Interview with Cheekface: ‘My favourite songs have a perfect synergy or perfect line or melody’

Tongue-in-cheek LA-based indie rock trio, Cheekface, brought out their second full-length album, Emphatically No, earlier this month, showcasing their distinctive talky vocals and staccato, upbeat instrumentation, in their follow-up to 2019’s Therapy Island.

The band comprises guitarist and singer Greg Katz, bassist and singer Mandy Tannen and drummer Mark “Echo” Edwards. Tannen met Katz through his girlfriend, with whom she worked as a graphic designer and Katz and Edwards had run into each other in the local music scene.

Cheekface wasn’t the first name put forward, Katz had wanted to call them Plumping: ‘They thought it was a terrible name,’ he laughed. ‘We had a band name shoot out and wrote 100 names and then crossed out all the ones we didn’t like. One name idea was Ryan Gosling’s Delts! Then we thought of Snackface but that was taken by a snack company. The ‘cheeks’ part comes from a friend’s bad cat who doesn’t like people or being alive.’

The name of the album, Emphatically No, is a nod to the underlying themes throughout the album, such as setting boundaries and self-improvement: ‘You know, when you want to improve yourself but are sceptical about self-help,’ Katz said. For Tannen, the title also references the importance of setting clear boundaries: ‘It’s something I was working on at the time, making healthy boundaries,’ she said. ‘Help people sometimes push the ‘yes’ but it’s ok to emphatically say no.’

Importantly, the latest album has given Cheekface an opportunity to develop their sound. ‘Our first album was about exploring sounds we liked, we felt we’d started to define the band,’ Katz said. ‘Now we know what’s unique to us, we’ve pulled together things that we like and are exploring who we are.’

‘One of the secrets to our songs is that they have very conventional song structures’

Katz and Tannen write the songs together: ‘We’ll write basic loops, riffs, the verse and pre-chorus,’ he said. ‘One of the secrets to our songs is that they have very conventional song structures, we find the pockets and grooves that we like. We take turns singing stuff, I’ll throw out some lyric ideas when I’m improvising. My favourite songs have a perfect synergy or perfect line or melody in a particular place where it jumps out at you.’

The biggest challenge when performing live is not laughing at the often hilarious lyrics but keeping together the talky lyrics – that are often not rhythmic – and the guitar part, that very much is: ‘It’s musically really hard,’ Katz said. ‘At the beginning, I would basically go into our practice space for hours a day to figure out how to do it. There are a lot of parts, though, with no guitar and then I can kind of rap and not worry about it.’

Katz particularly enjoys self-parody, which weaves throughout all the songs. ‘I love changing a few letters in a common phrase to change the meaning,’ he said. Two such lines are ‘crying’s the new black’ in ‘Crying Back’ (which also references the Justin Timberlake song) and ‘Dress for the dog you want’ in ‘No Connection’, which I bring up. ‘We love dogs, they pop up a lot in the album.’ Tannen chips in: ‘I have a dog, I bought him in the pandemic, he’s a 12 year old mutt!’ (She later holds up her dog for me to see and he’s adorable and sleepy looking but it is early morning in LA.)

One of the strongest tracks on the latest album is ‘Best Life’: ‘We wrote it the year before the pandemic,’ Tannen said. ‘When Greg brought up the main lyric of the song (about life not getting better than it is now), I thought it was dark but he said that it was more about this being your best life, it was more matter of fact.’ Katz describes it as ‘a self-help song’: ‘It’s a very meme-able, self-help phrase, whatever life you’re living is your best life, whether you like it or not. It’s about the frustrations of mundane life and what you might long for versus where you are.’

As the song goes: ‘Hey! Have a very, very, very interesting day! Great minds think a lot, and so do ours, when it’s boring, let’s pretend we’re not bitter, or better than everything, they say smiling’s contagious, but you know, so is yawning.’

‘Do you want to leave your taste and creativity behind in search of wealth?’

For people not familiar with the LA area, the track ‘(I Don’t Want to Go to) Calabasas’ is a reference to the small city in the northwest Santa Monica mountains which is home to celebrities such as Will Smith and Justin Bieber. ‘I didn’t know where it was!,’ Tannen laughed. ‘Greg explained it’s where people like the Kardashians live.’ Katz explains: ‘It’s not tasteful rich, it’s nouveau riche, you don’t want to go where the nouveau riche are, but it’s also a metaphor. Do you want to leave your taste and creativity behind in search of wealth? It’s also a reference to the Elvis Costello song, ‘(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea’.’

Tannen cites Elvis Costello, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and Minutemen as big influences. ‘Cake is always big for me, they’re my favourite band,’ Edwards said. ‘Rosie Tucker is real vibrant, we covered her song, ‘Lauren’,’ Katz said. ‘I also like Mamalarkey and Guppy. I really love Odnesse, she’s amazing, and Dante Elefante.’

‘No Connection’ is one of the catchiest tracks on the album, with a great brass section, along with lines such as ‘we got a lot of croutons, so we better make this salad’ and ‘he’s a farmers’ market shaman with a petition for you to sign, well just let me know when you finish taking down capitalism, man’. Prior to writing this song, they’d covered ‘Bad Liar’ by Selena Gomez at a few shows and it has a sample of ‘Psycho Killer’ by Talking Heads that plays throughout. ‘It made us notice the super simple disco kick drum pattern in ‘Psycho Killer’ that gives it so much power, ‘Katz said. ‘We used that kick drum pattern in the chorus of this song and in a few other places on the album.’

‘Obviously, we all encounter that message of ‘no connection’ on our screens at inconvenient times,’ Katz said. ‘There’s a line in the second verse about a farmers’ market shaman that’s inspired by two guys at the Silver Lake farmers’ market who are always there. One wears overalls and no shirt and is always collecting signatures on a petition. The other guy has a long beard and is always burning incense. They’re amalgamated in this song. People in LA recognise them, though, in the song and are like “Is this about the dudes in Silver Lake?!”‘