Splendid could never have a "favorite" band. Objectivity aside, there are just too many different tastes and opinions for us ever to arrive at a consensus. Therefore, out of respect to those staffers who undoubtedly think otherwise, I won't describe Beulah as our favorite band. They are, however, a band that many of us really like...in a purely objective, ready-to-scowl-disapprovingly-at-a-moment's-notice sort of way, of course.

As it happened, we were more or less first in line when Beulah frontman Miles Kurosky began speaking to the press about Beulah's newly-released third album, The Coast is Never Clear. Miles is excited about the record. So are we. We're also excited that, unlike our 1999 interview with the band, a certain Editor didn't accidentally record over the best bits of the conversation...

Splendid: From what I understand, the way you did the new record, The Coast is Never Clear, was a little unusual, right? You wrote most of the songs in Japan while you were there -- which would've been the beginning of 2000, right?

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, I went over there in December of '99, and I was over there for a couple of months. I had some of the songs already worked out, and I wrote some there, and I fine-tuned 'em there. Then I recorded them on my four-track and I sent them to all the guys on cassette. Then a few months later we went into the studio, and we were there for most of the summer of 2000.

Splendid: So you got to spend a nice long time getting the songs straight?

Miles Kurosky: Yeah... I think on this album I put more effort into the actual songs -- the structure of them and the arrangements. I know the last record had a lot of intricate arrangements and whatnot, but on this one I was a little more particular about how I wanted the songs to go. I wanted them to be flawless, and I didn't want them to sound as cut and pasted as the last record. I just wanted to do something a little different, I think. I think it helped for me to write the songs on my own and send them to the guys to see what they thought.

Splendid: So it gave you kind of a clear head, rather than the confusing sort of committee approach you'd get if you all worked on stuff together?

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, totally.

Splendid: It definitely seems to have worked. There's a lot of clarity on The Coast is Never Clear. It also seems like a mellower record. More organic sounding.

Miles Kurosky: I'm glad you tapped on that, because that's exactly what we said. We thought it was a more organic record when we were making -- more like songs that came out of just playing, as opposed to "manufactured" songs. I mean, Heartstrings was kind of interesting... Bill Evans, who plays keyboards, always calls the songs I write "Frankenstein creations", because I like to piece them together -- I'll have a chorus and a verse hanging around and I'll just kind of glue them together and see how they come out. On The Coast is Never Clear, I didn't want the songs to sound like they went from part to part -- I wanted them to sound like songs. To be more classically structured, and to see where they went from there. And they are mellower, I guess, in some ways.

Splendid: Certainly not mellower in a bad way -- more relaxed is perhaps a better way to put it.

Miles Kurosky: I think the main thing is I wanted to make a different record. I know a lot of people really loved Heartstrings, but I couldn't bring myself to make the same kind of record. I shied away from anything that sounded particularly close to Heartstrings -- I'd say "I don't want to do that, because it sounds too similar." We shied away from certain instruments that sounded a little too much like they belonged on Heartstrings.

Splendid: But there are still nods to Heartstrings, certainly.

Miles Kurosky: Oh, yeah. You can't escape who you are.

Splendid: "Popular Mechanics for Lovers" has the horn at the beginning...

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, totally. There's always going to be that sort of thing -- Bill Swan plays horns the way he plays horns, I write lines the way I write lines, and I think you just do your best to investigate what you can do differently -- to see who you are and what kind of art you can create.

Splendid: Well, yeah. Any time a band makes a new album, I think they're looking for that "33% familiar/67% new" mixture down pat, so they can make progress from where they were...

Miles Kurosky: And some bands don't make any progress at all. There are bands I know of who write the same record over and over.

Splendid: Luckily, they find fans who are willing to buy that record over and over again.

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, there are a lot of fans who don't want anything new, and I'm sure there are a lot of people who aren't going to be happy that we didn't do Heartstrings again. That record for us was a kind of watershed, and meant a lot to a lot of people. Anyway, the main thing I wanted to do was write good songs -- flawless songs, with good lyrics. All the way down to the titles. If it's good, people will like it. It's like the whole thing with Radiohead; everybody wants another OK Computer, but they can't make another OK Computer. Not that I'm comparing Heartstrings with OK Computer.

Splendid: Beulah spent a lot of time -- most of 1999, at least -- on the road with a lot of really good bands. How much did their influences and approaches color the songs on The Coast is Never Clear?

