Spring member D’Arcy Briggs sat down with musician Eevie Echoes for a wide-ranging interview covering her new album (The Pros and Cons of Being a Wallflower), the Brooklyn music scene, coming out, class war, and mental health under capitalism.
The Cons of Being a Wallflower is out on January 10th, 2024 on Ska Punk International. The album can be ordered on 12” vinyl here, or digitally through Bandcamp. You can find all social links for Eevie Echoes here.
Hi Eevie, thank you so much for speaking with me today. First off, can you please introduce yourself?
Hey D’Arcy! Thanks for inviting me. I really appreciate it. My name is Eevie, I perform under the stage name Eevie Echoes, I’m an afro-Latina trans woman, native New Yorker and punk musician. I’m also the frontwoman of the band Eevie Echoes & The Locations.
What are some of your musical inspirations that both come out in your live shows and recordings, as well as others that influenced you as a music fan and person?
It would be virtually impossible for me to mention my music career without mentioning Against Me! at least once, so I’ll say that Laura Jane Grace and her band Against Me! is a huge musical inspiration of mine. I think it’s very clear in some of my vocal stylings and lyricism that I take a lot of inspiration from them. They have a way of using narrative storytelling to get really important messages across and being very visceral about emotion and the human experience in their songs and that influences me a lot especially as someone who spent a lot of her creative life as a writer and poet.
I also used to be a pretty huge Twenty One Pilots fan growing up and I think something about the way that they put sad songs to really upbeat melodies, their cryptic song promotions, and the way they know how to build an immersive world around their music really captivates me. They also put on a very high energy show and that inspires me a lot. Audience involvement is really important to me for live shows and I think a good part of that comes from them. I also take a lot of musical influences from being kind of a Hot Topic pop-punk, emo kid. Pierce The Veil, Fall Out Boy, Green Day, Linkin Park, and MCR are a few bands that come to mind.
Political rock was also huge for me. I think when I heard Rage Against The Machine for the first time it kinda blew me away in the best way possible. Tom Morello is my guitar hero. I love how art and music especially can be a very powerful vessel to speak truth to power and can be another person’s window into your life and into some of the most vulnerable parts of yourself. That fascinates me and it’s something I try to capture in my music.
You started to perform in Brooklyn in 2021. What was your scene like and how did it feel to join?
One thing I can say about the Brooklyn scene is that I have always felt loved and supported at every single step of the way. I started playing live music at Cuckoos Open Mic (shoutout to Jackson Sturkey) and there was a love in that room that can’t really be explained. That open mic and the people I performed with there will always be very close to my heart because the room was always just brimming with young creatives who just performed for the love of performing and cared so deeply about sharing art with one another. Having such a loving and accepting space to start playing music in, especially fresh out of quarantine, freshly out as trans and still very new to playing guitar, was life changing for me.
I made a lot of connections at that open mic, performed as the featured act a few times, and kind of segue’d my way into the scene by performing for Dave’s Lesbian Bar as like my first big show. Things kind of snowballed from there but I have always felt love from the scene for the music I make and for the person I am. When I didn’t feel accepted by my family for being queer, I knew the music scene would accept me and I think knowing that I had fostered this beautiful connection with other artists, a lot of whom are also queer, really early on set me up for success in a way.
What is your song writing process? Do lyrics come first, or do you have a melody or a broader emotion or theme?
Songwriting is a bit of a mixed bag. I’m very in my head a lot of the time and sometimes it’s because of anxiety and sometimes it’s because a song idea just hit me. Honestly, it’s probably undiagnosed ADHD. I will sometimes just write random lines or a phrase that stuck out at me in my notes app and revisit it later.
Sometimes I get a melody in my head so I hum it out into my audio recorder app. Other times, like in the case with “Growing Pains” off the record, a full song will just play in my head, mixed perfectly, fully formed. It’s very sporadic for me. I usually find that when I’m taking a subway ride, randomly during my daily commute my brain starts wandering and I get inspired a lot during my commute because there’s not much to focus on.
What was it like to go from a solo performer to forming a band?
It’s tough. Like genuinely I feel like people don’t talk enough about it. It takes a lot of guts to create what feels like this perfect little baby and then give it to other people to interpret and manipulate it in their own ways. But ultimately it makes something way more beautiful in the end. One feeling I had to fight a lot with when I first started working with other musicians was this feeling of perfectionism. I had to fight my instinct to be really scrutinous like “you’re doing it wrong” and I think that issue came up a lot more in a two piece indie band I was in with my former bassist and good friend Jon pre-Eevie Echoes. I had to learn to be flexible and not to be so unyielding because part of what makes music so beautiful and what makes collaboration so beautiful is the interpretation and adding different flairs to a song. That perfectionism is something that I think has morphed itself into more of an imposter syndrome as of late but I recognize that I have high standards for who I work with creatively.
