Cycles of time and music

I write a lot about speculative fiction and books for this newsletter, but at the core of that work, I'm mainly interested in the process: how people write and tell stories in all of its forms. How do they translate inspiration into story, and how does the process and circumstances of the writing leave fingerprints on the results?

That fascination extends beyond the genre fiction that I usually write about. One of my favorite bands is the Virginia-based rock group Carbon Leaf. I've been listening to their music ever since I was in college, and I've found their songwriting to be a step above the usual top-40 rotation. Their lyrics are deep and thoughtful, touching on everything from love and relationships to loss, loneliness, and heartbreak to memories, nostalgia and more innocent times. Their music has formed something of a soundtrack for my life, and I go back to their work often for inspiration, wisdom, and comfort, sometimes finding new ideas or revelations, sometimes getting reminders that sticks me back on the right path.

2024 marked the 20th anniversary of their breakout album Indian Summer and the release of their latest, Time is the Playground, which I described as a "moving meditation on time, nostalgia and love."

Album Review: Carbon Leaf’s Time is The Playground

Carbon Leaf’s latest album Time Is The Playground is a moving meditation on time, nostalgia, and love

Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak

The band will go on tour this fall, which will take them all across the country through the end of the year. If you're in the US, there's a good chance that they'll be coming to an area near you, and I'd recommend checking them out when they do.

I've long wanted to find out about the writing that goes into their songs, and late last year, I had an opportunity to chat with the band's songwriter and lead singer Barry Privett. I was thrilled at the opportunity, not just as a fan of their music, but as someone who's curious about how the combination of writing, lyrics, and technical skill came together to form the songs that have brought meaning to their fans and listeners.

We spoke about the band's origins and evolution, how signing with a major label and the rush to produce a hit left them frustrated, and about time and nostalgia and how he approaches the writing process.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I've read that Carbon Leaf traces its origins back to your days at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia. How did you and your other band members first meet?

Terry [Clark] and I met not even the first day of school: we met at the prep orientation program that was required of freshman at the time. He's a more extroverted guy than I am and we just became friends that way he makes friends with anybody he meets. We were friends in our freshman and sophomore years and by our junior year, that was probably the first time the idea of a band started taking shape.

Carter [Gravatt] was two years below us, our original bassist [Palmer Stearns] was a year below us, and our original drummer [Scott Milstead] came in as as a freshman when we were seniors. We were all in different classes, [but] it's a small campus. I think Carter, Palmer, and Scott were playing together, and then I would get together with Terry a little bit. This is just a long, winding way of saying that over the course of those four years, the band really didn't come together until my senior year with these disparate pieces just coagulating at some point. I knew Terry, Terry knew Carter, Carter knew the other guys and then we...

Coalesced around one another.

Yeah. I think at that point the four of them were playing together and needed a singer, and Terry was like "well, I know Barry does some singing," so I jumped in and we started learning a bunch of covers. That's kind of how it how it started.

What subjects were you studying while you were there — were you there for music?

When you're in college you're kind of figuring it all out. I was into writing and performing, so I was an English and journalism major. I think Terry, was doing English and a music–what was the music program called?–I can't remember. Something on offer there. Carter was environmental science. I can't remember with the other guys who're no longer in the band–but yeah, just the liberal art education you get in and try a bunch of stuff and see what you walk out with.

I was going to ask if if any of you had been studying English because it seems like there's a real literary bent to your song lyrics.

I was more into creative writing than literature, but certainly in high school I was a pursuing that track: [I took] AP English and lots of writing papers and literature analysis. When I got to college, there was the English and the creative writing side, but then on the journalism side, I'd never written more in my life in terms of volume of assignments.

Our teacher was a staff writer for the Richmond Times Dispatch, so he treated the classroom like it was the newspaper and you were a beat reporter. He wanted people to learn how to analyze and write quickly as if you were under that kind of pressure and it was tough, but by the end of that semester, you had so much confidence as as a writer just being able to synthesize the story down to the basics.

You certainly couldn't hide; you had to work. If you were cheating the system, you couldn't just pull a paper from some files, you had to go to downtown Richmond; this is going on today; you've got it interview this and that and you've got to come back with the story. Nobody enjoyed it, but at the end of the day, you're like "damn that was a really good exercise."

