Q&A: Feats of Time With Chalk Talk’s New Album ‘Sun Lies Heavy’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY SKYE SCHOENHOEFT ☆
Photo by Alejandra Sol Casas
CHALK TALK’S NEW ALBUM — reaches out through the dread of time to sing to you a memory. Built across streams of voice memos and phone calls, their work is a lyrical fairytale about growing up and finding meaning. Musicians Nina Tartibi, Sophia Rose, Katie Pruden, and Stella Singer started Chalk Talk in early highschool, and the band has withstood distance and years to release their second album, Sun Lies Heavy July 11. Packed with whimsy, the album’s tender tones are sewn together by synth, pedal steel, and storybook reminiscences.
The band members’ zoom screens pop up from pinpoints across the country: NYC, San Diego, Oakland, and Arkansas. The girls are used to this dynamic, working stretched across digital space, and never miss a beat to build off of each other’s thoughts. We asked them about their process, their influences, and their journey to make this album.
LUNA: How did Chalk Talk start?
FIA: Nina and I met at School of Rock, both leaving at the same time in eighth grade. Afterwards, we decided to jam. We ended up making a bunch of songs, then we were like, oh, we should record these. Nina said, there's this girl in my class that plays classical piano, maybe she'll play keyboard for us. We played a few small shows, like Prom.
[Katie jumps in for a correction].
KATIE: It was formal.
FIA: Two weeks before we recorded, we raised all of the money by throwing a show at Nina's parents’ house that ended up getting way too big. I met Katie at that show.
LUNA: How old were you when this was happening?
NINA: Fia and I started Chalk Talk when we were 15. For the first year and a half we were a fake band messing around with Fia’s guitar, just the two of us. We tried to make a music video in the sewer tunnel by Fia’s. Super 2017 vibes. I met Stella in my creative writing class in 2018. I also met Katie around that time because we went to high school together. So everybody was in the band by April 2019, were all around 16-17.
LUNA: How do you guys approach making your music? How was the making of this album different from the last album?
FIA: The last album was called Sometimes I Call You because we were all over the country and we were calling each other to send demos and stuff.
NINA: It was started in the pandemic, so it was all long distance. Stella was still in high school for another year, and Fia, Katie and I graduated and moved away. The album ended up taking two years to make. It was kind of an unintentional album because we just had all these songs we were recording every once in a while. Katie and I even wrote a song over FaceTime one time. It was really cool to see how different it was with Sun Lies Heavy. Almost everything was written last summer. We have all graduated from college at this point. It was a lot more collaborative this time around just because we weren’t so far apart. Our producer Austin moved up to L.A., where Fia and I are based. Everybody is singing on this album, even Stella has the little whistles in the interlude.
[Stella nods in agreement].
NINA: It feels like a very collaborative, thematic, string of songs.
FIA: We were trying to create cohesiveness for this album. The ability to have the studio setup for three or four days made us realize new opportunities. We have pedal steel on this song; let's put it on this song too.
NINA: There's definitely some instrumental alongside thematic and lyrical motifs. The glockenspiel is in this part, and then the piano does that same riff on a different song.
KATIE: What was different with this album was we actually came into the studio with songs that we felt a lot less certain of, arriving with just the bones. With Sometimes I Call You we would have two days for spring break to make the song. Consequently, we had to have already written a lot of it. That's why a lot of why it feels like an album of singles, compared to our new album.
STELLA: There was a lot of experimentation in the studio. We have some stuff on there that I don't think we would have come up with beforehand. We used a Casio SK-1, a little sampling thing, that ended up being on a bunch of songs.
FIA: And you guys walked in that one day and Austin was like, I need you to come try this. And I'm under the piano with sticks trying to hit this certain metal bar. It was so weird, but it was just a fun, totally experimental situation.
NINA: Austin was renting his friend's studio in Hollywood before he built his home studio. That was a tiny room. So for a lot of my vocals, I'm literally standing like four inches behind the band. But because it was really intimate, it encouraged a lot of experimentation. Like, we don't have the best acoustics in this room. How do we combat that?
FIA: One of my favorite moments was when we recorded “007,” Nina and I were both right up next to a double mic. We both have our own guitars and are both singing the same lyrics. I remember trying not to look at you because I didn't want to laugh.
