Going back to my beginning days of roller skating, I would have to say my first skate friend was Alex Leeds. Alex and I would meet during Covid in Logan Square, Chicago, Illinois, under the train tracks in a parking lot to roll around and catch up. He was way better than me because he could easily do a forward 360 and I was amazed. Amongst our Covid catch-ups, what we had in common was both being heavily in the Chicago music scene. Wishing and waiting for the quarantine days to pass so we could have live music again. I was working my way up in the industry while Alex was the bassist of a band called Slow Pulp. I sat down with his band member and lead singer, Emily Massey, to chat about tour life.
You guys were just on tour with the Pixies, right? Then now it’s Death Cab for Cutie?
Yeah. We did a tour with Death Cab in March of last spring, a year ago in Europe. Then it just went really well. They’re so nice to us. It was so fun to be on tour with them.
What were the highlights of going on tour with those big names?
Well, we’re huge fans of Death Cab. I think all of us at different points in our life have been very into one of the albums. We did not even meet the Pixies.
Yeah. I feel like everyone has had a time being a fan of them at some point around our age. I worked their show at Metro and they were so nice. When I worked backstage with them, I was like, “I love you guys.”
They’re so kind. Very down to earth and just kind of goofy. I think one of the most impactful things about touring with them was... Well, first of all, their live show is incredible, and that’s so inspiring to see them just have honed in on something so well. But I think it was just the behind-the-scenes energy of them just laughing and having a good time, being silly. It felt like no matter how long you’re a band, if you’re able to be friends, I feel like that’s the most important thing. Anything to make something sustainable. It felt cool to see them just goofing around. Nothing changes as you get older, maybe.
They’re like normal people. Which is weird, it seems like.
They’re normal human beings, yes. I was a bit starstruck when we were all hanging out. But we’re so excited to tour with them again in just a few weeks. This next tour is with Death Cab and The Postal Service. It’s for their 20th anniversary tour. It will be three weeks around North America. Then we go to Europe after that and do a headlining tour there.
What’s your favorite place so far in Europe?
I really love being in Amsterdam. I had never been there before. The last time we were there, we went there with Death Cab for the first time, and it was so just chill. I expected it to be kind of crazy, and it was so relaxed. I mean, I think they’ve been doing a lot to make sure that there aren’t tourists that are tripping all the time all over the place, which is cool, too. It had a sick vibe, too. But it’s just nice to have all the bikes and all the walking.
There’s a blading event there and every time the event goes on, I always see posts of people biking from place to place and it just looks gorgeous. I would love to go there eventually.
If you can make it out there, it’s worth it. It’s so, so good.
That sounds like a dream. You guys are not from Chicago, right? What made you want to make the move to come here?
We’re from Madison. We had some friends that were living here. We decided to kind of see what we could do if we took the band more seriously, quote-unquote, because Alex (bass and vocals) was living in Minneapolis. Henry (guitar), and Teddy (drums), and I were living in Madison, just a few blocks away from each other. We wanted to move to a new city and be together. We moved to Chicago in 2018 because we had some friends in Post Animal who lived here and were already kind of ensconced in the music scene. So, it felt like a nice kind of entry way to have some people we already knew.
Bigger scene here, maybe.
A bigger scene, bigger city, more things happening. But we all lived together in a house in 2018, and Henry’s partner lived with us as well. There were five of us in a three bedroom, which was hilarious. Way too much time to spend with the people that you work with.
Yeah. My roommate works for this company, too, and she skates, and we travel together. So, I get it. It’s almost like a relationship. It’s funny.
Hey, you can make it work. Seriously, I joke that my bandmates are my three husbands. We are all married in the way that we have to navigate our lives together.
What are the pros and cons of being the only female in the band touring with three guys.
That’s a good question. I mean, they’re just wonderful people and we all have so much fun together. But I think there are sometimes certain dynamics that I notice, or even tours that we’ve been on where I’m not only the only girl in the band, but the only girl in the whole tour of many, many dudes. I miss having some energy that isn’t so masculine all the time. Usually, when we do a headlining tour, I think it’s necessary to have someone who isn’t a man, at least one person who’s not a man in the band that’s playing with us. So that’s made touring fun and really opened up my eyes to a lot of things because it’s so nice to have. Even someone being like, “Can I throw a tampon?”