That was all good priming for turning it all into kind of a living, I guess.

So was that idea of storytelling embedded in your songwriting early on?

When I was younger I was into creative writing and when I had writing assignments in high school, I'd definitely gravitate towards that. But I was also into movies and just getting lost in that kind of make believe storytelling, so writing became an extension of that when it was no longer interesting to put on masks and goof around.

When the band formed, for a number of years we were fine [doing covers] but when it started kind of boring us, I think [that] clued us into the “maybe we do want to do something on our own."

The instincts were kind of there and we decided that we wanted to pursue our own music or it just wasn't worth doing. We already had a base [of fans] for like seven years of all of our contemporaries as a cover band, but once we started writing our own material, we quickly lost a lot of those people and had to rebuild from the ground up.

Your early albums – Meander (1995), Shadows in the Banquet Hall (1997) and Ether Electrified Porch Music (1999) feel to me very 90s and I can't quite put my finger on. It might just be the equipment you recorded on, but they also feel very exuberant and enthusiastic.

But when you when you released Echo Echo [2001], it felt like there was a real shift in tone and sound: it and its successors were more thoughtful and lyrical. What was behind that evolution?

Meander was the first album with the original five guys and it was the first 12 songs we wrote and recorded. If we had been prudent, we would've written 10 more songs and instead of making a half-good record, we'd have made a good whole record. There's material in there that doesn't quite work, but I can look back at some of those first three records and appreciate the phase that we were in, where we were just experimenting with any creative idea that came to mind.

There's clearly in those songs a glut of ideas that probably could've used some pruning, but when you're young and a new group working together, everything seems like a good idea. So learning the process of stepping back from a song and determining which which babies you're gonna kill and what the point of the song is is just part of the process.

I would say we took a pretty big leap from Meander to Shadow. Meander was just kind of like ... our bassist liked the [Red Hot] Chili Peppers, so he slapped a lot of bass on a lot of songs that probably didn't need it and I was in this weird world where I was between old REM and Nirvana.

With Shadows, we started experimenting with some more acoustic instruments and that was where the lightbulb went off: "okay, this might be a little closer to home." [It was] a little folkier but still kind of all over the place.

[We just jammed] Shadows with as many lyrics as possible, and so I was gradually learning to let go of some of that real estate and let the music speak more for itself. With Ether, I feel like the songs got a little tighter, a little bit better arrangement-wise, and I wasn't trying to write as many of the lyrics as I could.

I think to answer your question, that shift from Meander to Shadows to Ether into Echo Echo, I was learning about where to put a melody and where to stop. As we got better at that, the songs just started connecting a little bit more and there weren't as many super-eclectic niche ideas that were rattling in my head. Maybe a little more plain-spoken than the kind of poetry on Shadows or Ether. I think that, the acoustic instruments, the melodies, the tighter arrangements, all of that contributed to setting us up for Echo Echo and then the leap into a more mature sound with Indian Summer and onward.

When I was re-listening to Meander, something I noticed is that all of the different parts of band sound like they're at equal levels. But in Echo Echo and Indian Summer [2004], your voice is fairly central. I'm not trying to say that your voice has taken over the band, but I can hear you more clearly and the lyrics are more front and center.

For sure. We were just trying to bring it up at the mix a little bit. I'm on the fence about that stuff. I kinda like the vocals to kind of sit in the mix somewhat–I feel like for some of the albums, we got way too on top of the music. I look back and just listen to it and I'm like "Gosh, you can't even hardly feel the music" on some of those [tracks.]

You kind of learn how to do that, and whether it's just a volume issue or whether it's an EQ thing or compressors, a lot of those things are discussions that I have with with Terry (who's also our engineer). He's the one in charge of bringing to reality the things that we're trying to verbalize.

What's an example of a song that you look back on and see the lyrics taking over?

Well, they're certainly prominent in Echo Echo, but the music is also a lot tougher and thicker around it, so it isn't isn't quite–it's a pretty hot master, big and bright out of the speakers.

I think similarly for Indian Summer, but maybe not as aggressive, and then when we got into Love, Loss, Hope, Repeat, I think the vocals definitely jumped too far out of the mix. We went in under duress for that record, where we were trying to springboard off of Indian Summer's success.

