At 28 years old, Rachel Brown of New York duo Water From Your Eyes is part of the last generation to remember the days before on-demand television. Back then, you were stuck with whatever was broadcasting live – advertisements and all – and if you didn’t like it, you had to go on a frequently fruitless hunt: slavishly switching between channels, as in the video for the band’s single ‘Life Signs’. At 29 myself, I can attest to how deeply disorientating ‘channel hopping’ was: darting between scenarios (animated and live-action), genres, characters and sounds as quickly as you could form an opinion on each.
Channel-hopping also happens to be a handy analogy for the experience of listening to Water From Your Eyes’ excellent new album It’s A Beautiful Place: a dizzying, technicolour collage of glitch-pop, nu metal and – on ‘Playing Classics’ – even Eurodance. “Dog days / Epoch / Bankrupt on top, yeah you won / You stole the sun,” Brown sings in one typically jammed-together line on ‘Night In Armor’.
For Brown, television is a lifelong passion. Long before they began pursuing music, they dreamed of writing for the small screen: describing their free-form lyrical style as a counterpoint to the often rigid, restrictive screen-writing guidelines drilled into them while studying screenwriting at university. In this very indoors-y edition of ‘Things I Have Learned’, Brown explains their love of TV, how it has changed during their lifetime, and its bearing on their bizarre, brilliant new album.
Childrens’ TV contains valuable lessons
Teletubbies, Dragon Tails, maybe Sesame Street? My parents were pretty lenient with how much television I got to watch – not to say that they didn’t have opinions, or I didn’t get yelled at when I was watching TV rather than doing what they wanted. But I feel like most children’s television from that era had lessons for kids – especially playing nice with others. Barney, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood – they all had a lot to do with “don’t be a bad person when you grow up. Be a nice kid, and get on with people.”
Growing up, there were a lot of TV shows about musicians.
I watched one of the seasons of American Idol pretty much weekly – the one with Sanjaya Malakar. He had beautiful hair, I remember him well. Then there was Hannah Montana, Big Time Rush, The Naked Brothers Band: a Nickelodeon show about two brothers in a band, played by Alex and Nat Wolff. I actually met Nat. I went to a pre-screening of the Pavement biopic, was outside smoking, and this guy was like “are you here for the premiere?” And I was thinking, ‘it’s 10AM, why else would anyone be here?’ We got asked back in before I got a chance to respond, but later I realised ‘that guy was in The Naked Brothers Band!’
I feel like seeing live music had more of an effect on me wanting to do music than seeing it on TV. But there was a point where I kept watching things and thinking ‘that’s what I want to do when I grow up.’ I watched a biopic about Coco Chanel, and Project Runway, and thought I wanted to be a fashion designer. Looking back, I just liked the shows.
Kids today don’t appreciate channel-hopping.
It was good. Those Saturday mornings when you’d watch cartoons, but if there wasn’t anything interesting on you’d just go outside or do something else. Nowadays you can just binge watch. I know it was hard enough for my parents to pull me away from the TV for dinner when it was just a random thing I’d put on that I didn’t even care about – I can’t imagine a child binge watching television and being asked to do anything. I do also think there’s something sad about how people don’t tune into the same thing anymore. There was a TV show called Awkward about a pregnant teenager – it wasn’t great, but I remember all the girls my age in middle school watched it. I just had to be included in the conversation.
Commercials used to be fun.
There were all those weird toys you could buy, which always involved some strange gloop that had no purpose. I always really wanted these pens or pencils you could get, which created these crazy patterns when you drew with them. I feel like that was the perfect time for ads, because ads were fun. The Kool-Aid man, the Apple Jacks ads where the cinnamon and apple were racing each other to the cereal – I wanted to watch those. Then there was Lucky Charms. Why were we eating so much cereal back then?
I grew up wanting to write for television myself…
I went to school for film and television production, focusing on screenwriting for TV. That had been my dream since I was about 12 – to work on Saturday Night Live or something. The most interesting thing I learned, was that characters can never get what they want. As soon as they get what they want, there needs to be a brand-new problem. There’s always something out of reach – otherwise people will stop watching. And I was like, ‘that sucks.’
…but then I went off the idea of it as a career.
I do work in video production [Brown directed a recent video for fellow New Yorkers Model/Actriz] but I don’t write – mostly out of fear that whatever I write might be bad. It takes so much effort and time, you have to send it to people to get notes – you’d have to really believe in what you’re doing. Also, a lot of the time you need experience to even be an assistant in a writer’s room, and the only way to get that is through internships which you have to pay the university to do. Looking back, maybe I should have just caved, but it went against everything I believed in. When I started doing music, it just felt like the easiest thing for me to be doing, and somehow that turned into a whole career. It’s funny because people want to be musicians, it’s a dream people have. It’s all Nate’s ever wanted to do. I wanted to write for television.
What I’m watching these days.
Recently I got into Grey’s Anatomy. It’s mostly about women with problems trying to be doctors, and hot older guys they have crushes on, but then they’re all a mess. The first season’s really good, I watched it three times. But the seasons go on, I got to a point where all that stuff was stressing me out – I was like, “please just let them do their jobs.”
Writing lyrics replaced my desire for screenwriting.
I’ve always found it easier to write in my voice than anyone else’s, which could be a detriment to screenwriting but for not lyrics. Also, I think because I went to school for screenwriting and we learned very specific structures, that things have to be a certain way for stories to work, lyrics feel so much easier. I could say anything, it doesn’t have to make sense – with Water From Your Eyes, they’re supposed to be as abstract as possible. I think that’s why I ended up being drawn to music so much with my free time, to the point where now it takes up almost all my time. There’s no rigidity. No plot points.
Water From Your Eyes’ new album It’s A Beautiful Place is released on August 22 via Matador
