Melina Duterte is waving a crocheted Baby Yoda in front of the Zoom screen. The L.A.-based musician better known as Jay Som usually keeps the adorable creature on her desk, but today she holds it throughout the call, its mint green ears bobbing in and out of the shot. “I crocheted that for her birthday,” proudly offers Ellen Kempner, aka the Poughkeepsie, New York-based leader of Palehound. “I was trying sooooo hard to get it there on time. I’ve never overnighted something before, but I overnighted that.” “Ellen’s an insanely good gift-giver,” counters Duterte. “I really am so intimidated by that.”
Over the last few years, the rising indie rockers have forged a long-distance friendship built on mutual fandom. Within minutes of joining the Zoom, they are calling each other geniuses and espousing “I love you”s. Duterte and Kempner first met in the greenroom before their 2017 co-bill in Sacramento, with the former touring behind Everybody Works and the latter A Place I’ll Always Go. Hearing them tell it, a heartwarming supercut starts to materialize: the San Francisco concert where they met each others’ dads, the post-show diner trip where they cemented their forever bond over chicken nuggets and grilled cheese, the time Kempner let Duterte use her Boston apartment as a makeshift greenroom despite not being home. It was only a matter of before they teamed up: Doomin’ Sun, their debut album as the duo Bachelor, merges Duterte’s expansive production impulses and Kempner's perceptive lyricism.
Sparked by a 2018 jam session that felt refreshingly effortless, they rented an Airbnb in Topanga, California and set up a studio there for two weeks at the beginning of 2020. They chose that space in part because it had a piano, and in part because it had a hot tub, one they used every day to the point of getting rashes. It was a joyous, deeply restorative time, and they prioritized making music that captured the way they felt when they were together. They emphasize the hours spent listening to Billie Eilish, Radiohead, and Brittany Howard, the nights spent watching The Mandalorian, and the daily 7 p.m. “crazy time” rituals, which entailed screaming and purposely messing up tracks for fun. “I listen to the record and I just remember laughing with Melina,” says Kempner.
While Doomin’ Sun doesn’t sound quite as jubilant as the accounts of its creation, there is a lightness in its exploratory guitar parts and an almost associative quality to its lyrics. The songs combine vivid imagery rooted in intimacy and desire with a gnawing fear of climate change and walking alone at night, among other things. The relationship between ambient anxiety and warm, immediate comfort provides the album’s central tension, in its own way a reminder of why it’s nice to have a friend when everything else seems to be crumbling.
Ellen Kempner: Oh my God, so nerve-racking. We were recording the music to “Sand Angel” [from Doomin’ Sun], and it’s so awkward to ask, “What does this song feel like it should be about?” Melina started doing some mixing, and I started writing about having a sex dream. I had the first verse and thought, Damn, this is probably really weird.
It was also really gay. We really bonded at that point about being the same age and being queer. I hadn’t met someone like you in the music industry yet, someone I could really click with. We joked about how we were the different kinds of gay in middle school.
Melina Duterte: I was the emo gay.
EK: And I was the sensitive, I don’t know what to wear gay who was into Ani DiFranco. Melina’s also from the Bay Area and I’m from Connecticut, so we had different experiences.
MD: I love asking you about growing up in Connecticut. I’m just like, “WHAT?!”
EK: And I’m like, “You were out as gay in middle school? That’s insane!” I was kicked out of my first girlfriend’s house all the time. Connecticut is conservative in a way where people will have an Obama sign on their lawn, but if you’re in their house and you’re gay, they’re not happy about it.
MD: I love sci-fi movies and dystopian sounds. For Doomin’ Sun, I was really into tape loops, and Ellen also loved them, so we were making our own. I had this Tascam 4-track, and we recorded sounds into it, put them into the computer, then put them back into the cassette tape and used a pitch wheel to make synths that way. We made notes through the cassette tape, which was really cool.
EK: That blew my mind. Melina has taught me so much. I never learned how to use Logic or ProTools or anything, and I was like, “I’ll never know how to [produce].” And Melina really slapped me across the face and was like, “You can absolutely do that. You already know how to do it.” She’s the best producer I know. The master of groove, a complete magician. I’m gonna call you out: She reads user manuals for fun!
MD: I do love manuals, I keep them. Even for appliances. My partner will open stuff and throw away the manual and I’m like, noooooo.
MD: We jammed a lot. When I collaborate with people, I love the heat-of-the-moment recording. You get your raw ideas and just record. Recording in studios can get stressful because you’re on the clock and you’re thinking about your wallet. I don’t want to think about money when I’m recording music. I want to have fun and do as much experimenting as I can.
EK: I was shocked by how smoothly things went. We had so little time and had such a huge ambition, but I never felt like there was pressure, which was different for me. I’ve been really serious in recording sessions before, because I’m prepared and I have the emotional weight in the songs. But these songs were spontaneous and about how we were feeling at the time. We laughed so much and didn’t do that many takes of anything. That was my biggest takeaway: striving for a perfect vocal take is not what it’s about.
MD: It was a really egoless experience. I think that’s the way it should be all the time. Even if some things weren’t working, we would laugh about it and just move on.
EK: I never got my feelings hurt and I think vice versa. For example, there was this beat that Melina made that sounded like something that would play during a hacker scene. I was like, “I have an idea!” I started playing really bad slide guitar and it was one of the worst-sounding things.
MD: You got a Tabasco bottle [to use as the slide]! I was like, “That’s not gonna work!” Then we came up with the name Tabasco Slide.
EK: That was our fake band name.
MD: Honestly, I’m mad we didn’t use it.
EK: Both of our partners were like, “That sounds like a white rapper.”
MD: I love ABC’s The Bachelor. I’ve been watching for a long time and I think it’s one of the most insane shows that exists. It’s so weird and so straight and the marriage family values are so funny. It’s really messed up and it’s really entertaining.
EK: I couldn't get over the fact that one of the gayest people I know is obsessed with the straightest piece of media. We were joking about how funny the name Bachelor is for the two of us, because we’re just these two queer introverts, and I think with “Bachelor,” you get an image in your head of this straight man and a bunch of roses. We kind of felt like, “This is the complete opposite of what we are.”
MD: I learned how special friendship and working relationships can be. Before making the album, I was really stressed out about being Jay Som and always having to talk about myself and thinking about what my next move is. I didn’t realize how much I needed to be with a friend and laugh, and be around someone that inspires me so much. Literally, no one else plays guitar or writes music like Ellen. I don’t know many people like her and when you have that, you have to really cherish it. I love you dude!
EK: I love you too! One of the things we talked about a lot was being solo artists really young. I started at 19 and you started not that far after. It’s too much responsibility to put on someone at that age. So much of who I am is shaped by being exposed at that age, especially as a queer woman. It was nice to be able to really talk to someone who understood that, because a lot of people would be like, “Oh shut up, stop complaining.” Working with Melina reminded me of why I do music. There are people [in the music industry] who love to make you feel bad about yourself, but our friendship has built a little bit of a shield around ourselves. We can brush off the bullshit a lot easier.