Literally.
Something as simple as that, or someone doing their makeup before a performance and doing that together. It just feels so much more comfortable.
It’s bonding.
It’s not like anybody’s making me feel uncomfortable. I feel very lucky that I’ve been in a lot of spaces where people are incredibly welcoming and very understanding. But it’s just something different. It’s like that unnamed thing of, I think a lot of my friendships that are with people who are not men are just so deep, and vibrant, and vulnerable, and emotional. Not that men can’t be that way, of course, but it’s just this whole other dynamic.
Yeah. I mean, being in the music industry, it’s very male dominant. My boss from Live Nation, Sam Goulet, always said she wanted to have badass females working on her production team. She did and still does!
That’s so sick. I had a horrible UTI on tour once, and we were touring with Alvvays, and they have a ton of women on their production team, too, and on their crew. I remember just being like, “I have really bad UTI. I don’t know how to deal with this.” The guys are like, “Sorry.” Then they’re like, “We really get it.” So, it’s a lot of those little tiny things that just add up.
For sure. I read that you were introduced into Slow Pulp on their second EP, right? How did you guys meet? Were you friends before or were looking for a singer?
I think I met Teddy first. I was in a band in high school, and that was kind of a part of the Madison music scene. Teddy was in this band as well, and I think our bands played together. I just really hit it off with him and some of his friends. Then I also had met Henry through Teddy, and they all played music and they had bands. I had a band that was kind of ending. So, I started writing some music with Henry first, and then Teddy and Henry, and I would just jam in my parents’ basement. But they had a band with Alex, the three of them. After just a few years of becoming friends and hanging out, they asked me to join their band as a rhythm guitar player and backing vocalist. So, I wasn’t a front person or really a writer, necessarily, in that band. Then it kind of just slowly happened. I think I sang a song, and then it transitioned into me. They’re like, “Do you want to sing some more of them?”
They’re just like, “This is sick. Let’s do more of that.”
Then I started getting more involved with writing with them. Now I’m the front person. Which was kind of an interesting pathway because it wasn’t a role that I necessarily felt. I was a front person in my old band. But with them, it didn’t happen right away. So, it was maybe not the most comfortable position for me in the beginning, also just because I was like, “I’m not good at that. I’m not good at this.”
But it sounds like it was organic because they loved what you brought to the table, so they’re just like, “You should do this.”
Exactly. I think they kind of believed in me more than I believed in myself at that point in time, which is supportive.
It was uncomfortable at first, and now it’s probably super easy. You’ve been doing it for a while now.
Yeah. Well, I feel like each time we started an album I’m like, I don’t know what I’m doing. But then you fumble your way through. But yeah, it’s a lot more comfortable than it was.
Is there different writing processes or do you guys all come together and do it together?
I feel like it’s different for each song. This last record, I spent a lot of time at a friend’s family’s cabin in northern Wisconsin and started some songs and wrote some melodies and the lyrics. The guys also will write guitar chords and things and send them to me. Then I’ll take them and kind of work a song out of that, or they’ll write songs and then I’ll sing them, or help with lyrics, or whatever it may be. But there’s also a song that we just kind of jammed on, and then it became a song from the practice space. It’s kind of different each time. For this next record, I think we don’t know what it’ll sound like or what the process will be.
That’s kind of cool that it’s different for every song then.
They all have a lot of different energies within the songs. Which I think is what’s fun about it, because it’s not just one person honing in on something. Which sometimes can be complicated in its own right, too. I think that we try to just kind of not have too many expectations and see what happens.
So the Sum 41 bit that you guys did “In Too Deep,” whose idea was it? How did you guys do the photos? All of that was so funny. I loved it. I texted Alex and I was like, this is fucking awesome.
It was so fun to make that cover. I can’t remember. I want to say it was Henry who had the idea to do that song, in particular. I think everyone was just on board because it was so funny. Doing the album artwork, we used to have this practice space that had a bathroom, it had a bathtub in it and a shower. So, I think we all took the pictures there and I think they used a leaf blower.
