Miranda and the Beat are Here to Kick Some Ass

To say it’s been a long, strange trip for punk rock trio Miranda and the Beat would be a bit of an understatement, but they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Consisting of Miranda Zipse (guitar, lead vocals), Dylan Fernandez (Farfisa), and Alvin Jackson (bass), the band recently relocated from NYC to New Orleans, and while their music is just as high energy as ever, Miranda says other aspects of life have slowed down a bit thanks to no longer having to constantly move at an NYC pace.

“The speed adjustment, I feel like we’re adjusting to that pretty quickly,” she says, adding with a bit of a laugh that when she returns to visit NYC, “I’m going to be that annoying person from out of town that walks slow now.”

There is nothing slow about Miranda and the Beat’s upcoming album Can’t Take It, which is due out October 25th, and was written and recorded while the band was staying in a remote village in Germany.

“The album is sick as fuck,” she says, “Everybody should listen to it. At least two songs are going to be your new favorite song because they’re all really different.”

The common thread that holds all those different songs together is they all feature heaping doses of punk rock, with a little bit of psych rock sprinkled on top.

I caught up with Miranda over Zoom, and she discussed the wild ride through the German countryside that led to the writing and recording of Can’t Take It, what makes this album different from their previous work, and the joy of discovering she and her bandmates are all “borderline psychopaths.”

You moved out of NYC, and relocated to New Orleans. I know a lot of bands have been moving to Nashville, which is starting to get a little crowded. What made New Orleans your destination? 

I think we just got a little tired of the competitiveness of music, and we just really wanted to be in a place where it was more about the love of music, and the preservation of culture.

How long have you been there? 

We’ve been here about four months.

It’s been one of our favorite cities for a long time. We always request a day off here on tour, and the last time we were here we were like – you know what, I think we should just come back.

How has the scene in your new home been influencing you musically, or otherwise? 

Well, it hasn’t been that long, but it’s felt really good to just be able to go to shows, because New York’s gotten so expensive that I end up working every single time there’s a show. So it’s just been nice to have some free time, and be able to just play again, and play in a house, because when you’re in a tiny apartment, and you have roommates, you can’t really play that much.

So practice has changed. 

Yeah, and I mean, honestly, summer is the slow season here, so there hasn’t been a whole lot going on, so I can’t speak quite yet to how New Orleans is going to influence us, but I can definitely say that we’ve been writing more, so we'll see.

Your upcoming album is Can’t Take It, and according to your bio it was recorded in King Khan’s Moon Studios Rock n Roll Vortex in a remote village in the German countryside. At first I thought this was totally fictional, but then I found all the King Khan info online, and discovered everything is real! I guess the obvious question is – how did you wind up in a remote village in the German countryside? 

We did a European tour, and we had talked about recording with King Khan before, and we were like – we’re already over there, maybe we can go record with him.

He had told us he lived in Berlin. It turned out he lives four hours outside of Berlin, and it was actually closer to Frankfurt, but he didn’t tell us that until we were already getting on the plane to fly into Berlin. So we actually ended up renting a U-Haul, and driving there, but the only U-Haul that we could afford was like a cargo U-Haul, so the back of it is like completely separated, you can’t see in the back.

Kim, who was the drummer at the time, her twin sister, and Alvin, the bass player, had to ride in the back, in darkness, for four and a half hours.

They got really drunk, and had a great time, but I think to them it felt probably more like 12 hours.

At least they had alcohol. 

Yeah, we got it because when we first closed the doors, they were like, “We can't do this, guys, we need something,” but that’s how we got there.

Hopefully there was also like a hurricane lamp in the back, or something, like an LED one. 

I think they just had their phones, and they had a speaker.

Please tell me they got breaks, and their eyes didn’t have to readjust after four hours of being in the darkness. 

Well, it was at night, so I think it was not as shocking, but also, of course we let them out. This sounds so terrible. We let them out to pee.

Only to pee. Nothing else. No food. {laughs}

No water. Only booze.

