PREMIERE: Personal Space – “Dad USA”

With a dynamic mix of indie, prog, punk and a splash of yacht rock, Brooklyn group Personal Space offers plenty to sink your ears into. Their new album, A Lifetime of Leisure, deals with the broad swath of social and societal issues facing most under-fifty-somethings with their latest single, “Dad USA,” being no different.

The band in their own words details the track as a, “Weird trip through the alienated male American boomer mind, where all understanding of reality is mediated through dumb TV/online culture war and commercial spectacle.”

Check out “Dad USA” and stick around for an interview with Personal Space below. A Lifetime of Leisure is out March 26th on Good Eye Records.

Hi, Personal Space! Congrats on your new album. Can you tell us a little more on who you are and how you first got into making music?

Everyone in Personal Space has been involved in music making since at least their high school days – Alex, doing rounds on the Chicago teen open mic circuit; Jesse, playing out with his dad, a bassist and music teacher; and Sam, years ahead of the game, with his Men in Black tribute band.

Personal Space started as a project in about 2014, with a mostly different roster of players than the current group. Back then, Sam was the principal songwriter and the songs focused a bit more on riffage than groovage. We released a largely unheralded EP, foolishly titled The Early Universe Was Entirely Opaque and then mucked about until we came up with the idea to write a pseudo-concept album about growing up in saccharine suburban paradise (what a novel idea!).

Sam and Henry, who comprised the remaining core of Personal Space, asked Alex and Jesse, then early purveyors of the mid-teens Brooklyn smoothcore sound via their vehicle, Face of Man, to join Personal Space. The resulting record, called Ecstatic Burbs, was released in 2016 on Tiny Engines. Sam was still the main author of most of those songs, but with considerably more input from the rest of the boys.

By the time we got along to recording A Lifetime of Leisure, our forthcoming release on Good Eye Records, the band had become a much more collaborative project, with Alex and Sam doing the bulk of the songwriting.

What’s your songwriting process like? Who are some of your biggest influences?

Songs usually start with an idea from either Sam or Alex and then are fleshed out by the rest of the band. Sometimes, if things aren’t working with the larger band, we send songs back to the drawing board, where we usually end up sequencing more and more elaborate MIDI drum tracks until the whole song sounds terrible. Then we throw it out and start over again. On ALOL, we have songs that sound pretty close to the initial demo, and we have other songs that went through more than ten different versions before they started to work out.

Our only influence is Steely Dan. When we joined this band, everyone committed to listening exclusively to the Dan for the duration of our time together as a band. This has been very limiting in some ways, and tough in social situations, but we think it’s really helped the music we create.

What are some of the larger themes at play on the A Lifetime of Leisure?

ALOL is a snapshot of bourgeois life during the extremely drawn out, terminal stage of late capitalism. It’s about slowly sliding down the slope of downward mobility, without ever really understanding how or why you got on that track, and then trying to make sense of the pit of chaos you find yourself and your compatriots descending into.

But, it’s also about treats and treating, the series of quotidian salves that we all use to get through the general chore slog. More than anything, ALOL is about trying to reconcile the comforts of being a materially well-off person with the psychic distress of living through the last habitable era in human history.

How do you plan on celebrating the record release?

With all the posi vibes we’re bringing to the table, the celebration kinda writes itself?

Joking aside, we’ve each got a nice bottle of 2008 Louis Roederer Cristal Brut that we’re going to pop simultaneously in our respective vacation homes at midnight on release day. (Observing proper stay-at-home protocols is very on-brand for PSpace.)

Any new bands/venues/purveyors of the arts you could turn our readers onto?

Michael Coleman, other than being the outstanding engineer who mixed ALOL, is a superb songwriter who releases music under the moniker “Michael Rocketship”. He has a really vibey song called “There’s a Place” from Rocketship’s 2018 release that’s been on repeat for us lately.

Any parting thoughts? Open platform!

A lot of us are involved in organizing with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), so we like to plug their work when we have a chance. We definitely recommend reaching out to a chapter near you, especially if you were involved in any organizing during the 2020 election and are looking for something politically constructive to do a bit closer to home.