#flossy clouds

Will McGovern makes transcendent bedroom pop music under the moniker Flossy Clouds. He also just released a new single, Arrow, today, so be sure to check it out! His music seriously transports me to a different place and I always feel like I should be driving through a desert on a starry night whenever it’s on. In this interview he talks about the influence of Santa Fe on his music, the musicians he finds inspiration in, and the ways music has helped him in his own life.

Q: Where did the name “Flossy Clouds” come from for this project?

A: I think “Flossy Clouds” comes from a few different things. Living in Santa Fe, you are always surrounded by 60 miles of sky in every direction. It’s always around you, and so are the clouds.

So, when I first moved down here I would watch the clouds in-between classes at school, totally in awe of the sky and clouds, thinking that the clouds looked a lot like cotton candy. At some point, in that first September, I found an obscure Harry Nilsson song on youtube that has this beautiful line

"The flossy clouds like sugar spun / I’d happily forget them all”

Which, for me, perfectly captured the clouds in New Mexico. I guess the name sticks in my mind because the clouds are this constant presence that has always helped me get out of my worried head and focus on something beautiful, which, deep down, is what I want my music to do for people. I want it to be like the sky and the clouds.

Q: How did moving to Santa Fe for college from Massachusetts impact your songwriting? Did you find the different landscape and culture influenced you in any way? 

A: The move was a really formative experience for me, in a couple ways. I think growing up in Massachusetts was on the one hand a very supportive creative space: I was encouraged to sing and play instruments since I could talk and I was always seeking out new music. On the other hand, I was always afraid to write my own music and instinctually very self critical from a young age. This anxiety got a lot worse in high school, because high school is nonsense. I actually went to a very competitive, very caustic "arts high school" outside of Boston. When I was there, surrounded by young people making very accomplished art, I began to see songwriting, the art I wanted to pursue the most, as something that required a certain aesthetic ability that I didn’t have. I didn’t want to allow time for growth, time for processing, because I was afraid and impatient.

Moving to Santa Fe after high school I met my friend Darian, who was in a similar boat in terms of songwriting anxiety, and we started sharing song ideas with each other, both aware of the pressure to “make good art” or whatever. I remember I felt immediately comfortable with him and my ideas because we were just excited to have these ideas and someone to listen. I stopped caring so much about how others would hear my songs because I had support from my friends like Darian and Clint and Rowan. These people are like personifications of Santa Fe to me: I think Santa Fe has a really defined sense of place, it has a character of openness and a little mystery that reminds me of the people I’ve met here. I had never met anyone like these friends and I had never seen anything like New Mexico. Everything is brown and gold and softly curved but always vast, extreme. My friend Joey says: “New Mexico is only kinda America .” I think that’s true: it’s too weird and too beautiful.

Q: On your latest release “Moon Lighting” you put dates before the lyric notes of each song on your Bandcamp page. What was your reasoning behind this?

A: I did that to try to show people how disparate the songs were in terms of when they were written, since choosing to use old and new material was a new thing for me. Like, on the first record, I arranged and recorded some of the songs I had written over my first year in Santa Fe. I had the whole summer to record it, and had absolutely no idea what I was doing. So I ended up learning a lot with this group of songs and this big chunk of time to think about them. I had a bunch of equipment and help, too, from my friend Luke, and I didn’t worry about, like, production quality all that much, because I was effectively making the record in another person’s studio and they were much more in control of the production side of things in a technical way.

For “Moon Lighting,” though, I was back in Santa Fe at school, trying to write and record and go to class all at the same time, not to mention the fact that I had really shitty equipment and no money. Basically I was feeling super dejected and I couldn’t write much. So what I ended up doing was trying to focus on recording and arranging more and writing less, like, I would sit doing was trying to focus on recording and arranging more and writing less, like, I would sit down with Ableton, a borrowed guitar (mine had been accidentally smashed by a friend) and the internal computer mic, and I would just try to figure out my way around Abelton. That’s how I came up with something like “Moon,” which was all twitchy and sample based and really different than AHFTS, in an exciting way. At this point I started playing with a drum machine I had borrowed from a friend and I bought my first synthesizer, just learning my way around them and taking notes. I knew that when I got to go back to Massachusetts and record with better gear and another person I would be able to work with more attention to detail.