When they would come out each time we’d stop they would be drunker and drunker. It was very entertaining.

From the front, we had Saba Lou, King Khan’s daughter, we gave her a ride out there, as well, so there were three of us in the front. Dylan was driving, and we were having philosophical, pleasant talks about yoga, and meditation. Meanwhile, they’re all wrestling in the back, and we just hear Daft Punk blasting. So the two vibes were so polar opposite.

At what point did you realize the drive was a lot longer than you thought it was going to be? 

It wasn’t that bad, because we had just gotten off of a two-month tour, so the four and a half hours was just super chill.

But yeah, we didn’t know it was going to be that far until he sent us his address, and we were at the airport.

It was a literal village. There isn’t even really a grocery store there, and his house is like The Addams Family house of the village. He has all these weirdos coming over, and the neighbors are peeking through.

That’s pretty cool. Did you stay there? 

Yeah, we stayed there. Slept in the studio.

It’s basically a house from the 1600s, and a house from the ‘70s that are connected into a compound, so we all were able to stay there, including the sound engineer, who stayed with us.

I read that you wrote and recorded the entire album in five days. What was going on in your lives that facilitated such a burst of creative inspiration? 

Well, we said that we had a record written when he asked us to record, and we did not have a record written.

We did go through a lot of tumultuous changes in New York City maybe like six months prior, involving multiple breakups, multiple friend breakups, and I think that we had a lot to write about as a group because we all went through it together. 

I have to imagine those five days were pretty intense. Did anyone outside of the band hear from you, like friends or family, or was it just the band? 

I think I called my mom once to show her the place on FaceTime, but for the most part it was very focused.

It was a blast. We had so much fun. Very therapeutic. We’d have barbecues every night at the end of the day, and then we’d go back in after dinner and keep working on things, and writing other stuff.

It was just super fun, but definitely no one heard from us.

You just came home with a new album? 

Yep, and Pete (D’Angelo), who’s the label manager at Ernest Jenning, and Khannibalism, was shocked. He was like, “Wait, what did you guys just do? You guys just recorded another record? We just put out the other one.”

That’s hilarious. What’s something you did on this album, musically, that maybe you hadn’t attempted before? 

I think it was because we were so removed from everything, and because we had just gotten off tour and everything – we’d been away from America for two months – we really just made this record like whatever came out of us at the moment, and without thinking about anything that we like, if that makes sense, like no prior influences, nothing that’s going on in the world, just like this is what we feel right now.

It’s a very visceral record, and it’s really different from the first one. I think we’re all really proud of it.

You’ve been touring a lot over the past year. What have you learned about yourselves, and your audience, while on the road? 

What we learned about ourselves is none of us know when to stop. As a group, none of us know when to be like, hey, maybe we should take a night off.

We all love to adventure, we all love being on tour, and we work really, really hard.

It’s definitely a really cool group of people. We’re all borderline psychopaths. We’ll keep playing music until we are dead, like literally physically dead.

As far as audience, I think we’re learning who likes us. We’re still really new to touring, we’ve only been doing it about two years, so it’s been more about creating and making connections.

We haven’t fully gotten to experience coming back to places, and seeing who comes back yet.

One thing I love to ask artists who are in bands is how they’ve been influenced by the other members of their band. So give me an artist or a band you’re now a fan of because someone else in the group turned you on to their music. 

Oh my god, that’s such a hard question.

Ever since Dylan and I met, like the day we met, we’ve always been on the same page artistically, and we’re always showing each other new bands.

I’m really spacing off the top of my head for something.

Oh, I know one – Dylan and Alvin both really like Ata Kak, and I didn’t know who that was before.

Who? 

He’s like, I don’t know how to describe (him), but he was like an unknown artist from Africa, like electronic, weird stuff. He made this one record (in 1994), and some guy found it (in 2002), and it got huge. Then they found (Ata Kak), and now he’s touring with that record.

He’s sick as fuck.

 

For more Miranda and the Beat, check them out on Bandcamp.