Thanks for Coming originated in the mind of Rachel Brown. They are a project that focuses on indie rock with heartfelt lyrics and a throwback to 90's indie rock. Thanks for Coming have just released its debut album titled No Problem composed of 13 songs that appeal to our inner self when faced with life's dilemmas, problems and insecurities.
Deeply ingrained with a sense of honest vulnerability, Thanks for Coming makes music that will appeal to any indie rock, lo-fi and indie pop.
- You started recording songs in 2012 and then created Thanks for Coming. How was that transition like?
It wasn’t really a transition as much as of a declaration. It took me three years after starting to record my songs to find a suitable project name as well as the confidence to even admit that I made music. Only five or six of my close friends in high school knew that I wrote songs until I started releasing music as thanks for coming in 2015. Not even my parents knew. They were very shocked to find out that I had been secretly writing songs for years, but probably relieved that they hadn’t wasted their money on my guitar.
It wasn’t really a transition as much as of a declaration. It took me three years after starting to record my songs to find a suitable project name as well as the confidence to even admit that I made music. Only five or six of my close friends in high school knew that I wrote songs until I started releasing music as thanks for coming in 2015. Not even my parents knew. They were very shocked to find out that I had been secretly writing songs for years, but probably relieved that they hadn’t wasted their money on my guitar.
When I first started going to shows around Chicago, I began to meet musicians, including Nate Amos, who still plays in the full version of the band as well as produces almost all of the albums, and he especially was supportive of my songwriting, which I think gave me the confidence to not only continue writing songs but to even perform them in front of people. I had done stand-up before, but standing on stage sharing intimate thoughts in song form was absolutely terrifying to me. Music has always been a mechanism that I use to share my vulnerabilities, something that I have never been comfortable with, which is why I kept it private for so long. If anything thanks for coming is just concrete evidence of my emotional evolution.
It’s hard for me to differentiate my experience growing as thanks for coming and just as a person in general, because it started when I was eighteen, which is a point in my life that I faced a lot of changes and in turn felt like I grew up a lot of ways. I find it somewhat difficult to explain this project, since it’s sort of just an integral part of my being and even a way in which I communicate with myself and to the world. I guess to finally answer your question, the transition felt a lot like what I imagine butterflies feel when they break out of their cocoons or how a banana feels when it ripens. I let go of a big part of who I was, which was mostly fearful, and welcomed the idea of growing into someone who I guess I am still becoming.
"Music has always been a mechanism that I use to share my vulnerabilities, something that I have never been comfortable with, which is why I kept it private for so long. If anything thanks for coming is just concrete evidence of my emotional evolution."
- Your songs have a unique sense of style; they sound spontaneous and are very catchy as well. How is your process usually like? Do you write the lyrics first and then the chords or is it a simultaneous flow?
Thanks! That’s very kind. These days, the process depends on the song. For a long time, I would write the lyrics and the chords at the same time, but I’ve recently been writing chord patterns beforehand and then writing the lyrics. A lot of the time my lyrics are thoughts I’ve written down in my journal, so in a way they’re written, but they don’t really come together in their final form until I have something written on the guitar. I guess in short, my process is I have thoughts and feelings about something and then I play with my guitar until something sounds good and feels true, if that makes any sense.
"I write songs to externalize whatever is making my brain hurt at that present time. I only feel comfortable writing songs about me and my thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of the world. It’s a very self-involved project, but it’s also just a method for me to try to understand myself, so of course it would be extremely self-centered. Believe me I wish that I could experience the world outside of the context of myself, but I can’t, so I may as well write songs about me and my feelings, and hope in some way that someone else out there can relate."
- The lyrics on No Problem are very intimate and personal. What themes do you feel more comfortable writing and singing about?
The lyrics on “no problem” are pretty funny to me now, since I feel like I am in a very different place than when I wrote them. That album is me at age 20, halfway through college, on my second year in New York, dealing with uncertainties about who I was and the choices that I had made that led me there. I spent a lot of time defining myself in terms of who I was to other people, and I think that year I finally realized how miserable it was making me.
I don’t know if this makes me sound pretentious—it probably does—but I don’t write songs to make music. I write songs to externalize whatever is making my brain hurt at that present time. I only feel comfortable writing songs about me and my thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of the world. It’s a very self-involved project, but it’s also just a method for me to try to understand myself, so of course it would be extremely self-centered. Believe me I wish that I could experience the world outside of the context of myself, but I can’t, so I may as well write songs about me and my feelings, and hope in some way that someone else out there can relate.
I waste a lot of time thinking about love, so obviously I waste a lot of time writing songs about it. Not necessarily romantic love, although there are a fair share of songs regarding that, but more so the concept of love in general: losing love, missing love, attempting love etc. I’ve written songs about loving my friends and family, about trying to love myself, about the absence of love I have for myself, about understanding how best to love the world, about whether or not what I am feeling is love, about letting go of love and learning to let it in. This is sort of my deepest, darkest secret: I think about love all of the time and desperately wish to give it and experience it correctly. I highly recommend a book called “The Art of Loving” by Erich Fromm, I read it in a class I took in college that was quite literally about love. Great read, really changed my life.
