Bear Hands Bare All on New Album
Words by Geoff Burns
It’s about a week after the last show of a three-week tour with Cage The Elephant, Foals and Silversun Pickups, and guitarist/keyboardist/vocalist Ted Feldman of Bear Hands is on the phone. It was their first arena tour as a band.
“We were playing first of four bands at like 7 p.m. and I was afraid no one would be there, but people came early so we were playing to thousands of people every night,” Feldman begins, adding it was also the first time they traveled in a bus to each show.
Based out of Brooklyn, New York, the four-piece, which also includes vocalist/guitarist Dylan Rau, bassist Val Loper and drummer/vocalist TJ Orscher, has been making music for a long time now, and even more so, the guys have just released their third full-length album, You’ll Pay For This, via Spensive Sounds. It’s a collection of 12 indie rock songs that lyrically deal with change and attempting to live with those changes.
Throughout a period of six months in the early half of last year, in between tours and on the road, Bear Hands started writing songs that would eventually evolve into You’ll Pay For This. But it was after a show in San Diego, California, during a tour last year where Feldman and Rau decided to extend their trip and take a short, three-day retreat to a cabin about two hours east of Los Angeles.
“A friend hooked me up with a friend’s house that was in the mountains,” Feldman says. “We were only there for three days but it was an extremely productive three days and we wrote four of the songs that made the record.”
Those three days included total isolation: No Internet, no television and no one else around.
“Sometimes you write and then get to a point where it’s sort of a natural stopping point and then go home or you pick up your phone or whatever,” Feldman says. “But there was nothing to do so we kept going. That was really helpful, just total isolation. We spent all day every day [writing].”
After the two left the cabin, they made a trip to Los Angeles and spent another four days at Kenny Carkeet’s (AWOLNATION) studio, who additionally engineered their songs “The Shallows” and “Boss.” All of the songs were recorded at River Run and Doctor Wu’s studio in New York, except for drums and bass on “Too Young,” which were recorded at Terminus Recording Studios in New York.
While Feldman amped up his role in helping out with lyrics for this album, he also co-produced the record with James Brown (Foo Fighters, Arctic Monkeys).
“In the recording process James and I were recording and I would sit there with Dylan as he was singing and sort of coach him through it or with Val playing bass, that kind of thing,” Feldman says. “I sort of dabbled in both roles as a songwriter that is inherent in what I do, but then I also am creating sounds and a lot of what we do in the songwriting process is interfacing with a computer and making the sounds, so that kind of operating, too.”
“27 years young don’t make sense” is a line in “2 AM” that is “kind of a 27 years club, dead zeroes reference” Feldman says, who is actually 29 and the youngest in the band. While the album’s lyrical content deals with growing older and having to live through those changes, Feldman says they’re not teenagers anymore. There are a lot more references throughout You’ll Pay For This dealing with age. In their song “Too Young,” Rau sings “too young to keep it together/too dumb to know what we wanted.” And with age comes with wanting something more in life as he sings “I’m a piece of shit/it’s a point of pride/I’m the super rich complaining I want more in life” in “Winner’s Circle” and “I want my life to have a purpose/tell me if you think I deserve it” on the album’s closing song, “Purpose Filled Life.”
“We didn’t talk about what we were going to write about before we did it, but I guess for the age of the band we’ve been here for a long time,” Feldman says. “I’ve been in a relationship with my girlfriend for a really long time and things develop over time that are just naturally on the brain. Living in Brooklyn the neighborhood has changed significantly since we’ve lived there. There’s a lot going on around us that I think drives what I find to be interesting or truthful or self reflection or whatever. There’s some elements of things changing around you and everyone goes through shit. No matter what age you are, it fits something to some level of truth, I think, and that’s cool.”
Facebook // Twitter // Website
You can purchase You’ll Pay For This on iTunes or in the Bear Hands online store.