My music is very personal and I almost always have a very clear cut idea of how I imagine a song so I only work with musicians that I trust implicitly. It’s hard to win my creative trust but I think that because I have a good working relationship and a good friendship with my bandmates that it’s much easier for me to soften up. Working with my bandmates for almost 4 years together now, I trust them to do what feels right and I tell them that I trust their creative instincts and that if what they want to add serves the song then go for it.
And with the album now out – how does it feel to see something go from an idea in your head to something people can hold in their hands?
It is fucking surreal. I’ve been playing some of these songs live for almost 4 years now with my band and I’ve watched how our live performances have slowly changed and evolved these songs. It was a very slow cooking process. Like if you go all the way back to the first show we ever played as Eevie Echoes & The Locations, there’s a very early version of Letters that we played for that show. This album feels like a capsule of the work we’ve put in for the last four years. I’ve been talking about this thing for a while.
The record is something that I am extremely proud of and that’s hard for me to say because I have low self-esteem but it is incredible to hear fully realised versions of songs that have only ever lived in my head and on stage for the longest time. Just thinking that it will be a tangible thing is still very hard for me to wrap my head around. I think when I touch (and maybe bite) the test pressing and then the final pressing of the vinyl that it might fully hit me but right now I’m still kind of in shock that the album is real.
The album certainly focuses on the personal, but heavily relatable to so many of us out there. Did you have a hard time putting out such personal lyrics? There’s a large sense of catharsis and healing?
Writing from a personal place has always been very easy for me. I am a very physical person. It’s what we call in psychology, somatization of feelings which is a fancy word for physically feeling your emotions. I’ve always found that writing and creating something has always been a very cathartic way for me to cope with things I feel and so actually writing things that are personal isn’t difficult for me. Putting them to songs and then performing them and recording them and sharing them with the world is the hardest part for me because I’m lifting the veil and I’m giving the world this very personal part of myself.
It’s scary as hell but I have heard from a lot of people that the songs I write resonate with them and that’s the highest form of compliment for me. Knowing that my songs provide a semblance of comfort for someone means the world to me because that’s what the artists I admire have done for me. I will say that the process of recording this album was deeply emotional for me. I cried multiple times in the studio because singing those lyrics was kind of like revisiting the feeling I had when I wrote them.
I remember when we tracked the really intense vocal part at the end of “Letters,” I fully broke down in tears after the take that’s on the album and the band came and gave me a huge hug. It was a really sweet moment and that was a huge release for me because I was speaking directly from the heart there.
Many of the tracks cover topics of parental relationships, religions and family trauma, manipulative people, anger, and anxiety. Why do you feel it’s important to cover these topics?
It’s important to me to cover those topics because it’s just fucking real. That’s all stuff that I’ve been through firsthand and it’s my way of saying, “Hey this situation is fucked up and I’m going to tell you all about it.” I’m not a very confrontational person in real life. I’m actually scared of conflict to be completely honest, but since I generally keep things bottled up I release those feelings in my music. If something pisses me off you can bet that I’m going to write a song about it. I also think it’s important for people to hear about those parts of life and specifically for folks who are like me to be hit with a dose of reality.
Coming out kinda fucking sucks sometimes. Being out and proud is not easy. It comes with a lot of stress and pain and you’re going to latch on to people and things that are not healthy for you sometimes. As a queer person and as a Black person, you have to learn to grow a thick skin to survive in this world. I think levelling with people about the real possibilities of a situation is really in a way doing them a service. I don’t want queer people to have to suffer more pain because they weren’t prepared for their world to change when they came out. It’s a deep cut to face rejection from the people who say they love you but it’s salt in the wound when it completely blindsides you.
The truth is, things are hard sometimes and I think that being able to prepare yourself for that possibility is so important for managing your expectations and to help you find true, loving people, who can help weather the storm if it comes.
You’re pretty upfront about the intersectionality of both resistance and oppression, from capitalism to transphobia as well as the often deliberate attack on mental wellness. What are your thoughts on this link?
We exist within the confines of a society that prioritises power, money and material above everything else. I think everything boils down to power: who’s in power? What commodities do they have at their disposal? Who shapes the status quo? Ultimately the way that our society has been structured for us puts the laypeople (those who are not the top 1%, and not cis straight white males) at an inherent disadvantage because the powerful will always serve and remain loyal to the powerful.
