On his debut album Sunflower, Briston Maroney showcases his penchant for flourishing atmospheric melodies that frequently pay off in big, impassioned choruses that leave a mark—in a very good way. The 23-year-old Nashvillian’s first proper long-player arrived on April 9th via Canvasback/Atlantic, following a quartet of Eps, the first of which, Big Shot, he released independently in 2017 as a teenager. Spending most of his childhood in Knoxville, Maroney worked his way out of busking and basement gigs to a record deal in 2018.
Trying to neatly define the album’s sound is challenging, even for Maroney himself, who has a broad musical palette that ranges from traditional folk to hardcore hip-hop. “To be honest, I have a really hard time seeing Sunflower for what it is,” he admits, “because it was such a long process and some of these songs are so old. I don’t know if it’s a rock record, or if it’s an Americana record or an indie record. It’s really hard for me to know.”
Instead, it’s probably better to just let the buzzy thump of “Bottle Rocket,” the wistful glimmer of “Cinnamon,” and the melancholic swell of “It’s Still Cool If You Don’t” hit your ear objectively and decide for yourself.
Bolstering Maroney’s heartfelt works are prolific producer John Congleton (Brian Wilson, David Byrne, St. Vincent, The Killers, The Roots) and Jim Abbiss (Adele, Arctic Monkeys, Birdy), and co-writes by Dan Wilson (Semisonic, The Chicks), Jenny Owen Youngs, and Manchester Orchestra’s Andy Hull and Robert McDowell.
After a brief tangent on the topic of comfortable pants (we’re both fans, it turns out), we eventually settled into a heartening discussion about Maroney’s earliest days as a working musician, navigating the recording industry as a new artist, and the path that led to Sunflower—and where it might take him next.
First, I want to congratulate you on Sunflower finally seeing the light of day. I’ve really liked exploring it over the past few weeks.
Well, thank you. Thank you very much.
The press assets I received has a quote from you saying the album is “all of the things I’ve been stoked about since I was twelve coming together.” What did your younger self envision about this moment and the music you’re making now?
Funnily enough, probably not too different of a picture than what came out. I think I’ve always had this pretty simple, pretty distinct idea of what would sound beautiful about life as a bigger thing. But, really, with music, I find myself always connecting with the same couple of musical sentiments or elements on records that I listen to. It’s just looking at Sunflower and knowing it’s influenced by stuff I was listening to when I was twelve that really lit a fire in my soul for the first time. It breaks down to some pretty simple things, honest things. Simplicity is important. The album is called Sunflower—we didn’t overthink that too much. We tried, but…[laughs].
I was saying to somebody the other day that we’d had these album titles that were, like, these huge fifteen-word proclamation things. But then I said, “you know what? No. I’m not worthy of trying to do that.” [laughs] I’ve just gotta keep it simple. And making sure I acknowledge those really minute and easy, but defined, beauties has always been the thread throughout what I’ve dug musically.
And you were already writing songs at about that age?
I started writing when I was pretty young—like, eleven or twelve. Very, very unfortunately I think my mom still has the sheet of paper that I wrote my first song on. I distinctly remember rhyming “you’re so beautiful it struck me like lightning...I love you so much that it’s frightening.” Looking back on that, if my mom would’ve read that...If I read my twelve-year-old child’s lyrics, I would’ve hugged them and said, “what’s goin’ on, buddy?” [laughs] “You shouldn’t be threatened by your love. You’re a child.” So, yeah, I started when I was young.
I loved listening to music. I always liked writing poetry in school and stuff, and I loved creative writing. I wrote songs with no intention of playing them or singing them ever. But then I realized I did want people to hear them. I honestly didn’t know I was going to sing or play guitar, I just liked writing and reading a lot. I started singing just so people could hear those things I was writing.
When did you start playing the guitar?
Around the same time. I had a pretty badass grandpa who bought me a little guitar and taught me “Louie Louie.” I distinctly remember playing the same three power chords for—and I’m not even kidding—six hours straight, and then looking down and seeing I had a blister on my thumb and thinking “I am a god! This is the greatest thing. I’ve done it.” [laughs] Honestly not much has changed. [laughs]
After you started writing songs, you began playing farmer’s markets and house shows. What was the weirdest gig you were booked into when you were first performing?
Oh, God. It’s crazy how immediately tractor festivals come to mind. I’m from Knoxville, so if you drive thirty minutes in any direction from [there], you can find a tractor festival on any given day. Those days were really funny, man. We were always ending up at rodeos, and I remember playing unplugged when there was a tractor pull going on next to us. I still don’t exactly know what a tractor pull is, but it’s probably exactly what it sounds like. So, yeah, I would just stand there in my little khaki shorts playing my Woody Guthrie cover while these people are pulling tractors. It was very formative, really shaped me. [laughs]
But I progressed, like you said, into the basement shows, and there were countless ridiculous memories of those, especially in my early touring days. We were always rollin’ up to some kid’s house who told us there was a stage, and then you get there and it’s not a stage, it’s a basement. And that’s cool, but then it turns out to be not his basement, but his cousin’s basement. And his cousin didn’t know that we were going to play a show, and then his cousin comes and wants to beat you up. [laughs] It just never went smoothly. But those things are formative, too.
