Audio Jane – Turning Terrible Plans Into Great Songs

Connecticut-based indie rock foursome Audio Jane have a terrible plan, but it’s a plan you’re going to like the sound of, as A Terrible Plan is the name of the band’s upcoming album.

For Audio Jane – which consists of Sarah LaTorra (vocals, guitar), Mike Ciunci (drums), Nate Harris (bass), and Mike Goldberg (guitar) (photo: L to R) – A Terrible Plan is actually part of some great plans that are now coming to fruition.

In addition to the release of the album, which is due out March 26th, they're also featured on the soundtrack to the movie The Never List, which was just released on Amazon Prime, and a variety of other streaming services.

They also have two live shows lined up, although Nate admits that with the band having only played one show since the pandemic shut everything down, “We’re gonna have to remember how to do it again. Never mind just the nerves of getting in front of people and playing, but also remembering the whole back catalog.”

When they hit the stage they’ll have the music of A Terrible Plan as part of their set, and I caught up with all four members of Audio Jane to find out more about the album, the lyrical element they feel everyone will be able to relate to, and whether or not we should refer to them a shoegaze band.

  

You’re considered a shoegaze band, which is a genre I’m not sure everybody knows a lot about even though it’s been around for, I want to say, a solid 35 years. What do you see as the role, or the place, of shoegaze in 2021? 

Mike C: I feel like it’s such an inherently British thing … I don’t know. It’s a good question. Everything comes around. I think there’s elements that weave itself back through, even in newer bands, so if you think about the last five years, and bands like The xx, even though there’s a lot of electronica, and breakbeats in The xx, there’s a lot of shoegaziness in The xx, as well.

I don’t know that there are bands that are out there really touting themselves as shoegaze, as opposed to you still have bands that have shoegazy elements in them. They’ll weave in like trip-hop and shoegaze together.

So are you guys holding the flag right now, in terms of holding it down for the genre? 

Sarah: I don’t know what flag we’re holding right now. {laughs}

It’s interesting to hear you say that. I opened by saying you’re a shoegaze band, but is that a fair classification at this point? 

Mike G: It seems tough to classify us without stringing together two, or three, different genres (together).

Sarah: I get (told we’re) grunge rock. I guess I just feel like we write what comes naturally, and then it is whatever genre it fits into.

Does it bother you when someone gives you a single genre classification? 

Mike G: The only one is the ‘90s rock thing.

Nate: Yeah, I feel like that sorta signals like a nostalgia that we’re really not going for. We all grew up on ‘90s music, so of course it’s gonna be kinda infused in everything, but yeah, I’m the same, I don’t really like the reference to a decade rather than a genre.

The new album, due out March 26th, is titled A Terrible Plan. Does this title have anything to do with what you were hoping to accomplish in 2020 before the pandemic hit? 

Mike C: No, but looking back it very well could dovetail, and fit into it nicely.

So what was the terrible plan? 

Sarah: It’s one of the lyrics in “While You Were Gone,” and it fits into the theme of a lot of the songs. They’re (about) situations that went bad.

Mike G: Relationship-wise.

I feel like you’re all doing fine relationship-wise, so are these your own relationships that were worked into songs, or situations that others have been through that you’ve observed? 

Sarah: I mean, I’ve been married three times so … {laughs} … I’ll just leave that there.

Nate: Relationships have a long tail, so she can go to that well for a long time.

Mike C: We will milk Sarah’s pain for all of the songs.

Everyone: {laughs}

And you’re OK with that, right? 

Sarah: Oh yeah. {laughs}

Are these songs written in a way where the people involved are going to be able to figure out the lyrics are about them? 

Sarah: I think they might possibly know, but it’s kind of vague. I try to make the songs somewhat relatable, so it’s not super specific, it’s just more hitting on that emotion, because I want it to be relatable, and have feeling behind it.

Mike G: As someone in the band, I can also take what the songs are about and apply them to my own life, and my own relationships, and relate to them that way, too, so hopefully listeners will do the same thing.

Mike C: Yeah, I think shitty relationships are pretty universal.

Let’s take a second to flip things. Once you’ve recognized something is terrible, how do you turn it around? 

Sarah: Write sad songs about it. {laughs}

Mike G: The songs are like alchemizing the relationships into something productive, something fun to listen to.

