It's no secret that we absolutely love Sadurn here at Born Loser Mag. The Philadephia based band has quickly become one of my personal favorite bands, and their debut album "Radiator" a top contender for our album of the year. We recently talked to them about the band‘s beginning, their latest album, and about my funeral arrangement. Check it out!
Rapid-fire Questions
1. What have you been listening to lately?
Good question…… I’ve been revisiting ‘designer’ by aldous harding a lot lately, it’s so good. Also just came off of a regularly scheduled jason molina binge, mostly didn’t it rain. A song that got me through the other day was ‘two beers in’ by free throw, I feel like every once and a while I have a certain toxic angst itch that only songs like that can scratch haha
2. Would you send me a cease and desist if I start performing under DJ Sadurn?
Yeah
3. Do you need an extra band member? I can shout “DJ SADURN” at the beginning of every track.
Ok let’s talk
4. What do you think Hope Sandoval from Mazzy Star is up to?
How’d you know i love her???
5. Y'all are my 100th interview.(At the time of writing not) I feel like you deserve a medal. What do you want your medal to say?
Wow sick that’s a lot of interviews… what if it just said “100”
6. When I die, can you play Mambo No. 5 by Lou Bega as they lower my casket?
I love this question and i hope it happens for you but i don’t want to take on the responsibility
7. First album or artist that made you fall in love with music?
You could say it was NOW 8. Or you could say it was early AFI, that’s the first artist where I had multiple cds and just felt really entrenched in it. NOT decemberunderground that’s when I turned my back on them.
8. When I was kid I used to get nightmares after reading Goosebumps books, so my mom said I wasn’t allowed to read them anymore. Then she caught me reading Night of The Living Dummy 3 and I got grounded. What is something that you used to get in trouble for as a kid?
Brutal. For me it was sneaking on the internet to play neopets
9.What’s something that you’ve always wanted to talk about or share that nobody has asked you about?
I don’t get enough opportunities to brag about my recorder skills. I’m pretty good
10. Any local Philly bands that we should check out?
Jon tab and amelia’s bands!!!!!!!! Mother moses, Soupy and Amelia Cry Til I Die respectively. Also you know who’s so sick is the band Florry, they’re so fun to see live and I always dance.
To start things off, can you introduce and tell us a bit about yourself?
OK!! My name is g, my full name is genevieve which is fine but I don’t prefer it. I’m nonbinary. I love my friends. I live in west philly and currently work at a garden center. I’ve kept a diary pretty consistently since I was like 10. I have bad spatial awareness...
You started playing guitar in 2015. What was your involvement with music before then? Were you writing songs or working on music before then?
I did a lot of singing groups! I’ve always been singing, and could kind of play piano. I was kind of writing songs since I was 8 but also not really until that year I learned guitar.
Sadurn went from being a solo project to a full band. Was it a process going from working on your own to a more collaborative process? Or was the transition pretty smooth?
Well it was mostly a duo with jon for years before becoming a full band - that was super easy, jon would just throw some sick riff on a song I’d written and we barely needed to practice or own any gear. It was very different transitioning to the full band, more effortful, and more gear needed, which was all new to me. Also with adding more instruments and bandmembers and amps it was easy to feel like I was no longer in control of the sounds that were happening, and I had a harder time hearing and locking in with myself - these were major adjustments. I think we’ve worked hard to mitigate that stuff and it feels really good now.
Was there anything in particular that made you decide to start recording/putting out your own music?
Writing songs was feeling really good and new, like a very rewarding new creative outlet, so I was really inspired by that feeling and by the friends I was making who were doing it in that capacity - as in recording and releasing stuff. I started just by putting some songs on soundcloud and I think each next step I took, like playing my first show or making a bandcamp, were all kind of inspired by friends doing the same thing.
You signed with Run For Cover Records earlier this year! What has that experience been like?
SUCKS! Just kidding it’s been so awesome. We signed with them may or june of last year so it was kind of a long waiting game before the album started rolling out, but also that allowed us to get together some videos and stuff. It’s all been very exciting.
Congratulations on your upcoming release, Radiator! (out now) It’s already one of my favorite releases of the year. What was your vision going into making the album?
So glad you like it that much !!!! We weren’t initially sure if we were making a full album or not, it kind of depended on how many songs worked out. But the main vision was to try to maintain something that I thought was special about our older acoustic recordings while expanding on each song with the full band set up, kind of deciding song by song what made sense. The idea was to keep the songwriting and whatever feelings were the core of each song at the center. That mindset and the fact that we were new to playing as a full band kind of took us in a bunch of different directions, which turned out to be cool.
What did the writing/recording process look like for you and do you have any anecdotes about writing Radiator?
There was no idea in my head that I was writing songs for an album, I was just writing songs when the opportunity came up...and there was a small batch of them that we originally wanted to record that were motivating the process. Since the pandemic kind of raised the stakes of getting together to record, it turned into a situation where I needed to come up with enough songs to make the whole thing worthwhile. That led me to bring in demos like lunch and icepick that I hadn’t imagined being in the same universe with the other ones, or white shirt, which felt like this little wisp of a song that would maybe stay in the demo universe. We also dug up a couple previously released songs to try out with the full band, one of which was the void / Madison… I like the full band arrangement better than the original and it stuck for the album. The other one was a song called “firetruck” that we were gearing up to record, and decided not to at the last minute… even though it was cool with a full band, it felt like the acoustic version of the song made more sense. The full band kind of took some of the intimacy out of it, and that felt wrong. So we scrapped it, it was the only thing that got scrapped.
