, it’d be like, “all right, we get there early in the morning, we’re just going to play live as a band and try the song in many different ways. Let’s move around the puzzle pieces. Okay, what if the bridge came before this chorus” or try it every possible way just playing together in the room, and then maybe have one or two good takes before we break for lunch. And then spend four or five hours working on just the guitars, couple hours doing just the vocals. And then so by the end of every day, you’ve almost finished and it’s ready to mix just one song, and you can really spend a day obsessing over the details of that one song. It’s really nice, actually. I hope we get to do that again. It’s very luxurious to totally be living in one song for a long time.
How did recording in former church influence the songs?
Belfiglio: I don’t know if it really… We’re not religious people, so other than just having the space, I don’t really feel like the aspect of the church really influences us, but Matt Peel really decked out his studio and just made it really homey. So, it was nice to just have so much space to relax and all of us in the same recording room. That’s kind of rare too, especially in New York. Sometimes it’s really hard to get all five people in the same recording room.
Hozie: The glass wasn’t colored, but I could see it on the floor doing interesting patterns throughout the day. That definitely influences the way you play. It’s probably the slowest of our records because I think we’re grooving more and just living in the space, whereas in the past we had a tendency to go, go, go, go, go.
Belfiglio: We tried to do that intentionally.
When I’ve interviewed artists that have recorded in former church spaces, they always mention the acoustics being really good. Was that the case for you?
Hozie: It’s really good.
Belfiglio: I think traditional churches can be hit or miss because of how much space you have to cover to soundproof it, but Matthew did a really, really good job, so I think it was.
As far as future plans, it sounds like the band might be touring the states next year?
Belfiglio: Yeah, we definitely are. We’re going to tour America opening for a band that we haven’t announced yet in the spring, so that’ll be fun.
Hozie: Going to a little bit of Canada, maybe three shows or something.
You have some overseas shows later this year.
Hozie: Yeah, we’re going back there in November for a couple weeks, so that should be fine. And then also in February and March.
Without further ado, here’s our track-by-track discussion…
“All Inside Aquarium”
Hozie: I think to me, it feels like the introduction to our new realm in that if you really read the lyrics, it has a beatific, almost hippie kind of perspective, which I would actually say the new album has. There’s kind of a more spiritual side of this record than certainly any of our other ones. Yeah, you know the Deep Purple song “Hush”? I only recently came back to that song, but I heard it out and about and I was like, “Oh my God, All Inside Aquarium is so similar to the song,” which I think is kind of cool. That’s one of my favorite tunes, but how it has the “na, na, na” kind of following a hard rock riff.
Belfiglio: People say Jane’s Addiction though a lot during the song.
Hozie: Yeah, I think it has to do with the funk elements of it.
Belfiglio: Think it’s the way you go, “Ah, broke.” Very Jane’s Addiction.
Hozie: Yeah, Jane’s Addiction, I don’t know how much you’ve spent with them in your life, but they were by far my favorite band when I was first getting into rock music and are still probably my favorite if I had a gun to my head, even though they’ve done a terrible job at preserving their legacy. It had so many blundered reunions and terrible comeback albums and stuff.
Belfiglio: Sometimes magic just can’t be recreated.
Hozie: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, truly. But yeah, they were a big influence on this record, and certainly that song too. I was thinking, I had written down in my notebook, “There’s no virtue in denigration,” which is a phrase I’ve been saying to myself a lot the last three or four days to try to, as best as I can… It’s like the old platitude, “If you have nothing positive to say, don’t speak at all.” So, I’ve been trying to embody that in my life, so I thought I might as well sing that in the chorus, doubly remind myself. I think there’s a place for criticism, of course, but that’s not the same as denigration. Denigration is just purposely trying to put somebody down. It’s not like I did that too much, but I find when you’re hanging out with friends, sometimes you just want to fill the gaps of the silence with either gossip or shit talking or whatever.