Miles Kurosky: I'd say a lot. That's one good thing about being in a band -- meeting other bands and playing with them and seeing how they operate. Especially bands you respect. For instance, we all love Wilco, and Summerteeth was one of our favorite records of that year. And to be on the same stage, and even become friendly with those guys, was great. Seeing how they operate... Wilco has a really organic take on music, and that really helped us. And just being on the road with Luna, and seeing how Dean Wareham writes songs -- he writes good songs, and they're simple, so we don't need to go overboard... I'm trying to think of others.

Splendid: One in particular I noticed -- didn't you spend some time on the road with the Ladybug Transistor?

Miles Kurosky: Yeah. The thing with Ladybug Transistor was, I think right after Heartstrings came out, their record -- I forget the name of it --

Splendid: The Albemarle Sound?

Miles Kurosky: Yeah. That came out at the same time as Heartstrings, and I remember hearing it and thinking "Aw, God, we should've done it like this." We were kind of doing an orchestral thing, though not as much as them, and I just thought that record was amazing. I kept joking to the guys that I wanted to make an "elevator" record -- but I was serious. And then Albemarle Sound came out, and it was actually a really great elevator record, y'know? I remember just thinking "This is amazing." I fell in love with that record. Some of that came out in The Coast is Never Clear, but some of the other bands we toured with probably had a greater effect, just because we went out with them later and we were getting used to different things. You've seen us live a few times --

Splendid: Yeah.

Miles Kurosky: We rock pretty hard, and I think that had an effect. I was like, "Okay, we're good at that. We might as well use some of that." There is some mellowness, I think, because there are more guitars on this record. We were sitting around and playing guitars a lot. We didn't make certain orchestral instruments as much of a focus as we did on the last record.

Splendid: You also had the advantage of not having Heartstrings' weird recording experience -- you were just in the studio, rather than working in people's office building foyers or wherever there was space.

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, totally. That was one of the best things -- not having to worry about the technical aspects. Not just the technical aspects, but finding somewhere where you're not going to bother someone and have them kick you out. As silly as it seems now, I think it was a big change to actually be in a studio. Not a million-dollar studio, but good enough. You feel comfortable, and you're just making music rather than worrying about other things.

Splendid: After the success of Heartstrings, I imagine you had enough time in the studio to indulge yourselves.

Miles Kurosky: It's funny with studios, though -- you could always use more time. Studio time is expensive, so you can't do too much, but I could've done another month. After I got a copy of The Coast is Never Clear, I was like, "Oh, I could've done this to this song. I could've added this. It would've sounded good if I added this there..." All these crazy things. I had to stop listening to the record because I just kept hearing more things I wanted to tinker with... But it is what it is. I think I was like that after Heartstrings too, I think, and after Handsome Western States -- especially after Handsome Western States. It is what it is, though.

Splendid: You'd never be 100 percent satisfied with an album, though, would you?

Miles Kurosky: No, but after I heard The Coast is Never Clear, I liked it better than Heartstrings. I thought the songs were stronger and more put together, more solid. I listened to Heartstrings again recently and I thought, "Oh, this is a pretty good little record." But there are songs on there that I don't consider great songs. On The Coast is Never Clear, I didn't think there was too much fat. There's not too much goofing around -- I think they're just solid songs straight through. We were planning on putting fifteen songs on the record, but we didn't have time. We ran out of time, actually.

Splendid: So there are four more "demo"-type songs waiting to be B-sides and Japanese CD tracks?

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, they'll come out as B-sides on one of the first singles. We didn't do them the same justice we did to the rest of the record; we didn't have time. We went to do them and we decided it didn't matter how well they were done. They sound good -- I would've liked to have put them on the record -- but then you couldn't fit the record onto one side of a cassette. That was one of our main goals -- to make sure the record fit on one side of a cassette.

Splendid: So people can pass it around to each other on tapes?

Miles Kurosky: No, you know, whenever you put a record on one side of a tape, it's always awful if it's too short, like Heartstrings is -- you have ten to twelve minutes left and you're like, "Well, how do I fill that?"

Splendid: Right, you don't know whether you should stick some other songs on there or just leave it.

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, and it's also awful if you lose a song or two. So we came in right at 41 or 42 minutes.

Splendid: That's kind of an old-school aesthetic, isn't it, trying to fit into 45 minutes, since there are all those 110-minute tapes now.

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, but those never sound as good. I was weaned on 90-minute cassettes, and that's how we all thought of it. I guess you have to have those 110 minute tapes now, because bands make albums that are 75 minutes long.

Splendid: Or 79 minutes, or as much as they can pack on.

Miles Kurosky: Yeah... anyway, these other songs were actually good. I thought they were strong songs, too, without much fat. We just didn't have time...

