Ripping Guts Out with Redbud’s Long Night EP, Track-by-Track
“It fascinates me, the art of controlling your live sound to emulate recordings when so many factors are out of your hand,” remarked Katie Claghorn of Austin, TX’s Redbud, on translating the project’s expansive and genre-melding recorded sound to the stage. Redbud released their debut Long Night EP earlier this year through Beacon, NY label Good Eye Records while establishing their footing locally as a full band. “I've leaned into the live show being a unique experience.”
“I've researched how some of my favorite artists have brought their recorded sound to the stage — Ruban Nielson in particular,” Claghorn shared with Wormbrain, “In some of their live videos, I've noticed they were able to translate their recorded sound almost directly to the stage — and of course it requires some pretty specific gear setups. It should be, in my opinion, a novelty of seeing a band live after knowing their recorded sound.”
“Redbud live is inevitably more hi-fi and we're an upbeat squad of golden retrievers,” Claghorn stated. On whether Redbud has any preference for the studio or the stage, they simply said, “Both performing and creating art are such a high for me and everybody in the band that it's not a comparison we consider.”
Across the five track on Long Night, Redbud glides seamlessly around pinpointable influence. Rather than speculate, Wormbrain asked for their influences both obvious and obscure.
Their favorite songwriters of all time list touts the aforementioned Ruban Nielson, as well as Daniel Rossen, Naomi Saalfield, The Mars Volta, and Robin Pecknold. Their self-proclaimed essential bands are Dirty Projectors, Grizzly Bear, Khruangbin, King Krule, Melody’s Echo Chamber, and Tune Yards. When squeezed, their less evident inspirations include “a lot of indie dad shit that my dad played for us growing up (i.e. Built to Spill and The Notwist),” Chet Baker, Wes Montgomery, Dorothy Ashy, Louis Prima and Keely Smith, “my middle school/high school listens — MCR, The Used, The Dear Hunter, Brand New, Tegan and Sara, Led Zeppelin,” and Latin Jazz.
Photo by Ismael Quintanilla
“For me, the Long Night represents a personal inner odyssey that ripped my guts out, and spit me out on the dusty ground to rebuild who I was and how I thought of myself.”
“We are at a nice place with music where we are about to record a full-length LP and for the first time, we feel oriented in the local scene and we're able to make a conscious decision about who is on our recording team. We finally have some of the resources we've been working so hard for and it's time to focus on creating something we really love. Again.”
Photo by Ismael Quintanilla
“I will say each song from Long Night touches on very different topics pulled from my life.” Katie Claghorn, who originally started Redbud as a solo project in 2020 before bringing in the other golden retrievers, told W.W that the debut, “certainly is rooted in personal experience.”
“For me, the Long Night represents a personal inner odyssey that ripped my guts out, and spit me out on the dusty ground to rebuild who I was and how I thought of myself. Each of the songs came from a wrenching moment in my early-mid twenties that left me wondering where I stood in the world and where my place would be.”
“Where ‘Kin’ is from the perspective of a young person pondering with fresh eyes who they want to be in the world, ‘Island’ is a breakup song. ‘Sad’ on the North Side captured a moment when I was caught off guard by falling in love after giving up on connection,” offered Claghorn on the short summations about each song’s story.
‘Franny’ I don't even know what that song is about because it's about so many things. I'm gonna try to explain. Franny in its guise of being a song about a nonsensical tale based on my cat, is truly a story of losing friends to disagreements and growing apart. I think I chose my cat as the topic because he was a consistent comfort to me while going through a couple of friend breakups during quarantine. Soul Work resembles the moment release after holding on for so long.”
Photo by Ismael Quintanilla
If the TL;DR of each track wasn’t enough, you’re in luck! Katie Claghorn also went deep for Wormbrain World readers on a long form track-by-track of Long Night, just keep scrolling — but not before you hit play on the album first!
Photo by Ismael Quintanilla
“I don’t even know what that song is about because it’s about so many things.”
