The story of Julian McCamman’s project Victoryland has all the makings of an indie rock legend. After his previous band broke up, he moved to the Big Apple with even bigger dreams; it was there that he met his creative match in the sharp, young producer Dan Howard. This hunger is all over his Good English debut, My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It. It’s a record propelled by pop catharsis and lyrical revelations, never losing the scrappy magic of an invigorating new idea along the way: each song keeps a piece of its original demo recording in the final product.
I recently spoke to McCamman from his Brooklyn apartment. We talked about the process of making the album, moving to NYC from Philly, and a whole lot more. You can read the interview and listen to the record below.
How’s New York? You’re a newer resident, right?
I'm coming up on two years. I think in New York years, that's new for people, it seems. But I love New York. It's my favorite place I've lived. Everywhere I've moved, it's because it really felt like the right time. And I've consistently since I left my hometown, I’ve lived in places for about three and a half years. I think I'll probably live here longer than that, just because this is the most community I've ever felt like I've had. And it's the most fun I've had in a city. I moved up here at
a really exciting time. I was in Philly before this, and the New York music scene didn't seem super appealing then. The indie sleaze shit was popping off really hard. And I was like, It's not really my vibe. But then bands who I really respected started to pop off. And also I was just eager to leave Philly.
What bands drew you to New York?
YHWH Nailgun for sure. My music doesn't sound like that, but it reminded me of a time with my old band where we were really hungry and creatively exciting. I’ve never told these guys that, but seeing them perform, it was one piece of the puzzle of deciding to leave my old band. I was like, Oh shit, you want to feel that inspiring. I never aspired to sound like them that much, just because I don't think you can imitate them. They do one thing that's insane and it’s their own thing, but I think that they reignited some kind of desire to dig deeper into myself. Really work on finding myself in the music and finding my own thing.
You grew up in San Diego. Were you involved in any scenes there?
I felt pretty isolated on the musical front. The scene that was really popping off when I was there was metalcore music, like Asking Alexandria. Fucking Attila or something, right? And I didn't like any of that stuff. My friend group did. The kid I smoked weed with. I was kind of chronically online with it. I obsessed over blogs and stuff. A big introduction to music was my older brother. His friend group would do acid and listen to Animal Collective, classic teenage indie shit. But he introduced me to so much good music that’s still some of my favorite stuff to this day. I spent my time researching and finding a lot of cool stuff, but he was always the one who was digging harder.
My sister had The Unicorns’ CD. You remember that band? My oldest brother was in a band called Literature that had a little bit of an indie moment. But he and my sister would like a band like Beulah, or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. All that shit in middle school. We would go up to LA to see shows, it was really dry. San Diego's got a weird musical DNA, people don't really like touring there. To answer your question, no, not really.
Your older music—your first project as Victoryland, Sprain, the Blood stuff—it’s all noisier. It does have a darker sound. Your new album is precise, it's hookier. Did you always have a desire to write pop songs?
I just knew I had kind of a pop sensibility. I started to bring ideas to Blood that were getting rejected. Definitely coming from a band that, especially earlier on, was trying to subvert the typical song structure, I wanted to prove to myself I could write a pop song. I also just knew that if I wanted a lot of people to listen, there had to be some level of accessibility and excitement around it. Sprain, in its own weird way, was an attempt at that, too. I listen to that now, and I think I was just a little more insecure as an artist, and was trying to hide my voice and my lyrics underneath the guitars.
You were a rhythm guitarist, right?
Me and my brother would switch off rhythm and lead, and we would both write songs. So, I mean, yeah, I was a rhythm guitarist and the lead. It was a lot of kind of shape shifting roles. It's also totally not an insult or anything to be a rhythm guitarist.
Were there any songs that you proposed to the band that are on the new record?
“Arcades.” It was a Blood song first. And it sounded way different. That song is actually the one I felt the most insecure about on this record. I actually love it now, and it was a lot of my friends' favorites.
I suppose this is the case with any new artist, but I see a lot of the press for this record comparing your music to other indie rockers. Who would you compare yourself to?
I think it's song by song. For Dan and I, there's an obvious era, like 2008 to 2012. That was a real golden era. I also just grew up on that shit. I love Deerhunter a lot. But I think it was a really genuine expression, and it was a little siloed off from influences directly. I mean, what I was listening to the most while I was recording was live Van Morrison videos. That's just kind of a consistent obsession. It's funny because that's not anywhere on the record. Maybe I'll make my Van Morrison record at some point.
To me, this feels like a record about vulnerability. Besides your own, what’s some good music to get vulnerable to?
