When body / negative shared “persimmon,” the lead single to their forthcoming LP everett, it felt like a curiously ambient recording to lead the album rollout with. Yet if you have any familiarity with Andy Schiaffino’s prior music under the moniker you likely understand that the wispy, cyclical, percussively sparse, and very nearly haunted recording is par for the course—in fact, diving into the rest of everett it’s actually among the most structured tracks. Elsewhere (including on the other two pre-released singles), the vocal and guitar contributions from fellow self-proclaimed “heaven metal” musician Midwife help steer the recordings both in the direction of minimalist soundscapes (“sleepy,” also featuring the field-recording assistance of Amulets) and swelling zoned-out shoegaze (the closing title track) with the wandering “ataraxia” landing somewhere in between.
Yet beyond the obvious inspiration of Midwife and the ethereal company she keeps—and perhaps Britney Spears, whose uncharacteristically Hot Topic-y “Everytime” body / negative covers on everett—Schiaffino’s palette of influences for the LP was largely informed by the music they’d briefly found themselves addicted to, whether they happened upon it through TikTok, an inspired Wes Anderson needle drop, or somewhere a little more conventional. Before everett arrives in full next week, Schiaffino gave us a detailed look at 10 of the artists whose work influenced the record through direct homage—or an attempt at direct homage that resulted in an equally influential 180 from that reference point.
Check out the playlist and writeups for each of their picks below.
Nico, “These Days”
I watched The Royal Tenenbaums for the first time last year while working on this record, and it really resonated with me. It made me feel very seen regarding a totally fucked-up romantic entanglement I was dealing with at the time. “These Days” was on repeat as a result: “Maybe we’ll just have to be secretly in love with each other and leave it at that.” This song, that movie, and that entanglement directly led to the song “fraidy cat.”
Red House Painters, “Drop”
I also went through an extremely devastating breakup in the spring of 2022, which led me to listen to a whole lot of Red House Painters. Immediately after the end of that relationship, I relocated to San Diego from Los Angeles. During my time there, my painstakingly long drives back and forth from LA to SD were largely soundtracked by this song. I have so many memories of crying to “Drop” on the 5 South at 2 a.m. “Drop” also inspired some of the lyrics on the title track, “everett.”
HTRK, “You Know How to Make Me Happy”
HTRK is one of my holy grail artists. Their production is incredibly inspiring to me; I’m head over heels for the minimalist, atmospheric, hazy worlds they create. Venus in Leo is a perfect record, and the sparseness of many of those songs motivated me to step away from layering stem after stem. Instead, I’ve been aiming to let my songs exist in this kind of lonely, empty world. I also adore the programmed drums throughout HTRK’s albums, and anytime you’ve heard a drum machine in my stuff, you can safely bet everything about them was inspired by HTRK.
The Beach Boys, “All I Wanna Do”
This song is often considered one of the forerunners of the shoegaze genre. Brian Wilson is such a genius; I am forever enamored with the dreamscapes he’s created and all of his extremely forward-thinking ideas and experimental execution. I really want to make stuff that includes these kinds of crazy multi-part vocal harmonies—maybe on my next record!
Alex G, “End Song”
Alex G is another artist I listened to frequently during the making of my newest album. I really love his voice; I find imperfect, unique voices to be so much more interesting than clearly well-trained ones. His melodic sensibilities are also top-notch, alongside that signature Alex G “shitty 100-instrument keyboard recorder” sound. His sound influenced the last song on my record quite a lot.
bõa, “Duvet”
OK, maybe it’s a little embarrassing to include a TikTok hit here, but I absolutely love this song. It perfectly captures the essence of early-2000s department store dreamcore bliss. There was always this huge comfort walking around now-defunct big-box stores like Dillard’s with your parents, hearing something like “Fade Into You” playing on janky overhead speakers, making an already starry-eyed song even more liminal. Think of those “___ playing at a party but you’re in the other room” YouTube remixes—same vibe.
Anyway, this song is great, and I’ve also always been totally mesmerized by slide guitar. I sat down aiming to write some slide guitar stuff directly inspired by “Duvet” one day, and instead did a total 180 and wrote “Persimmon.” A lot of my stuff is written that way—sitting down wanting to emulate some exact tone or melody and ending up with something way different. However, some slide did make it onto this record, courtesy of Madeline [Midwife] on our reimagining of my song “Ataraxia,” which was a song originally on my debut EP Epoche.
