Q&A: Weaving Together Personal Experiences, Bestfriend Talks “places i’ve lived,” “places i’ve left,” Pandemic Processes & More
CREATING DREAMY SONGS THAT TURN SEEMINGLY PERSONAL, LONELY EXPERIENCES INTO UNIVERSAL ONES — Bestfriend is something special. Stacy Kim and Kaelan Geoffrey formed the band in 2018, and have been creating ever since. The Canadian duo is showing just how magical musical projects and friendships can be, despite living thousands of miles apart from each other.
Releasing several songs in 2020 — such as “Last Bus in the A.M.,” “Does It Matter,” and “I MISS YOU,” Bestfriend is following these successes with an incredible project: their new EP places i’ve lived. This EP is all about storytelling, growing up, and a loving perspective on the outgrowing pieces of their young adult lives. Their hard work and dedication to their craft shows through with an already created follow-up EP places i’ve left, as well as a beautifully made online letter writing campaign for their fans.
Read below to learn more about the duo’s collaborative process, their favorite bands, and their new release.
LUNA: Hi Stacy and Kaelan! How are you both?
STACY: Hi! Thanks for having us! I’ve had a bit of a stomach ache for the past two days but I’m being really brave about it. Otherwise great — came back from Toronto last week after writing with Kaelan, and there is truly nothing like your own bed after being away for long periods of time.
KAELAN: I’m great. Eating leftover cauliflower wings on the balcony with a nice little coffee. No complaints.
LUNA: I saw that you met partially through a mutual friend and partially through Instagram DMs — how did this evolve into deciding to make music together?
STACY: I change this story every time I tell it because I am honestly not 100 percent sure, but I am at least 90 percent sure that it started with me getting a new keyboard — a little AKAI MPK Mini, posting about it on Instagram, and Kaelan going, “Hey! I have that keyboard! What are you doing with the keyboard?”
He sent me a cover of The National’s Apartment Story he’d been working on — I still remember how it sounds to this day — and I loved it. I sent him a cover I’d been working on of “Smoke Signals” by Phoebe Bridgers; he loved it. It was pretty immediate from the start just from the way we’d made those covers that he and I had a lot of the same thought processes and ideation for sound and sound design. I think we literally just went, “Cool. We should start a band,” and then we started a band. Rest is, as they say, history.
LUNA: Where are you both living? How does being in different environments affect your music?
KAELAN: Stacy’s living in Vancouver and I’m living in Toronto, which is to say we’re living several time zones and many many miles away. We do most of our writing at separate times and hand off our progress to the other like a relay baton. We definitely miss out on a bunch of the happy little breakthrough moments you can get from writing in a room together every day, but I also think the weird little barrier sort of builds in a bunch of space to carve away at stuff slowly like a statue in our free time. I’ve found that can be pretty helpful for breaking through cold spells.
LUNA: What is your collaborative process like?
STACY: Most of the time, I’ll write a song and record a super basic demo — generally just me and my guitar, or piano — and send it over to Kaelan. He’ll flesh it out a lot on his end, which is always a really cool process; sometimes I’ll write a song intending for it to be a bit of a sad ballad — think Angel Olsen — and he’ll send it back and it’s the catchiest bop I’ve heard in a while.
It’s cool to see how he can interpret anything I write and chords I give him and go, “Hey, I think this could actually sound really cool as, like, an LCD-adjacent song instead.” And I trust him and his ability to parse through music in that super special way that he does, so we go with it, or I’ll make changes, and go from there.
LUNA: What inspires you, either musically or just in general?
KAELAN: It’s a little obvious and a little lame but I’m pretty much entirely driven by feelings, more so than I’d like to admit. Stacy is the same, conveniently.
STACY: I am huge on visuals, TV shows, movies, music videos. I’m actually pretty sure that a lot of my music taste was actually developed during my super formative years watching NBC’s Chuck. They played just the absolute classics — Bon Iver, Slow Club, Radiohead — you get the gist. I'm easily inspired by a good episode of a TV show or movie. Ask Kaelan — the day after I watched Portrait of A Lady On Fire, I didn’t shut up about it for a week straight and wrote an entire song inspired by it.
LUNA: Your letter writing campaign is so fun and creative! How did that idea come about?
STACY: Thanks! It’s definitely a lot of fun! The idea came about when we realized that a lot of what we were writing about in our songs were really universal experiences. You think you’re writing about such personal experiences, but then you listen to a song with, like, 10 billion streams and everyone’s going “I feel exactly this way.”
We realized that with all of the stories we had to tell about the places we’d lived or people we’d loved, there are people out there who want to tell their stories too, but just haven’t quite had the right avenue to do so. I’m really excited to see what people have to say in their letters.
LUNA: Do you have any advice for people interested in pursuing a musical career?
STACY: You don’t need a PhD in music theory to make good music and you don’t have to be the master of any singular instrument to make good music. You always hear about musical prodigies — like, say, Jacob Collier — where they could play any instrument backwards with their eyes closed. Like, that obviously rules so much. Jacob please write with us. But you don’t need to do that as a prerequisite to make cool stuff. A lot of it is just pure intuition. Oh! Also, let yourself make ugly things.
