Me Not You Q&A Part 1 – How a Pandemic & a Podcast Changed Their Sound


Me Not You duo Nikki Taylor and Eric Zeiler have been making music together for over a decade, but they’d never made anything quite like do you feel the same?.

Dialing back the synths, and electronic elements they’d become know for, the late December release featured a stripped down, intimate version of the NYC-based band, with lyrics to match.

I recently caught up with the duo, and in this first part of our two-part interview they discuss the creation of do you feel the same? – which was influenced by their unique pandemic living situations, and a classic rock podcast – and shed a little daylight on how those things brought about a change in sound.

Let’s start by talking about do you feel the same? I believe this is your first full length effort as Me Not You. Was it planned as an LP from the start, or did it come together later as a full length album? 

Eric: Small fact check, we did have a full length album, sort of, in 2019. We had put out the singles for like a year, I think we had put out 8 of the 10 songs as singles, so, admittedly, it didn’t feel like an album, at least to me, because we had made it over a long period of time.

I think I saw all the singles on Bandcamp, but I don’t know if I saw it as a complete album. I may have just missed it. It happens. 

Eric: It’s possible that my Bandcamp bookkeeping has not been great. (Editor’s Note: It’s there, I just missed it)

I’m pretty sure on Spotify it’s an album, but there’s a weird thing on Spotify with lengths of albums, and number of songs. There’s a grey area between EP and album on some of the DSPs.

If it’s at least 8 songs I consider it an album. 

Eric: Yeah, so it’s an album, and we love it, but I love do you feel the same? more, because that one was was actually approached as an LP, and it was the first time we’ve ever really done that.

Nikki: Yeah, the way we wrote it, and approached it, was definitely more of your typical – we wrote all the songs, and got ‘em on guitar, and jammed on them for a while, and then got into a studio and created them.

This was different than our normal process, which was more like writing a song, getting it to the finish line, writing another one, getting it to the finish line. This was definitely conceived, and written in a short period of time, which I feel is great because all the songs flow together, and inform each other, and it is definitely of a certain period of time, which is cool.

Eric: It’s the first time we’ve ever done anything where we didn’t put out any of the songs from it until it was mixed and mastered. Then we were like OK, what’s the first single, what’s the second single? But it was already done.

We’d never worked like that before. Even in Little Daylight I think we had singles out before we were finished with the other ones for the album.

This was a totally unique process for us.

With it being the first time you’ve ever done things this way, was there an underlying theme you wanted to address with the album, or was there something you were going through that made you say – we can make 12 songs out of this? 

Nikki: I don’t know if we were trying to write about certain things, but just the time that we were writing it, it was pretty natural. It was kind of right when the pandemic started, and I had moved out of New York City, and was living in Rochester with my parents, and my family, which was interesting, for six months.

We were just trying to figure out how to write this album, which is probably why the process was different, too. We wanted to write an album from a distance. We were sending ideas back and forth, sending tracks back and forth, so the songs really evolved out of that time period, and ended up being a lot about leaving New York City, being back with my family for six months, and coming back home, and going through all those experiences. That was what informed the lyrics on the album.

Eric: We kind of made it backwards from how we normally had worked.

Nikki and I have been playing music together for over 10 years, and I feel like we’ve always worked in a way where the music, and the tracks, are the beginning. Nikki and I will sit and jam on instruments, and then come up with a feel, and then go into the songwriting part, or I’ll make a beat, or a synth thing, and Nikki will react to it.

We’ve almost always been driven by music more than anything, and this time around we were apart, and Nikki was sending me these voice memos of her playing acoustic guitar, and singing these crazy amazing songs.

I was up in Vermont taking long walks, listening to these little snippets of ideas that Nikki was sending, and it was so clear that every one she would send was better than the last, and I was just waiting for the next one to come. They were lyrically the best thing Nikki’s ever written, I thought, and just felt like something totally new, almost so new that it could’ve been a different band, but we love Me Not You, so it was Me Not You.

It was a huge shift in approach, and in content, as well.

Once we had complied enough of these ideas that Nikki had started we talked about just wanting to produce them in a way that felt really simple, and elegant, and not get in the way. (Previously) we, or I, probably more as a producer sensibility, always tried to be clever, and get a lot of ideas in everything, and with these it was like – do less. Don’t fuck it up.

Nikki: Also because we started it as these really simple voice memos, and I was singing them really quietly, because I was singing them in my parents’ house trying not to wake up my kid when she was napping, or sleeping. I was in the basement just trying to play, and sing really quietly, and it just had this really intimate feeling to the voice memos I was sending. I think we were inspired by that, and then it was like – let’s just keep it the same kind of vibe, with minimal instrumentation compared to what we normally do.

So you were at your parents’ house with your husband and child, trying to not wake anyone, while Eric, you were walking in the woods in Vermont, chillin’, gettin’ the good vibes. 

Eric: Yup. With my dog. Trying not to die of COVID.

Other than temporarily living outside of NYC, what other major changes were going on in your lives, either before you came up with the album, or while you were coming up with the album? 

Eric: I got married in January right before COVID, so it was still pretty new.

I still live in Brooklyn, so that didn’t change, but my wife is from Denmark, so we spend a quarter, to a third of the year over there, and we bought an apartment there, so even during COVID I was spending a lot of time abroad. That was a change.

Also, Nikki and I being apart more was definitely a change. Previously to COVID we were together almost every day. All of a sudden we were apart for many months, still trying to make music.

During the time you spent in Denmark, did anything there spark something in you musically? 

Eric: No, but something that did, for me, and it’s probably not very cool to talk about, but I got into listening to this Grateful Dead podcast.

Nikki: He’s very cool. This is cool stuff.

Eric: I love the Grateful Dead, I always have.

Nikki: We both do.

Eric: I kinda go in and out of them over the course of my life, and with COVID, for some reason I got back into them in a big way.

They made two albums in 1970 that were really stripped down. They went from being a psychedelic band to almost being a folk rock band, and over the course of this podcast they analyzed the way they produced and recorded the music in granular detail.

I was really inspired, because it was sort of the same thing as I was talking about, where there were these beautiful songs, simple songs, and the goal was to not fuck it up. That was definitely on my mind when I was hearing Nikki’s songs, and when it came time to produce them I think we were both aligned in just wanting to do the bare minimum to serve the song.

For me, that was where the inspiration came at that moment.

I think it was also, with the COVID pandemic, I was not listening to as much electronic music, or as much glossy pop music, or as much hip-hop as I normally do. I was definitely listening to more organic stuff. I kinda feel like a lot of people were doing that. Taylor Swift made her albums that sounded like that, and kinda everybody came out with a stripped down album in 2021.

In terms of my listening, I wasn’t listening to stuff that felt super produced, and electronic, so then when it came time to make the album, I think we both wanted to use a lighter touch this time around.

It’s interesting you used the word lighter, because when I think of your Reckoning EPs there was almost a darkness to them. 

Eric: For sure.

Glossy and 2020 didn’t really go together. When you think of glossy, and electronic, and pop, you’re thinking about having fun. We weren’t having fun in 2020. 

Nikki: Everyone was in their bedroom, shoegazing, and being introspective, so everybody wrote music that felt like that.

 

For part two of this interview, where Me Not You discuss the unique rollout of do you feel the same?, as well as the pressures of the social media age, and some of the pros and cons of releasing music in 2022 – click here.

You can listen to, and purchase, all of Me Not You’s music on Bandcamp.

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