Bowling Shoes
WIMITLA. EDITOR’S CHOICE
By Eli Goodwin
A picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes, it may just be worth a thousand songs. Inspired by a desire to learn more about how to record/produce as well as a friend’s photograph of bowling shoes, Jeremiah Bermel put all his eggs in the basket of a new solo project called, you guessed it, Bowling Shoes. Upon attending the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Bermel expanded Bowling Shoes into what it is today: a band with four core members that never fails to put out a head-bopping, toe-tapping, drive with the windows down on a summer day type of song. Though its members have changed in the past, the band is currently headed by Jeremiah Bermel, Ben Walker, Sam Nazaretian, and Sean Thomas. We recently spoke to Jeremiah about how he chose the other members of Bowling Shoes, the magic of that hyper-specific Bowling Shoes sound your listening ears may have noticed, and more!
Eli: Hey! Thanks for speaking with me today. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Jeremiah: My name is Jeremiah Bermel, and I am the lead singer of a band called Bowling Shoes. It started as a solo project for me in high school when I was 19 and wanted to learn how to record, and that first EP was a project for myself in order to learn how to do that. It basically just became a band from there. We all went to Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and we just kept adding members and putting out stuff as a band.
E: So how did you start making music?
J: So I myself started when I was really young. I was pretty much always singing when I was younger, and then my parents sent me off to classical piano lessons in probably first grade or kindergarten. But, I kinda quit that and picked up guitar. I wanted to be a rockstar moreso than a piano player. After that, I practiced guitar really hard all throughout elementary and middle school. It was always a part of my life and I really love guitar. Then, I started writing my own songs when I was about 15. I played my first show when I was 15, too. I played in a couple bands throughout high school. At the very end of high school, I started Bowling Shoes because I really wanted to do my own thing and have a lot of say. To this day, I'm still quote on quote the band leader. I started really making songs for myself with this band. Everything else before that was for other people's bands. The Bowling Shoes songs were the first songs I ever did that were for me.
E: And to put it all in one place, how did the band get together?
J: The band got together at MassArt. We all had classes together, and we’ve kind of had a rotating cast of characters, so some people who were at one point or another in the band are not anymore. But yeah, we met at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and I went there for sound. I kind of spent all my time in the recording studio there, and I’d get my friends to come with me and hang out and record in there. Ben, who is the lead guitar player, and I met in an “History of Experimental Sound Art” class. It was kind of just love at first sight between us.
Bowling Shoes via Instagram
E: That’s interesting. If you went to an arts college with so many talented people making up your class, how did you pick and choose, as the creator of Bowling Shoes, who was in the band?
J: Two people who I met very early on, one who is no longer in the band and Ben, we bonded prior to starting the band about a lot of the same bands and artists that we all liked. Ben also played in another band that I really liked at the time. I had said to him “Hey dude, you play in this band and that’s really sick,” and he replied “Yeah dude, we should jam sometime.” I basically went up to him and just said I love your band. It was pretty awkward.
E: Great story. I know that Bowling Shoes was a solo project originally, but where did the name come from?
J: The name came from a photograph that I had a friend take in highschool of themselves wearing bowling shoes. It was a really nice film pic. For whatever reason that picture stood out to me, and I remember writing a very proto-Bowling Shoes song called “Bowling Shoes.” The song never became anything, but I kind of realized that Bowling Shoes would be a great name for a band and nobody else had it as a band name. I was super excited about that and couldn’t believe no one else had it as a band name just because it’s such a great band name and it rolls off the tongue so easily. It’s got such a classic feel to it. Yeah, that’s how it happened: because of that picture and that song. The band name was obviously better than the song.
E: So, out of curiosity, is that picture of the bowling shoes the photo version of the cover of your first EP?
J: It is based on it, yes.
E: So speaking of your first EP, you made your debut in 2018 with the eponymous EP. Why did you choose an EP as the music world’s introduction to you, and why the select songs on it?
