#badbadman

The Impliers is the alternative/indie psychedelic rock duo from the minds of Charles Ingram and Dan Hartman. Together since their High School days in Greenville, NC, they have been welcomed by the indie underground scene  populated by members of now-iconic bands such as Future Islands, Valiant Thorr, and Municipal Waste. Their multi-media artistic explosion features sprawling psychedelic, electro indie-pop, comedic infomercials, cleverly hilarious visuals, and playfully tripped-out music videos.

They recently released their single “Bad Bad Man” from their upcoming album cocoon.  “Bad Bad Man” brims with synth pop goodness tempered with cool atmospherics and trippy vocals that are warm and inviting.

We got the chance to speak with the duo in this edition of Indie 5-0. So, without further ado, let’s dive in:

What was the inspiration for your new single “Bad Bad Man”?

Our new record cocoon is a concept record that explores the human condition in a pretty long-form way. When putting together our band and especially this record, we realized we had an opportunity to share a much broader viewpoint of ideas than stringing together songs that were single ideas or even one closed ended album. We outlined a very long story universe that encompasses a lot of the things that are interesting to us, or that we've come to believe through our own soul searching. Cocoon is made up of parts 3-5 of the much larger story, and Bad Bad Man just happens to kick off part 3. It's safe to say that the broader narrative that we've created for you to explore on cocoon and in the coming years is the inspiration for that song. We would never want to take the meaning this song has to you from you! As everyone experiences life in their own way, but we are very interested in hearing other's interpretation of Bad Bad Man and would love to hear about it if you reach out to us! But Bad Men take many forms, and we will give you one interesting, but unrelated fact. Charles and I met in high school, but went to different schools. Many years after I was talking about a person who used to bully me in the first period, and I started paying him my lunch money to get him to stop. Charles said "That same kid ALSO used to bully me years before that, and I also paid him my lunch money to get him to stop."

What was the writing process for “Bad Bad Man” like?

Dan: In general, Charles and I have opposite styles of writing which create a positive creative tension. While Charles has fine tuned his improvisational abilities to create a guitar tuning or mood and create in real time, for me song components enter my head fully formed and I've tried to fine tune the ability to reproduce the idea in the studio before losing them. This was one of the songs that the main sections came to me just as I was stepping out onto my porch, and I hurried into the studio to get the idea out using a microkorg, acoustic guitar and drum machine in a few minutes. The final mix still has that initial performance, notably the intro of the song. Over the next few weeks, more melodies and harmonies would come to mind and get added to the song and the structure came, and while writing the rest of cocoon this song was always there, and melodies from other songs made its way into “Bad Bad Man” and vice versa, but the song mostly sat on the shelf for a year waiting on lyrics. We knew the full story arc of 'cocoon' and the broader concept of the upcoming albums that will lead into/follow the story from cocoon but we didn't want to force anything on this song. In general, we like to let the idea sit in the front seat and see where it takes us. David Lynch says "Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.” in his book 'Catching the big fish' and we've definitely learned that to be true. This song was one of the first tracks made for the record, but it was the very last to have finished lyrics - but one day the full story clicked and hit us like lightning, and the lyrics were finished in a few days and that was that.

What song/album inspires you the most and why?

There are so many, but one to highlight is 'Fake can be just as good' by Blonde Redhead. When we were kids, we went to the Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill on a school night to see Blonde Redhead perform when they were touring this album in a pretty empty club. Here you have this band, who was largely a noise band at the time just blowing the place away as a 3 piece. Blonde Redhead has gone on to have an amazing career and following, but being able to look back to where they started back then, they had all of their elements that hang in there today, beautiful melodies, dual frontman/woman trading vocals, interesting stories, driving guitars, and a range of moods and atmospheres - it left such an impression on us in how they walked the line between melodic and noise - but how much they were able to do with 3 people was especially amazing. Being able to see their growth over time, it's hard to imagine where they started, but it's been super inspiring to see what they've achieved and how they've kept part of those roots that we were able to see as impressionable kids that were easily the youngest in the crowd that night.  

If you could sit down and ask any musician/band anything, dead or alive, who would it be and why? What would you ask?

David Lynch. David has such a unique ability to create an emotion when watching or listening to something he's done that is completely absorbing. He creates a sense of time and place that feels like the moment you wake from a dream and ask yourself "was that real, was that a memory?". It's inspiring to see an artist who has earned the ability to own his full expression across so many mediums. A lot of art these days is driven by using metrics to understand what works and what doesn't, but it just feels like David has an intuition for what he wants to express that connects so deeply with his audience. It's something we strive for, we don't want to be "something for everyone", we want to be "everything for someone" and find those people. Both Charles and I picked up daily meditation years ago on David's suggestion. What would we ask? Well, a lot of David's thoughts and advice are well documented. Charles and I do a lot of creating through brainstorming and really appreciate being around others who can riff on them, and with David I think we would probably like to pick a creative idea, explore it in casual conversation and follow the rabbit.

What inspired you to go into the music industry? What made you choose music?

Considering that we're self created, funded, produced and published, it's hard to say we're really in the music industry completely! But we started making music together in our early teenage years and we found some success back then having some significant releases and a healthy live following, and while Charles and I had committed to each other we would always follow our dream - we really didn't take it seriously enough. We continued to make music on our own and focused on being better producers learning how to put together full productions on our own, but we never really shared it with everyone. After amassing a few hundred songs each and having dozens of short films and sketch comedy videos, we revisited that teenage promise that we would follow our dream to create music but to be smarter and more responsible about sharing it with the world. We enjoy music & film so much we do it for fun, and we're hoping that we can find our audience over the coming years, as we feel like we have something compelling to say through music and can bring some joy to people through our video/music universe.