I guess getting older is trying to realize you don’t have to fill the gaps, you don’t have to try to please everybody. Sometimes it’s better to just say nothing.
What inspired the title?
Hozie: I just love the phrase. I was writing a poem, and that was one of the lines from the poem, I guess maybe because of the alliteration, but it had multiple meanings to me. There’s sort of the feeling that now that we’re being mass surveilled through our devices, the feeling of we’re all inside the fish tank being observed by these corporations, which seems kind of negative, but there’s also this sort of…
Belfiglio: The positive side of that?
Hozie: No, I kind of meant it in the Nietzschean sense where his concept of the eternal return where he says, “Imagine that your life is going to happen over and over again the exact same way that it’s happening now, sort of like a schizophrenic nightmare.” But I think I definitely know what he meant by that was it’s sort of this thought experiment that make sure every gesture, every choice you do through every moment of your life is done thoughtfully and with the most vitality and passion because it’s going to happen over and over again. So, if this is the movie that you’re going to have to re-watch every day for the rest of your life, it better be an interesting one. So, I was thinking your life is like an aquarium and all consciousness is like an aquarium because it will be on display for all of eternity.
But then also, of course, there’s kind of the saying of, it’s almost like a train conductor like, “All aboard.” It’s like telling anyone who wants to listen to the album, “Welcome to our little BODEGA playland where hopefully you can have new emotions and ideas.”
“Weather Me”
Belfiglio: It’s just having a fractured mind trying to navigate living. There you go.
Hozie: Not fractured at all. [both laugh]
“Literary World”
Hozie: “Literary World” is sort of like, I’ve been saying it’s the thesis of the album where I’ve heard people make that argument. We live in a literary world because actually when you’re reading on your phone, even if it’s just on Instagram, of course there are pictures, but you’re reading texts too. So, somebody made the observation that people are reading more texts than any other era would have. But my tune is sort of a quippy back and forth between two people. I maybe pictured them at an art gallery or something debating the show that they’re watching. And I guess in the tune is like, “actually we live in a philosophical world because we live in a didactic world where everything is argumentative. This is the way things are. If you disagree with me, you’re wrong.” That’s from what it seems like is 99% of online discourse or whatever, which is very different than literary discourse.
Literary things are more empathetic because I think a good novelist gets you inside not just his main character’s point of view or her main character’s point of view, but into everyone’s, including the extras, maybe even including the animals if they’re a really good writer. And they allow you to see the world from many, many vectors. So, you can see it from a psychological point of view, you can see it from an economic point of view, you can see it from a geological point of view, you can see it from a geometric point of view. You know what I mean? The possibilities are boundless. I think this is where philosophy goes wrong in some aspects where you can say, “okay, let’s study this situation or this phenomena” or this person’s work or whatever, this person’s way of being through an economic point of view, whether that’s Marxism or whatever economic theory you want to throw at them.
And then they can say that is the reason for why this person is that way. But then you can do that with a psychological point of view. You can say, “let’s study their childhood and figure out why they are the way they are.” And then they can be definitive about that and they’re like, “let’s look at it from a biological point of view. They were hardwired in this sort of way.” Or you can say, “let’s look at it from a cosmic point of view.” And there’s many different points of views and all of them are helpful and interesting, but none of them can tell the whole story. But I think a literary point of view takes into account all those kind of things. I guess it’s sort of like The Smiths’ “Cemetry Gates” [where they sing “A dreaded sunny day / So I meet you at the cemetery gates / Keats and Yeats are on your side / While Wilde is on mine.”
It’s sort of like in that classic indie rock tradition of celebrating poetry and literature, I guess. But it’s more than that. We need poets to envision an alternative and as long as we just live in a strictly didactic world, we’re never going to have that.