Foo Fighters, “Everlong”
I guess the Zoomer hits keep coming! “Everlong” is such an underrated and misrepresented track. People have this total butt-rock idea of Foo Fighters, which I guess is pretty correct for the majority of their catalog, but “Everlong” is different. There’s this really great video online of one of the guys who engineered this song, Bradley Cook, talking in-depth about the recording process. They employed so many innovative recording techniques (something I highly appreciate as someone who leans into experimental recording techniques myself—fuck doing things by the book). Anyway, there are these backing vocals on the chorus, which honestly are so subtle that I didn’t even pick them up until I watched the video.
These backing vocals were provided by Dave Grohl’s girlfriend at the time, Louise Post of Veruca Salt. Dave really wanted some female backing vocals on this song, specifically from her, but Louise was on tour. To most musicians/engineers, this would pose a major problem, but instead, they did probably the coolest thing ever, which was to have Louise call into the studio’s landline telephone, which they then recorded. I use a modded landline receiver mic for all of my vocals—it adds this really unique built-in EQ that just makes everything sound so…wistful. The idea of having your girlfriend call in from tour and do these quick little vocal takes for you is so goddamn romantic. This song was a big inspiration for the title track.
ML Buch, “I Feel Like Giving You Things”
ML Buch’s record Skinned was something I listened to every day for months when I was in the thick of working on everett. I love every song on that album, and I’m sure elements of each one have somehow seeped into my record as well as the stuff I’m working on now, but this song in particular was hugely inspiring. Track two, “sleepy,” began as a three-part-harmony acapella song I’d brought to Madeline, who was co-producing the song with me. We wrote all of the instrumentation around the vocal melody and kept it as sparse as possible. I did eventually scrap the vocal harmony and made it a lot less weird (there were some spooky pitch-shifted minor thirds in there before), but the end result still stayed pretty true to its simple beginnings.
Allison Lorenzen & Midwife, “Glycerine”
It’s a bit meta, including a song by my collaborator and one of her collaborators on this list, but alas, I couldn’t exclude it! Man, when this song first came out, it was on repeat and frequently had some waterworks coming out of my eyeballs. Those lyrics! “Could have been easier on you / I couldn’t change though I wanted to”—so real. Allison and Madeline’s vocal harmonies on this song were one of the main references I brought to Madeline for our vocal harmonies on “everett”—boy does that track have a lot of inspirations! I’m such a sucker for what I call a “jerk-off chorus” (singing another vocal melody over the main one, which somehow perfectly works together); so Madeline’s vocal parts are her contribution to that need of mine. I also want to mention that I had never heard of Bush, nor had I ever heard this song before this cover came out, and I firmly believe that Madeline and Allison’s cover is worlds better than the original.
Slowdive, “Crazy for You”
It was such a dream come true having Slowdive’s Simon Scott master this record, given how singlehandedly influential Slowdive has been on body / negative. My earliest stuff under this project name would never have existed had Pygmalion not existed. “Crazy For You” is by no surprise my favorite song in the Slowdive oeuvre and was the main reference for the final mix and additional production on my track “persimmon.” “persimmon” started off way less atmospheric—I had this giant wall of sound building up with endless delay feedback compounding on itself. The song was just guitar, piano, and vocals, all with the same delay on each track, and all, of course, recorded to tape.
I brought the track to my incredible engineer/producer/harp player extraordinaire/friend Megan Searl (Lillith 1181) wanting to just make the feedback a little less muddy and clean up some bad frequencies that I couldn’t quite hone in on (I have significant hearing loss in my left ear, which unfortunately plays a big part in how a lot of my mixes that I do myself sound). Megan surprised me with basically a complete remix of the song, which lent every element an immense amount of breathing room. Sometime between my initial recording of this song and bringing it to Megan, I sat down with my friend Justin Maranga [of Ancestors and Dune Altar Records] and we wrote, recorded, and co-produced some absolutely stunning post-rock guitar parts, which added so much to the song.
“persimmon” then evolved even further—this way-more-atmospheric version was seriously lacking some low-end, so I enlisted Lionel Williams [Vinyl Williams] to write a bass part, and he recorded some absolutely killer drums as well (which were, at my request, as close as we could get to Mark Kozelek’s drum tone on the second Red House Painters record. I am, for the most part, massively opposed to any kind of percussion in my music, but some bottom-heavy snare will always be an exception). I adore how this song ended up sounding, and how all of these collaborators came together to make something I absolutely would not have been able to dream up on my own.
