Bay Area-based Careful discusses new release after almost a decade: ‘Promise / Practice’
Written by Olivia Stabile
Careful, the lo-fi art-pop project of multi-instrumentalist/producer Eric Lindley, found its roots in Brooklyn and grew out of the cross-stream of art rock and concert music in Los Angeles. After being dormant for almost a decade, and now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Lindley is putting out Careful’s fourth release, Promise / Practice, referred to as a “meditation on loss”.
Best Left’s co-founder Olivia Stabile had the opportunity to ask Lindley some questions about Careful’s newest atmospheric indie-folk EP, starting from the ten years leading up to its release to the future of the project.
Best Left Magazine: Your first EP in nearly a decade, ‘Promise / Practice,’ comes out on Sept. 22 – how are you feeling about releasing music after this time?
Careful: It’s been cathartic — really fun, and also very intense. It feels a bit like part of me was sleeping for a decade, and finally woke up again. Other parts of me were awake or have woken up for the first time in the meantime. For example, I’m now a parent, so it’s not like life was empty, but I had forgotten what it was like to get carried away and just exist in the world of a song for moments, and it’s wonderful to do that again on a regular basis, either when writing, recording, or performing.
How long have you been working on this project? Was this a long time coming, or did you take a bit of a creative hiatus?
C: This project was pretty focused—I had over a hundred different partial songs & scraps over the years that I had started on but never finished, but for the most part I brushed all of that aside and started from scratch for the EP. I wrote the songs in about a month, then recorded & produced them over the course of a few months (I forget now, maybe half a year? This was all in the mid/post-pandemic time warp). I would have released them a lot sooner, but I had this idea that they weren’t done and needed another producer to help finish them. After working with a handful of different folks, I found that I liked what I had originally done the best, and that’s what made it into the final EP. I want to work with other folks more in that way in the future, but it wasn’t in the cards this time.
What was your writing process like for the EP – both lyrically and sonically? Was it similar to your process in the past, or has creating ‘Promise / Practice’ been different than your previous work?
C: It was pretty similar, in that I have a handful of starting places for songs that are effectively fragments: a word or phrase, a melody, a harmonic progression, a particular style or timbre, a concept or story — any of these can be the starting point, and I play with that a little bit, either improvising chords or playing back a recorded loop and singing nonsense words to an improvised melody where I can’t think of real lyrics yet. I effectively do that over and over, gradually writing down what sticks, until the basic songwriting is done. Then if I haven’t already, I’ll take it into recording software and play with different sounds & textures until the production is done. The songwriting part is usually quick — like a couple hours, sometimes spread out over a day or two—but the production can take anywhere from an hour if it’s simple and works in one acoustic take, or months off and on if it’s challenging or complex, or I can’t quite get it to feel right. What was different about this EP is both the context (pandemic, raising a kid and seeing news of recent school shootings like Uvalde at the same time, reading a lot on narrative and music theory), and that attempt I mentioned about working with producers.
What motivated the creation of ‘Promise / Practice’ and how have your experiences over the last decade shaped this new EP?
C: In large part, just having time again—during the pandemic, working from home gave me just enough time each day that I didn’t have to commute, and this enabled me to seriously work on music in a way I couldn’t before, at least not alongside being a parent. But like I mention above, being a parent has shaped my sense of the timeline of my life, the way my life interacts with others, a sense of responsibility, and also deeper emotions associated with things that affect kids. For instance, the tiniest things can be earth shattering for them, like these minor disappointments when something doesn’t work out for them like they imagined, and when I think about how emotional those things are, versus the range of trauma that many kids are exposed to, it’s really heartbreaking. The song Promise is about a school shooting — I wrote it a couple weeks after Uvalde, I think in part because it took me that long to emotionally process that event, longer than it would have before I was a parent.
The EP is described as “a meditation on loss”– something everybody can likely relate to at some point in their lives– what do you hope listeners take away from ‘Promise / Practice’?
C: I used to just make music because I wanted to, like it was interesting to me and I liked doing it. That’s still the case to some extent, but I also think more now about what music has meant to me, and why I tend to put music into the world that has a lot of sadness in it. I think it’s partially because that’s what I have tended to personally listen to, but I’ve also read that sad media (music included) can be a means by which people process their own deeply sad emotions, and can serve as a kind of therapy, a way of experiencing feelings in a safe setting, or accessing feelings that can be locked away otherwise, or on the other hand empathizing and enhancing their ability to listen to and be kind to others. Sometimes people write to me out of the blue and share how music I’ve made has done one of those things for them, and that’s been very meaningful to me, and the best I think I can hope listeners can take away.
The EP is called ‘Promise / Practice,’ with the first track entitled “Promise” and the closing track entitled “Practice” – what connects these words together and how do they tie into the meaning of the EP?
C: The songs themselves are very different from one another — they exist in pretty different narrative worlds, but thematically I thought of the word “promise” in the sense of something that’s promising, that has a lot of potential. It’s about school shootings, where that spark of promise in so many kids is extinguished. “Practice” on the other hand, I was thinking of as a kind of ongoing routine or ritual that has to happen to improve or even maintain a skill or outcome, and the contrast between how promising something might be, but without a dedicated practice it may never come to fruition. Part of that references the small-scale experience I had of feeling like I had some amount of promise, but didn’t engage in my practice of music for subject matter of the song “Promise,” where we have so many kids across the country that are just packed with promise, but we as a nation and a world can’t seem to commit to the very basic practice of keeping them safe.
What about this release are you most proud of?
C: My friend and a truly wonderful artist Miwa Matreyek collaborated with Lisa Gelley and Company 605 to make a dance & projection performance with “Promise.” It’s really beautiful and heartbreaking, and seeing the power of that performance makes me glad that I put the music out into the world, if it can inspire something like that.
What’s next for you?
C: I’m playing shows with the EP release, and look forward to connecting with folks in person (I forgot how much I loved that part). In the meantime I have a good amount of new songs that I’m hoping to start recording soon for another album!
Make sure to check out Careful’s newest EP Promise / Practice, out now!