I listen to music in a really weird way these days. I watch a lot of live videos, and someone I saw when I was 16 or 17 play solo, who I've been really obsessed with again, is Mitski. There was an era of her performing live with just her acoustic guitar and singing that is so raw. It makes me cry every time. I really respect her. Maybe I'm having a weird teenagehood revival. Been listening to a lot of Bright Eyes, too. Xiu Xiu. That's really deep. You see yourself in it, you know. They have some lyric about their armpits looking like black moons or something. You just feel that shit.
My friend Victoria plays in a band called @, which is vulnerable for sure. Love that, but her solo record, Biodiesel from Brittle Brian. There’s one song, I think it's “Down By the River.” The vocals are really loud and upfront. It's not really the most immaculate vocal take, but it's so human. I was obsessed with that song for a long time.
You had two poets perform at the album release party. The lyrics on this album also read as very poetic to me. Were there writers that inspired the writing process?
One through my friend Naz was a poet named Frank Stanford. He's really amazing. I'd say Raymond Carver. Short story, author guy. I feel like they just understand the weight of association. I have a good friend named Danielle, and we had a conversation the other day. She actually played the release show. We both kind of talked about how we feel like words kind of have a utilitarian thing. There's a purpose to them. But then also, words are emotional objects. And I think if you understand that words have an emotional charge, then when you put them next to each other, they can be a doorway to a feeling. And I feel like both those authors understand the balance between the utilitarian purpose of language and the emotional charge and kind of inanimate object element of words.
Most of your covers feature figurines. Why is that?
If I had to try to boil it down, there's something about projecting or anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. I think all the dolls I use just look sad to me. There's a humanness to them. It’s like you're looking at them, but you're also kind of like looking through them, because there's nothing there. It's an imitation of, like a human form.
This has been driving me nuts—what’s the instrument at the beginning of “Here I Stand?”
It’s a guitar, but it’s run through something I used in Logic for a lot of stuff on this record, which is called delay designer. You can map out the steps of the delay. You can also map out the changing of the notes. So what you’re hearing is just the delay of those two notes, arpeggiating. We do it with two guitars, which was Dan [Howard]'s idea.
Speaking of Dan, the album very much feels like one of those records where the studio was an instrument. What was the process of recording and producing the album with Dan like?
It was awesome. Most of the songs started with a demo I made on my laptop. So, that loop was something I made on my laptop, and it was really Dan's idea to keep parts of the demo in the actual recording. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Most of the songs are a kind of collage between his studio in Williamsburg and my demos. I think it became kind of a sonic characteristic of the record, because there are these really lo-fi feeling elements, and then there's these really hi-fi drums and other ending guitars and whatnot. I think we really grew as collaborators. I learned to trust him more. Now we've started working on the next one, and I feel like I trust him more than ever. Especially with the response that this is getting, it's put a real fire under our ass.
Can you list the moments that are demos on each song?
“Here I Stand,” it's definitely the loop. And then “No Cameras.” That main sound, I made that with the same thing in Logic. “I got God,” it's the main looping thing. “Keep Me Around” was a weird one, because that was from an original batch of songs we worked on before we started working on the record. And Dan brought it back up later, being like, This demo is really good. And I listened to it again before it had any vocals on it. And I was like, Oh, my God, I cannot believe we made that. That’s way better than I remember it being. But the drum sounds in the beginning are from the demo. What else? The drum machine on that track is from my home demo.
“Arcades,” the big synth sound. On “Blur,” it's the lead guitar line, all this stuff too. He would re-record through an amp or put it through a distortion box. “You were solved.” The synth lead-up. That was a home demo. The drum beat is based off of a drum sample I chopped up. “Beach death” was something we did completely in the studio. I feel like you can kind of tell with that one. I added some tape hiss. “Fits” was, I mean, that's a whole other conversation, but a lot of that is the home demo, a lot of those looping samples, the crazy, noisy guitar. The last song, “I’ll Show You Mine,” I think it was nothing.
The press materials describe Victoryland as your project. What is Victoryland to you?
Victoryland is really 50/50, me and Dan, especially this record. I think I'm just more the front person. That’s the vibe we're trying to give off. With Dan, he doesn't really care about having his picture taken. I’m much more shallow in that way. I want the notoriety or whatever. But the live show is like a six person band. It's a big situation, and it's really sick. I feel like we really captured the vibe of the record. I think part of maturing as a musician is realizing that if you copy paste from the recording to live, it doesn't always translate. There's been a lot of work on our part to try to translate it live, and I think we did a really good job.
I’m also interested in a lot of different forms of art. Victoryland is definitely a musical project. It's not gonna become a filmmaking company. But if I had to put words to it, it's a vessel for expression. Music is amazing, and it's what I want to spend my life doing. But I also think you can kind of chip at the same cosmic thing with different art forms. First and foremost, it’s a recording project between Dan and I. But I've never felt like I was in a band that was the complete package. And now, for the first time in my life, I do feel that way.
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