Beyond love, I often think about depression, grief, the end of the world, losing my mind, the ways in which our leaders are failing us, the ways in which I am failing my fellow human beings—you know, just the usual, run-of-the-mill anxieties one faces in this day and age. In a way, it all just relates back to love anyways: the lack of love we are taught to have for others, the world, ourselves.
"I guess in a way, the idea of a plastic bag does relate to the insecurities and anxieties that we all face growing up, and even just living in general, best illustrated by Katy Perry’s lyrics from her hit song Firework: 'Do you ever feel like a plastic bag / Drifting through the wind/ Wanting to start again.'"
- Overall, there is a feeling and atmosphere of a coming-of-age album. The anxieties and insecurities we face every day and learning to cope. Is this any way related to the choice for the cover art of the album?
The plastic bag idea was inspired by the “Thank You” bags that you used to get when you bought things at most stores, before the plastic bag ban went into effect. The plastic bag is a cultural symbol of the idea of “Thank You” and I thought it was funny, just like how I thought releasing a 24-track album would be a funny thing for a completely unknown band to do, and how releasing a 24-track album with a music video for every single song would be even funnier—which it was—to me, but only after it was all over. The process was definitely not as funny as I thought it would be, it was mostly just a lot of scheduling and work.
The plastic bag is just a play on the “Thanks” theme that I can’t help but embrace. The phrase “No problem,” is just a direct response to the phrase “Thanks for coming.” The whole album concept outside of the music itself was the continuation of the original joke which was “Thanks for coming, I’m thanks for coming.” That’s where the name came from, it was just a joke I thought of.
I guess in a way, the idea of a plastic bag does relate to the insecurities and anxieties that we all face growing up, and even just living in general, best illustrated by Katy Perry’s lyrics from her hit song Firework: “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag / Drifting through the wind/ Wanting to start again”
- You play various instruments. Which one was the first and the one you feel more attached to?
Haha, unfortunately, I actually only play the guitar. I’m attempting to learn the bass, but only time will tell where that goes. It might actually be better for me, since I’m not particularly talented on the guitar anyways. With thanks for coming, almost every single song is written on my tiny acoustic guitar that I’ve had since I was 9. The only reason that there are songs with actual instruments is because I am lucky enough to know very talented musicians who agreed to play in my band. Nate Amos, who also produced the entire album, plays the drums, Charlie Dore-Young plays lead guitar, and Mike Kolb plays bass.
- In the book A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wrote: The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. During the album, I remembered that passage and how you intermingle a sense of hope with a subtle melancholy. Are there any writers/authors that you feel connected to on a deeper level?
I guess overall, I relate more to pieces of writing than to the collective work of any one person.
I previously mentioned Erich Fromm’s book, The Art of Loving, which again, literally changed my life, or at the very least is forcing me to try to change my life. My favorite book from adolescence is this book called Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta. Big fan of the graphic novels Watchmen by Alan Moore and Ghost World by Daniel Clowes, I also love the HBO Watchmen TV series as well as the film adaptation of Ghost World. Some more literary favorites are: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, The History of Love by Nicole Strauss, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.
One author I love is Haruki Murakami. He’s one of the few authors I’ve really gotten into, and perhaps the only author that I’ve read multiple books by. I read a lot as a child, and then pretty much stopped reading altogether besides a few books here and there until recently. I am very excited to be reading again, maybe by the next interview I’ll have a better grasp on the literary world.
Most of the writing that I feel deeply connected to tends to be presented as films and television shows. It was actually a dream of mine to one day become a screenwriter, which is what I went to school for, before realizing that I had the option of pursuing music. One of my favorite shows ever is Bojack Horseman, which I think really captured a sense of humanity and both the pain and the beauty that comes with just being a person, despite being centered around a humanoid horse. That show was so well written and dealt with so many different aspects of what it means to face being alive, all the while throwing in animal puns and absurdist humor. I am still genuinely sad that it ended, but happy, because it deserved the ending it got.
Two of my favorite films are Chungking Express by Wong Kar-wai and La Grande Bellezza by Paolo Sorrentino, which both capture humanity in very different but equally beautiful ways. I’m a big fan of Charlie Kaufman’s screenwriting as well, he has a way of depicting the truths of the world in dialogue and stories that I can only ever hope to imagine a tiny fraction of. And of course, I always appreciate what Jean-Luc Godard and Agnes Varda have to say in their films. It’s funny writing all of this and realizing none of these filmmakers write in English, which is the only language I understand, so also big shoutout to whoever translated those films, big fan of the translations.
In terms of lyrical writers, two of my favorites are Stephen Malkmus and David Berman. David Berman has this way of commenting on life and the world and people that is so profound and candid, while Stephen Malkmus barely makes any sense, in the best possible way.
I’m a real sucker for 90s indie rock, in case you can’t tell. Hearing Built to Spill, Pavement, and Silver Jews for the first time really changed my life, and if I’m being entirely honest, I had Third Eye Blind’s self-titled album playing on repeat for months while I was writing the songs that ended up being on no problem.
Text & Interview: Cláudia Zafre
Band: Thanks for Coming