“Astro Night Ride”
Hozie: That track is actually probably my favorite for a couple reasons. One is the arrangement itself is meant to be a roller coaster track where the opening, the intro, sounds like a lift hill, like you’re going up to start a roller coaster ride and there’s some percussion that gives you the click clack of the grinding chain lift. And then the tempo speeds up where you’re going down the hill really fast. And then there’s a key change when we’re out in the woods and then it goes to halftime at the end when we hit the break run. It was a fun challenge to sort of create. It’s longer than most roller coasters would be because it’s like five minutes or something and most roller coasters are probably sub two minutes or something.
My mom died a while ago, probably eight, nine years ago. But recently, especially when we were working on this album, I was having all these dreams where it felt like she was visiting me and we were riding roller coasters together. They were sort of cosmic coasters. The lift would go so high, we’d be up passing the rings of Saturn and doing loops out in the Milky Way. It was an astro night. It was like an astro night ride. And I would always wake up just with tears in my eyes feeling really ecstatic. And I guess it was almost like flashbacks to my childhood of riding coasters with my mom, but also it felt like something else. So that’s really what the song is about. But I thought it would be fun to have the band recreate the feeling of being on a coaster.
Where did you go to ride roller coasters when you were a kid?
Hozie: Good question. So, I guess the one I was thinking of most, because when I was real little, I lived in Columbia, South Carolina, so we would go to this park called Carowins that’s right at the border of North and South Carolina. And they had one of those inverts that was Top Gun themed. It’s now called The Afterburn. I actually mentioned it in the track. I say, “last time altogether on the Afterburn,” but it’s one of those ones where your feet dangle and there’s clones of them all throughout the world. I guess usually you see them as Batman rides, but that was such a nineties sort of genre of coaster that was so cutting edge at the time with the track being so smooth and it just really feels like you’re flying. So that’s kind of the one I had in mind. But yeah, I didn’t want it to be one particular track.
It’s meant to be… I even mentioned the lattice grid in the song, which would be of course a wooden coaster, which isn’t that one. So, it’s sort of like a dream logic takes over. It’s not really one type of coaster.
“Pick Up the Check”
Hozie: I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but I have a lot of single friends that are in their late 30s or even 40s now, and they’re always complaining about it, but I find them… Something happens where it’s like your standard’s lower or something like that. So, these people are often going on dates with people that they don’t even like, that they find this company is insufferable, but yet they go along with it. And the song started as a simple thing of me saying, “look, if you’re on a date with one of these people and you don’t want to be there, just pick up the check and get out of there.” And if you can’t afford it, just put it on credit. Just get out of there, your own wellbeing. Because what’s actually at stake is your mind.
It’s like that famous saying of “you are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with.” I think that is really true. So, if you’re spending time with all these mediocre minds, your own mind is being mediocre, which is a classic BODEGA theme, I think. Most of our songs deal with the influences and the inputs that actually determine how you think. So, the song actually is, there’s much more at stake than just the date or not. To me, it’s also something I’ve been learning as I’ve been getting older, and me and Nikki talk about this all the time, is learning how to say no to things.
We even put out a record last year under the name NODEGA, which was kind of alluding to that. But as a band, you find yourself being forced into all these situations like, “Oh, can you guys do this? Can you make these posts?” Really simple things, and they’re not malicious, but if your record label tells you, “Hey, can you make this kind of post? It’ll help promote you guys,” whatever, you don’t have to do it. It’s our band at the end of the day. And it’s so simple, but me and Nikki are like, “We have the right to say no if we don’t want to do something.” That’s just a small example, but I do think you learn how to become more and more yourself as you get older. We made a fun music video for that song that was meant to take place in this sort of faux fancy restaurant where there’s a bunch of fish tanks.
I cast my friend Madeline to play the protagonist in the video, and she’s on a date with this guy with this creepy mask on. It’s kind of surreal, but if you see the video, you kind of see that he’s basically offering… It’s like a Faustian bargain. “Look, I’ll give you all these things. All you have to do is think and do whatever I tell you to do.” And most people probably would be willing to do that, but I think it’s a Faustian trap.