J: So, the EP was done because I didn’t want to do one song. I basically had three skeletons of songs that I was really psyched about and they were all really short. I’ve always loved the idea of just short and sweet songs. Music that just gets its point across very quickly and is very accessible. So I had these three short songs that were maybe 7 minutes total, and I figured it would be the perfect little taste of what this project could be if it ever goes anywhere. I didn’t really expect it to go anywhere, it was just a little project for me to learn how to record, but I guess it did.
E: Awesome. So moving along your discography, your first full-length album, Larry, was put out the next year. I love the directions you take with your music. “Portland” was the song that introduced me to Bowling Shoes, and it’s actually on one of my favorite Spotify playlists. Enough about that, however. I especially love the funky sort of instrumental breaks. What was the concept behind Larry?
J: Larry was a very light, loose concept album. It’s named after my grandfather, Larry Frankel, who passed away just under a year before it was released. He had a huge impact on me. I’m very into education and I very much cherish my education that I’ve been privileged enough to receive. I was able to go to college at such an amazing place. He was a big part of the installation of that in me. It was very important to him as well. Basically the album was kind of just honoring him and me critiquing myself. He was a paleontologist and geologist, and a big part of the album was me lamenting that I didn’t have as much of a scientific mind as him and wishing I did. If I did it all over I’d want to be a scientist of some sort. That was the very light concept of the album; it was both honoring him and self-deprecating. There’s a line on “Paleontology” that says “I don’t have a scientific mind,” and that kind of encapsulates the feelings that were going through my head at the time of writing the lyrics for Larry.
E: Amazing. So my favorite song on Larry, and probably of your discography at large, is “Block Island Blues Band.”
J: Hell yeah, thank you.
E: No problem. Now knowing the concept of Larry, I’d love to know what the song is about.
J: “Block Island Blues Band” is named after a joke I have with a few friends that we’ll move to this island off the coast of Rhode Island. We’re from Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The joke is that there’s this kind of vacation-y, touristy spot, Block Island, and we’ll move there, just scramble our lives, and become a blues band. We’ll play at bars on the island and stuff. The song is kind of a melting pot of lyrical stuff that was going on. I screwed up pretty bad. I had a big f**k up at the job I was working at that summer, and I was feeling really nervous about that. I’m also screaming about science in the song, though. It was kind of a painting of what that period of time in my life was like. It was just what I was going through during that period of processing my grandfather’s death and hard times at work. There was also a lot of questioning, you know? Am I making the right career choice? Should I have been a scientist?
E: What is your typical production process like, and who does what in the band when it comes to the song?
J: A typical production process as it has gone is usually that either Ben or I will come up with a skeleton of a song that may or may not have vocals on it--
E: Sorry to interrupt, but what does Ben do?
J: No problem. Ben is a multi-instrumentalist. Guitar and keys. We also do some mini-drums on demos and try to figure out what we want the direction of the song to sound like. We basically do a pretty full-fleshed skeleton between the two of us. After that, we take it to the rest of the band. We figure out how to play it live, how to make it make sense in production. A lot of our demos end up becoming like the real song, so we mostly do a lot of cleaning up. Ben and I will take it to Sam, for example, who is our bass player and a sound engineer. Sam is the one who makes it make sense. The way it goes a lot is that Ben creates some sort of banger. Sometimes I create a banger. I give it the Bowling Shoes heart, and then Sam makes it make sense. Afterwards, we teach it to Sean on drums.
E: Oooh, okay. I’m going to skip ahead a couple of questions because that is a perfect segway. You guys have a really unique, sort of happy-go-lucky sound. How do you achieve this, in reference to the Bowling Shoes heart?