Wormbrain World asked Katie Claghorn of Redbud to break down the full EP with a track-by-track explanation, and they told us:
“Kin” — The lyrics to Kin came from a poem my older sister wrote in her first year of college. She was coming into herself and seeing the world around her with a fresh pair of eyes. Now an independent adult at a university thousands of miles away from home, she could make what she wanted of the world. Her words struck me as wholesome, the kind of neuropathway I want to maintain in my own brain. Her realization at this young, impressionable age was that the world is wondrous and full of movement and discovery and it dawned on her that she wanted to be a part of it all. She was saying, I choose adventure, I want to create, participate, and contribute. This was one of the first songs I wrote. I actually couldn’t decide on whether to choose the cadence of the first half of the song or that of the 2nd half. So I took both of them and sewed
them together with the instrumental breakdown section.
“Island” — Island is...*sigh*...a breakup song. It was birthed quickly after a heart wrenching relationship ended. I’m essentially conveying in the lyrics that I wish I could ignore all of the issues I saw in the relationship and keep it going. But I realized that delusion isn’t going to work so I ended things.
One morning mid-August 2021, I awoke alone in my bed with the vocal melody for Island. As soon as I gained consciousness, I made a groggy voice memo that I apparently named “Disco” which must have been the drum beat I initially envisioned for the song. We gladly took Island a different direction but I’ll be damned if I don’t write a disco song before I die.
Photo by Ismael Quintanilla
“Sad on the North Side” — “I was sad on the North side” is a sentence I heard a friend speak while I was writing this song. I immediately knew it was the phrase that would seal in the song to be complete. We were discussing the power of meeting someone you are immediately captivated by after internalizing the idea that you’ll be alone forever and never find love ever again. This is another song from the very beginning of my song-writing era. I didn’t understand the tempo of it until I met and jammed with drummer Sam. Playing on beat was a challenge for me back in 2020 but the guys made it easy to find the beat when I got lost. I really wanted this song to be on our first EP. It’s one of the funnest songs to play and it feels short and sweet like a little love letter from us to the audience.
“Franny” — I wrote this song about my cat. My big, silver, mischievous barnyard cat, Francis. I scooped Franny the kitten from an apartment complex during 2020. He was offered to me in a Facebook group after I posted about finally being ready to care for a furry friend during the Q. As Franny aged, the necessary flea baths grew more and more difficult as he grew more and more aware of what drawing a bath meant for him. He looked so pathetic one day during his flea bath that I began to sing him a lullaby. I sang the tune (which became the verse melody) to myself for a few months before finally forcing myself to sit down and find some chords that worked alongside it.
“Soul Work” — Soul Work was written as a poem in 2018 before I began writing music in 2019. At the time, I had just graduated from UT Austin and was on some sort of early-20s low-budget eat, pray, love expedition in Colombia. I parted from my Austin friends I traveled to Colombia with after rescheduling my flight to extend my stay. I was now solo. I landed in Granada, Colombia at an eco-bhakti-yogi-Hare Krishna village. They were lacto vegetarians and didn’t eat onions nor garlic. My stomach was in peril the whole time from an excess of delicious fibrous meals. Daily activities included: tile mosaic art, cooking lunch for the whole compound, whacking back platano trees that are home to spiders that then fall on your face, and yoga. Anyways, I was reading “Wherever You Go, There You Are” by Jon Kabat-Zinn. This book on mindfulness meditation, I believed, would help guide me through my post-graduation-broke-up-with-my-college-boyfriend existential crisis. I woke up every morning in Granada to the bitter cold at 5a in my stiff bunkbed, covered in thick, scratchy blankets. I almost always opted to rise early than stay in bed a little longer. I strolled around the perimeter of the otherworldly-structure-filled property, reading about how I was where I was and writing a poem called Soul Work.
W.W: What is Wormbrain?
KC: It's the name of an evil AI.
W.W: Thank you for sharing with Wormbrain.
Redbud’s debut EP Long Night was released on February 24th, 2023 by Hudson Valley based independent label Good Eye Records.
