Photo by Bridget Baker, 92bridges.com
When I meet with Grant Eadie, the early-twentysomething electronic musician from Bellingham who does business as Manatee Commune, it’s early in the first day of Bumbershoot, a couple of days before he’s scheduled for a set inside Key Arena. Used mostly as a basketball arena but it has become the home for electronic music over the long-running Labor Day weekend festival. That apparent chasm with the intimacy of Manatee Commune’s music with the large space, and knowing that Eadie is a creative and inventive musician with a lot of big ideas, has this being one of the local sets I’m most excited to catch at Bumbershoot.
I’ve heard the songs from the forthcoming Manatee Commune album (due out 9/16 on Bastard Jazz) several times now and find it to be a gorgeous, lush album that sounds great listening with headphones. Manatee Commune is one of my favorite local albums to be released in 2016 because its intimate soundscapes and instrumentation embody the feel of the Pacific Northwest. It’s helped by a trio of female collaborators who add harmonies when needed. As Alex Balk of The Awl put it about the album’s first track, “What We’ve Got,” “It sounds like summer, which, as we know, is ending. It’s the perfect track to play us off.”
After this weekend, Manatee Commune has one show scheduled in Portland at Mississippi Studios on September 30, with more to surely come in the near future. We met up at Bumbershoot to talk about his music, playing it live, and the excellent collaborators he works with on this great album.
You have a new album out in about weeks and I want to talk a little bit about that at first. Can you tell me how those songs came to be?
That’s a good question. Well, I mean, this is by far the fastest I’ve ever written music. When we signed up with Bastard Jazz, we had that single ‘Clay’, that EP that came out. In December 2015 I started up on the full length. I went through a really, really bad writers’ block the year before and I realized that one of the really important aspects of music writing for me is inviting people into the studio and just having them listen to things and even if they don’t say anything, just listening to them talk about music is just really inspiring.
Also, this is kind of funny, my girlfriend moved in with me, Marina (Price), so she’s the most featured artist on that record and so she was kind of like my co-writer in a lot of things where I would get stuck on something and she would come into the studio and would give me some insight into it. It is really cool because she’s not a producer and she’s not an electronic artist. She would say like abstract things like “It sounds too bright,” or something like that. It was enough for me to work on and move forward with.
Most of my music starts with field recordings I take while I’m out just walking around or just kinda experiencing things. A lot of the record came from a series of field recordings I took between August of 2015 and February of 2016. So all of that stuff, like a lot of funny conversations I had with friends, a lot of ping-pong playing a lot of little parties and stuff like that. I even got this ridiculous recording of 25 of my friends all gathered in my living room chanting “Sea cow pow wow” really loud. That kinda of inspired me to make some really funny tribal-ish beats so that was really fun.
The record just kinda fell together. I really started to actually fall in love with it and start to realize how much I loved making it and working on it kind of towards the end of the process and I could see … I had a big list of where the song were going to fit together and that was when I really got inspired to really finish it up and choose the songs that I chose to be on it.
I’m really anxious to hear those songs in an arena environment at Key Arena on Sunday. I think that is such a different place than where you might expect to hear your music.
Me too. It’s going to be a trip. Yeah, we’ll see.
Could you talk a little bit about how you are getting ready for that? It must be a big shift from playing clubs to having to put on a show inside an arena.
Yeah. I guess in a way I’ve been getting ready for it for quite a while now. Let’s see. I make my own visuals for my live set and I’ve worked with a couple other people. I’ve been working on making these visuals using my own code that a couple friends help me write. So I can launch and play my visuals at the same time as my audio, then also juggle playing all these different instruments. So that’s kind of been one of the main things that I’ve been working on because I’m going to have a pretty massive screen to work with, so it’s been kinda fun trying to put that together. So the visuals are all based on some creative common stuff that I found on the internet over the last couple of years. That’s been pretty cool trying to bring that all together, like the video aspect and the audio aspect.
On top of that, really breaking down my music and finding what parts I want to play on my viola and what parts I want play on my guitar and where I want to bring those drums in. It’s been really fun trying to break everything down for the record and piece it all back together in this way that’s digestible for a live setting.
Yeah, I’m real curious to see how you bring those songs to this set, because this is a basketball arena and I think that’s what I like is the intimacy for the songs. There’s something that’s really great about listening to a record like this alone in your room on headphones.
I’m glad to hear that. I mean, that’s how I wrote it. I was by myself. It is an intimate album, in my opinion. That’s how I prefer to enjoy it, yeah.