NINA: Intimate.
LUNA: How do you guys think you grew as artists and musicians over the course of making this album?
STELLA: Starting in this band I mostly played classical piano. Over the course of being in the band, I've been gaining confidence with different instruments and different types of synthesizers. On “Sword,” I recorded something that was eventually performed on the cello, which was really cool to write a part that a different instrument ended up playing.
NINA: Stella was able to bring in a lot of her classical roots into a lot of the songs. There's a lot of classical piano in “By the Brick” and “Sword Lies Heavy.” It was fun to see where our inspirations come from and how that has bled into our own sound. I've been proud of everything we've put out, but this feels like something that we did with intention. We each brought our own inspiration and were able to execute it with stuff that I don't think any of us saw coming. It definitely gave us all the confidence to know that we can trust our taste, trust our vision and our experimentation will lead to something cool. It's all part of the process.
KATIE: There were so many new sounds in this album that really opened my eyes to a lot of things. Having somebody play saxophone or flute or strings, Tommy who plays pedal steel for us, it was really fun having other people coming in and out of the studio. The four of us have been working together since we were 16, so it was cool to have this third perspective of different musicians coming in.
FIA: This album feels like the first of our adult lives. Before, it felt like a teenager’s project, but with this album it became our job and our passion.
LUNA: Did any emotional themes arise while you were making this album?
FIA: Katie and I had a water inspiration for different metaphors for love interest in things that were happening in our lives. There are all these water references and, weirdly like, construction themes. We never expected that, but realized when we looked back at the tracks.
NINA: Dam. Brick. River. Clocks.
NINA: We all graduated in the past year. There’s this feeling of being lost or like you're running out of time, but then you also have all the time in the world. The people that I've played this album for have all given a consensus that it feels like it's floating. I didn't plan for this in my writing, but this is sonically complemented. Katie and Fia, you guys too talking about water, I think of the flowy-ness of time and experiences is what came up. Feeling lost, feeling like you're floating but it'll eventually get to something, whether that's love or a job or the future, that's so vast. That’s what we ended up capturing, which is really special because I think this is such an intense, emotional period of time for everybody. This is how we decided to take a snapshot of it.
KATIE: I also want to say, I'm in my bed right now.
[Katie turns the camera around to show us her room].
KATIE: All of the songs that I make, I sit right here in between my weird little clothing rack in my bed. That has something to do with the writing process too. Usually the lyrics come after an improvisational start. The whole water imagery is the antithesis to being in my tiny little confined room in New York. The music came out of the opposite feeling of being stuck. All of us in these little spaces have something to do with what naturally comes out of the sound in our lyrics.
STELLA: Yeah, there's an element of fantastical storytelling. Everything's coming from a true emotional place, but like Katie was saying, you're in your small room writing about this river or a dam or something, and it feels like a storybook. “Sword” is like the most blatant example of that. When I was writing the lyrics for that, I was writing a lot of creative fictional stories for a class so I pulled from there. I see that in the other songs too, where we're in these places imagining an alternate reality.
NINA: I want to add something about “Sword.” Stella texted me one night. She said, “I wrote these lyrics for this song. Can you put a melody and guitar over it?” Then we started texting in a shared notes app and I just kept seeing more lyrics appear, and then I would move them around. They just kept appearing into the night. It was really funny.
LUNA: Do you guys each have a favorite song off the album?
KATIE: It ended up being “Sword Lies Heavy.” I couldn't be present for a lot of the process just because I live on the other side of the country. Because I wasn't around, I had a hard time envisioning what it was going to do. It was the song I was most wary of. Watching it being created and the process in the studio completely changed that. Seeing Nina take vocal take after vocal take made me love the song because of how much work we put into it. It's just such a ballad. It has such vivid imagery that it also really requires you to actively listen. Putting it as the last song on the album is very telling of how we feel about it and the purpose it serves.
STELLA: I second that. I had the two intro lines to that song stuck in my head when we were on tour last year. We were in Boston in this hotel room, and I wrote down what ended up being the first verse. Then, like Nina was saying, we were going back and forth doing this notes app Tetris with the lyrics. It's really cool to see it come in this full circle, having had the seed of the idea for the song while we were on tour all together. It's come around one year later, recorded and done, and it feels really special to have so much energy put into it and all the different instruments that are on it. There are lots of layers: different vocals, we ended up putting some field recordings on it. It feels very personal.
