The Songwriter Speaks: BYRH’s Sam Hersey on “Pinkish Clouds”
Words by Bennett Kelly
Indie rock trio BYRH is composed of guitarist/lead singer Sam Hersey, bassist Christian Joyner and drummer Ian Bley. Hersey spoke by phone from Jersey City with Look At My Records! reporter Bennett Kelly about the band’s new single, “Pinkish Clouds,” released March 30, 2022.
This is actually the third published recording of “Pinkish Clouds.” The first was released nine years ago this month, live and acoustic from an open mic at the Alchemist & Barrister in Princeton. Thank You Volcano was a project with my former songwriting partner Ryan Lovelock that we were trying to make happen but never really got going.
“Pinkish Clouds” came about indirectly for us. We had a very short song called “Robert Yuley” that we wanted to add another bridge and chorus too. We were messing around with it on guitar and we figured out where we wanted to put the bridge. And I just went up to a room by myself with the guitar and started playing with different little chord patterns, chord picking progressions that were more lowkey, more subdued than the rest of the song, which was a little heavier. And on the first or second try, I started playing the opening, descending riff. And then I looped that on my laptop and one of the first things I played next was the opening melody. And it just came out in one take and I was like, holy shit this sounds amazing. I went back downstairs and said I think I have something for the bridge.
We played “Robert Yuley” for a little bit with that part in the bridge. Eventually we decided it was too good to just be a little one off thing in that song, and started writing a whole new song around that little melody. The Alchemist & Barrister version is what we developed around it.
For the title, we had to name the file on our computer, and that was the imagery that Ryan said the song made him think of: pinkish clouds, a sunset, so that was it.
The song has changed a lot since then. I was never very happy with the lyrics. I pretty much had placeholder lyrics for five years. The only thing that was really set in stone the whole time was the chorus lyrics, which are just kind of gibberish imagery that make some sense in the context of the song. But the chorus is pretty much a stream of consciousness, just how it felt in the moment. I think we were a little bit drunk when we came up with the chorus, but it was a pretty synergetic thing.
Ryan moved away and I kind of had the song to myself. I would come back to it every now and then and try to write a better verse for it. I just couldn’t let it go. It wasn’t until I started playing with Christian [Joyner] and Aaron [Gollubier, original BYRH drummer], when I added more chords and made the progression more complicated, that the lyrics came. It was basically me reflecting on my experience with love, my inability to commit in relationships and how my love and passion and relationships sort of invariably fades. You know, “Time will pass us by and leave us friends, I don't know why it has to end.” It's not a love song about one person per se, but it's kind of about my experience with love.
Christian and Aaron were living in New Brunswick showhouses at the time and that’s where BYRH was conceived, in that scene. Our first show was in fall 2018. The demo version of “Pinkish Clouds” came out in March 2019. Aaron left the band, and we brought in Tony D’Arcangelo. He drums on this new version, but he’s also since left the band.
The sound of this newest recording is much different than the sound of the original recordings. The song structure is pretty much intact from the 2019 demo, but at a higher tempo, and the drum beats are a lot different. More aggressive and bombastic. That was Tony putting his own spin on it. In the 2019 version we didn't have the stops in the “No, I don’t do well” part, and that was to make it more dynamic, take the listener out of the flow of the song for a second so it's more effective when that next chorus hits.
I guess it's in E, I wanna say. I’m not really sure what the notation would be. The intro and melody is E, E7, A and then G# minor. The verse is E, E7, A, back to E7, but lower on the neck, so that even though the verse progression is similar to the opener, it feels like different chords, then C# minor, E7, A, G# minor, A. And then the chorus is A, G# minor, F# minor, A minor. I’m sure there's a way to analyze it in terms of key and music theory, but I haven't ever really needed to do that. I don’t really write songs in a key, just try to figure out what chords sound good together.
We recorded at Mt. Moon in Highland Park with owner/head engineer Justin Calaycay. We took all the things that I did for the demos, all the delay, the feedback, the swooshing and stuff, and we tried to recreate what we could with his higher quality equipment. There was a lot of experimenting with delay, splicing up audio files, rearranging them and processing them so that they made weird sounds, and some other feedback stuff with Justin’s delay pedals.
We used a Mel9 pedal over the “It’s a new moon, don’t wanna talk about it” outro. The Mel9 is like a Mellotron simulator that the Beatles had for “Strawberry Fields Forever.” It’s a guitar pedal, and we had it on the saxophone impersonation, so it's basically modeling a Mellotron sax sound. And then Justin actually played saxophone himself over that. So I was playing the chords through that pedal and it was doing the Mellotron sax sound, and Justin recorded a real saxophone on top of it too to give it more depth. Make it extra saxy.
When we play live, we usually play the first half of our set in open D tuning and the second half in standard tuning starting with “Henry” and then “Pinkish Clouds.” If a set is going rough a little bit, that will usually turn it around because those are two of our catchier songs. And we also play them the best of any of our songs. They’re two of the oldest that we have, so they're very well-practiced. It makes for a familiar home base in the center of the set. They're probably my two favorites as well. They get me going a little bit, so it has that kind of triple action of turning the tide.
Ian [Bley] has pretty much split the difference between Tony and Aaron. He’s got a simpler drumming style like Aaron did but he still plays Tony's parts, and he’s still inclined to play at a higher tempo like Tony did. He’s simplified some of Tony’s parts, but for the most part, he's playing what Tony played on the record with his own feel to it.
Right now we are working on a backing track for all of that swooshing stuff. We're going to add it into the live show soon, but it's a little complicated so we've just been leaving it out for now.
“Pinkish Clouds” is probably the song that I’m most proud of that I've written. I never really gave up on it over the course of five, six years. I kept coming back to it and I finally feel like it's reached its full potential. Which not a lot of songs do. You have to compromise on stuff, and I feel like I never had to compromise on it.
But it’s also hard to have perspective on these songs after you’ve heard them all five thousand times. The album is coming out in the summer, and we’re getting back to recording new stuff soon. We have other good songs that deserve to be born, so to speak.
Lyrics:
Time will pass us by and leave us friends
I don't know why it has to end
Or be resigned that the feeling left
I don't know why
Then it overflows my feelings dulled and overgrown
They bloom up out of tangled weeds
I forgot about the things I need
The things I need
[Chorus]
It's a space age station waterfall
I can teach you teach you how to fly
It's a space age station waterfall
I can reach you reach you in the night
Then I bid farewell and give my chance to someone else
And I don't know what it is I need
And I don't know how it is I feel
No, I don't do well, I just do fine
And that's ok, so nevermind
I don’t do well, and that's just fine
And that's ok, so nevermind
[Chorus]
It's a space age station waterfall
I can teach you teach you how to fly
It's a space age station waterfall
I can teach you teach you how to die…
It’s hard to talk about it
It's a new moon
I can't sleep without it
Talk about, talk about it…
I can talk about, talk about it…
Stream “Pinkish Clouds” below!
You can purchase “Pinkish Clouds” via Bandcamp. You can also stream it on your platform of choice. Keep up with all things Byrh by following them on Instagram.