Splendid: That just gives Beulah fans a reason to buy the singles, right?

Miles Kurosky: Yup.

Splendid: So...the Capricorn situation... Even before things dissolved with Capricorn, they had this reputation, where if your band did a record for them you could never really be sure when it was going to come out. Release dates came and went... So when you signed with them, were you wondering if that would happen to you?

Miles Kurosky: Not really. I didn't really know the history of Capricorn. All I knew was here was a label that put out Cake and 311, and had a little bit of money to help us out. If we'd gone with an indie label, like Sugar Free or whatever, we'd have spent a quarter of the time in the studio, and been rushed. I was never too worried. I was worried a little when Capricorn was dissolving -- thinking "What does this mean to us?" -- but they made it clear that they liked the band, liked the record, liked what we were doing. They said "Just keep recording. Don't worry about it." Because this was going down when we were recording. They assured us that there would be another label, albeit much smaller and with a lot less money. To us all that mattered was that somebody would be there to actually put the record out. In retrospect, I think it was good that we stuck it out. Velocette, the "new" label, has a good distribution situation. There's only a handful of people who work there -- about five -- but they're into it and they're going to work hard. That's the main thing. The rest is up to us. All you really want from a record label is to print the thing, don't screw up the art, and get it into record stores.

Splendid: Then you take care of the business of making people want to buy it.

Miles Kurosky: Exactly. In some ways I'm happy they've downsized...

Splendid: You almost got the best of both worlds. You got the major label money up front --

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, we got some money...though I have to tell you, not much... We got a little bit of money and they helped us record, and let us do things that we wouldn't normally have been able to do... and yeah, then you get this sort of little more insular experience with Velocette, where they help you out and you don't get lost in the shuffle. Previously, of course, Capricorn was associated with Universal, and there's a lot of red tape with Universal. We could easily have become a casualty, and I was getting e-mails from a lot of kids who were worried that we were gonna be a casualty, and they were very angry about it. In the end, everything worked out okay.

Splendid: Listening to The Coast is Never Clear, I found myself thinking "My God, what if this record got tied up in red tape forever and became Beulah's 'lost album'?" That would've been a real shame.

Miles Kurosky: When I was getting e-mails from people, we started to fear that, too. We were all in a very somber state during the making of the album because of what was going on. The business is the business, and things were sometimes left up in the air, and we weren't given a clear indication of where things were going. I remember thinking "I like this record, and if things go poorly, I'll put in my own money to finish it." But that never came to pass -- the people that are now Velocette were very dedicated. It's funny -- about eighty percent of Capricorn are gone. Two out of ten are left.

Splendid: That's true of most companies these days, though.

Miles Kurosky: Yeah. Capricorn had kind of an interesting situation, though, in that they'd been a successful smaller major -- but an independent -- for thirty years. That's a difficult thing to pull off, and they'd pull a rabbit out of their hats every once in a while -- a Cake or a 311 -- to keep themselves afloat. I'm a lot happier with it as it is now, really, with not having so many people to deal with. The whole thing with Capricorn started a month or two after we signed, so we didn't really know the glory days of Capricorn -- we got there for the changing of the guard.

Splendid: Kind of like taking a new job with a company that you think is really great, and then on your second day there they start subtly cutting back on the benefits --

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, pretty much akin to a lot of folks who took dotcom jobs...

Splendid: Myself included.

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, you start out thinking you're hooked up with the next big thing, and everybody from Madonna on is putting money into it --

Splendid: You have $3000 chairs, and every day a few more of them are empty.

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, the people making the real money are the people who buy out those $3000 chairs for a couple hundred bucks, and refurbish other people's offices.

Splendid: But if there's nobody to go in them...

Miles Kurosky: Yeah...

Splendid: So when do you guys hit the road again?

Miles Kurosky: In August we're doing a small European thing -- we'll fly to Belgium and Holland and do a couple of festivals over there. Then we play a week of dates, then we come home the first week of September. The week after that we hit the road and do the states, then when we're home from that we do another month-long tour of Europe.

Splendid: So more intensive road time for you guys.

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, it's part of the game. You don't really have much choice.

Splendid: Well, it seemed like you spent a really grueling amount of time on the road for Heartstrings -- it seemed like more than a year.

Miles Kurosky: Off and on. It comes out to a lot of time because there's so much traveling involved... When you only get two weeks home and then go out again... It's all those little tours, one after another. We were out there for a while. I don't think we'll do that again. We like the idea of going out for three months straight and then that's it. We'll do this US tour in the fall, before we go to Europe, and then we'll probably do a second one in Spring, depending on what happens. Everyone's sort of looking forward to it -- we haven't played in a while.

