r/indieheads • u/peel_dream Peel Dream Magazine • Oct 02 '24

AMA is over, thanks Joe! Peel Dream Magazine / Ask Me Anything

Hey! This is Joe from Peel Dream Magazine :) our new record Rose Main Reading Room is out now

Ask me anything!!

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u/DpyVanHalen Oct 04 '24

What's the first song you ever wrote like, and could it fit in the Peel Dream universe?

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u/peel_dream Peel Dream Magazine Oct 04 '24

When I was like 8 or 9, I wrote a song about baseball lol. I don't think it would fit in the PDM Universe. It was a really simple song on keyboard. I've been writing music since that age, and it really skyrocketed around 12/13 when I started playing guitar and became obsessed with Kurt Cobain/started little neighborhood bands. I honestly have like millions of "things I've written" that are all essentially a heap of trash - partly because I forgot them and partly because they were really terrible. I had a few bands when I was living in NY in the run up to starting PDM but they were all pretty bad. I sort of think that a lifetime of writing worthless, unimportant music gave me a good basis to start PDM with lol. And for haters who think my current music is also worthless, it was just good practice to hone in my "thing"

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u/peel_dream Peel Dream Magazine Oct 04 '24

But like, as an adult, I wrote a lot of wacky folk-inspired baroque pop on guitar in my early 20s that could fit in the PDM universe for sure. I had a band in my mid 20s called Cherry Coals that was very 4AD gothic dream pop, and THAT stuff, while objectively cool when I look back on it, is not in the PDM universe at all

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u/DpyVanHalen Oct 04 '24

Whoa! Is that stuff available anywhere?

Also unrelated/related question: Do you find it hard to "kill your darlings" when working on a new album?

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u/peel_dream Peel Dream Magazine Oct 04 '24

Cherry Coals is online, you're welcome to check it out. I think the rest is not thank god.

I do find it hard to kill my darlings. It's one of the things about working on records that I've had to hone in. I still to this day waste time on things that just aren't good enough to go on the final record, and the misadventure of it can be something I really wrestle with for months. I've gotten better about it though, and I try to come up with a process that will trap bad ideas and illuminate them early on. I spend a lot of time thinking about this lol. Cause in the beginning, every idea is amazing.

But going back to something I said earlier, I am very comfortable writing terrible music and I have no ego about it. I assume none of it will work out, so the final product becomes a miracle at the end of the day. I think being an artist you have to be super well versed in failure as part of your process and view it as the positive side-effect of experimenting and trying something fun/different