In Conversation With… American Aquarium

American Aquarium’s new album ‘Lamentations’ is out this Friday May 1st 2020. Here, in this interview, BJ Barham talks about the inspiration and influences behind the new record. 

Hey, how are you doing? How’s quarantine been going so far?

I’m doing great, we’re getting a little stir crazy but it’s for the good of everybody so we’re ok with it.

I feel like it either brings out the creativity or the boredom – so which camp are you in? 

Yeah, we’re just taking advantage of getting a lot of home projects done.

I like to talk to people about the origins of their music, so where did you grow up and what kinds of music did you listen to growing up? 

I grew up in a little town in North Carolina called Reedsville, North Carolina and it’s a small rural farming town, probably about four hours from where I currently live in Raleigh, which is kind of the State Capital. Growing up, I was kind of in the middle of nowhere, so I listened to what my parents listened to and my parents listened to a lot of country music, whether it be what was on the radio or what records they had, which was kind of 70s or 80s country records, that’s kind of what I was raised on.

I think there’s always that moment for a musician when they know this is what they want to do. Can you remember that moment? 

Yeah, I was in college. I was twenty-one years old. The first moment you get on stage and play original songs in front of people and they respond to them, there’s kind of that moment where it clicks. I was at school and I was studying political science and history and all of a sudden I get on stage and I sing for people and then I didn’t think about my studies anymore. It took a while to get it off the ground as every small business does, any time you branch out and you start something new. It took a while. I’d say probably 2011/2012 is when we started seeing a turning point in the band’s trajectory, when we started seeing people coming to shows and singing along and we could make a living doing it. I had been wanting to make a living off it since the early 2000s but it wasn’t until then when I started being able to do that.

On May 1st, you’ll be releasing your new album Lamentations, it’s a bit of a funny time to release but how excited are you to get it into the world? 

Yeah there’s no game plan for releasing a record during a global pandemic. There’s no blog I can go and read, we’re kind of setting our own precedent and we’re trying to figure out ways to put out music. There’s a lot more people at home now, which means there’s a lot more people who are wanting to consume music, so we’re just trying to figure out ways to get music to people and cut out the middle man. There are a lot of people who have cancelled their release date and put it back to the summer and we just weren’t ready to do that. We had been sitting on this record since December and we feel like there’s still a lot of people who will support this record, whether we’re in quarantine or not. Hopefully they’ll be able to sit down for an hour and focus on what I’m saying, instead of putting it on the car as they go from A to B.

Wouldn’t it be cool if this caused the ‘record’ to make a comeback? 

I really hope so.

One of the tracks you’ve already released is ‘Long Haul,’ the last track on the album. It’s a gorgeous song, almost painfully intimate and soulbearing? 

I’ve kind of built a career on that, that transparent songwriting, almost showing too much. There’s a fine line between too much information and just enough to get your story across and I’ve kind of made a living walking that line. You have to know your strengths and your weaknesses, I think one of my strengths is the self-awareness that I write with. In my fourth or fifth records, I began the self actualisation process of stopping blaming other people for my problems and looking inward and blaming myself and then talking about that pretty openly. Our music is emotionally open.

I do think the more open you are with your audience, the more receptive they’ll be to that.

100%, I totally agree. That’s how I write, my writing style is very much open a vein and let it all pour out on a page. People tend to gravitate toward that, it’s honest and that’s what people want in songs, this unadulterated honesty and that’s what comes out in my music.

That completely comes across in Things Change, there’s a lot of hope in that record and it felt very therapeutic. For this record, Lamentations, what was the message you came out with from recording this album? 

So Things Change was definitely a hopeful record. I put it out right after the US election, after my entire band had quit. It was very hopeful in many different ways. For those who are undoctrinated Lamentations is a book of the bible that Jeremiah wrote, he wrote this book of the bible questioning God’s existence because his country was falling apart, Jerusalem was falling to Babylon. The whole entire book is this guy looking up to the sky and questioning where are you God? Why are you letting this happen to our country? I thought that was a fitting analogy for 2019-2020 America, a guy losing faith for everything he believes in, because his country is falling apart around him. I wanted to write about the multiple things that break us as human beings and so, if you listen to the record, there are marriages that are broken or where people die, there are jobs that are lost, there are people failing economically. I tried to cover as many aspects of things that can break us as possible, as human beings. Lamentations is just an expression of grief or sorrow, so I wanted to write about songs that fit that similar vein of things pushing you to where you just can’t take anymore and approach that with as many possible things as I could.

Some of the songs have silver linings in them, there’s a resilience in the human spirit that I truly believe in. Even some of the songs that are emotionally raw, there are still these messages of working your way out of these really bad situations.

You worked with Shooter Jennings for the first time on this record. How did he come to be a part of the project? 

Me and Shooter have the same booking agent, so we originally had this record to be recorded somewhere else and it kind of fell through at the last minute. I was really worried that we had the songs and the band, but we didn’t have the place to make the record. My booking agent actually recommended that I should talk to Shooter and I’d been a fan of his for a while – he did that Tanya Tucker record, the Brandi Carlile record. I’ve been a fan of his production, I just didn’t think that it would be possible. My agent called Shooter and he had his some days open that we had open. It was very serendipitous the timing of it.

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Would you rather give up songwriting or performing? I would say performing and continue to write songs, it’s part of the DNA.

What record, book  and thing would you bring to a desert island? Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run,’ anything by Cormac McCarthy and a guitar (laughs).

Favourite song you’ve ever written? The one I’m most proud of is ‘One Day At A Time.’

What are you reading right now? David Joy, an author from here.

Complete the sentence…

Music is… everything for me. It’s my job, it’s my hobby, something I love, something I’m good at, it takes care of my family.

American Aquarium is… my life’s work.

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