Do you remember the first time you were actually paid for your work?
Wow. Oh my gosh, that’s a great question. I think it was with my high school band and we played the botanical gardens in Knoxville, which is one of the prettiest places ever—it’s super East Tennessee. Yeah, we stood in a line and played our little hearts out, and I think we got paid, like, a hundred bucks or something. [laughs] Split four ways.
Aside from your own compositions, I imagine you were out there playing covers, too. What were some of the songs I would’ve found on one of your setlists back then? What were you listening to at the time?
Those really early days I went through some big shifts, you know? Up until I was eighteen or nineteen, I really didn’t feel comfortable doing my own thing. I mean, yeah, I was writing a lot and maybe I had an idea of what I wanted to say, but I was doing covers and leaned on just imitation and replication a lot. It was Woody Guthrie, and [Bob] Dylan, and Townes Van Zandt. I was also one of the biggest Avett Brothers fans in the universe. There’s a picture of my best friend and me that you could “a” and “b” with a picture of the Avett Brothers. I think we even bought the same clothes. We went to Urban Outfitters and bought the same outfits. So, we were super influenced by those dudes.
When I got to high school, I started listening to more obscure, grungy, angsty stuff. I had a buddy who changed my life—he started giving me Pavement CDs, and My Bloody Valentine CDs, and Jeff Buckley. Just all of these ‘90s bands. I started really digging that and was covering Nirvana songs and Pearl Jam songs. That was kind of the end of the cover era. It was crazy how shamelessly I’d be, like, “I want to be like that person, I’m just literally going to play like them.”
I’ve talked with a number of artists who live and work in Nashville. And I always have this idea in my head of the community there being a fairly well-oiled machine with these big networks of songwriters and musicians and labels all working in concert to crank out tunes. You’ve identified yourself as being part of the city’s DIY scene. What is your definition of that?
Yeah, I think it’s just friendship being fuel for everything you do. I was just talking to my partner about this—we’re pretty lucky in Nashville that anything we really want to do, we can call a friend and do it with them. I mean, damn, there are so few places where you can do that. Starting in this homegrown scene, we from the jump kind of all relied on each other. If you needed to book a show back in the day, you were going to get a basement slot, but they’d say “you have to bring along five other bands just to make sure people show up.” So, you’ve gotta know people who play in five different bands that you can call up and ask. It was a lot of that sort of thing of just needing one another to share this music and these songs, right down to videos, and photographers, and publishers.
Now that I’m getting to see more of the industry—whatever the hell that means—I’m crossing paths with a lot of friends who used to be at those house shows who now work for labels and publishing companies and stuff like that. Even then, it’s cool to have that connection of friendship. It’s just seeing everyone you encounter as a friend and as someone who deserves to be respected.
I know you’re still trying to feel your way through the industry. Based on what you’ve learned so far, what is perhaps the biggest fallacy of it that maybe the general public—or even new artists—might not understand?
Well, that’s a really awesome question. Uhh...man, I want to answer in the right way...I’m really lucky. The people I work with closely in the industry world are really kind and genuine. I really think I’m genuinely one of the luckiest people that has been pushed into this industry. Everyone I work with, I know I can trust, which was huge from the jump. I got lucky that they turned out to be people who had my best interests in mind, and I want to make that super clear. But, you know, I think sadly there are corners of the industry where the kind of people you see in movies about the industry tend to roll in with the sunglasses-and-suit-and-tie sort of thing where people don’t have your best interests in their mind.
I think honestly what could solve a lot of problems between artists and people who work in the music industry...our goals are different, you know what I mean? And it doesn’t mean they’re bad people, or that artists are good or bad people. If you’re working in the music industry, your goal may be to make money off of those things, and you may love music. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, in my mind. But I wish there was a way we could explain to younger artists more heavily, “hey...this person may love you as a person and may love your music, but they also want to make money off of you. And if you’re okay with that, then this is an awesome relationship. You should go for that. And if you’re not okay with that, then that’s great, too, and you should stick to what you want to do.” I think it’s really important.
Once I came to terms with “oh, the relationships with the people I work with can be friendships, but it has to be separate from where money’s involved and all of that stuff,” it was relieving. There is kind of a veil for younger artists, I think, of that not being explained.
So, what’s something you do better now than you did a year ago when you were still making the record?
