A CONVERSATION WITH… GLITTERER
We talked to Glitterer’s Ned Russin about writing short songs and their upcoming album Rationale.
Where are you from and what kind of music did you grow up with?
I'm from Kingston, Pennsylvania, which is a small town in the northeast part of the state. It's located near a small, slightly more urban area named Wilkes-Barre. There was a long-running underground music scene there from the early nineties and my brother became involved in that when he was a teenager and he's seven years older than me. When I was seven years old my brother started getting into punk and hardcore and underground music.
How old were you when you first started writing music?
My brother Ben and I tried to start bands when we were nine or ten years old. We didn't play instruments at that point so we were writing songs on my brother's guitar but it was just kind of a joke. We did this funny little thing where we would make records on our family computer and burn the CDs then sell them to the kids at school when we were in fourth grade. But, the first time I felt like we really started writing songs, I was probably ten or eleven. A year after that, everything kind of became real. That's when I started to play shows and when we recorded our first demo and everything. I think that’s when it felt like we felt confident enough in our own music to be a, quote-unquote, real band.
This album is the first project where you are a band, not a solo act. How did you find that transition?
I think it's an easier transition because it's going back to something that I know very well. I think transitioning to writing songs by myself was much harder. To be the only one to say yes to things [decisions] was kind of a scary thing for me at and I kind of learned to work within those parameters. Returning to a situation where it's four people working on the same thing, it gets frustrating at times because collaborating with people can be frustrating, but it's ultimately worth it. It's just very comforting to have the support of your friends and the ideas of your friends. It makes it feel much easier.
Your new album Rationale is coming out on February 23rd. Did you write this album with the idea of playing it live in mind?
I always think of songs in a live setting because I believe live music is the epitome of music. That's when music becomes real - when it interacts in real-time with real people. That is, to me anyway, the goal of playing music. With these songs and this record, it just feels like these songs will be exciting to play next to our other songs and to see how they situate amongst them.
What song from Rationale would you say you're most excited to play live?
We've been playing a lot of the songs live already. I'm a big believer in testing things out and letting the songs kind of unfold so I feel like I've stumbled on a lot better versions of songs after playing them so many times. Something just kind of makes subconscious sense and I find myself doing something that I didn't originally write. There's a song called ‘Recollection’ off of the new record that I think all of us really enjoy playing.
All of your songs are very short - do you intentionally write shorter songs?
I think there is this kind of thing currently, where bands and musicians are writing shorter songs because people's attention spans are shortening and shortening so they write a song that can fit in a social media post for whatever stupid reason. I feel like short songs make more sense to me because that's kind of what I grew up listening to. I feel like the majority of records that I listened to in my teenage years were 15 minutes long. When I started doing Glitterer I think there was a part of me that was insecure in my songwriting and I was like “if I get the song over quick, then nobody will complain about it.”
Do you find it hard to pick songs for your setlists?
I feel like we're in a good spot because we're essentially still a pretty new band. We kind of feel like we have free rein over the setlist. We kind of just play whatever we want. It doesn't seem like it's too offensive to people when we play three new songs that nobody's heard before and that's also because our songs are a minute and 15 seconds long for the most part. If you don't like it, it'll be over quickly.
I feel like we're afforded a luxury that a lot of people are not because I think a lot of people, when they see us live, are probably seeing us for the first time and we take full advantage of that by playing as much new stuff as we can.
Were there any shows you saw when you were growing up that were really formative?
I saw Lifetime when they got back together in 2007 or 2008. They played a show at Middlesex County Community College which has done shows since the ‘90s. It's a pretty legendary spot and I got to see a band that was really important to me and all my friends. We drove out to see them and it was early on in their reunion so it kind of felt like we were in a time machine by getting to see the band that we love, that we never thought we would get to see, in a place that I never thought I'd get to go to.
Why is the album called Rationale?
The title comes from this book called The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker. There's one part where the narrator is talking about how we think ideologies are these responses to the world and how we make sense of things. They're our belief systems but our ideologies are essentially arbitrary because the systems in which they are responding to are also human-made, therefore making them arbitrary and equally flawed. Our ideologies are trying to make the world a better place but it doesn't acknowledge that the reason that the world is in a bad place is because of these human-made systems to begin with. I really took to that idea and then came the album name.
You’ve said before that you think hardcore is an ideology. Did that thought relate at all to these questions about ideologies?
I think the vast majority of my beliefs come from hardcore; hardcore is an ideology. There’s a community that puts people first and puts these ideas about caring for people first and I think a lot of people involved in it would feel the same way. That doesn't mean that we all think the same thing but I do subscribe to the belief that it's like that. I don't know, it is like a way of doing something more than a way of sounding.