Media Musings #8 — Madam West
"It's about giving you more than just a body in a room, walking into the bathroom or going outside to smoke a cigarette at the moment you get off stage."
(Photo by Justin Joffe)
Each week, I’ve shared a conversation about art, media and/or existence I’ve had with an artist I deeply admire. As the main newsletter moves to a biweekly publishing schedule, “Media Musings” may follow suit. But for now, we soldier on.
I first met Sophie Chernin, a singer/songwriter and front-person of New York’s psych-soul-pop group Madam West, when we worked together at legacy communications trade publication PRNEWS. It’s nerve wracking when you work with somebody and find out they are in a band. There’s always this ‘here we go again!’ moment, as Sophie laughingly describes it, when you pray you actually enjoy their tunes because you don’t want to have to lie to them every day and feign interest.
Thankfully, Sophie's music with Madam West — a band that describes themselves as ‘Joni Mitchell fronts Yo La Tengo after they've taken too much adderall’ — is absolutely joyful to listen to. Together with her now husband Todd Martino on keys, Mike McDearmon on drums, Jory Dawidowicz on bass, and Will Clark on guitar, Sophie floats above the music with a deceptively demure lilt, often modulating and twisting her vocals onstage with pedals and loopers that echo off into astral realms.
On the heels of two recently-released singles, “In Color” and “February Goat,” I caught up with Sophie to learn more about how Madam West has acclimated to making music in limbo, how to separate egos and feedback when making music with your partner, navigating the balance between self-promotion and artistic pursuit, and much more.
I feel that the way that you relate to art and music, and the way that you write songs and perform, is so pure, maybe to your own detriment sometimes.
Absolutely. When I first started the band, there was just this whole Brooklyn aesthetic of being sort of as jaded as possible. I'll admit, I tried it. I tried the mysterious Instagram posts of the back of somebody's head. I tried the low-key hiding who I was, trying to play it as cool as the other bands who we would be playing shows around the city. I just couldn't do it.
My husband says I have no capacity for subterfuge, and I think that sort of describes me pretty well. As much as I would love to hide my emotions and not wear my heart on my sleeve, I just can't.
There’s also the fact that you work for a public relations trade magazine. You do the man's dirty work as far as marketing and PR and comms go, for the most part. There is a sentiment in those disciplines that withholding, only sharing the back of the head Instagram square, creates a promotional mysterious kind of energy that’s conducive toward you selling your brand.
Leaving them wanting more. I'm really bad at that.
I know you’ve thought a lot in that balance between operating on the business promotional side of things and also being present with yourself creatively. So I was hoping we could explore that a little bit.
We first started playing shows around the city around when Instagram was coming up, and Facebook was slowly becoming a little less hip, but I was so into it. I was making digital flyers. I was following a million accounts and building my online network. I was super into it, but on the other hand, it really took me away from the music because I was pursuing that high of the likes and the reposts and the events. Back then Facebook Events was huge, the RSVPs. I once had a venue tell me I couldn't play their gig unless I had 1,000 Facebook fans or something like that.
That's the digital version of those East Village clubs that say, "You have to sell this many tickets before we start paying you."
Yeah, exactly. I became so into that concept of ‘band as brand’ that it really took up my life that could have been spent composing and group writing, which is how the band works. We take forever to write songs because we write so collaboratively that it's not like I'm just the singer-songwriter. I rarely come in with a song fully baked. It just takes a long time.
(Photo by Justin Joffe)
In the beginning, I was so focused on that, marketing and building the audience that I wasn't as focused on the music. Then, over the years, I think part of working in the trades actually took me away from that social media obsession in terms of the band.
That was your day job and Madam West was your passion, so you could silo them?
Yeah. The last thing I wanted to do when I got home was go in and check the numbers and post. What I wanted to do was play music and write songs. So it was really this big reversal for me, making that social media stuff into work, and it really just reframed the way I looked at the journey of the band in general.
