Melt Exclusive: Rubber Band Gun

Rubber Band Gun, the storied, prolific solo project of musician and recording artist Kevin Basko, has served as a “journal” of its creator’s experimentations and exertions for over a decade now, maintaining its foundations in sonic intimacy while simultaneously urging itself beyond its own innate restrictions.

Basko began writing songs as a child, eventually attending the Berklee College of Music and studying songwriting and arrangement. 

However, after spending three years immersed in the life of big, professional-grade studios and collaborative environments, Basko had a realization: he preferred to make music largely by himself, on his own terms.

Thus, Rubber Band Gun was born, and an extensive discography poured forth from the interminable creative imagination of Basko.

His new record, Haters and Lovers, was released on all streaming platforms 4/24. Read our exclusive interview below.

This transcript has been edited for the sake of brevity and clarity.

What artists would you label as the biggest influences on Rubber Band Gun?

I've always really loved older music, and I'm a bit nostalgic about the older stuff, even though I wasn't alive during it. I've always really loved, like everybody, the Beatles, the Stones, the classic stuff. But then I started to find, in the early 2010s, groups that I hadn't really been exposed to, people like Todd Rundgren and different groups that kind of felt like their voice as an artist and as a producer was a pretty pure picture.

That was a really big influence. Another example would be someone like Tame Impala. I think everybody in the world at that time, seeing the pictures of his studio in his house and what he's able to do, I think it really did give a lot of inspiration to artists at the time that were thinking, “I want to do it my way, I don't necessarily want to be one part of a band that's compromising.”

Someone also like Mac DeMarco, similarly had a very pure vision of what they were doing on their own, playing all the instruments, kind of dealing with it themselves, and you really hear that. 

Also older artists like Emitt Rhodes who played all the instruments and produced it and recorded themselves, you really get this kind of pure vision, almost like a filmmaker would. 

When you were at Berklee [College of Music], what caused you to gravitate towards self-producing? Was it a gradual or an abrupt shift in your mindset?

So I played in a few bands while at Berklee. I actually started this one band with a group of my friends there, a band called Ripe, and they're actually a very successful kind of soulful jam band now. They do kind of pop soul stuff that's really interesting.

And, while I was [at Berklee] with them, we did a bunch of great sessions at the studios that were a lot of fun; a lot of really great stuff came out of it. I found it, as a songwriter, to be really enriching to work with other people, but also, like any kind of union, it's a big compromise. I think that's part of what collaboration is, is a compromise.

But the band had like seven or eight people in it, so it was a lot of compromise. That's all good, but I really was seeing all the other artists that I looked at, how pure their vision came out to be, and how unique, and how it really was a portrait of themselves. That's really what I was interested in. 

I've worked in a lot of big studios over the years, done sessions and assisted or recorded other artists. I've worn a lot of different hats there, but they're very different things to me. 

Now, I run a studio now in Philly that's kind of between a professional studio and a home recording. It's a pretty nice setup, a lot of stuff I've acquired over the years, but I really did find that the difference in Berklee in going from a multimillion dollar studio to my apartment with a cassette recorder and a couple of mics, and what I could get out of those couple of mics and cassette machine, it really did a lot of the kind of inspirational sonic lift.

I don't necessarily think there's a right or wrong way there at all, but, after spending a lot of time in those really nice studios, everything was super clean, super crisp, using tens of thousands of dollars with equipment, going home and doing the opposite; that to me is what creating is about.

It's the different turns you can take and the way that the minute you're done with something, you can make a pretty big swing the other way if you feel like it. 

As you moved into creating Rubber Band Gun, did you know what sort of sound you wanted to pursue?

So it was a lot of, again, me playing all the instruments, and I did it all on an eight-track cassette.

And so going from Pro Tools sessions in the big college studios that had infinite tracks to really thinking about filling up eight thoughtfully informed the sound. I think that, you know, Berklee, or at least Music College, a big point of it is the collaboration, is meeting people, working with the musicians. It's almost silly to put yourself in an isolated scenario, but I did a lot of things that were pretty much all collaborative my first few years at Berklee. And then in my final year, as I was kind of finishing things up, I was seeing all these great bands  that were kind of doing what I always wanted to do, which was, “Hey, let me take a crack at doing this myself.” That was a big factor.

And another huge thing was the realization of the number of people that were in the production end of that college that really had their right and wrong answers figured out about recording. I would ask them things, and they would sometimes have a very concrete answer about the right and wrong way to do things. And I found a sort of freedom in knowing that, on the cassette, you don't really have a lot of those options they wanted you to do.

So it got me outside of that realm of the theory of recording or what you're not supposed to do. I think that informed a lot of my freedom, just trying things, and I can find things within that sound that really fascinate me if it's done right, or not done right, but done with some color and some intention and some kind of interesting ideas behind it. 

