I had a chance to talk to Muuy Biien about their newly released album This Is What Your Mind Imagines. Muuy Biien is the brainchild of frontman Joshua Evans. The band also includes guitarist Robbie Rapp, bassist Xander Witt, and drummer Jacob Deel. This Is features mostly new material, but also two reworked songs (“Sister†and “Fallin’ Outâ€) from previous Muuy Biien releases.
Flagpole: So I actually like the first version of the song “Fallin’ Out†(originally released on Dark/Dork last October) better than the more recent one.
Joshua Evans: A lot of people do. A lot of people really like that one. Our friend Dustin really likes it, and when we put this one out, he was really bummed. He was like, “You guys are doing this whole new thing—you’re heading in this new direction, and you’re kind of forgetting about what you did before.†And that’s true to an extent—I mean, I want people who are into lo-fi to go back and listen to the early demos of these songs and like them, but at the same time, this is a pop song—this is a song that anyone can like and listen to—it’s not abrasive—it’s a pop song. And I just didn’t want to leave it behind.
Who writes the lyrics in this band?
JE: I do. Going back and re-recording these songs in this hi-fi setting allows people to understand me more, what I’m saying. Those two songs (“Fallin’ Out†and “Sisterâ€), lyrically for me, are heavy fucking songs, and I want people to hear what I’m saying. The lyrics are on Bandcamp. I always post the lyrics, and that’s something I’ve always wanted people to do more. I can think of people who I want to hear those songs, who haven’t really heard them yet.
Where does your songwriting come from?
JE: “Sister” is a cool song because I have a sister and we’re really, really close. She’s older than me, and our parents broke up when we were about five, and they didn’t really do too good a job being parents to us, so we kind of had to teach each other how to grow up, so to speak. That song [originally released on Knife Fights] is me convincing her that what I’m doing is a real thing, not just wasting time getting wasted and trying to be a cool guy, because that’s not what I want to do. I just want to make music. This is what I want to do forever. In the song, I’m saying, “We’re better than them, but we’re not quite there yet.” We are awesome and we know that we’re better than all these people, but we have a long way to go, and we’re working towards that. That’s a really cool statement, and it’s ballsy, and if you’re convincing people of that, then they’ll understand it, and they’ll think about it that way.
What about the ambient tracks?
JE: Muuy Biien started as a noise project. It was just me doing this. I think the ambient tracks show stylistic integrity. It shows that we’re not just these bearded, tattooed dudes playing this angry music.
It doesn’t sound like you guys would be big, tattooed guys. It’s so fast that it sounds like maybe you guys would be kind of skinny.
JE: Lean. We trim the fat.
But most of your stuff is punk music, hardcore music.
JE: We learned everything we know from that stuff. Black Flag, Minor Threat. That’s the most basic knowledge. It’s the perfect music. There’s no bullshit. But at the same time, we are not just influenced by that. We do have that attitude and that style of going to work every day and completely funding it on your own—we paid to get this record made. Before we even had the offer to do that, we had intended on just doing it ourselves. We were restricted in doing that, which I think worked out in our favor. We moved into this house because it had a basement, but didn’t know the neighbor next door. She called the cops on us the first day we recorded at five in the afternoon. So that immediately for us was like, well, we can’t record music here, we can’t practice here.
Where do you practice now?
JE: We practice at Jesse Mangum’s studio out towards Jefferson. We tracked two of the songs from the record ourselves there without his assistance. We just did them in his room, basically. The other six punk songs were done at my friend Matt Tamisin’s studio, Japanski Studios. The other three ambient tracks were done on cassette tape—Xander did one, and I did two. We practice at Jesse’s, but (lately) we’ve been practicing and recording at Matt’s.
Robbie Rapp: With Josh, he’ll come in one day with a new song. And he wrote it in a day. And the day after he wrote it, we learn it, and we record it, and it sounds badass.
JE: The last song on the record was done that way. We recorded it and learned it in the same hour. “Forward Motion.â€
Are you guys going on tour anytime soon?
RR: There’s been talk about it with the Rodney Kings.
JE: That’s just drunk talk. We had planned to tour on our own, which I think would be more beneficial. You know, I can’t decide. The thing is, if you get two bands on tour, you’re gonna be splitting the money from the shows, and you’re not gonna get shit. You’re just gonna get enough to live on the road, maybe eat here and there. But, if you go with another band, there’s a chance you’re gonna get a van if you don’t have one. Not saying that we would just use them for that, because we do like those guys.
I take it band tensions aren’t too high right now, between you guys?
JE: No.
RR: No, not at all. There’s always gonna be ups and downs when you’re dealing with a project, an entity, that’s higher than yourself—of course, there might be times when one of us is like, “Hey, you’re dropping the ball.”
JE: Me and Xander get in little bitch fights here and there.
RR: Of course, it’s important to have that, but it’s never ended with any sort of serious tension or serious problem.
Is that because you like your music so much, or because you like working on your music?
JE and RR: Working on it.