You anticipated one of my questions: I remember reading somewhere that you felt rushed following Indian Summer.

We recorded [Indian Summer] independently and then licensed it to the Vanguard, which was the start of our label years and which continued with Love Loss Hope Repeat [2006] and then Nothing Rhymes With Woman [2009]. Those three albums were in this concentrated, six-year period.

[After Indian Summer] our label [Vanguard] was like "we gotta get another thing out there!" and of course we were like "yeah, let's do it!" We showed up to Nashville at the studio in Franklin, Tennessee–Steve Earle has a country house and a studio–and lived there for five weeks, with no [prep]. We just we showed up with a producer. I think "The War War in Color" was the only thing we had.

I would just get up early in the morning and start working on material, and just started piecing together some songs and somehow it got done. But for the production itself, we didn't have a whole lot of time to sit and think through it. Five weeks to write, record, and mix a record is all very very tight when you don't really prepare and have no preproduction.

Peter Collins produced Love Loss Hope Repeat, and came with more of a different vibe than what we normally do. He was trying to trim every single song down to three-and-a-half to four minutes, and we ended up chopping up some stuff. The opportunity for the songs just kind of lost their character and their way in the search for "is this the radio hit? Let's trim this and this, and maybe it will be."

In hindsight, it was a very pop-polished and is a little sterile. When we did the re- recording, we fixed all that, but I think the record like that, I think maybe even the record like Constellation Prize, I think maybe there are some spots where the music could've been a little tougher, make vocal less on top.

We were there for the wrong reasons and when the next record, Nothing Rhymes With Woman came about, I was like "I'm gonna take the time to write the songs the way they need to be written," and so we got a little bit better there. But you trade things. It just takes more time.

The pressure of trying to duplicate a thing that happened with Indian Summer was making us lose a little bit of what we should be doing and so we we kind of got off that train and started rebuilding independently again.

This is fascinating to hear because I see this in other creative venues. It's always interesting to see the line between the influence of the production pipeline verses one's intentions and the art that they're trying to create.

When you have a little bit of success and then you build this machine around it, you're at the top of that foundation. If things are humming along great, everybody's doing their job, and they've optimized according to what their job in that whole system is, it may not be in the best overall interest of what you're doing!

It's hard to stop that that train and if you're not wise about it, you can get enamored with that insulation of all that energy of everything that's going on. But at the end of the day, it's like "well, is this thing I am in charge of making the best that it can be?"

Was leaving Vanguard and returning to independent recording your way of breaking that machine and building it back up?

By the time we released the Nothing Rhymes with Woman and the singles on the last two albums didn't go anywhere with radio, we weren't really making money off of the enterprise. We were basically trading our rights for a modicum of marketing power and publicity through Vanguard, and we realize we weren't getting much of anything aside from them throwing a single to the radio, in terms of what resources were worth that trade.

They were not offering a whole lot of money to make a fourth record and at that point we said “we know we can make a record in our own space for less money than what you're willing to give us.” It was a no-brainer at that point; we had exhausted the relationship.

This sounds like it was a tiring process, so I'm curious what types of things you learned making those three albums that you were able to use for the ones that followed.

Well, Indian Summer and Nothing Rhymes with Woman were both written outside of that kind of pressure that Love Loss Hope Repeat was written, so we were coming from a much more relaxed place. We were still an independent band when we wrote Indian Summer and I think we spent a year and a half on that record–way too much time in the studio. I mean, I say that, but we spent the time that we wanted to make the record we wanted.

It cost a lot of time and money, but that's what we wanted to get back to for Nothing Rhymes with Woman, and when we went independent and started recording our own stuff again, we were gonna be doing it for the first time in our own studio (for Meander, Shadows, Ether, Echo, we did a lot of recording at a studio and had some help.)

We spent $50,000 on gear and learned to use it ourselves, so there was a little bit of a learning curve in making the projects after Nothing Rhymes with Woman. So I can look back and go "oh man, I wish we could've made this record knowing what we know now." [But] I think with each record, you're just doing the best you can and then letting time determine what you can do better.