It was around Christmas that I got to come home and into Luke’s studio again. We had a week to make something, so I showed him my new demos and I would spend the nights looking through old demos to see if there was anything else that reminded me of this new sound I was playing with, just in terms of feeling or mood. I found “Ring,” “Soften” and a really early version of “Slug” all of which stuck with me in how much their mood was reminiscent of this newer, different thing like “Moon.” Long story short, the whole process was really complicated compared to the first record, with a lot of the material being culled from the past. I guess I included the dates so curious people could see into my head a little bit, into the process.

Q: One thing I love about your music is that almost every song seems to capture a snapshot of a specific event, which when combined with your other songs all weave together a bigger story. Is this an intentional decision on your part?

A: Yeah I mean, all of my favorite music feels lived-in, meditated-upon, or whatever you want to call that feeling when an album or an catalogue becomes a world. I remember being so enamored when I first listened to “Zentropy” and “Slow Dance in the Cosmos” in high school, because those records talk to each other in this super vivid way. Like, as a listener, just hearing those songs made me feel like I knew Ronnie and Frank, or their myth, or whatever. Like, "World of Echo” is another perfect example of this interconnectivity, and that album can tell it’s story to you awake or asleep, because Arthur is just that good. I realized that “connection" in my songs after I had recorded a few of them: I kinda stepped back and looked at the bigger picture. I think making a bigger story between the songs it’s just part of the process for me: I’m drawn to that sort of storytelling.

Q: What is the local music scene like in Santa Fe where you are based out of? Do you eventually want to move to a bigger city in order to focus on your music more?

A: The local music scene in Santa Fe is full of great people, but there’s a limited network of venues for people to play and even smaller amounts of people to play for: the city is so small. It’s getting better, though. Having Meow Wolf open this year has been awesome, because there is finally a “real” venue that puts on shows everyone is psyched to see. I saw Frankie Cosmos there and it was awesome, I’d love for us to play there some day soon. But, because of how small things are here, I’d really like to move away to another city after I finish college to focus on music and, well, everything else. I might move back east, I really like the sense of community that artists have in New York and Boston, not to mention places like Richmond and Asheville, which are small but creatively supportive. We’ll see, I guess.

Q: Do you think studying plays and literature has been a factor in changing how you structure the songs you create?

A: I think anything I study helps me write, but I don’t know if I really attribute like, a direct causal relationship between my studying western philosophy and literature with my songwriting style. I think its a much more spiritual, diagonal relationship. I mean, I’m not Dan Bejar, you know, I’m not writing songs like “Farrah, Straus, & Giroux” and trying to alienate people with references they can’t understand, like overloading them with personal, univocal information. I’m much more impressed with poets like Anne Carson and William Carlos Williams, people who are, on the one hand, trying to deal with massive ideas, but on the other hand, trying to craft something like a miniature, something digestible. I’ll never know who Carson’s talking about with the “Red” character or whatever, but I’ll know what she’s talking about.

Q: I always find it interesting to see where other people’s musical influences lie. What are three albums that you consider “perfect” whether or not they have influenced your sound directly?

A: Well the first one that comes to mind is “World of Echo” by Arthur Russell. That album is perfect to me because it helped me experience how an album can exist on multiple levels at the same time. On paper, it’s a simple concept for a record, and its songs are almost miniatures of songs, ideas for songs. It’s a edit of a series of live performances featuring Arthur’s voice, cello, and echo. But all of these seemingly simple characteristics of the performance actually end up informing its complexity when you hear the music. It turns out that his voice, cello, and echo are tools for him to express the most impressionistic feelings, pure id, like he’s in an ecstatic state, just repeating “California, here I come” for two minutes and you’re there too. I recommend listening to that album in the summer with headphones on, alone in the dark, lying on your bed.

The next one I can think of is “Hounds of Love” by Kate Bush, which is perfect because she totally has her cake and eats it too. She produced it herself, in her own studio, after not having a proper hit in like seven years, and she managed to make it her way, because side one is like, all top twenty hits in the UK and side two is a twenty minute song cycle about death. So people like me buy the record expecting “The Big Sky” and get way way more than we bargained for with “The Ninth Wave” on side two. But it works so well because at that point, after hearing the first side, you’re totally on board for anything. I can listen to it for days and catch something new every time, yet the moment I hear the drums at the beginning of “Running Up That Hill” I feel like she grabs me, and she doesn’t let me go 'til the whole damn thing is over.