Could you talk about who else you collaborate with on that, on the record?
Totally. So the first track that we released, it’s called ‘What We’ve Got’, and I collaborated with this girl in Detroit. Her name is Flint Eastwood. Crazy how it came around and we started working together. She actually just commented on a Sound Cloud song that I had.
It was ‘Wake’. She just said that she really like the song and so I messaged her and was like, “Hey, like, it’d be really fun to do a remix.” Then that happened. Then it was, “Do you want to do a song together?” And so I sent her a little beat and that’s been really fun. She’s an incredible artist because she’s a vocalist and a very talented producer and so it was fun to work with her. I’ve never worked with another producer before and we did it like very Postal Service-style, where we just sent things back and forth and just re-pieced them together.
And then Marina, obviously is … she’s the person that I collaborate the most with. We’ve been seeing each other for probably like three years now. So it was kind of fun to work on that record together because the first time we worked on music together was the first time we ever met, which was back with “White Smoke” and that was on the first record.
She’s working on her own folk music right now, so we are kinda of like in this dichotomy of both pushing our own solo albums and solo projects, so that was fun to work on with her.
And then Moorea Masa. I just happened to get to know her through [her boyfriend] and then over the course of maybe like four studio sessions … I would go down to Portland and hangout with her in her studio. The first thing we started off with was ‘Pull Me In’. She just gave me a really raw rough cut of her vocals and I ended up rolling with them and that became that song. I don’t think she was intending to but it sounded cool, so it ended up working out.
And then “The Garden Song,” it’s pretty funny, when I was working with her in her studio, she would dip out to go and take care of a few things and I would work on the production aspect while she was gone and I was working on this little beat just for fun and she walked in while I was working on it, and she just immediately just started spitting out vocals and then that became “Garden Song,” which was the third to last song and the second single that we released.
So yeah, Flint Eastwood, Marina, and Moorea. Yeah, so those three.
I’ve follow you since you kinda started out and I’ve just seen you progressively get bigger and bigger and play bigger shows. Was there kind of a pivotal show for you?
That’s a good question! Oh man that’s tough. You know, it’s funny, with the pivotal show thing, it’s like every time I have what seems like a pivotal show, I very quickly am knocked off that tower and quickly realize that it’s only like, there’s only more to go, does that make sense? A really wild moment I would say was DJing at Bonaroo. I did like a little DJ-slash-snuck in some of my own music set at Bonaroo and it was right as Flying Lotus and Slayer got out at the same time, so all of those people came to my stage.
So I was setting up all my gear and I looked up at the crowd, and there was only like 100 people there, and suddenly like these two shows get out and I look back up and I can’t see the end of the crowd, it’s like 10,000 people easily. First time I felt like there was so many people that I actually felt alone, if that makes sense. It was really humbling. So that was the first time I’ve had something like that. But that wasn’t like a real show, that was just me being a DJ kid and playing some of my music for people.
I say the main really big show that I got really excited for that really made me want to continue this project and actually made me really fall in love with playing live music was this show with Emancipator and Blockhead in November of 2015. I was opening for them on tour. We went down the West Coast, first time I had ever played in San Diego. I played at this venue called the Belly Up, it’s like a 650 cap room, sold out maybe like a week in advance or something like that, so it was totally packed out by the time I played.
I was first of three, I played at like 10:30 and for some reason everybody there was so excited. Nobody had heard any of my music at all at that point, and I was playing a bunch of the new stuff. I was still learning how to play my music obviously. I just had a great time that night. I was in a great mood. So when I was done, it was almost like 11 at that time and the crowd was so worked up over my set that they started chanting “MAN-A-TEE, MAN-A-TEE,” as I started walking off the stage and Blockhead is about to go on and Tony (Simon), that’s his name, he’s just shaking his head like, “Dude, like, what the heck. Why are you getting this right now?” I think it was mostly just because there was a group of like twenty dudes in the front that were blacked-out drunk. But it was a great show, I had a great time. Every time I go back to San Diego I get people that come to the show and are like “I was at the Belly Up! That show was crazy!” I’m like, “I know! Why did that happen?” That was one of the really big moments for me and yeah, it was a fun show. I look back on that one …
Before I finish, is there anything else do you want people to know about your music that we didn’t talk about?
I just love making music, it’s super fun, it’s my favorite thing in the world and I’m excited to go and tour the world and see what happens.
{Manatee Commune plays at Bumbershoot later today (!) at 4:30pm at Key Arena. Follow him on Facebook for more dates to be announced in the near future.}