When we went independent again in 2010, we were like "let's get a studio and let's get a project out every eight months" which was an insane goal. We did it for a couple of years, and made How The West Was One [2010], Christmas Child [2010], the Curious George soundtrack [2010], a live album, Live, Acoustic... And in Cinemascope! [2011], and then in 2013, we did two albums, Ghost Dragon Attacks Castle and Constellation Prize back-to-back, which was so stupid. We released them six months apart. I was literally sleeping in the studio to try to get this done.

This was where we were at peak where we set this ambitious goal, and [it was] starting to feel like those days where we were under these deadlines for labels. It started to feel that false sense of urgency.

It sounds like it wasn't as much fun as it could've been.

I mean, it was fun and it was the right decision at the right time. We were all about going independent and letting people know that we were serious artists, writing material and not just like going out and playing whatever [our] hits were. So it was a good way for us to say "this is what we're about [and] this is what we're doing," and was fruitful, but [eventually] I was like "I don't know where to go with this." Two albums in one year, [we] should've released those a year or two apart.

That's when we decided to do the re-recordings of the three albums that were on Vanguard. There was a clause in our contract that said that after five years, we could record those songs, [so] we consulted a lawyer and realize that there was language that basically said we could remake the albums and then we have a master recording that we owned.

You did it before Taylor Swift did it.

We did! All of our songs are owned by us, even when we were on Vanguard, but while we own Life Less Ordinary, but they own the master recording. So if someplace like Target called and said we want to use "Life Less Ordinary" for a holiday campaign, we would've had to say "okay, here's the number to call Vanguard and I guess we'll get a cut." Now we can say "here's our master."

To come back to your question about how things have evolved with our sound, we got very good at using those three albums to hone our engineering and producing chops.

What went into recreating those albums?

A lot of it was forensic work, because we had to go dig up and listen to an album that we recorded a decade ago in a different studio with different gear and then try to figure out how to emulate some of that stuff.

We wanted Indian Summer Revisited [2014] to be faithful to the [original] sound, but just feel better. The performance feels like it's been lived in a little bit, because when we were recording the album, those all the songs were new and we were in the studio and making up everything for the first time.

That's part of where the magic comes from, so you don't want to sacrifice that. And yet, you want it to sound great and maybe you want certain things in the production to not sound dated. It's a delicate balance of finding that energy and spirit, playing it confidently like you've been playing it for 10 years, but also being faithful to that original sound.

And then with Love Loss Hope Repeat Reneaux [2015], we wanted to improve on radically with the arrangements, the sound, the performance, and then again with Nothing Rhymes with Woman [2016]. So we got good making the records, but it took some time to kind of get comfortable with that.

I imagine that how you performed "Life Less Ordinary" in 2004 was different from playing it now. What types of things have you noticed have changed in those songs?

As it should, because if your players change, that's going to inform the song too. We picked up John Markel on bass 15 years ago, and he was a part of those re-recordings, but not the original recordings. Likewise, our drummer Jesse Humphrey has been with us for seven years now, so having players coming in fresh, taking the part as it is, but then making it their own can inform the way it's interpreted.

While listening to "City on the Sea" off Time is the Playground, I realized that it had melodies that you’d released in a demo to your website like 15 years ago.

Oh?

I saved it on my computer and would listen to it because it was a relaxing track. It was fun to hear it in a new song, and it's clear that you've been playing with ideas for this album for a while now.

That was the whole idea behind the album. It was born in 2020 when we got home from a tour and while the quarantine shut everything down. We put that idea together in those early months, not knowing what was coming.

Over the years, we've amassed a pretty good library of bits and pieces of songs or full songs and I wanted to get to some of those things that I loved but hadn't been able to turn it into a song for one reason or another. Sometimes, I'll have an idea or a melody or a line, pieces of music that I'm drawn to that I'll sit with but just can't get out of that paper bag.

So that had been rattling around in my brain a little bit in terms of what was going to be next. I wanted to bring some of those things back out and commit to them, even if it's just taking pieces of what's good and write around it.

So we did that for about half the album while the other half ended up being new material written pretty late in the hunt for songs. I put out some notes to the guys like "wouldn't it be cool to do this or that" or "I'm looking for a song with this kind of style to it." They love those kinds of challenges and they'd come back to me with a rash of ideas. I'd then pick the ones that spoke to me.