Splendid: Yeah, have you guys played all that much other than at the NoisePop festival?

Miles Kurosky: Practicing?

Splendid: Practicing, or just gigs.

Miles Kurosky: No, we haven't played a gig since then. We usually play in our hometown once or twice a year. We won't play there 'til we play at the Great American Music Hall in September. We did NoisePop because our manager also helps to run the festival, and he begged us to do it. He always asks us to do it, and it always starts off with me saying "No", and then he says "Please, please, please" and I'm always like, "I don't know. I don't know if anyone's going to remember us or care." Of course the tickets go on sale and sell out in a heartbeat and I think "Okay, we'll do this." We've been practicing; as we speak everybody's practicing hard and trying to get the show ready and get back up to speed and relearn the songs.

Splendid: The new songs aren't presenting any challenges in the live setting?

Miles Kurosky: We're pretty good in terms or realizing it's gonna be different; we don't worry too much. It'll be different. You know there was a difference between Heartstrings on record and live. We just decided we'll rock -- we don't need this part. Live performances are different animals, and they should be treated as such. I think people appreciate that; they're not going "Oh, they played it impeccably, exactly like the record". People realize that we're up there to entertain them, and if they want to hear the record, they have the record. If you want to see us mime it, listen to the album on your walkman while we play.

Splendid: There's a delicate balance between familiarity and the live experience.

Miles Kurosky: You've got to treat them as different things. They're different art forms. One is on a synthetic piece of plastic, and the other is live human beings with real reactions, different every time. It's a different ballgame.

Splendid: It sounds like you had a lot of fun writing The Coast is Never Clear's lyrics -- like you spent more time on them than usual.

Miles Kurosky: I did and I didn't -- actually, I think I just approached them differently. I think they sound like more time was spent on them, but they're a little more straightforward and coherent. There's not as much wordplay.

Splendid: I liked the Magnetic Fields reference in "Popular Mechanics for Lovers".

Miles Kurosky: These lyrics are a lot more personal -- I was trying to relay certain things. I'm aware of people's reactions to the last record; I know people liked it, but some of them didn't really feel as if I was "giving" something. I was just at a point in life where I could only write about certain things, and those certain things were always personal relationships. That's what's usually on the record. "Popular Mechanics" is about losing someone, for instance. I don't think I gave away too much on the last record -- I was a little guarded. On The Coast is Never Clear, I wasn't guarded at all. I figured what the hell, this is what's going through my brain, so I'll put pen to paper and get it out. One of those cathartic things.

Splendid: The music seems more confessional...conversational.

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, overall it's still a pop record. It'll still make you smile...but it's a little more bittersweet and introspective than the other stuff.

Splendid: Introspective without being glum or depressing.

Miles Kurosky: Exactly. That's the thing about being bittersweet -- it's life, it's relationships, and I'm talking about myself... I certainly had a reaction to the last record; it got great reviews, but I was really taken aback by all the "sugary" metaphors.

Splendid: I don't see where it was particularly applicable to that record.

Miles Kurosky: I don't either. I look at it more as...well, I'm a big fan of Motown. Motown had a lot of pop songs, and a lot of dance songs that everyone was smiling and dancing to, and you read the lyrics and they're like "The tracks of my tears." Everything's about broken heartedness and life experiences -- certainly a lot heavier than anyone ever gave the Motown songwriters credit for.

Splendid: What if anything did working with John Croslin bring to the mix?

Miles Kurosky: John helped out a lot. He's a great guy. A lot of the times we'd butt heads; I'm basically the one producing it and doing what I want, and John's used to actually producing bands and being more in the mix. I didn't realize it at the time, but now I realized that I was able to relax a little bit. I get into a zone where I'm a little bit psychotic; I'll make people play a guitar part for three hours straight 'til I think we got the perfect take. John brought a little more "human-ness" to it -- he's say "This is what you are. You're a band. You're playing music." I'm a little bit more stubborn. I still think he brought that in. The main thing is he brought fidelity to our sound that we lacked before. I think the record sounded okay before, but I think he was able to kind of put to tape what we wanted and make it sound good. He also relieved a lot of pressure -- the pressure of having to do it ourselves.

Splendid: Right. You can be just the guy who plays and sings or whatever.

Miles Kurosky: Yeah. And then you say "John, roll tape." Or I'd come in and say "John, I want this guitar to sound like this" -- I'd bring in a sound, or whatever. And that was good -- instead of me freaking out about it, or Bill freaking out about it, I could go get a sandwich and when I came back he'd say "Okay, I've got your mics set up like this... Go for it!"

