Baba Sonya
Photo by, James Kilker
Meet Baba Sonya
We’ve got quite the musical duo for y’all to meet today. Comprised of singer-songwriter Rachel Gawell and producer Mike Costaney, this partnership makes experimental, cello-infused tunes you should give a gander. With warmth and melancholy, these artists deliver emotional intensity in their recent release, pistons & pistils.
Below, we weight the pros and cons of bats for feet, the duo’s origin story, and talk nerdy about musical gear. It’s a good un so get on your bike and get to readin’.
Rock Music: A Mad-Lib by, Baba Sonya
Young people today would rather listen to a good rock music concert than to Johann Sebastian ROOSEVELT or to Ludvig von EISENHOWER. Rock music is played by STICKY groups of young men and women who wear their hair below their WIGS. They also wear very odd and colorful MAPS and often have beards. The groups have attractive names such as "The ECHIDNAS" or "BONO and The Three STOCKINGS." They usually play electric FLIP-FLOPS. One member of the group usually sits on a raised platform and sets the rhythm by beating his SYNTHESIZER. The songs are mostly about some fellow who has been rejected by his TRAMPOLINE. They are very sad and when young girls hear them, they often get tears in their CIGARETTES.
Would You Rather
have snails for hair, or large bats for feet? Please explain your answer?
Rachel: Large bats for feet because I might be able to levitate if I train the bats properly, whereas snails would be an unpleasant texture not to mention the slime which would inevitably drip down my face.
Some questions with Baba Sonya
How did Baba Sonya come to be?
Rachel: Mike and I used to be in a band together, called River City Extension. He was a founding member and did six years of hard time on the road with them everywhere including Bonnaroo and even Australia. I came in pretty late in the game, in 2014, and played cello on a few tours of the Northeast after my time in The Ballroom Thieves had ended. In 2015 Mike and I started hanging out, improvising, and writing songs. The first attempts are listenable on Bandcamp in our EP “How To Land a Hot Air Balloon.” Neither of us considered ourselves songwriters so it was a beautiful kind of workshopping space we created for each other that started the evolution of this as a “songwriting project” and eventually a “band” a couple of years later.
What is a band you would want to get a chance to tour with?
Mike: Imogen Heap
Rachel: CHVRCHES
Nicole: Bon Iver
Charles: Beach House
If you could write the score for a movie by any director ever who would it be? What would the movie be about?
Mike: I'd like to score a film about myself playing myself as a struggling composer trying to pitch my work to movie studios in progressively weirder ways, the movie will be directed by Rachel Gawell.
Rachel: Sofia Coppola, a movie about climate change that’s not a documentary and not an apocalypse story, I don’t know how they achieve that as a narrative but I’ll leave it up to the screenwriters.
How would you describe your creative relationship?
Rachel: At the beginning, there was just a desire to make things and a question mark about what it would sound like. Throwing time at it, sticking together over the years we’ve figured out a pretty natural flow of how we create. We each know when to swoop in to help things move, and when to stand back and watch as the other person makes things happen. I never bring a fully fleshed out demo to Mike, in fact, I write the smallest amount of song that still holds together because we do so well adding things in the studio in the moment.
Mike: I'd say it's one continuous metaphysical conversation/hang-out session from when we started recording demos until now. The sounds, ideas, and goals change, but I think at the end of the day we've always talked, listened, experimented, critiqued, edited, and written with the intent of understanding ourselves, each other, and whatever the hell the world might be. I think there's a period of time in our youth when we find people that we feel are like us and just spend a bunch of time doing dumb shit. We don't realize when we're young that we are learning each others' traits and forming bonds, but it's stuff you appreciate later in life and a lot of the time makes us who we are. I feel with Baba Sonya and the records we put out, its sort of a fast-track to understanding who we are as artists and how the aforementioned "dumb shit" pays off for us in an emotional way.
Do you have a piece of musical gear that you are really into right now?
Rachel: I’m a big fan of Earthquaker Devices pedals. I’m obsessed with Afterneath in particular.
Nicole: Op1 made by teenage engineering. It’s this sleek, compact device that has infinite possibilities, depending on the direction you want to go in, and for that, it lends itself to never-ending creativity.
Charles: my Juno-6 is the desert island thing. Otherwise, I’ve been using the Electric Majik 7 series overdrive pedal on all sorts of things recently, even drums and vocals.
Mike: I just bought a Shure Sm7b microphone, I haven't used it yet... but I think it is going to be all over the next record.
Who makes the art for your album covers? Is there a narrative behind the visuals?
Mike: We come up with a photo, image, or series of the images during our recording cycle and throw around concepts until we think it's right. I'm not sure if there is a narrative yet, but maybe one will emerge in a few years, haha.”
Do you ever feel intimidated to release emotional, introspective music?
Rachel: Yeah. Sometimes I feel like I’ve revealed too much private information in the lyrics. And sometimes at shows, there’s a loud rock band throwing down, just killing it, and I feel weird going after and setting an introspective tone. These are moments where I try to exercise a little bravery and trust what we put together as a team.