Interview: Sunflower Bean’s Julia Cumming is King Of The Dudes

NYC based trio Sunflower Bean has just released a 4-song EP titled King Of The Dudes full of straight-up rock & roll energy.

The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda caught up with Sunflower Bean singer/bassist Julia Cumming on the EP’s release day, just as she and the rest of the band were arriving in LA to play a release party. 

Listen here as Julia gives a track-by-track rundown of the new EP:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here:

MD: You’ve got a record Release show happening in LA, is that right?

JC: Yes, it’s our EP release on Saturday, it sold out a few weeks ago and I think it’s gonna be really insane. I hope people are jumping off the walls and the ceilings and what not.

MD: Fantastic. Sounds great, you’re excited about the release obviously, which is happening I guess for you tomorrow, it’s already the 25^th, here in Auckland, New Zealand.

JC: Yeah we’re all really excited for the release. I think any release is kind of like your baby. But with an album we did so much for Twentytwo in Blue and it’s this big thing, I think for the EP it’s more about just getting the tracks to the people, especially our fans, and letting them enjoy them. So it’s been fun to do this release but I also feel like the music is really at the forefront instead of a ton of photo shoots and all the kind of extra stuff that goes into a release and that is really refreshing.

MD:  Right. The EP sounds refreshing in itself. It’s 4 songs that just kind of rock out right in your face. Is that what you had in mind when you went to put this thing together?

JC: Yeah well, it’s funny when people ask what genre Sunflower Bean is they say you know, describe your sound in three words, I always used to say guitar-bass-drums. Because that was the easiest way I think for me to explain who we really were at our hearts and yet on both of our records I’m not sure that we’ve ever captured something that we do live which is really, really full of energy and really kind of hard hitting, I don’t think we’ve ever done that exactly on any of our records. So when we did the EP we just wanted to say, ‘Okay, cut all the extra noise, let’s get into the songs, just do them and make it happen’. I’ve been calling it writing with a sword,  because there was no time to look back and wonder and ponder if you’re doing things right. It was about finding that gut feeling where you make art and trusting that that’s what you need to do.

MD: And was there something that drove you to write and record and release these songs at this time? I mean it wasn’t that long ago since Twentytwo in Blue came out. You could have taken your time and put out an album a year and a half later and everybody would have been fine with that but instead you’ve kind of come hurling out with this, so why did this happen?

JC: Absolutely. I think to answer that with a question, why should artists have to wait because that’s the status quo? There is definitely that idea of being in people’s faces too much and you need time to be out of the world in order to develop the next stage of your artistic life. But at the same time, technology now allows us to have a really direct relationship with music fans. Arianna Grande uses it, Drake uses it, you can make a song in your home and put it out the next day to relate to what’s really going on in the world and the world is so insane right now, it’s like, who knows how we long actually have? I think we didn’t want to sit around and wait for another couple years to see what the climate’s going to be like. We thought we started something on Twentytwo In Blue and how can we wrap this era up with a bang and also give a little bit more, have a little more fun, have a little more adventure, have a little more volume?

MD: In the press blurb that I got, it says the EP is “a sharpened response to our times” so I’m wondering, if you can tell me, what it is you’re responding to?

JC: Well everything that we’ve done has been a response to our times. I think that I find that quote in most of our records because we’ve been writing about our experiences since we were all early teenagers to late teenagers and now in Sunflower Bean we’re early adults.  I think that Sunflower Bean has always been an experiment in reacting to the world around us and what we were experiencing at a rapid pace with excitement and with passion. I think in the case of the EP I think there’s you know a lot of things going on there. There’s sex, death, there’s love, there’s addiction, a lot of things that are deeper even things we were able to I think cover on the record because maybe I was afraid of some of these themes and talking about them this way and it’s reacting to the experience that we’re having right now, a lot of conversations about you know how should we be treating each other, gender politics, all this stuff is at everybody’s mind all the time so we kind of wanted to blow through it.

MD: Now I was wondering since there’s only 4 tracks on the EP, maybe we could just kind of touch on each one of the songs one a time and you could give me a few comments on them one at a time starting with The King Of The Dudes which is like a big bold statement that comes come right out of the front, if you want to elaborate on it?

