My friend, and one of Harrisburg’s finest rising artists, Stephen Michael Haas and I had a great talk about music that I can’t help but share; ranging from the debut album of his band Flower Garden, to his artistic collective that is Tree Cover, and other pressing musical debates (e.g. genre labelling, and the internet). Unfortunately, I’ll be out of the country as Stephen and Flower Garden promote their upcoming album with live shows throughout Central PA, but that hasn’t made me any less of a fan. Clue yourself into the life of an up-and-coming musician, and learn about the passion behind the lighthearted “personal pop” of Flower Garden. If you’re unfamiliar, check out “Children Play Like Dog” and “In Flower” just below.
Flower Garden - Children Play Like Dog
Flower Garden - In Flower
PastaRun Music: How did you get into music and start your band?
Stephen Michael Haas: It more or less started with drawing and having an escape. My whole life I’ve drawn, and drawn things as a way to create a world separate from my reality. And then it started to be the same thing, like I wasn’t in school and I wanted to find some way, like a big introspective project that would sort of some up a portion of my life. Not my whole life, just this specific moment in my life, ya know? So I started prying away at musical concepts and stuff for two years almost, up until about a year ago. And then I wrote all of this material, and that became Flower Garden, because it was of it was cohesive and fit into one scheme. I wrote all of it in 2011, and it’s still being expanded upon. It’s being recorded and stuff has evolved to now where it’s really its own thing. But it all came from the same place, of creating a world that you can immerse yourself into.
PRM: Musicians often view music as a means create their own order out of the chaotic world, is this something you can relate to?
SMH: That’s almost exactly what I’m saying. Like, there’s lots of stuff that I just don’t want see, whereas I can make this world that’s completely positive. That’s almost how I view music to the T.
PRM: What musicians and musical concepts have influenced you the most?
SMH: It was more like, there were bands, but it was more about specific feelings and poets. I was really inspired by using really simple, but heavy imagery to emulate specific feelings and there were more musical concepts of polyrhythms, where people simplify what they’re doing and then the band is all one instrument. So everybody is contributing to the rhythm as opposed to sitting on top of the rhythm section. African music is a great example of polyrhythmic, and Paul Simon’s “Graceland” was a big staple in writing it. And also David Byrne.
PRM: How has your music progressed, starting out by yourself and now having a full band around you? How much control over their playing do you have?
SMH: It’s really weird, Flower Garden, my baby is my album, which hasn’t been heard and probably won’t really be heard until August. But I have two fundamental differences in the live band and the album. The live band is supposed to be all of us coming together mutually to make an incredible, loving experience life. And at the same time it’s people taking all of the parts that I’ve written and expanding upon them. I’ve written all of the parts, the least being the drums, but the everybody expands upon it and makes it theirs. Right now I’m working on getting the band to sound more like the album, so when it’s released the band and album will have more cohesion.
PRM: How do you think the internet has changed the way that you can produce music, allowing you to handle production and distribution on your own? Is there a bad side to the ease of production?
SMH: Yeah, I think it’s both good and bad. For somebody like me, who’s extremely driven and is willing, I’m swearing to release my product with the utmost quality, up to the standard that a record company would be able to do. And I could do that foreseeably, with printing and mixing and mastering. But for someone like me, who doesn’t have the deep pockets that the record label has, the advertisement is sort of out of the question for a bystander. Because there’s the internet, anybody can push their stuff anywhere; it’s just a matter of it being good. So that sort of thing is really positive, where anybody with a voice can be heard, but at the same time though, there’s an emphasis on really quick satisfaction. Anybody can make some stupid thing and put it up online. So things are overly condensed, and there’s really a lot of stuff happening.
PRM: Well, I also think, there’s a lot of artists in the come-up, in those years when they’re struggling to make ends meet, that’s when they write some of their best stuff. So now if you have one album and you’re a superstar, do you miss out on the benefits of a long come-up. Continuing with the internet theme, how do you look at the pirating of music, and the ability to stream music for free? What are your personal views on the subject?
SMH: I don’t do it myself, for me the biggest part of music is, firstly experiencing it live; and, secondly, purchasing an album and actually being able to see it and hold it physically. The world is getting back into the idea of vinyl, and holding the music; but at the same time there’s always going to be people wanting stuff for free.
PRM: If you would have to label your music as a certain genre, what would you describe it as?
SMH: Me and my friends at my record label, Tree Cover, have come up to this idea and it’s called, “personal pop”, which is basically like an amalgam of everything we’ve ever experienced up and to this point, all into one thing, with a really personal message. But if you were gonna call it anything, I’d say a hybrid world or funk. I can’t really describe it, but world music has probably been the biggest influence.
PRM: Going off a broad definition of Folk music (not including just the Folk-revival genre); do you think you can truly define a song as folk or not folk music?