RR: Because we get along with each other. Josh writes really good songs—really lyrically, musically powerful songs.
JE: Now that we have these guys together, now that we’re playing a lot more, now that this record’s out of the way—you know, I wrote these songs with them (the musicians) in mind—with their playability and their styles in mind—but now I want to come to practice and them have ideas. This record has been us really figuring each other out, and me kind of directing it.
That’s cool, because you did the first two releases just by yourself, right?
JE: Yeah.
And you seem to have done pretty well getting musicians around you.
JE: When I dropped out of high school, I immediately jumped into these guys, this group of friends. I’ve always constantly had musicians around me, and I was the youngest, and it was always weird for me because I was looking up to everyone.
So you were the little brother?
JE: Sort of. People definitely understand that I’m young.
RR: Well, the thing about Josh is that he wants to learn.
JE: Yeah, I’ve always looked up to these guys, and that’s why I hang out with them, and that’s why I’ve kept them around. I mean, we lived in a house with what, eight, nine people? And we still came out of there sane people, and okay with each other, and okay with each other, and understanding of each others’ situations. Life is strange, and it is shitty at some points. I mean, I got lucky. And I was really abrasive at first because I quit school because I was addicted to painkillers, I was slinging a lot of pot, and never going to school. I wasn’t into it. And the only thing that I did continue was to always play music, and recording it, learning to how record in those days. And when I met Gerry, it all changed. The cool thing about Gerry—and I always talk about Gerry because he’s my best friend and we’ve been through a lot of shit together—we know each other very well. When I was in high school, I heard his record, Odd Tymes, which in the last year and a half, two years, people have kind of forgotten about it, and not really talked about it anymore, because a bunch of people heard it before it came out, and really connected with it. Odd Tymes is a timeless record, man. If you haven’t heard it, you need to listen to it.
Odd Tymes, by who?
JE: Green Gerry. Seriously, he’s unbelievable. Gerry Green, that’s what he goes by.
And Three Circles is after Green Gerry?
JE: Yeah. Three Circles is Green Gerry songs redone and reinterpreted with us.
RR: There’s a sense of camaraderie in almost a collective way, with all these bands—Pretty Bird, Muuy Biien, Green Gerry, and all that stuff. I guess that’s one of the reasons why we did choose to do the old songs reinterpreted. And we had Gerry come in and play on the record, and that was a lot of fun. And I had already met Gerry like a week or two before he came in. And I’d been hearing those songs from Odd Tymes, and I thought this was going to be a very serious and brooding guy, but he was this guy who was really silly, and huggy—he likes to give hugs.
JE: The day I dropped out of high school, I listened to that record—and me, my cousin, and three of my friends took four hits of LSD each right after graduation. And, long story short, we’re tripping on acid, and my friend Dylan runs away, and he gets arrested, we go look for him, we see that he’s being put on a stretcher, put in the back of an ambulance, and we just drive by, tripping, like, “Oh my God, what the fuck?” After we saw that I broke down. I thought my friend was dead. And this record (Odd Tymes)—it’s fucked up how good it is. And it’s more fucked up that people don’t know about it. You gotta read the lyrics—listen with headphones, especially. It’s amazing. But yeah, I met Jerry, and we became friends really fast. Then he invited me to play drums in his band. He was living with Jacob and them at the Birdhouse, and there were six of them at the time, and they invited me to live there, because it was cheap-ass rent. That’s how I met everyone and that’s really where I got involved here. I got really lucky with these guys. Sometimes we bash heads and sometimes we have our disagreements, but that’s just people, you know?
And Gerry used to play guitar in Muuy Biien before Robby?
JE: Yeah.
Do the songs all start with Josh?
JE: Yes.
RR: Primarily. I’m glad there’s been no jealousy within the band that Josh has been the primary songwriting force.
JE: Xander wrote a song for the band: “Something Rotten.”
RR: That was the first song that we actually all collaborated on. There was no bass part, and that was really fun, too, because it showed that okay, there’s a chemistry going on.
Did Xander write the lyrics for “Something Rotten?”
JE: No, I wrote the lyrics.
RR: Me and Xander gave each other the parts. He wanted me to play guitar on it, but the way that Xander plays the songs, he does kind of like this junky song—not junky as in drugs, but kind of sloppy and stuff, and he played it with this feel with all these different dissonant chords and stuff, and I just really couldn’t do it, and so he showed me the part, and I was like, “What can you do for the bass?” And so it was the first time that we all got together in a practice space and just put together a song. It took like thirty minutes. And then all we need were some lyrics, and Josh stepped up and wrote some really good lyrics.
JE: Being an artist, you wanna be heard, you know? That’s not to say that we’re trying to make money or anything, but we do want people to listen to the music. We want people to be blasted away by these crazy songs, but at the same time to be able to listen to them comfortably without demanding it.
Muuy Biien’s entire catalog is available for streaming and download at muuybiien.bandcamp.com.
Like what you just read? Support Flagpole by making a donation today. Every dollar you give helps fund our ongoing mission to provide Athens with quality, independent journalism.
