The inaugural album by The Blackburns, hailing from Philadelphia and its environs, is set to hit the shelves on April 12 courtesy of Sell the Heart Records. Thus far, we’ve had the pleasure of previewing a few singles, and they exude a captivating energy. To encapsulate their sound, one might liken it to the electrifying rock of The Midnight Callers intertwined with the infectious pop sensibilities of Hurry. It’s a convincing blend!

Nick and Joel delve into the creation process behind the album during our discussion.

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You can discover ‘Hooks’ featured on the Best Power Pop of 2024 Spotify Playlist.

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Could you share the journey of bringing this record to life? How did all the pieces come together to create the final product?

Nick: Joel reached out to me in January 2023 through a mutual friend, Andrew from the band Crossed Keys, about writing some songs. I was a big Plow United fan since the 90s, and I guess Andrew had sent Joel the stuff I did with Wax Wav.

We talked about the kind of stuff we’d been listening to lately, which was all in the same general ballpark. We talked about soundtracks like Angus, Mallrats, Clueless, Empire Records, Singles, plus 120 minutes from the early 90s. We each had a few incomplete songs in our back pockets, so we got together and shared them. The very first time we got together, Joel played me very early versions of Chill City and I Like LA, and I played him early versions of Southern Chester County and Time Turns Around.

Originally, we were just going to put an EP length demo together. But, a couple of things happened pretty early on. One, the early bounces of the tracks were sounding really good, and two, new songs were piling up fast. So, we decided to just go ahead and make a debut album. By May 2023, we had six songs completed, two of which we put online that summer, as the Chill City b/w Southern Chester County single. We recorded the final four songs in the fall of 2023, and completed the final mix right around the one-year anniversary of that first get together.

Joel: The final piece of the puzzle was Andy from Sell the Heart Records agreeing to release the album. Small labels are pretty conservative nowadays about what they’ll put out. This is understandable, especially when it comes to bands that aren’t going to play a million shows, which we certainly are not. Andy really liked the songs and that was reason enough for him. You’ve got to respect that.

Albums often involve collaboration with various musicians and producers. Could you shed light on how these collaborations contributed to shaping the album’s identity?

Nick: The first person that Joel and I brought into the process was Abe, who I’ve been playing music with for over 20 years. He played guitar in The Danger O’s and Wax Wav with me. Before we started tracking, we got together as a three-piece with me drumming, just to establish the feel of the songs. It’s one thing to have a voice memo acoustic demo, or even a fleshed out GarageBand demo with a drum machine and stuff, but it felt necessary to make sure the songs felt right being played by a human band. Abe is a great guitar player, and he played a bunch on the record. My strength and weakness as a guitarist is my loose feel, so I will lean on Abe for parts that require a tighter performance, and he delivers every time.

The next person we involved was Todd, who recorded and mixed the record, and co-produced it with me. I’ve known Todd for a very long time, and he had done an incredible job on the self-titled Wax Wav EP. We have a ton of shared reference points, so I knew he would get the sound we were going for.

Lynna, who played keys and sang with me in Wax Wav, also happens to be married to me, and as in Wax Wav, her keys and vocals really elevate these songs in interesting ways. The sounds that she gets out of her keyboard and how she sings takes our album out of straight 90s alternative pastiche, because she brings a new wave and dream pop sensibility, in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily hear on most of our stated influences.

Lastly, I want to shout out our live drummer, Justin. He’s a great singer and songwriter, as evidenced by the Danger O’s discography, and he’s also a great drummer, and has helped us bring these songs to life in front of people.

Joel: There’s one song on the record where Heidi Vanderlee contributed cello. Her parts are brief, but they make the song. Heidi and I have been in each other’s musical orbits for a long time now in a bunch of different ways, and I never try to tell her what to play because I know whatever she comes up with on her own will be way better.

Defining a song’s completion can be elusive. How do you determine when a composition has reached its final, ready-to-record form?

Nick: Because of our process in making this album, a song was ready to be recorded once the structure and tempo were set in stone, because at that point, I could at least track the drums. When you do it one instrument at a time, that means you can still be writing a new guitar lead once the drums, bass, and rhythm guitar are already tracked, plus the lyrics can continue to get refined throughout that time. This was very much not the old punk rock, get in a room, plug in and play, capture it on tape, warts and all. I love those kinds of albums, but I also love the opposite, taking care and precision at every step to ensure the album is as good as it can possibly be.

Success can take on different meanings as time goes on. When envisioning success for this new record, what does that picture look like now?

Joel: At this stage of life, for this project, success looks to me like getting to make several records with this same group of people, specifically to keep piecing songs together with Nick, who is hands down the best songwriting collaborator I’ve ever had or ever thought I would have. It would also be nice if the band generated enough money that we could pay someone else to deal with all the social media nonsense. Seriously, every time I fire up the band Instagram account I feel myself getting dumber.

While you can’t dictate how people interpret your music, are there specific elements you wish to highlight that set your songs apart?

Joel: One way or another, Nick and I are always trying to tell stories. And wherever possible I try to make people laugh, or at least I try to write lyrics that would make people laugh if they happened to be paying attention to the words. As we get deeper into the age of AI, certain things that people like about certain types of music are going to get really, really easy to create on a computer or even a phone. Other things won’t, at least not for a while. Storytelling is one of those areas where it’s going to take language bots some time to catch up with people, humor even more so. You can’t fake funny. You can fake all sorts of ambient moods, and you can fake all sorts of vintage recording environments, but the ability to tell a compelling story and create compelling characters and wrap it all up in hooks and melodies is still a uniquely human thing, at least for now. So more than ever, I really try to focus on that.

Nick: and Joel has pushed me more in that direction – of lyrics being something that can set our band apart. I’ve always been a first-draft lyricist, and focused the bulk of my attention on chords, arrangements, tones, production, and performance, which is still my natural area of focus. But Joel is great about challenging specific lines in my songs, like “what are you trying to say here?” or “would it be funnier or more interesting to say this a different way?” and by pushing through on that stuff, we ended up with some fleshed-out characters that I can picture living their lives when I write about them.

Can you recall the last instance when you felt the immediate certainty of having penned a hit song?

Joel: Having never penned a hit song, I can’t say, but I do know this: I’ve been writing songs since I was a kid, and I’ve never been a sophisticated user of home recording equipment. There’s always been that two-stage process of coming up with the words and the music and then handing it off to other people. Playing in punk bands in the 90s, that meant showing up at practice with stuff written down on a piece of paper, quickly playing the song for everybody and then seeing what they do with it. In recent years it has meant recording myself singing and playing the song on my phone and then sending it to somebody and seeing what they come back with. In both examples, every so often there’s this moment when you give people something and the way they interpret it is completely unexpected and way bigger than the sum of its parts, or what you thought the song could be. I get a chill in those moments that is probably pretty similar to what you are getting at with the question. For most of my life it’s been pretty rare, but working with Nick it happens like once a month.

Nick: Right on, thanks buddy.