But, those in power are not stupid. They know that class consciousness and camaraderie is the enemy to their entire empire and so they embroil us in anything we can possibly be distracted with so that the idea of fighting back, taking their power away from them, and reshaping our society to be more equitable feels too vague to be feasible and we’re all too tired to care. They poison us with alcohol and drugs, they beat us down with low paying jobs, bleed us dry to the point that a lot of us end up haemorrhaging money that we don’t have, force us to take out loans to pursue higher education because it’s the only way to get a job that can pay rent and put food on the table.
They spark these culture wars that have everybody at everybody’s throats and that introduces an entirely new form of oppression. Class war becomes so low on the priority list because we’re too busy worrying about our fellow person trying to fuck us over so that they can get a buck extra out of us. Greed and power is a plague and it only births more forms of oppression and deludes people into thinking that they can just “work hard enough” they can stop having to struggle. All of this impacts mental wellness. Just on the most basic level, people can’t afford a therapist and the therapists that are working clinicians are inundated with patients. Forget mental health even, a lot of people can’t afford to go to the doctor. People can’t afford to live.
Our most basic needs cannot be met without immense sacrifice in a capitalist world. Working class people don’t get time to enjoy our lives the way that we want to because we are all ultimately occupied with trying to provide our own basic needs.
What is your favourite track on the album and why?
My favourite is constantly changing but I think ‘Apathy’ has to be the one for me. I wrote that one loosely based off of a couple Sir Chloe songs that were stuck in my head (and it references their songs Mercy and Company). ‘Apathy’ also has the Creep chord progression which sneaks its way into my work a lot unintentionally. ‘Apathy’ gets me really emotional, especially live. It talks about this feeling of anger that’s just below the surface and it’s masked by this air of disillusionment or detachment but as the song goes on that facade starts to fade and you can feel the tension build as the song goes on until it fully explodes at the end. Also in the second chorus when the lead line comes in it gives me chills every time. Finally, just a genius production choice on Reade Wolcott’s part (shoutout We Are The Union, love y’all), the main riff switches from right to left ear from beginning to the end and I think it signifies an important emotional shift that was felt through the course of the song.
What has it been like to join the Ska Punk International family?
It’s been awesome. I love working with Chris and I think he does a great job of taking artists that have something special and just giving them all the right tools to really get somewhere. I saw what he did with Common Sense Kid and it blew me away. Craig was an artist that had really just started getting his feet wet with music when he joined SPI but he has this super special sound that’s really exciting and I saw how Chris and the SPI team were able to build this budding artist into a really well established musician now.
I especially want to give a huge thank you to Michi who’s been absolutely on it in terms of PR. I don’t know how any of this shit works I just make music and yell at people, so it is really awesome to have the support of a team who knows how to work with artists that are not immersed in the business side of things and build up artists that maybe don’t have as big of a following as they could have.
What are your future plans? Any upcoming tour dates or other plans?
Right now I want to ride the high of this album and keep making more music. Collabs are kind of my jam these days so I’m always looking for ways to get in touch with artists that I admire so we can put our brains together and make cool songs. No tour in the works right now but I’m slated to play Stoopfest with my band and SPI Fest (which probably hasn’t been announced yet so sorry if I did a spoiler). We also have an album release show coming up hopefully at the end of January. Details on that are still in the works but you can follow the band on socials to stay updated. We’re @eevieechoes on all platforms.
What are the bands or artists that we should all be checking out right now? Any home-scene heroes? What venues or restaurants do we need to check out?
Gotta shout out my scene homies and some of the heaviest hitters in Brooklyn right now, Crush Fund, Ok Cuddle, Pop Music Fever Dream, Qirl, Spare Feelings, The Bum Babies, Winter Wolf, Frida Kill, Desert Sharks and The Lonliers. Also I have to send love to Themme, Hurricane Holly and Willy Mao who are all buds of mine that I love dearly. The hottest spots to hit right now are Purgatory, Bar Freda and Hart Bar. Wonderville is also a sweet place to gig and TV Eye is dope. If you want good food you have to hit Crifdogs in the LES and honestly support your local Mexican food truck or halal cart. There’s one Mexican food truck a couple blocks left of The Broadway with one of the best burritos I’ve had in my entire life.
This final question, possibly the most important, originally comes from Cookie Hagendorf: It’s 2 am. You’ve just finished attending or playing a show and you’re in whatever state that might find you in. Nothing is open except the local corner store. You need to get something salty, something sweet, and a drink. What do you get?
Easy. My go to bodega order after a gig is a cream cheese and bacon on a roll, Green Tea Arizona and a Baby Ruth bar or a Kit Kat.
The Cons of Being a Wallflower is out on January 10th, 2024 on Ska Punk International. The album can be ordered on 12” vinyl here, or digitally through Bandcamp. You can find all social links for Eevie Echoes here.
Author
Did you like this article? Help us produce more like it by donating $1, $2, or $5. Donate