Maybe not so much this past year with live shows in limbo, but one payoff for you from that reframing has been your true investment in nurturing a community. You’re good friends with a lot of bands, both as a lifelong New Yorker and an active advocate of local music. I don't get the sense that Madam West operates with this agro, late-capitalist competitive edge, that almost ‘New York energy run amok’ vibe where it’s ‘our band vs. the world’. That energy seems to prompt a lot of other bands to put business over stuff more important, and more crucial to survival.
Yeah, I was really sick and tired of other bands treating us like shit when we were in the green room — just this swagger, especially from white, all-male, lousy college bands in North Brooklyn. There's just the sense of, "I'm cooler than you. I have more connections. My dad works in the industry."
I like to try and turn an evening into a through-line of bands that enjoy each other's work. What I like about the community that I'm in right now is that it's this really small, almost invisible label. We call it Floordoor Records, and we've put out some vinyl and that kind of stuff, but our main thing is that we book shows together. We promote each other's music.
(Photo by Justin Joffe)
It's very collective-oriented, so all of the shows that we play are with bands we love that are very different from each other, but each have a core emotional commitment to the type of music that they're making. That type of [approach] became much more attractive to me than trying to play every single venue in the city, meet every single band. That stuff just got so exhausting. It became very important to find a family of bands because the New York scene is so siloed and pocketed and disconnected. This is where I found my home.
As New York became more of a creeping, neoliberal paradise with the Bloomberg-ification of the city, and Just Kids got pressed into newer, illustrated hardcover editions, it seems like the white, upper-middle-class neoliberal "creative class" co-opted this energy that used to exist organically, that used to be called collectivism. And it ultimately sounds like you have a good tribe with this label—but there’s a right way and a wrong way to form a tribe. Look at The Capitol riot. A collectivist mindset makes everyone mutually invested in each other’s survival, success, and well-being.
I've become so much happier with other musicians who I know, their friends, or friends of their friends giving me feedback and supporting my music. I think I used to envision the millions of faceless, nameless listeners who would listen to me once I was more like St. Vincent [laughs].
But once I realized how empty that feeling was, even if I did have a post that did really well or got a gig at a really nice venue, that stuff just was nowhere near as rewarding as getting a nice email from one of the label’s founders talking about the specific parts of the songs that they liked. It's about giving you more than just a body in a room, walking into the bathroom or going outside to smoke a cigarette at the moment you get off stage.
Right, more than lip service. It's also interesting you used the word ‘feedback’. I'm thinking about how that feedback loop works within Madam West with regard to creative collaboration, especially now that you and Todd [Martino] are obviously living together and maybe the primary composers, but still seek the rest of the band’s input. How does that work with regard to composition and recording now.
I'd say that Todd and I, living together and being together, definitely spend more time workshopping songs that ultimately turn into band songs, but not all of them [get written that way]. “Warm Bodies” is one that we wrote at home and brought to the band almost fully baked.
Now, in quarantine, we're doing a lot more duo writing without a full band, so we’re playing with drum machines and visual projections. We're doing a cool live stream. A UK-based friend on the label, Arminda Klier, is doing this group live stream Feb. 20. So, we recorded a bunch of projection visuals, synced to the music, to turn our apartment into a stage. I'm not sure how applicable it will be to a full-band setting, frankly, because it's so reliant on synthesizers and drum machines and that can make it hard to give the same live sound. But hopefully, when all this is over, we can get back together and figure out what works and what doesn't.
I will say, I'm not the best at accepting feedback from inside the band, particularly from my husband. I can be really sensitive, and I conflate criticism with accusation, around a certain line or a lyric or whether or not I have a sense of rhythm (because that has definitely always been an issue for me). I take that so personally. I sometimes take that as a criticism of me from my partner, as opposed to criticism of a thing that we are collaborating on together.
That's the ‘don’t shit where you eat’ conundrum at work, I guess. The history of husbands and wives, and even romantic partners working together… it's not always a disaster, but it's often ill-advised. So it makes sense that sometimes expectations and emotions co-mingle, I imagine. How do you guys separate the wheat from the chaff there and evaluate things together objectively? How do you sort out what feedback to internalize and what feedback to chock up to egos or other things?