That's how "Neon Signs" and "You and Me" came about. So, some of it was old stuff from the past, going back 15, 18 years. One song was recorded on a cassette tape in our original basement with our original drummer and we changed some stuff and made what was old new again.

Time is something you've revisited quite a bit, even back to your first album with "Clockwork". It seems like it's a recurring theme for you. Echo Echo and Indian Summer, felt like albums about standing on the edge of adolescence or young adulthood and experiencing things like heartbreak or going out on your own for the first time, whereas Time feels like it's a much more introspective album.

The thing about Time is the Playground: each song references time in some real way. That was kind of the theme: that we're in this expanse, moving through time in a linear fashion in a straight line towards the final destination, and yet we live our lives in these loops, through cycles of seasons and hours of the day, and our traditions, relived on an annual basis.

I was just thinking about all of that time and how all of the stuff is ours to play with while we're here (however long that may be) and just pulling ideas from different eras, different times in life and then kind of synthesizing them all together into this new project. None of the songs really deviate from the idea that the clock is running and this is life in your moment.

It could be very much like "Black Mask 1983," where you have this massive surge of new incoming information as you cross the threshold from childhood to adolescence and you're bringing all the things that have shaped you until now, but then you're seeing and feeling all these other things, so you kind of have one foot in both of those worlds.

But then there's also songs like "Call Ahead" or "Me and Mick" or "Time is the Playground" or "Neon Signs" where you're looking back at your experience and getting an understanding of owning your life as it is, in spite of your choices or maybe because of your choices and being being okay with that, or being okay with trying again.

There's a line of "Time is the Playground":

You can't go back and start again
You just start again from wherever you end

So, being okay with that and understanding that life might bring some bad decisions or regrets but you know, what are you staring at towards your future?

In a way, if you have one narrator through all these songs, he's kind of standing in between these two worlds, his past and his future and what you're left with in every single moment of your life is the present and that's where "Time is the Playground" came from. It's like "hey look around, you know you can you can you can sit and think about it all you want your life is here to be lived."

I want to close this out by looking back over your career: how have you guys changed as a band and your approach to songwriting? You're obviously not the same people as when you started or in 2004 or 2024.

I have to really love the song and have to be drawn to a reason to write it. Whereas early on, I was just like "let's just grab these piles of songs and I'll just write write write write. I look back and go "yeah, some of this is good, some of it's not good." And then of the good stuff, what's effective? It's a hard thing to get right.

I want to always be writing and not wait for inspiration, always working towards inspiration, but I want to make sure that I'm going down a path where I love this idea, even if I'm when all is said and done, even if I'm the only person that gets it. I want to love this idea, and I think if I do that long enough, I'll know if it's good or not.

When we were younger, we had a lot more time to kill and we would get together as a band and just jam more and sometimes stuff would come from that. Sometimes the guys were getting into groups of two or threes and come up with the ideas. Our days now are not as free as they used to be, and so we have to do things a little bit differently. And we're still trying to work that out. We would like to, as a goal going forward, get together more often in smaller groups and get some writing in, but if we can't do that, then I've got material that I'm waiting to get to and I'll come up with something and will forward it around and then we'll begin the process of putting it together.

I'm guessing that writing is harder to do that while you're on tour.

It is. I used to write a lot on tour, but we've gotten surgical with our touring and my day is busy by the time I get up to the time I hit the pillow. I used to, when I took my driving shifts, have a notebook in my lap and I'd be working on things, but I used to be able to separate my brain a little bit easier than I can now. Now I just need to choose one thing and do it well, then put it away and go to this other thing.

I spent four months and isolation in different places over the course of a winter or two, literally snowed in, writing 10 hours a day to get Time is the Playground to where it ended up. That worked well, but it's more of an immersive experience.

Was it practical? Not really, because you have to drop your whole life to do that. But at the end of the day, I'd probably rather do that then try to write the same thing over the course of three or four years.

Thanks for reading: this was a piece that I've wanted to put together for years now, and I was pretty happy to learn about the band and their approach. Let me know if you're a fellow fan of the band, or if you're coming to them for the first time.