I was going to say that, it had to have been some sort of blower.
Yeah. But we were just shaking our faces as much as possible. I think they were taking slow motion videos of it, and then we just screenshotted parts that looked the most ridiculous. Yeah, or looked, maybe there was wind going around.
So, were all of you guys a fan of Sum 41 back in the day?
I feel like they were probably bigger fans than I was. I knew the hits. I wasn’t listening to the albums, per se. But I loved that song, for sure.
It’s so American Pie.
Yeah, exactly.
When I saw the album artwork, I was like, “That’s a good bit.”
It felt like a no-brainer. Yeah. We’re about to release a cover of “Hanging by a Moment,” by Lifehouse. Which is such a funny thing, also an unexpected thing for us. That one was a harder album. We didn’t have an easy pathway to the album cover as we did for the Sum 41 one.
When I went to a Bully show last year, she’s sang a Jane’s Addiction cover, “Jane Says,” and it was fucking perfect. How do you pick the songs you want to cover?
Sick. Yeah, I think covers are so fun, and I think they are the best way to segue into learning more about music and writing music. We don’t do a whole lot of them as a band. I feel like individually we all kind of will learn songs. Henry makes a lot of instrumental covers. We had the “Hanging by a Moment” one kind of on deck for a while. I just felt like I wasn’t nailing the vocals. Then we just changed the key, and then it was fine to make it happen. But we’ve talked about doing some more covers, for sure. We’re big Coldplay fans, so maybe we’ll do a Coldplay cover.
You should! How long is your next tour that you’re going to be gone?
It’s going to be three weeks, and then I think we have two weeks off, and then it’s another month after that.
The weeks that you’re off, is it like you are stoked and then all of a sudden you go through this depression phase where you wish that you were still out on the road? Or are you like, thank god, I’m here.
I feel like since... Last year we toured almost six months—not straight, but it was a lot of time. We had some time off. We did two weeks, our fall tour was six weeks, and then we did two-and-a-half weeks in Europe with a week off in between. We were so burnt. I do enjoy touring. But the older I get, the more I’m like, being stationary does sound pretty nice. I think now this apartment that I’ve moved into, it’s one of my favorite homes I’ve lived in. So I’m like, I don’t want to leave. But especially when it’s nicer out in summer in Chicago, it’s so great. But I feel grateful that we get to tour and do it at the scale we do. It’s just finding the balance of what’s healthy. Also, my body just gets so fucked up on tour all the time, and then when I come home, it takes a couple of months to readjust.
Do you get sick? I mean from singing so much?
I get sick. I think it’s just lack of sleep. I also have some autoimmune stuff, and I have chronic fatigue. So, I think tour really kind of does a number on me. Yeah, you just kind of eat like shit you don’t sleep for months at a time. This tour, I’m going to attempt a sober-to-end-gluten-free tour. So, pray for me.
Are you guys ever annoyed? I feel like if I didn’t get enough sleep, I’d be like, “Don’t talk to me.”
Yeah, it could be your favorite person in the whole world. It’s going to happen when you’re just spending that much time, that much condensed time. You share beds in hotel rooms every night. We’re about as close as it gets.
I feel like the hardest one was when I went to Australia for three weeks with my best friend for skating, and we took an RV from Melbourne to Brisbane. Those just two weeks we were all close corners and all sleeping in the same beds. We’re all just in need or space and alone time for fucking 10 minutes.
We’ve all got sound-canceling headphones. We just spend hours not talking to each other. We have to. Sometimes I’ll drink a ton of Red Bull and I’ll drive. Everybody’s quiet and I won’t listen to music for like five hours recently. Didn’t listen to anything. I was just loving it.
Just in your thoughts?
It is amazing. Yeah, it’s only when I’m really caffeinated.
Would you rather never worry about money again, but never laugh, or have to work for the rest of your life, but laugh every day?
Oh my god, work and laugh. I think I’m going to work for the rest of my life anyways. I can’t imagine. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very good at doing nothing. I often do it a lot. But I think, yeah, I like making things. I like doing stuff. I like moving around. So, I feel like... I want to be laughing forever.