“Oxygen”
Belfiglio: It’s like a song for enemies. Basically, it’s just being someone terrorizing your inner peace and writing a song to exercise them outside of it, outside of you. Someone who believes in their bullshit so much that they think that just breathing is genius and that’s something that they invented.
Hozie: You got anyone in particular in mind?
Belfiglio: It starts with a B and ends with N. I like that. [laughs]
“Fear Not The Fear”
Hozie: It’s one of the more simple ones in the sense that it’s about insomnia. I find myself having a lot of trouble sleeping the older I get, especially when I’m on tour or especially when I’m on a film set. And it’s not necessarily stress or anything. I’m just so excited…and it’s hard to come down. And it’s something I was saying to myself as I was falling asleep and it’d be like five, six and the sun’s coming up and I haven’t gone to sleep yet and it’s like your third night in a row basically doing that. You may have fallen asleep for 30 minutes, but then you wake right back up. So, I started saying some of the lines in the song, “Nothing but grace.” That was a mantra I was saying to myself or “fear not the fear,” everything will be fine just because you didn’t sleep.
It’s sort of like conversation with the self. Similar to “Astro,” we tried to do a bit of narrative arranging where there’s a long drone jam after the second chorus, and that’s meant to evoke sleep paralysis, kind of those creatures of the night that show up and pin you down when your brain is awake while your body’s asleep. Funny enough, it started rubbing off on the rest of the band. There are many members of the band that would have insomnia problems on tour. So, it’s a song all of us could relate to.
“Slow Train” (Bob Dylan cover)
Hozie: Yeah, those lyrics are Bob Dylan, but the music is our own. So, we wrote an original tune and used his lyrics. I always just thought that song has such brilliant lyrics. We cut a bunch. Dylan has three or four more verses, and I think those extra verses cheapen the song. I think our edits are good. Also, with how fast we play…with his mellower version, I guess it works to have eight verses or whatever. Do you know that Dylan song, the original one?
I think I’ve heard it. I’d have to listen to confirm.
Hozie: It’s one of his stranger albums. It’s in his Christian era, and Mark Knopfler from Dire Straits produced that one. It’s actually one of his better sounding albums. It’s a great album. Me and Nikki love that one, actually.
Belfiglio: It kind of has cheesy instrumentation sounds, but I don’t know. You get used to it. And it’s obviously a really good song to play.
Hozie: It’s really slick for Dylan. But it’s fantastic. I think most people discredit it because I think most Dylan fans probably don’t subscribe to traditional Christianity. So, when they hear, “oh, these are his gospel albums,” they skip those ones.
Belfiglio: I just don’t believe Dylan really believes that.
Hozie: I don’t know. I mean, it makes me actually realize that all of his work has been Christian. All the early ’60s songs are Christian songs.
Belfiglio: I think he likes the element.
Hozie: He likes the imagery.
Belfiglio: Yeah. I think he likes being the one who’s the sincere for God, but I don’t know if he actually believes for God.
Hozie: Yeah. “When The Ship Comes In.” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” These are all Old Testament kind of phrases. So, I really think you have to understand Dylan through the language of the church kind of in a way. Obviously, he’s much more than that.
“Combustible”
Hozie: I reread Fyodor Dostoevsky Notes from Underground on tour once. I remember we were in Sheffield and I was so blown away by how great and intoxicating that writing is. It was kind of a quick game. I wrote it in the green room from the protagonist of that book who is sort of a down and out, sick, lonely man, probably the best modern analog would be Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, who was certainly influenced by Fyodor Dostoevsky, but that kind of lonely… Or I guess in 21st century terms, kind of like the incel, the guy who hangs out on his own, doesn’t have any friends and no women will touch him with a 10-foot pole or whatever, and he’s full of bitterness and anger. And even if somebody offered to help him, he would say “no,” which I think that kind of character is a big part of the rock and roll mythos as well.