Splendid: So did that cut down on the mic-stand-wielding brawls between you and Bill?

Miles Kurosky: Well...lately Bill and I have been doing pretty good -- maybe that's because I've been living in Atlanta. We haven't really had a knock-down drag-out fight for a while. Maybe we're growing up. Bill just got married, and we just kind of grew up. I think in the first week we were in the studio we were fighting all the time, and brawling and what have you, and even after the record was done we were getting into a lot of fights...

Splendid: It's almost hard for me to believe that, just because I've spent some time around you guys -- not much, but you never started to kick each other's asses during that time.

Miles Kurosky: You were at the Listen.com party at SXSW (2000), weren't you?

Splendid: Yes I was.

Miles Kurosky: Well, on that same tour, I think two nights later, in New Orleans at the House of Blues, backstage, I tried to hit him over the head with a chair, so there you go.

Splendid: Yeah, but the House of Blues'll do that to people.

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, exactly. It's those funny folk art chairs they have there.

Splendid: Yeah, you kind of want to break those anyway.

Miles Kurosky: Although I also tried to hit him over the head with a beer bottle. I don't know. Bill and I are just salt and pepper, or salt and vinegar, or whatever. We're different. We have gotten better, though; we're mellower. All those entries in his diary are true; he likes to keep track of everything we do and everything I say so he can throw it back at me and haunt me with it.

Splendid: Well, most creative collaborations are kind of volatile, right? You can't expect everyone to be lovey-dovey all the time.

Miles Kurosky: It's hard. I write everything, and I do the production, and Bill does a lot of other things -- multi-instrumentalist type things. A lot of the time it comes down to me just saying yes or no. I know that's hard for some people. In the end, Bill and I are friends. Like I said, we've gotten a little mellower. We're not really at each other's throats as much as we used to be. But I think John Croslin helped with that -- he made us realize when we were being childish. That's good -- it's always good to have somebody like that around to kind of temper everyone's natural tendencies, whatever they are -- to be mean or to be a fool.

Splendid: Yeah, I think that's another advantage of having some "outside" person in the studio -- it's someone you don't know, so maybe you behave a little better, or clean up your act.

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, it was great working with Croslin. It was also great going to Nashville -- I got to go to Nashville and mix with Roger Moutenot. That was fantastic.

Splendid: Sounds like a cool experience.

Miles Kurosky: It was great. I got to fly out to New York and master with Greg Calbi. Everything I got to do after we recorded was good fun, and things that we wouldn't normally have access to. It was a good time. I just hope everybody likes the record, after all the hard work we put into it.

Splendid: When you go on the road, will there be any new folks along to add to the mix?

Miles Kurosky: We have a lot of new gear -- we're using more digital things, samples of mellotrons and chamberlins so we can replicate the strings. And we'll take our own sound person and light person.

Splendid: A bigger ensemble, then.

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, and we'll do some backdrops, some video stuff... The main thing was that we didn't want to do the same thing. A lot of people have seen us a few times, and I don't want to be like a lot of bands who put on the same damn show. We certainly don't want to do that. We also have a new drummer -- but other than that, and an electric piano, nothing new. We just wanted thing to be closer to what we made, and everyone's a little better at their instruments, so it'll be nice. Hopefully it'll up the ante.

Splendid: And you'll be in bigger rooms this time around.

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, we're headlining this tour -- we didn't want to go out with someone else again. There comes a time when you've put in enough time opening for big, good bands, and it's time to do it yourself.

Splendid: And I gather you were well-received pretty much everywhere.

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, even on tours with Gomez, which we were a little worried about, we went over well. No matter what, people appreciate a band that loves what they're doing and is enthusiastic about it. I'm just excited to be out there. We'll see how it goes. I'm a little tired of playing my guitar on the couch or in our awful practice space.

Splendid: What's bad about the practice space? Just that it's a practice space?

Miles Kurosky: It's just a place you go -- a purgatory. Ours is a little worse because there's a guy with a window and he can watch us from his kitchen. I don't know how we're able to get any work done.

Splendid: So he's actually seen Beulah more times than anyone else?

Miles Kurosky: Yeah, I don't think he's too excited about it, though. He gets to hear all the bum notes -- us learning to play the songs.

Splendid: So if we ask him about Beulah, he'd be like "Oh, those bastards..."

Miles Kurosky: Yeah. He doesn't realize that we do anything. He has a number of bands in the practice space who practice and don't have shows. A lot of bands just practice but don't play out.