J: That’s almost always been something that I’ve particularly stressed about the band. It’s something that we’ve stressed with every artist that we've ever worked with--from the album art to the videos. It’s something we always strive for. We like quirkiness. We try to always infuse a sense of quirkiness into all of our work. That’s basically it. I just like the way that happy-sounding, staccato-y music makes me feel. The polarization of doing happy-sounding songs with darker lyrics is also always fun for me, but I generally like listening to more upbeat stuff, so I wanted to make more upbeat stuff. But yeah, infusing quirkiness is always something we try to do. It’s like, “How can we make this quirkier? How can we give this the Bowling Shoes quirk?”
E: Right. That was the word I wanted to use, quirky, but I always feel like it’s been so beaten over the head, so I was sort of shying away from it.
J: I think it’s the only way to describe us. It’s literally the way we describe it amongst ourselves: the quirk, the quirkiness.
E: There definitely is some sort of idiosyncrasy to your music. For sure. Who do you think your biggest musical influences would be in terms of this sound?
J: Our influences are always changing. Larry is almost two years old at this point, so at the time we were listening to a lot of indie rock and beach music. We all loved this band A Great Big Pile of Leaves. We still love them, they’re awesome. They’re from Brooklyn. Peach Pit. Queen Moo. Rex Orange County. All of these bands and people were some big influences then. Now, it’s just everything. We’re just trying to do a little bit of everything. At that time, however, that’s what we were trying to be. We were trying to emulate that indie rock sound that was popular at the time. But again, now it’s everything. I always kind of get a loss for words when people ask who our influences are because we all listen to so much. I can never tell people who my influences are without looking at my Spotify playlists that I slowly collect.
E: I get that. Inspiration is everywhere, no matter what you do. Do you guys ever see yourselves tackling other genres maybe?
J: Yeah. We have a--well, I can’t say anything yet. I’m not allowed to say anything yet. But, I think that on a lot of our new stuff, that’s a big thing that we try to stress. We try to cover as much ground as possible in terms of genres.
E: Awesome. Why are the dynamics of Bowling Shoes different from the other bands and even solo acts you’ve done? How about this iteration of Bowling Shoes in particular?
J: Oh, I have an answer for that. Bowling Shoes is a corporation. We’re so professional with the way we work. Yeah, we started off as friends. At this point, however, we’re all so busy that the band is just straight business. We try to be as deathly efficient as possible whenever we’re together. I don’t want to understate the fact that we’re all still friends, but we just have a very, very strict business relationship. We all love what we do and love playing music, so when we’re here, we’re here to make music. We want to like the music we make, so we put our all into it and take it very seriously to that extent: We’re here to make music. We don’t have huge egos about our sound or anything, it’s not that crazy. But when we’re together, we’re making music, so that’s what we focus on doing. We don’t really f**k around.
E: Interesting. So, do you feel like that is the most special attribute of your band, or is it something else?
J: Yeah, it probably is our most special attribute. I like to say that something that informs that is that I consider Ben to be my musical soulmate. The way that we’re able to work with each other at this point is so seamless. We met when I was a freshman in college and he was a junior in college. We’ve always had a seamless, working relationship. We were able to pick up on each other’s styles very quickly, and we just started writing music with each other very quickly. We’ve always been able to have that very quick relationship because we’re on the same page all the time. It’s almost like a given thing. Sam is a newer member of the band, and it’s starting to apply to him too. We’re all just on the same page.
E: So is it currently you, Ben, and Sam?
J: It is currently me, Ben, Sam, and our drummer, Sean. We also have two live members who may or may not be more full-time members. The core members are me (Jeremiah Bermel), Ben Walker, Sam Nazaretian, and Sean Thomas.
E: Who are you working with in a dream collab?
J: I’ll give a couple of answers. If it were someone dead, Freddie Mercury all the way. He’s a legend and one of the most epic singers of all time. Alive, the artist Benny or Doja Cat. I would love to work with Doja Cat. I think she’d be so much fun to work with and write a song with.
E: Alright. So, I know there’s some big stuff going on that you can’t disclose, but answer this next and last question to the best of your ability: What’s 2021 looking like for Bowling Shoes?
J: 2021 is looking like a good year for a Bowling Shoes fan.