KAELAN: Write every dang day. Or as often as you can at least, but like, actually as often as you can, not just as often as you occasionally remember. Most of it will probably be garbage. That’s totally cool, don’t worry about it. It’s not about trying to write a hit every day as much as it is about building a relationship with yourself, an image of yourself to yourself, as a person who does this sorta stuff. Making it feel natural and normal was a big part of getting myself to take writing more seriously — it can be so, so easy in the beginning for it to feel like some foreign thing you are silly for trying.
LUNA: Who are some of your favorite musicians?
STACY: Julia Jacklin, Rina Sawayama, Big Thief, Lil Nas X, Aly & AJ, Billie Eilish, The National … I have a pretty extensive list, but that’s the gist of it.
KAELAN: The National is my all-time fave, so, frankly? Pretty disappointed in you for using them up Stacy. Actually though, of note: I was pretty much the exact target audience for the Taylor Swift/Aaron Dessner/Matt Berninger collabs the quarantine gave us. I’m genuinely a diehard fan of hers as well (like, every-word-to-every-song-off-her-early-records diehard), so this little adult contemporary shift for her was just like. Oh man. This is it. I can die happy now.
LUNA: Is there anything you can tell us about your upcoming EP?
STACY: I’m very proud of it and I think it will hopefully make a lot of people feel a lot of things.
KAELAN: It’s all about stories and storytelling. We’re no good at writing narrative-free music.
LUNA: What were some highs and lows of creating this EP remotely?
STACY: Of high school football. Sorry. I’ve watched maybe two episodes of Riverdale in total but could name my top five funniest scenes. I might let Kaelan take this one because that’s all I’m going to think about.
KAELAN: I hope to someday love something, anything, like Stacy loves referencing “the epic highs and lows of high school football” at the first sign of legitimately any adversity. The highest point for me was the “car test” of the final set of masters for the EP. It’s a bit of a ritual at this point to drive around (probably late at night) and give it a listen top to bottom to confirm, yes, this rules, and it’s always an emotional little trip. It’s great getting to do it with the people you made the shit with, so obviously not having that opportunity sucked, but coming back and both messaging each other like “lol, i cried” was a pretty good runner-up. In terms of lows — who cares, honestly. Ups and downs and all that. Can’t make sad music without some lows here and there.
LUNA: It’s so cool that you separated your upcoming EP’s places i’ve lived and places i’ve left into two parts. What gave you the idea to have two releases related to each other in theme?
KAELAN: I suppose it wasn’t so much about having two releases related by theme as much as it was about having a whole bunch of stuff we wanted to say and make and didn’t feel like one release created enough space for it all. There were a lot of little stories and feelings we wanted to share and we found they pretty easily were separated on an equator of whether we were looking back on past experiences with very clearly defined memories and emotions, or looking forward with less clarity and more general anxiety. We both graduated school for the last time mid-pandemic, so on top of the built-in uncertainty of being a twenty-something recent graduate, we had all this extra stuff (let’s not get into it for all of our sakes) to worry about as well. It also meant those memories of past experiences felt even brighter in our minds in comparison to waking up every day locked up in the same house.
LUNA: What is your favorite song that you have created together?
STACY: Kaelan’s gonna laugh, but honestly, there’s this song we made back in 2018 called “Television ’99” that is always, always going to have a soft spot in my heart. Kaelan had written the first half and then sent the second half — the “drop” — as a totally separate thing and I remember being like, “Hey… this could be one song...” and it worked! My first musical moment in the duo where an idea came into reality. Beautiful.
KAELAN: Track one of the EP is called “You Want Everyone To Love You” and man is it just so special to me. We set out to write a one minute or less introductory song to contribute more to the general ambience of the release as a whole than anything else. The song got to a minute long and we were sort of going, “Hmmm, okay, this could probably use another minute, maybe with some vague build up near the end?” Cut to a day later, having added another minute, and the rhetoric sort of evolved into, “Hmmm, okay, this is probably going to be a full song, and it might also be my favorite, and also I know we talked about a vague buildup but what if actually it just sort of blew up and was good and cool.” And we both liked that idea, obviously. We tend to be a really wordy band and this was a cool opportunity to experiment with driving a song forward almost exclusively with production choices.
LUNA: How does your upcoming music compare to your past releases?
KAELAN: It’s definitely our favorite stuff yet. A lot of working together remotely (and also becoming just generally close as people remotely) was figuring out the best systems and strategies for getting it all done. This EP marks the first time I think we can fully and confidently say, yeah ok, this is what Bestfriend sounds like.
LUNA: What are some goals you two have for the future of your music?
KAELAN: Stacy and I have talked a bunch about how fun it would be to score a movie together. We’re both big into the art of the OST and would love to give it a go someday.
STACY: Playing a god damned show!!
LUNA: Is there anything else you want to tell us? This can be about anything!
KAELAN: Yeah, no, definitely. Rats can tread water for up to three days without drowning. They can fall from like 50 feet and be totally cool with it. There are no rats at all, like, at ALL, in Alberta, Canada. They hunted them all in the 1950s and now are all weird about rats. I don’t even like rats or anything.
STACY: Okay.
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