Well, the way it's been working lately is, we'll be working on a tune, and then we'll get into some big disagreement that, in a lot of cases, will involve each of us needing to go off and do some individual practice. For example, the concept of timing. I want to be better with rhythm, but I don't have a natural sense of rhythm the same way a lot of drummers and bassists in rhythm sections have, so-
Todd's a trained jazz pianist, right?
Right. His inner meter is so much better than mine. So when he told me, "You need to go practice [to a] metronome so that we can do this song acoustically and you can be on entrances," I was so upset. I threw a tantrum. I was not happy about being told to do homework from my husband. But I do respect his opinion enough, his musicianship enough, and his own discipline. He practices every single day. I've never seen him skip a day.
(Photo by Justin Joffe)
Then I went, and for three days, four days in a row, I practiced for half an hour, 45 minutes to a metronome, even though it was boring and I hated it. This was for the live stream that we're doing, we recorded it as a video and it worked. He was right.
So a lot of times it's sort of a push-pull and then, ultimately, we come back together. But there is some friction, especially in a group setting. There have been some arguments. I wouldn't have wanted to be a fly in the room while a couple argues in the middle of a band, but I did kind of try and hide the fact that we were together in the earlier days of the band. I would be singer Sophie Chernin, because that's my stage name, my great-grandmother's last name. I didn't want people to Google me and if I was looking for a job, for example, I didn't want people to be like, "Oh, she's a hippie musician. She's not going to be employable," or whatever.
In bios and such I would write, "Keyboardist Todd Martino and singer Sophie Chernin," not "the couple." We only got married last summer in a backyard pandemic wedding, but I was worried that that would hurt our chances of whatever indie rock star fantasy I had going on at the time. Because of that exact thing, ‘the Yoko effect’ and all this, I don't know.
If you ever watched Girls, there's a whole thing with a folk duo and it completely explodes. Not that I'm a huge fan of that show, but it exemplifies that stereotype that couples just cannot work together artistically for an extended period of time.
And it is a stereotype, one that's probably true for some couples who don't do any self-reflection. But you guys work on yourselves and put a name to these things. Even your ability to see those boundaries and acknowledge when you get caught up in a feeling versus when there's validity to it, it makes you two different. I also wonder if there might be just some energy of you not wanting to be able to be defined in relationship to a dude, even if it's your dude, at work.
Absolutely. I think we're both very stubborn. I never want to cede my power as a band leader or manager, but I have to. That's what drew me into playing in a band and writing collaboratively in the first place.
I went to undergrad for theater, so I do have that performer's [need] to gain acceptance and positive feedback from the audience. That's always been a part of my identity, but I hated the thing that acting was all about pitting individuals against each other. You're waiting in a line to audition for a bunch of casting directors who will be looking at their phones when you walk in. You have zero control over the outcome and every bitch in line fucking hates you.
(Photo by Justin Joffe)
I was really done with that scene by the time I graduated. I'd very much decided I did not want to be an actor and I had already started playing a lot of folk shows. So that escape into live music from the acting world is really what drew me into bands, into the world of live music.
That’s also what pissed me off about these competitive, catty bands that we would sometimes share a bill with, because yes, there is technically competition. It's buried, so you don't see that there's hundreds of thousands of bands competing for label attention and to get signed, whatever that means. So there's competition there, but in the context of a local scene, there's just no point in putting people down or giving other groups the cold shoulder because you don't think that they're going to make it or they're not going to benefit your network in some way.
It's always disappointing to see that sort of business-minded cutthroat competitiveness happen, when a local music scene can become something like a hologram of progressivism. Without naming names, some folks we both know who have purported to make safe, recurring residencies for marginalized or underrepresented types of artists are presenting something that resembles a community on the outside, while ultimately still falling into that same kind of marketing self-promotion mindset.
D-I-Y: drama in your music community. During our early years of playing around the city, there were some bookers that were definitely taking advantage of their role in power, however small it was to be booking 50 to a 100 person club. There were people who were definitely outed and ejected from the scene because they were found to have done that shit. But I'm 100% sure there are plenty of other dudes to take the place of those abusers and those people taking advantage of the system, even at the lowest possible rung of the music business waters.