SMH: I think one of the biggest things right now that runs with this is Indie music. People call something indie music as an actual genre, but that’s not really anything, that doesn’t mean anything. All indie means is that you’re independently putting out your own music, you’re independently doing something. So that doesn’t mean anything, and I think that’s kind of void of any reason. Like Bob Dylan, that’s folk music because of a certain way he plays, but from an artist’s perspective; folk music can be anything it doesn’t have to fit into any specific parameters. It could just be someone expressing something, it could be anything. Just like folk art, it’s coming from, more or less, non-establishment sort of base: somebody coming up from nowhere, that’s kind of the impression I get.
PRM: Yeah, I’ve always had the idea that it’s more raw or unpolished in a way. Maybe less professional and you’re really doing your own thing.
SMH: But at the same time, in a different context, it could be somebody being really earnest but in a different medium. And defining what is folk music is the tricky part of it.
PRM: I like to look at the Beatles, once the epitome of pop music, but now everyone in the room knows them and connects to them, and that’s almost folky?
SMH: I’ve never really thought about that, but yeah, I think the landscape is always going to move around, any sort of landscape really.
PRM: What you think of electronic music as folk music? Anyone with a computer can make music, does the easy access allow electronic music a new channel for folk performance?
SMH: To make something really good with that stuff, you have to be really good with those programs; and I think back in the day the folk musicians weren’t always that good at what they, there were really good musicians, but they mostly just had a statement to say. You look at Punk rock music, and that’s really the same way, just a bunch of people with something to say. I think any movement of people that are really obsessed with anything, obsessed with things happening and want to have a voice, that’s folk music, that really what it is. Some people yearning to speak out, like music that’s really passion to move. And whether that’s electronic or singer-songwriter or punk rock or even what I’m doing, that’s all the same.
PRM: At Tree Cover Records, your Harrisburg-based music and arts platform, you really have an artistic movement going, could you touch on this?
SMH: I guess you could say that our biggest influences are the do-it-yourself scenes, like from D.C. hardcore, Ian McKay; late 70’s-early 80’s. Just seeing what their approach was, and looking back, it was the same exact thing that happened with folk music. I think it’s just a need to do stuff, and believing in that your music and that it should be heard, and people banding together and doing what they can, whatever is in their skillset to make it reality. Within Tree Cover, that’s what it is, like within my friends that’s what it is, the whole community is invested in seeing people flourish.
PRM: As an artist, how do you couple your artwork with your music? Does your artistic style impact or play with your music?
SMH: Well the thing with Flower Garden was that I didn’t want to just put my artwork on top of the music, because I felt like I could develop an art style specifically for Flower Garden. Like how the Egyptians have like a canon or a structure that they stuck to in the artwork that they did in order to communicate. I think with almost any musical project there should be a visual language to accompany the musical language to express what it is, I think that’s how things should be.
PRM: So are you a big proponent of music videos to accompany the songs?
SMH: Yeah, and I think that a lot of bands do it as an afterthought like: “let’s throw a cool looking thing over here” and, “I have another cool thing that I did”, they don’t really go in tandem, they’re too separate thoughts. People really aren’t cognitive of the weight of their visual arts. A lot of times it’s an afterthought.
PRM: What has been the biggest struggle with this? Has is been keeping another source of money coming in, or keeping yourself motivated?
SMH: The biggest struggle is really knowing that, well this project isn’t DIY anymore, the biggest struggle is knowing that I am clearly relying on other people, and that this project won’t finish itself without those other people. And I’m coming from such a place that I can do it, and I have the means of doing everything myself, but I don’t have the skills to know how to mic the instrument the way it needs to be to make it sound perfect, and I can’t mix and master all of that stuff. So there are times when people can’t work as long as I can work, or can’t go about it in the same way because they’re not as passionate for it. So I am sort of at other peoples’ whims, so if there is a time that I’m going crazy it’s because I can’t control it all.
PRM :Has the sound of the album stayed pretty consistent? Have you always had a solid idea of what you wanted to produce?
SMH: I know exactly what I hear in my head, and I’ve known it since I started; but when I first stepped into the studio, I was a little lost, because I had never experienced the studio before with my own music. So I was sort of just do whatever and learning, so the first five months could have been a hell of a lot more productive if I would’ve known more, but it was a really big learning experience. And I’ve had to redo a good deal of stuff, but now I’m getting back to how I want it to sound, and I’m not compromising at all. At first, I didn’t really understand a lot that goes into it. I’m so used to live performance, and spontaneity, doing a lot on the guitar. When you’re thinking about an album, where you’re going to be layering so many pieces, there’s gonna be three guitars as opposed to one, or a guitar a vibraphone part and a piano part; so you have to start thinking, “this is an arrangement,” you don’t put all the creativity into one instrument, you have to step back. So I had to learn how to play less, and play more effectively. So it was almost rebooting my whole style. Knowing when to play, and that there is such a thing as too much.