JC: Yeah sure, The King Of The Dudes was a Nickname that Nick gave me when he kind of saw how I would interact with bands backstage at festivals because they have a tendency to go over and say hello and you know, kind of make friends. It’s silly to even talk about this because it was just kind of an observation but it became this long running joke because in music there’s a lot of everyone sort of always looking at each other, checking everyone out, once you break down that wall, everything’s a lot more fun. It’s even my favourite thing about playing festivals because usually it’s just kind of difficult and it’s fun to actually meet people and see the other bands. Long story short, I thought this nickname was a little silly and a little annoying and it wasn’t until we wrote the song and worked with our producer Justin who was like, “‘King Of The Dudes’, that’s  a really amazing idea. I think you should look at that” and started writing it. It actually became a way to own that title and find a way for me to deal with it and it’s been a really cool process so that’s that song, it’s about me interpreting that nickname and owning it and giving it from my own power rather than someone giving it to me.

MD: Cool. And Come For Me is the next track. What can you tell me about that?

JC: So that was a song that we had the music and the vibe together, it was always giving us this really strong vibe of almost like a beckoning, a warning. ‘Are you really going to do this, are you really going to do that?’ The music often times has its own energy which will define what the lyrics will become and we were kind of working with this and as we were writing these lyrics, it was almost like, do you really want to fight me, do you really want to take me on, we kind of saw this double meaning with sexuality and personal aggression and strength within their own sexuality and kind of wanted to combine those two in a really unique way. And I think that indie rock music in general sometimes there’s a lot of outlets to talk about your sadness but sometimes it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of outlets to celebrate certain parts of yourself such as your sexuality in a weird and kind of fun way. So we wanted to do that as well.

MD: Fear City is the next one, it’s a bit slower, slightly slower than the opening two tunes, what can you tell me about that?

JC: That was a low key favourite of all of ours because I think it’s a really special song and it’s sort of about experiences that I had as a young person in New York City and sort of, I think falling in love is too extreme for what I was feeling but this experience of relationships with an addict in general, I was using that experience but of course we all have different experiences with people in our lives like that who have those kinds of struggles. I think that I finally felt comfortable with seeing what I had to say in that space and maybe even providing a little bit of dialogue for other people who have that experience with other people in their lives and kind of that helpless feeling of ‘I know you won’t take my advice this time, I know I can’t make you change your mind but I’m crawling out of fear city, I don’t want to be afraid and sad anymore dealing with this kind of person.

MD: And The Big One sounds like to me as if it could have come out of The Runaways first album or something, very punky, what can you tell me about that one?

JC: That one is a really interesting song, we started working on it the minute we landed in LA where we recorded at, we worked on it for about an hour and then we put it away for the rest of the week and worked on other things and came back to it right at the end before we were getting on the plane. So it was really inspired by this desperate, tired and excited energy where sometimes a lot of your best work is made because you’re kind of up against a wall and for whatever reason, when we were writing the song I just knew what it was going to be and what I wanted it to be about. I really don’t want to explain it so literally because it takes the fun away from it. It’s a poem so the way I wrote it is going to be different to what others people see, so I’m excited to see what they think about it but ultimately you could define it as being a song about death and birth.

MD: Alrighty. That sounds like The Big One.

JC: Big concept.

MD: Yeah. So it’s the beginning of a new year, you’ve got a new EP out, what’s laying ahead for you and the band as the year plays out for you?

JC: This year we’re doing a lot of festivals, we’re doing a lot of travelling, we’re going to Mexico City for the first time, at some point and we’re going to places we’ve never been and I think that will be really fun. We’re also going to take some time in order to really think about what the next record might be and how we want to approach that, so it’s less big tours and more so just reaching people that we haven’t reached in the same way and just living the dream.

MD: Well you haven’t been to New Zealand yet, have you? Hopefully you can find a way to…

JC: No we haven’t, I was just saying the other day I would love to go, it’s so beautiful there but we’ve never been.