I want to talk a little bit about you guys kind of pivoting to singles. Specifically, let's talk about “In Color” and “February Goat,” the latter of which just came out this month. Where’s your head at with the single release model right now in lieu of releasing an album? How has the process for recording and releasing these informed your next steps as a band and how you plan or hope to exist once there's some return to normalcy and you guys can get back together again?
Part of it's just logistical. Before the pandemic, I think we had hoped to put together an EP with the two songs that we put out. The other part is definitely algorithmic. The big piece of advice given to musicians in the digital realm is to release your singles one at a time for optimal viewage and listening. So I definitely think that that was part of it. We did have a single get 30,000 spins a couple of years back, which is not huge, but [there were] definitely some people listening who we don't know.
So, I guess we took a similar approach except this time. I approached it from that perspective, of social media and marketing as not the core of my music. I did a lot of individualized pitching to different blogs that have covered us in the past, but wasn't trying to pay a publicist or spend every hour of every day promoting these singles. They were songs we wrote that I felt really good about, and I wanted to put them into the world. Of course, last year was not the time to center ourselves as an all-white band, putting out music in the middle of a pandemic.
I really wanted to put them out as, "They're warm. I hope they make people feel good," and so I thought they were a good winter-time release. But the other piece of it is just that we write music so freaking slowly that the other three or four songs that we had in the pipeline were just not ready to record before the pandemic. But I think we do have a good duo record in us. We do have a bunch of songs in the vocals and electronic drums world, that'll either be something we'll do separately or something that we bring in the full band for, but that's sort of TBD.
Must be hard without being able to safely rehearse.
We got rid of our rehearsal space last month just because there's five of us, so it's not really safe to get together in a small cement room with no windows, which is like a ton of the band spaces in New York City. Our drummer has really terrible asthma. On tour one time, we stayed in a Motel 6 where somebody had just smoked a giant blunt or something before we came in, and so he had to go be nebulized. So to him, the idea of coming across town from Inwood to Brooklyn and risking his health for the sake of live band practice wasn't worth it. I completely understood that.
So in “February Goat,” are you referring to a literal goat? Is it like a Groundhog Day thing or is it the G.O.A.T? Who is the February Goat and what is the February Goat?
It's going to sound just the dumbest thing. We had a “Goats of the World” calendar hanging in our rehearsal space, so every month we would flip the page and there'd be a different goat staring at us while we rehearsed. I guess, because we wrote it in February, our bassist just suggested the name, a sort of marker of a point in time. The song itself is about wanting to go back to the good times; wanting to bring back the fire in your relationship; wanting to go back to being young by having plastic surgery or obsessing over youth culture.
It just speaks to our overall, weird, goofy aesthetic, especially our bassist, Jory. I think he's got the best sense of humor in the band. He named another song “Erstwhile Manatee.” He's big into anthropomorphic names. I think it's great to have somebody in your group who doesn't take themselves, or you, too seriously. Because when you do, you run the risk of going into that ‘band as brand’ territory again of, "I'm not doing this because it's fun," or, "I love what I'm doing because I want to be commercial. A serious musician is one that is always thinking about business at all times." They really push against that concept.
What can you tell me about “In Color”?
I don't like to talk about this much, but it’s a song about waking up from an overdose in high school. I was in a psychedelic place from a combo of pills that I’d taken, and then most of what I remember is a few hallucinatory moments before I ended up in the hospital, then waking up and having everyone around me and this sort of Wizard of Oz type, "And you were there, and you were there, and you were there!"
[The song] came from a dark place initially, but it speaks to just wanting to get out of your body, wanting to get out of your daily life and your space. That, of course, is so relevant to our situation now. It's like the most crazy, the most fantastical that my life gets is when I'm dreaming or when I'm watching anime or something really off-the-cuff or when I’m out of the reality that we live in. Only in dreams do we really find escape sometimes.
So there is a positive element of that — you can escape, you can go outside of yourself — but there's something to be said for the people who surround you and nurture you. What really brought me back from that really dark place, as a teenager, was that I was understanding my place in the world, understanding that my actions affected my family and the people who cared about me. I think, to me, that's what music has become.
This conversation has been edited for clarity.