BRKN LOVE

What themes do you find attracted to writing about? I write about what I know. I’m attracted to the darker sides of things. Everything is usually about love, loss, existential dread, self-doubt, pain and joy. There isn’t a ton of happy songs on my record, but that’s just how I was feeling at the time of making it, who knows how it will go next time around.

It’s becoming more popular for an individual to write the majority of their music and have friends or hired musicians play the parts with them on stage. For yourself, how did you come to decide who you wanted to play with you and why do you value these people both as musicians and as individuals?

My recording band and touring band are different. I chose the guys I wanted to record with based off of a previous experience I had working with them and I decided it would be just be easy and fun to have them do it again. I found my touring band basically through the New York City music scene. It’s a big city, there’s thousands of great musicians, and with help from my manager we were able to find the right guys to join me in this group. Having guys who are generally lovely to be around is almost more important than having great musicians in the band, since you’ll have to spend a lot of time in close quarters. They’re all great players though, aside from being great guys and I wouldn’t be able to do this without them.

You’ve made the comment in regards to your name that you can show your feelings while still rocking out. I wanted to ask a bit about your experience and journey with music revolving around this. In the past, did you ever think the contrary? No, not really. I think that’s what music is all about isn’t it? Even if the feeling is lust and joy, it’s still a feeling your expressing. It may not be as serious, or dark but music is all feeling at the end of the day. I’m just attracted to people who spill their hearts out these days, although I do love a sexy Prince tune.

What is it about this genre of music that you are attracted to and what makes you inspired to continue writing music like this? I just like the abrasive nature of it. I like the cathartic energy. It’s more aggressive in it’s sound even when it’s sometimes singing you sweet melodies. I like that people give no f*cks in rock & roll, which is something you don’t see often in other genres (except maybe hip-hop). I like things loud and I like to know people are playing their instruments with their own hands. There this certain level of humanity that rock has, that connection that will never really go away, to me at least, it’s the people’s music.

Talk a bit about your album art, a heart with a dagger. What is it about this symbol that you feel works as a motif for your band as well as for all of the tracks that it encompasses? I find it highly literal and almost too spot on sometimes. It’s a heart with a dagger. It literally represents a broken, ripped up heart. Though, I think it looks super hard. Like, it takes balls for a dude to put that on his stuff since it’s a pretty emotionally shocking image. I think it shows comfortability in one’s self.

What do you hope that people take away from seeing your live performance, perhaps versus listening to the recorded version? That we sound the same or better than the record. There’s nothing worse than seeing a band and they sound nothing like themselves. We hope to exceed expectations. Also, our performances can get pretty chaotic and wild. We hope to take people to a huge party essentially. After this last tour, what should people be looking out for next? We have a tour of the US coming up in May with Pop Evil, we’re doing a bunch of festival dates as well including, Sonic Temple, Epicenter, Rock USA, etc. We also just confirmed another tour with Crobot and Ten Years over the summer, as well as some cool oneoff shows that you can check out on our website.