And it’s actually disturbing to me how much I relate to that character, even though my life situation is not at all like that. I understand that kind of bitterness and anger, and it kind of spoke to me in a way. So, the song was written so fast, probably in five minutes.
Belfiglio: Probably the best song.
Hozie: Yeah. Some of the best songs just show up and that’s that. But some of the chords from Burt Bacharach, which no one would ever hear, but the song “Always Something There to Remind Me.” In the middle when he goes, “I was born to love you.” Those are the same chords when you take the three chord and you make it a major third instead of a minor third, and then you get that.
Belfiglio: He’s going to come for royalties now.
Hozie: Well, I mean, no one will ever hear it, and you can’t copyright a chord change. But yeah, I don’t know. I’m giving away some of my secrets here.
“Pile Driver”
Belfiglio: It’s just the joys of collaboration. It actually came about me arguing for this album, and I was playing around on a song, and I had different lyrics for “Pile Driver,” and Ben was like, “We don’t want that post-punk shit on our album.” And I was just like, “Let me play. If we’re not going to do genre, then what does it matter if I have…” But in the song, you can see you have one point, but it goes to three. So, we go back and forth. We go round for round in our collaborative process.
Hozie: Well, one thing we agreed upon when we were first starting to write these songs was like, “Okay, let’s do no rap rock kind of stuff,” because we had really done a lot of that on our second album. And then, I mean, you could argue that “Pick Up the Check” has some rap rock elements too.
Belfiglio: It was so unfair. Double standard. [laughs]
Hozie: I mean, I like the song.
Belfiglio: Also, I was thinking more of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I feel like The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are not post-punk.
Hozie: Creativity doesn’t play by the laws of whatever rules you come up with. It’s kind of cool because both those songs sound like they could or should have been on especially Broken Equipment, our second album. So, it gives some continuity to our discography.
Belfiglio: It sounds like one of your songs. It doesn’t have to be relevant to one era.
“Backbeaten”
Hozie: That is a portrait of many guys who I know in New York scene who kind of embody this romantic Johnny Thunders kind of vibe where they hang out on the Lower East Side, wear the leather jackets, see themselves as these just mythological rock and roll down and out types, but none of them actually put in the work to work on their music. And because of that… Well, yeah, I don’t want to be too hard on these guys, I guess. But it’s this idea of people not willing to actually try, because if you try and fail, that’s much harder to deal with than if you have this unexpected fulfillment of promise. If people tell you as a little kid, “oh, you’re going to be great one day,” which I’m sure all these people heard that, then they think that they’re going to be great one day and they’re just buying time until them. But they’re never going to put themselves out there, and so they’ll never actually have to be tested to find out whether they’re great or not.
It’s easier just to hang onto the promise. Although the funny thing is when we were recording the song, not all the lyrics, but a good chunk of them, I realized maybe similar to “Combustible,” I was like, “wow, I relate to these a little too much.” And actually, I understand these guys because I am one myself. I’m a missionary for this thing, rock and roll, that has no God anymore. There is no rock culture anymore, really. So, jokes on me. It’s a topic of mine that I’ve been fascinated about for a long time, which I guess is what I would call this sort of rock crisis of faith.
“Olivia”
Belfiglio: It’s for my cousin who passed away in 2010, and me talking about how I found out about her death and just kind of writing a song for her to keep her memory alive.
You can connect with BODEGA at the following links:
- Facebook: Facebook.com/BODEGABK
- Instagram: Instagram.com/bodegabk
- TikTok: Tiktok.com/@bodegabk
- YouTube: Youtube.com/BODEGANYC
- Bandcamp: Bodegabk.bandcamp.com
- Spotify: BODEGA on Spotify
Dig this Sequential Listening feature format? Here are a few more to check out. Or click here to return to the homepage, where you can begin a different journey of your own choosing.
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.