The third record is one that hasn’t influenced my “sound” as obviously as the other two, but has influenced me probably more than the others in terms of actually producing music, and that album is “Yeezus” by Kanye West. This album is really important to me for a few reasons: I remember being very, very, obsessed with it when it came out because it was so damn hype, I was totally fascinated in how hype it was. In Boston at the time, that shit was everywhere: it was in the water. You would hear it at every party, and my friends and I would play it so much you’d think that shit was only available for a limited time. Like, it was pretty clear from the first notes of “On Sight” that it just hit perfectly. So, as a producer it means a lot to me because it’s on the one hand this super visceral and blunt album, and Kanye feels very unhinged as does the music. But on the other hand, Kanye and Rick Rubin basically worked backwards on the thing, and spend a bunch of time just cutting shit from the beats and shortening songs, so it ends up being the only exercise in production restraint, or minimalism, in Ye’s shortening songs, so it ends up being the only exercise in production restraint, or minimalism, in Ye’s whole catalogue. Front to back it’s air-tight, so much so that it’s really claustrophobic in some places, like that one part of “I Am A God” where Kanye’s just breathing heavily into the mic, in-between these terrifying screams.

Q: What do you use to record your music equipment-wise? Do you feel that if you had the option to record in a studio you would still choose to self-record?

A: Equipment has always been a inconstant thing for me, like, because I’m so broke from student debt. So I always used to just hold out to record at my friend’s houses with their equipment, which was super inconvenient living in Santa Fe. Until recently, I haven’t used any of my own stuff to record my songs: mostly I would just plug Ableton into my friend’s mixers and go from there. For the new record, though, as far as I can tell, I've made a really serious effort to buy all of my own gear and record at my new house by myself. So this album is sort of experimental, i guess, because I’m just learning how to use all of this new shit I bought for myself. But, if you want like, a specific piece of equipment that I use a lot, that would be the SM7-B, which is this kind of strange microphone that was traditionally used for broadcasting, but I got turned on to it seeing people like Connan Mockasin and Dev use it. It’s just the best microphone, no doubt, for everything, and everyone should have one.

Q: I know writing is an important part of your life, so do you have a journal of ideas for lyrics that you go back to pick from and edit? Or do you sit down with the very specific intention of writing a song?

A: I never ever sit down with the intention of writing a song. I’m not Neil Young, I’m not a fountain that can turn itself on, or whatever. I’m of the belief that nobody can really write a song if they sit down and say to themselves: “Ok, I’m gonna write this song now.” Like, in my experience, there has to be an idea that comes prior to any real intention to write a song. The first and best ideas I have for songs come pretty subconsciously: I mostly just journal in my notebook or on my phone. The phone is good for the audio aspect: like, usually I just come up with a vocal melody at work or in the car, or in between places, and I sing it into my phone. Same goes for instrumental melodies and drum ideas, I’ll write them down in my notebook.

Q: Is there a certain sound or atmosphere that you are trying to create with your songs, or do you try not to limit yourself in regards to the style of your songs?

A: Most of the time when I’m writing I try to create a sense of space in the songs, either through the narrative of the lyrics/arrangement or otherwise. With my new record, I've recorded and found a bunch of sounds that I’ve incorporated into the songs in order to put the listener more directly into the record’s space. There’s a geography to the album: the geography of my familiar haunts in Santa Fe. Generally I want to capture a listener some way or another, and I think that you have to write an atmosphere into each song and album in order to really make something that a person will stop and listen to and hopefully to have an intimate relationship with. Keying into a consistent sound or mood is what makes my favorite albums so important to me, so I don’t consider working with a definite palette of instruments as a “limit,” but rather as a condition that ensures my doing better work.

Q: In your description for A Hit From the Swing you say you’ve always found catharsis in music. How has making music helped you deal with some of your anxieties and personal struggles, whether making or listening to it?

A: As a person with chronic, sometimes crippling social anxiety, making and listening to music has always made me feel away from whatever harm my anxious mind is imposing upon me. I remember there was a point in my first year of college in which I felt so incompetent as a student, artist, and person that I didn’t sleep for days, skipped all my classes, avoided people, ect ect. I was doing this because I felt like I had been doing a shitty job in all these different ways, but really I was just torturing myself. One day when I was trying to sleep I put on this audio/visual piece by Arthur Russell and Phil Niblock called Terrace of Unintelligibility, which is basically a half-hour of Arthur playing his song “Answers Me.” After 15 minutes I fell asleep and felt rested the next day. That might have been the first time I didn’t feel tired in weeks, all because of Arthur Russell cooing with his cello. So music is like medicine to me, sometimes kind of literally.

Q: You tag your music as “devotional” on Bandcamp? Do you think of your music as spiritual, at least for you personally, or was this just an inside joke?

A: Yes.