What do you hope your listeners take away from the album? And what have you taken away from creating it and putting it out?
I hope that people like it haha. I definitely learned a lot from the whole process, it was different on every level from making the homemade eps we put out earlier. There’s a massive amount of work that goes into making and releasing an album besides writing the songs, even after you’ve finished recording it. So much shit honestly, I can’t believe I have to do that whole thing again. Just kidding it’s going to be great.
I read that you were unsure about putting out your song “Ice Pick”. Was there anything that made you decide to put it out?
I think I got so burnt out by the end of arranging icepick that I wasn’t sure if it was ok or not, I thought the song might be really cringey. I’m someone who has a lot of deep self doubt, I have trouble really having conviction in my own stuff sometimes. But I did feel really proud of how the ending came together and coming up with the reverse outro track, so that’s probably what saved it for me.
I also read that the recording process for IcePick was different from the other songs on the album, right?
Kind of, yeah! I mean it was most similar to ‘lunch’, because those were the two songs we didn’t track live together. But while lunch we pretty much finished during the initial group recording session, icepick came away from that time in need of a lot more attention and arranging. So it was a lot of experimenting with adding different layers to the song kind of after the fact and seeing what worked… jon and i were working on it together at his house in like february of 2021, a few months after everything else had been done. It was a challenge.
I absolutely love your songwriting. I think that including details in their writing makes for a completely relatable, original song. How do you balance how much information to share with your listeners, while still not feeling like you’re revealing too much? Is that something that you even think about?
Thank you! Haha. Great question… I’m usually not thinking about people listening to a song while I’m writing it, so there’s no filter there. There’s only one time that it really kept me from sharing a song I liked, just cause someone’s name was in it. I tried changing the name but it didn’t work. So yeah there’s no purposeful parameters around that.
Is it ever difficult to go back and revisit certain memories or situations through your songs?
Yeah definitely, but only when it’s connected to stuff I’m currently upset about.
It’s always interesting to me when songwriters use a name in a song title like your song “The Void / Madison”. Is Madison a real person or was the name changed?
Haha it’s funny I did change the name for this one, but not after writing it - it actually came out as madison right away even though it was about someone specific with a different name, I’m not sure why.
If I was a songwriter, I’d be scared of writing a song about someone or a specific situation and have that person confront me. Have you ever written a song about someone or a specific situation and had the person involved call you out?
No, I generally go the route of directly telling people that songs are about them, before they’re really shared… it’s pretty uncomfortable sometimes but for me it’s the only way if those people are still in my life. If people are still in my life it’s because we can have conversations like that. It’s pretty rare that I’m secretive about it.
Can you write a song called “Isaac” and just roast me for 4 minutes?
Haha you would have to really piss me off
You tend to write about personal experiences. Does writing a song about something in your life change the way you look at it? Whether it’s a fear, a worry, a heartbreak, etc.
Yeah i mean, what it really does is make space for feelings that I’m having… which usually makes it feel better or easier in some way to be having those feelings, i dunno. I think when we’re fully honest and accepting of ourselves in whatever we’re experiencing it eases up something in our brain.
What would you consider the most important thing to keep in mind when writing?
It’s important to keep in mind who you’re trying to roast
How do you pronounce your track “<---”
Haha yeah wait why did I make that decision? I just call it the outro.
Oh shoot, I just realized that its “Icepick” played in reverse! Thats so cool. How did the idea for that come about?
Haha thanks, I was trying to finish the arrangement for icepick and was considering using reversed samples in it, but ended up just liking how the song sounds in reverse generally. The whole thing is pretty wild but I decided to just have it be the end part without any backwards words. But if you ever get a chance to play all of icepick backwards I recommend.
You were recently at SXSW, what was that like?
Well it was our first time going there and we had no idea what to expect. We were only there for two days and one of the days we were invited to willie nelson’s ranch festival thing, so we skipped the other sxsw showcases to do that. We were like, he’s pretty old, we should probably go. But the one night we were actually at south by was so fun, we got to meet a lot of nice and cool people, and we somehow avoided getting covid. I think if we did it again next year we’d have a much better idea of how to plan for it.
Did you get to see any cool bands?
Only the other bands that played the run for cover showcase with us! But they’re very cool! Shout out waveform*, mini trees, sun june…. They’re all sick bands.
Any plans to come back to Texas anytime soon?
Not on the books. But we are awaiting willie’s official invite.
Do you have a favorite song to play live?
Right now it’s a new song that we get most hype about playing, just cause it’s new. And it goes a little harder than most of them, jon breaks out the distortion pedals a little bit on a solo. Doesn’t have a name yet though.
Have you ever cried while performing?
Not in front of an audience, I think the adrenaline of performing creates just enough of a barrier for me. But definitely at practice, there are times I’ve had to just stop playing because a song was messing me up too much emotionally.
I know being a touring band can be pretty difficult. What are some ways that we as listeners can show support to you and other touring bands?
Come to shows and buy merch! And wear a mask to keep the bands safe and on the road! And also, go the extra mile to look up a band’s touring schedule … I guarantee they’re trying to make that information easy to find, and it’s draining to continually push stuff on social media all the time.
To wrap things up, do you have any questions for me?
What was the most recent time you put on a song that turned out to be 100 percent exactly what you needed to hear in that moment, like viscerally satisfying ? I love when that happens.
I'm not saying this just because I'm interviewing you, but your song "Snake" is definitely one of the more recent ones. Also, "The Gaping Mouth" by Lowertown!
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