[laughs] Jog. No, I think I have better meltdowns that are shorter meltdowns now, if I’m being honest. Finishing that record was one of the crazier times in my life. Learning to “survive” that process made it so much easier now to get in situations with writing or creative stuff, you know? Be creative, hit a wall, and go “whoa, this sucks, but it’s okay. Tomorrow might be when the solution comes. Or it might be a week or a year, but it’s gonna come.” So, I think I’ve just learned to become a bit more rational and stop telling myself that I’m never gonna write again. [laughs]
I want to give some attention to the really ambitious visual album you made with filmmaker Joey Brodnax to accompany Sunflower. Tell me a little bit about how that came to fruition.
I don’t know the answer to that. [laughs] I think I’m still wrapping my mind around that. It doesn’t make sense to me why I love it. My relationship with Joey runs really heavily on doing things and then going “why the hell did we do that?” And then laughing really hard about it before we do another crazy thing. But, yeah, this album almost felt incomplete without us making a film about it. We had time with COVID striking and we had the energy to do it.
It was totally a mindset of ‘why don’t we try and paint a picture of this entire record?’ And we’d never done something like this before, but I’d also never made an album before, so why not make a short film? We did it so at the end of the day we said we tried, and that we also had a ton of places to move forward from. The film, though, is essentially ten music videos with a lot of pretty crazy little clips cut in between—and some of it’s just random shit we thought looked cool, some of it is pre-scripted monologue stuff, and some of it’s this cool graphic thing we made. It doesn’t make sense to me, but I think I’m cool with that. [laughs]
You’ve made and released Sunflower after four successful EPs. As someone who writes for an outlet that champions the album art form, I’m curious how you feel about making an LP as opposed to releasing singles and small batches of songs, which seems to be a trend—and maybe a preference.
I have always been an album person, and I think I’m stoked to keep making albums. I’ve always been an “eras-of-bands” person, and I love being able to look back and associate an album with an artist’s haircut, and outfit, and attitude. I just think that’s awesome. I love that sort of performative side of things.
So, for me, it’s always been an album thing. I’ve always sat around and schemed and have hundreds of little notebooks filled with possible tracklists for records that will never happen. Sometimes they’re not even songs that exist. But, you know, Sunflower, as much as it is a literal record, it’s a much bigger-picture thing for me of “this is the first chapter of my story.” I’m definitely big on that and I’ve always just been drawn to artists who do that.
But I get it—it’s just hard now with labels needing songs and artists needing to put out songs and that whole algorithm conversation. I think when I’m old and grey, though, I want to be able to look back and say, “that’s a body of work.” I like thinking of albums as books on a bookshelf. I’m sure you’ve heard the quote from Jeff Tweedy where he says something like “I look at my records on a shelf and think ‘okay, what kind of record have I not made?’” I think in that way, too.
Well, let’s explore that. Certainly not to diminish Sunflower’s big moment in the now, but if you had no restrictions or limitations in terms of time, budget, and resources, what kind of album would you want to make?
I think it would be me and Rick Rubin in a room with a hundred-track setlist of hip-hop songs, and rock songs, and folk songs, and piano songs, and then just sounds of someone gargling water for thirty seconds. [laughs] You know, just crazy shit. I’d want to do something just insane. But I think album-to-album progression is my favorite thing about music because I love the limitations, more realistically and to answer less silly.
I think the next record I’d want to make would be a big rock record. In my mind, I feel like progress would be making a sort of anthem-y rock record that also sounds like it’s underwater. I don’t know, just something big. And I might start writing songs like that and think “this is stupid. I should go back to making farmer’s market music in my little grandpa boots and saddle up.” But who knows? I do love the idea, though, of progress and growth.
Just to deviate for a moment, I have to leave a little love note here to Dan Wilson, who I love as a producer and songwriter. I assume that was a great experience to write with him?
Oh, dude. He’s awesome. He’s a fantastic person and one of the coolest people I’ve ever met.
My last question, in the spirit of Albumism—and I know it’s not always an easy or fair question for anyone that loves music—what are your top five favorite albums?
Oh, fuck.
See?
Okay. I think that’s a great question. Uhh...how fast do people answer this?
Sometimes not very quickly. Take all the time you need.
I want to shoot from the hip. The first one that comes to mind is Band of Horses’ Everything All The Time—that’s an important record to me. I always want to say [The Beatles’] White Album, because it was one of the first CDs I owned. It’s hard to choose between the first couple of John Prine records, but either Sweet Revenge or his self-titled debut album. Those are huge for me. And I can’t choose between [Smashing Pumpkins’] Siamese Dream or Gish...but probably...probably Gish? I don’t know. What record am I leaving out? What kind of record am I not thinking of?
What about a hip-hop record?
Yeah, well, honestly either [Souls of Mischief’s] ‘93 ‘til Infinity...I loved that song and then discovered the album after, or [Wu-Tang Clan’s] Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) for sure.
But honestly, I’d have to say it’s probably Big Thief’s Masterpiece. That record changed my life. Yeah, I’m going to stick with that.
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