Wisconsin’s Telethon released their latest album, Hard Pop, on June 21 via Take This To Heart Records. Vocalist, guitarist, and lyricist Kevin Tully opened up about the power-pop-punk quintet’s evolution, Hard Pop’s introspective lyrics, their compositional approach, and more.
With this record, you’ve had a new release every year since 2015. How do you maintain that sort of work ethic?
I think the best explanation is that we get super antsy super easily—that and we really, really love writing songs. After a record gets made, like totally finished—tracked, mixed, mastered, everything—there’s usually a couple month period where you just have to wait for it to be released. In those times of waiting, we’re still coming up with new ideas, new melodies, new parts and showing them to each other. Those ideas eventually turn into songs—a process we’ve gotten pretty down pat after being a band for almost five years. So, what happens is that by the time the album we just made actually comes out, we already have a handful of song skeletons for the next album. The pace that we make music at is my favorite thing about being in this band, for sure. It’s what I’ve truly always wanted from a band, and we have so much fun doing it.
What’s changed for you since [2018’s] Modern Abrasive?
Well, we tracked Modern Abrasive completely by ourselves in our band house [and] home studio in Milwaukee, whereas we made Hard Pop in Oakland, California, with our good pal [and Grammy nominee] Jack Shirley. That alone changes the entire vibe, because it makes it so all we have to do is set up in a room and play the songs. Someone else, someone who knows exactly WTF they’re doing, is on the controls, and we can simply worry about the musical side of things. Don’t get me wrong, finally being able to make a record all on our own out of the comfort of our practice space is unbelievably convenient, but there is something to be said about going somewhere far away specifically to create something, in a set amount of time, for a set amount of money, with a working pro who has opinions and expertise completely outside the band. It makes for a wholly different experience for making a record.
This record deals a lot with mental health. What made you want to look inward and open up about that?
With a few exceptions, Telethon songs have always been from the perspective of a person who isn’t specifically me, no matter how similar they may be. This new album was originally going to be a concept album from the perspective of a character—actually, a person way different from me—trying to solve some suspicious deaths in a small town, but as time went on and the amount of time we had before we’d booked studio time kept getting smaller and smaller, I was not making much progress writing lyrics, and certainly not much progress I was happy with. So, just as a thought experiment to get me outside of my head, I decided to take the song structure of the first song on the album and rewrite it in a completely stream-of-consciousness way from my own perspective, and the lyrics just started pouring out of me. So, I tried it with another song, then another, and before I knew it, the album was half rewritten. This was, by far, the most natural Telethon album to write and doubled as being the most cathartic for me.
How has dealing with those struggles impacted you and your songs?
Since the first record, [2015’s] Witness, I’ve always written about mental hoops we jump through on the day-to-day. That feels to me like a fountain that will never go dry. Maybe more accurately, I really don’t know how to write songs about anything else. But it’s nice, because any moment of any day of any way of any year, no matter how mundane, can become a Telethon song. And like I said before, putting words to the stuff that happens when I’m on the train or checking my email or walking the dog has become a super cathartic and helpful thing for me. I can look back on any line from almost any Telethon song and remember where I was when I wrote it, what thing in my life inspired or informed it, etc., so it’s almost like a weird diary of sorts.
Your previous work, specifically [2017’s] The Grand Spontanean, was written about fictional characters. How did it feel working on songs that were more biographical?
I’ve already talked to this point a bit—oops—but A) no matter who the fictional characters in our songs have been, they’ve always had some pretty obvious lineage back to my brain. No matter what. It’s unavoidable. I use [and] used characters to think through things in exaggerated ways, like “caricature” versions of the aspects of my own personality. B) To be able to completely ditch concept and just write whatever comes to mind, figuring out the narrative from line-to-line without worry about any higher level or big picture, is an amazing feeling. I think, eventually, we’ll get back to writing conceptually, but for now, the more biographical stuff is feeling super comfy and nice.
How do you strike a balance between the fun pop elements of the music and the intensity of opening up about mental health lyrically?
That’s just how Telethon makes music. We love pop and good hooks and have a lot of fun while playing music, and it just comes through. I think, no matter how hard we try to make a total bummer of a song, people will always say it feels fun or sunny or energetic or whatever.
I should also say that writing lyrics has never been an overtly, intensely sad experience for me. I usually write stuff at least a few days after shit has hit the fan, so they’ve got the benefit of hindsight and hopefully some humor. One of the songs on Hard Pop did make me cry the first time I heard it on the album, all strung all together; I had written it super-duper fast, and I guess I hadn’t realized how much emotional baggage was being stored in it. I was listening to the first mixes of the album, and bam! It really did me in. Full-on waterworks on a hotel couch.
The composition of everything on the album, musically, is insanely impressive. What goes through your mind as you’re putting together a song instrumentally?
I think it’s a combination of each band member knowing their instrument pretty well and also the fact that we’ve known each other and have played music together—not just in Telethon but in high school and college bands—for, like, 10 to 20 years. We’ve got a really nice, familiar shorthand with one another and know the type of sound that’s going to come out of each other’s instruments. Jack [Sibilski], our lead guitarist, is also really freakishly good at arranging songs, and I think we all have gotten pretty skilled at it as we’ve gone along too.
It’s also worth noting that our producer [and] engineer Jack Shirley helps a ton by dialing in exactly the sound we are shooting for on a given song, and our collaborator Peter Hess—who did all the strings, winds, horns, etc. on the album—is a pro and a genius who can just write beautiful orchestral arrangements around our noisy rock ’n’ roll without us having to do much of anything besides crassly, abstractly describe what we wanted it to sound like.