NINA: I also third that. I have two answers, but “Sword Lies Heavy" tangent first. Something that was really special to me about this album—and particularly that song—is my acoustic guitar that I used. It was my first guitar gifted to me when I was about ten, after I told my parents I wanted to learn. Guitar players are gonna hate me all around the world for this, but I've never changed the strings. And so after what, like, 13 years? They sound really bad and really muted. But I recorded the first demo of “Swords Lies Heavy” at 1:00 am really quietly into my voice memos with my guitar while I was home in San Diego when my family was asleep. Then Austin really liked that guitar sound. So I got to bring that guitar with me to record it in a big studio. This guitar that has been with me since I was a child, my first real gateway into playing music, is making music on this album. But then, actually, the last guitar string broke. So it's the end of an era. The song was just such a feat of time.
NINA: My other answer was "Time Again.” When I sent the voice memo of the first half, it was either Katie or Stella sent a photo of them with a tear rolling down their face. And it was just really funny because I was like, whoa. I was just improvising, feeling a little bit like #heartbroken for, um, no reason.
KATIE: Nina is the ultimate legend of sad bangers. She'll send us some gut wrenching little recordings from her voice memos. And we're like, God damn it.
NINA: I didn't expect the reaction from my band mates, and I think that made it all the more special to me, to be honest. I felt really proud of it lyrically and sonically.
FIA: I have three answers. One of them is “Time Again,” I just remember leaving the studio just feeling so confident and so excited for this chapter. I also think that “Sword Lies Heavy” is a great representation of the album in full; it came out exactly how we were envisioning. And my third one was one that really scared me. “Little Maumelle.” It was a song that I ended up singing on. That wasn't the intention, but I had such a vision for it. I wanted Nina to sing on it, and we went back and forth and back and forth on it, but the lyrics were tying into so many different, deep things in my life. For some reason it just sonically and vibe wise fit my scratch vocals. I was never a singer before this. So it was a terrifying feat that ended up coming to fruition.
KATIE: Also, like two minutes before Fia was supposed to go into the booth and sing, she was like [whispers] “Can you do it?” I said no. I'm glad you did it.
FIA: I did not expect that to go the way it did, but I like it.
Photo by Alejandra Sol Casas
NINA: Also on the train of “Little Maumelle.” That was my favorite recording moment. It was the last thing we recorded; it took like one or two hours to do the scratch. And then Austin was like, oh, we'll develop this later, like in L.A. or whatever, because the studio was in San Diego. When we came back to it, it was just the four of us girls. I mean, and Austin, but like—
Katie comments in the zoom chat “Austin is one of the girls.”
NINA: —it just felt like we were playing it live with Fia singing and playing guitar in the isolation booth. Katie was playing bass in the control room with me on the little sampler Casio. And Stella was playing the grand piano. It just was really special.
FIA: Can I tell the story?
NINA: Yeah. You can. Before though, I just want to say it just felt like, “Okay, like these are the girls, we're recording this, we've been doing this forever, and, look how far we've come.” I loved that. But, yeah, tell the story, Fia.
FIA: My partner and I were having a conversation about how people way back when would travel down rivers to meet each other. Hypothetically: what two rivers brought us together? This whole song is two rivers colliding. It's just a sweet song that ended up being so fun to record. And I didn't expect it to be that intimate with me singing too.
LUNA: Were there any unexpected roadblocks to getting this made?
STELLA: Money.
[Everyone laughs]
FIA: One roadblock that we did have was we were playing too much with the sampler synth that Austin has. We would just like to waste so much time making “yo mama” jokes and sampling “bruh.”
NINA: The main roadblock is that we're not based in the same place. We're goofy and we're unbased.
LUNA: What are you guys most looking forward to with the album's release?
NINA: Uh, blowing up and acting like we don't know nobody.
FIA: That's the full answer from all of us. You can say “from all.”
STELLA: I'm excited to hang out with you guys on tour.
KATIE: Yeah hanging out. That’s what we’re most excited about.
FIA: Maybe getting a new tattoo to symbolize this album. We all got matching tattoos for our last one.
The girls all immediately lift their arms in sync to show me the outlined symbol of a star.