Nate: I feel like there’s a certain comfort, too, in a relationship, knowing – OK, I just hit bottom. I am at the bottom now, so I’m going up from here. I’m gonna drink a little whiskey, and then things will start to be better tomorrow, and every day thereafter, hopefully.

There’s a real comfort in that, I feel.

The lead single is “While You Were Gone.” Why is this the song you chose to release first? 

Sarah: I thought “While You Were Gone” is catchy, and it does have that title lyric in it.

Mike C: It’s a good representative, I think, of the overall feel of the album. There’s an element of garage with more uptempo stuff kind of mixed in, and I think the overall theme is there. There’s kind of the grayness in the darkness undertone aligned to it.

To Sarah’s point, besides being catchy and a little more uptempo, I think, overall, if you kind of amalgamated the rest of the music together there is an underlying theme, and tone, of sadness, and darkness, woven throughout.

Nate: I feel like when we started working on it I kind of always had heard that as the first song on the album. It gets going in fits and starts – me and Mike C on bass and drums, it’s like we can’t decide if we’re starting the song or not. It starts and stops, and finally it gets going.

I feel like the song style itself, the arrangement, everything – I feel like I see where we’re going in the future. That seems like the direction we’re going, so I’m excited.

Mike C: One of the things I love about it more than anything is Sarah sounds so pissed on it. That raw emotion that she evokes, I love.

There is an element, kind of a non-shoegaze element, where it’s not dreamy. There is a real kind of visceral reaction that you can hear.

Sarah, when you’re getting rawness in your singing, what do you draw on other than personal experience? What are your influences for that particular aspect of your music? 

Sarah: I grew up listening to Kurt Cobain, and all the grunge stuff, so I guess that is one of the big influences. I mean, I don’t get as raw as Kurt Cobian, but I’ve always loved that rawness in a lead vocalist.

I think it’s really just being true, feeling some sort of emotion when you’re singing, and conveying that. That’s important. I don’t like it when somebody is so polished that you don’t hear that there’s feeling behind it.

When the pandemic hit, what did you all do to make sure Audio Jane would still be going strong? 

Mike G: We waited a couple weeks, and eventually we started getting together with masks on, and recording.

Nate: I’m not sure we’d be where we’re at now with the album (were it not for the pandemic).

We had probably eight shows, or so, booked between March and May. At first it felt like oh, it’s gonna be two weeks, or whatever. We just watched each one of those shows fall off the calendar.

I think we started (on the album) in April, or May. Sarah had a baby in June, so we took a couple months off after that, and then we just worked through, because we haven’t had anything else to do.

I feel like (had life been normal) we would’ve played a lot more shows, and done a lot less recording in 2020.

Mike C: I agree in that I think this doesn’t get made, and doesn’t get made in the way that it was made, oddly enough, without the pandemic. I think our focus would’ve been on more live shows, and I think besides the pandemic, again with Sarah being pregnant I think there was a commitment to all of us that not only did we need to respect each other’s health, but it wasn’t just us that we had to worry about. Sarah was pregnant, we had to worry about that. I think we made a great commitment to each other to say look, we’re only going to do this if we’re very safe, if we’re very comfortable, and we agree to be in our own little kind of cohort bubble. And again, it all worked out.

We took as much precaution as we could. We had the luck, and capability, of, at the time, being in Sarah’s basement, which was wide enough, and spread out enough that we could practice and play, all with masks down, and not really be that close to each other. So I think it just worked out in an odd way that probably would’ve not turned out the same had it not been for the pandemic.

Sarah, with the baby coming last year, which was clearly not a terrible plan, have you seen motherhood change anything about the way you approach music? 

Sarah: I think the way that I write songs going forward is going to change a lot just because the things that are relevant to me are so different now. It’s completely changed who I am as a person.

I don’t even know, right now, how I’m functioning, because I haven’t slept for three days.

I haven’t had time to write since he was born, but I’ve thought a lot about how I want to change things, and thought about ideas for songs, and how I want to approach writing, so I’m excited to have had a break from writing songs, just to see how it changes what comes out next. It’s probably not going to be about terrible relationships so much, and I don’t want to write so many songs with just the regular structure that they typically have. I want to kind of shake things up.

You can pre-order A Terrible Plan via bandcamp. 

For more Audio Jane, check out audiojane.com, and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.