I didn't study production or engineering at school. I studied songwriting and arranging for strings and lyric writing, stuff like that. So I really kept myself pretty childlike when it comes to the recording process. It was about the exploration. It was about making mistakes, and I think that, when people go through my discography of like 70 plus releases, you can hear the sounds change.

You can hear mistakes being figured out. You can hear me go too clean, maybe, or you can hear me pull it back; it's very much a journal. And that's why I keep my band camp in chronological order. So you can really kind of go through it and the journey. 

It's interesting that you mention the “journal” aspect of your discography. How has that initial, intimate sound evolved over the years?

I always try to have a sort of limitation on whatever new album I do, whether that's the recording mechanism or a very thoughtful decision to not have a certain number of instruments.

I did an album that's coming out this Thursday that I did on a four track cassette machine, so it's even less than the eight, but it's a little bit better fidelity than the older stuff. It's a little cleaner. You wouldn't really call it, at least in terms of my old music, really challenging to listen to or gritty or anything. And I made a thoughtful decision to not have any real drums and to not have any bass guitar. So it's just Wurlitzer keyboard, acoustic guitar, drum machine and vocals, and it's actually one of my favorite albums I think I've made in a long time. I think it's very personal to me and very clear, and I find that there are other records I make where I put a similar limitation on it.

So I try to make these decisions with the production, and, if it's not about the instrumentation, it might be more about the genre. I might try to make a jangle pop record. I might make a big band swing record, which I want to try to do this year. So, to me, it's all about remaining fresh and keeping me on my own toes, keeping me out of this thing that is common in music, which is this sort of rut or a sort of boredom.

To me, it's all about retaining the joy in the process because despite all of the ways that we receive validation these days, whether it's press or posting or whatever it is, the process of making it will always be the closest you can get to heaven or anything close to that sort of joy.

So that's why I'm kind of a junkie for it. I keep making it because that's where I get my best feeling.

Response is always nice. I've had good response, bad response; I've had everything about everything I've done from anyone who's listened to my stuff. It's always nice to hear feedback, but I really make it for myself. I hope people will like it, but I really do because I like making it, you know? 

That's also why I don't really love how modern labels function. Because of the time it takes for them to advertise it, do all the things they need to do, you know, it sometimes comes out a year after it’s been recorded. For me, I like to kind of mainline it to my audience, maybe it'll be a month after, but I like to show them the picture right after I take it.

How has that love for experimentation and limitation been extended through your work in your studio, Historic New Jersey?

It's been really great to work with other artists. Having my own outlet for my own music kind of lets me take any feelings that I might have about how I would do things out of how I produce someone else. At the same time, I really do go about making their records the way I would make my own. So it's kind of this weird double-edged sword where I want the artists to sound like themselves, but I also want the record to sound like what my records sound like insofar as, when they come and make a record at Historic New Jersey, it's going to be a Historic New Jersey record.

In my view, it's the same way when someone goes to Motown or someone goes to Stax, there's a sound that's developed over time. Now, again, they let their artists do their own thing and they sound like themselves, but it's still about the collaboration. 

I think I've gotten pretty good at never letting an emotion or a sort of feeling that's not in the best interest of the song affect the direction of the music, and I'm very blunt with my artists. I'm very honest with them. I've had a really good track record of people who come here, not to speak too highly of myself, but for every artist that's come here, almost everyone, it's been a very eye-opening experience for them; that’s how they’ve talked about the process that we use. It's very different from other studios. We're not looking at our watch; I'm not charging by the hour. We work in a way that's very collaborative, and I'm also not just sitting there pushing buttons. I'm very active with the music, the parts, everything is working, so it's a very different process.

It's a little old-fashioned in a certain way versus some studios I've been to nowadays, and I think that's part of why I love my job because I'm really able to work with people that are looking for a direction and looking for guidance. I really do believe in all the artists that I work with.

When I work with artists, I ask them for the tiniest idea. I don't like it when I get a demo that has a lot of stuff; I like seeing the birth of it with the artist. I don't wanna re-track something that's years old and has so much baggage and emotion and memories behind it. I want something that's a voice memo, and I want to make that with them to let it go from the birth to what it will become. I want to do better than what they think it could be. 

So that's become a really great experience and it's therapeutic for them, and therapeutic for me, to see this creative process. 

To me that's what creation, art, music is about and that's what human music is about. Aside from the AI world that we're living in, that humanity is something that I'm very passionate about in my work with myself and other artists. We don't really tune up the vocals, we don't really quantize things. It's a very old fashioned process of how we do things, but, at the same time, it's never pastiche where it's nostalgic in a way that feels derivative of anything. I think it's always pretty purely itself. 

I've worked with a lot of artists especially since the pandemic, and we're working more than ever this year and a lot of great music's on the horizon.