The songwriter and visual artist guides us through the making of Red Pants’ latest album, “Not Quite There Yet.”
Self-reliance has become an essential part of Jason Lambeth’s creative process. Lambeth makes up half of the psych-tinged rock duo Red Pants, along with longtime collaborator (and award-winning author) Elsa Nekola. Since Red Pants started recording in 2018, Lambeth has: launched (and subsequently shelved) the tape label Painted Blonde, directed a string of music videos, elevated his own visual art, and self-produced a large handful of records. Since those early 2018 recording sessions, Lambeth’s solo-turned-duo project Red Pants has released: a live album, two digital singles, three full-lengths, three “demos and alterations” compilations, and six EPs.
Not Quite There Yet, Red Pants’ recent album, marks a career high point for the band. Released via the Madrid-based label Meritorio Records, Not Quite There Yet adeptly showcases the duo’s strongest skill sets. Winsome moments of looseness, modesty, mesmeric haze, pointed grit, and free-form exploration litter the album’s sonic landscape, invoking a host of the band’s slacker-punk and alternative rock forebears (Dinosaur Jr, Built To Spill, Yo La Tengo, Times New Viking, Sleater-Kinney, Blonde Redhead, and Wilco among them).
A good deal of Red Pants’ charm and magic lies in the freedom they give themselves. Lambeth and Nekola commit to capturing the feeling a song generates, rather than getting hung up on chasing technical perfection. “I can’t imagine that sort of stress,” says Lambeth, in reference to recording in a studio and looking for a perfect take. To Lambeth, perfection seems to be relative and much more connected to generating a positive, near-indefinable emotional response. And that comes across in waves on Not Quite There Yet. A winsomely rugged style of production elevates the album’s ability to invoke a sense of grounded euphoria.
“Watch The Sky,” one of the singles from the album, is a perfect example of that ability. In the song’s lilting vocals, Lambeth’s layered vocal harmony, the keyboard overlay, and the ascending guitar figure, listeners can feel a sense of adventure, discovery, and serenity. It doesn’t matter if the listener is zeroing in on the song’s sum total or its individual parts, there’s enough emotive heft to be found in either to draw a strong, instinctive response. How the musicians behind “Watch The Sky” felt while making it remains a slight mystery, but chances are it felt, on some level, spiritual.
There’s an unspoken pact that a lot of musicians make by agreeing to combine their talents: an inherent agreement to create something of meaning. Something that not only wins favor but feels fulfilling to all parties involved. And the ones who are really good at capturing and presenting that feeling can rope their listeners into feeling it as well. On Not Quite There Yet, Red Pants cement themselves as a band that can accomplish that feat. “Watch The Sky” is one of a handful of songs on the album that tap into a transcendental sense of an all-encompassing freedom. Something that feels akin to floating.
“Crimson Words,” the album’s first track, also taps into this feeling. An escalating sense of nervous energy is evident in the song’s cresting guitar progression and shaky, lightly distorted keys. A touch of menace seeps into Lambeth’s vocal delivery, and a dreamlike falsetto harmony line adds to the tension. Nekola’s drumming is straightforward and restrained, but it suits the song’s aesthetic; it’s a dark opener but it blows the door wide open for the band to spend the rest of Not Quite There Yet toying with various atmospheres. “Witching Hour,” the subsequent track, taps into something that builds off the dread of the opener while integrating dynamics that’d feel at home on any mid-career Sonic Youth album.
On “Rockwell Kent,” Nekola memorably takes over lead vocal duties and delivers in spades on a track that tempers its sweetness with spikiness. “He said he would drown in Bantham Bay, but he’s still got you,” goes a portion of the chorus, as it interrogates the relationship between impulse, desire, and fate. Muddy guitar tones and a winding bass figure expertly punctuate the song’s translation of unease. Penultimate track “Visions Of Gloria” is one of a handful of tracks that pick up the tempo to provide a jittery, toe-tapping jolt of energy. That energy carries over into the album’s punchy closer “Quiet Eyes,” which comes across with an extra dose of conviction and confidence. “Try to tell me / The world is calling / It’s in one ear and out the other,” goes the refrain. Red Pants’ world is their own and they’ll shape it the way they see fit.
Not Quite There Yet is an absorbing, rewarding listen, and captures just how much Red Pants have honed their craft over the past five years. Each of the album’s nine tracks has something substantial to offer and reward listener investment and exploration. But more than a dozen releases into the project’s career, Lambeth would likely be the first to tell you that the band’s still working on advancing their artistry. And given how restless the project has been in the past, we may not have to wait too long to see the duo’s next evolutionary step.
Lambeth sat down with Tone Madison in early November to discuss his creative process, Red Pants’ history, the excitement that accompanies new material, his various other creative endeavors, and so much more.
Tone Madison: On a recent podcast appearance, you mentioned that you had started doing Red Pants as a byproduct of a running injury. How does a timeline like that come about?
Jason Lambeth: Yeah, a little bit. I’d taken up running shortly after my first kid was born in an effort to kind of prolong life. Like, I figured I should live longer. And, yeah, so I don’t know, I just kind of quit making music and I quit making art. My wife and I were also starting up this in-home daycare business. So that took up a lot of time as well. And then it was several years later that I got hurt. And I was kind of twiddling my thumbs. Like, I need to do something.
So I pulled out a sketchbook and then one thing led to another and I was kind of down in the basement and making some music again. And I slowly started to pull out an old four-track that I hadn’t used in forever. I thought that was kind of done with, but then I started to meet all these people that were avid four track recording enthusiasts as well. And this kind of all coincided with Elsa moving back from grad school. That summer, we started to jam together again, for the first time, and it’d been like [a] five-year break or so.
Tone Madison: And the two of you had previously been in a band together.
Jason Lambeth: Yeah, I had this project called El-tin Fun that lasted for like 10 years. And a lot [that band’s] best stuff is very Red Pants-ish. I usually had one drummer, or sometimes it’d be a drummer and a bassist that would back me up. Towards the tail end of that Elsa came into the fold and we played a few shows together. But then I just sort of got burnt out. I just wasn’t into it anymore. And then I kind of filled that space with running, and she moved away for the grad school program. But I think the break [wound up being] kind of good.
Tone Madison: Breaks can be good! But it also seems like that creative trust was already cultivated before Elsa officially joined Red Pants. Up to that point, the band was a solo project, correct?
Jason Lambeth: Yeah. I did a couple of songs here and there. And I did an EP I think that was entirely by myself. Then I did an EP where she played drums on like one song, it was just like a little lo-fi four track thing. But after that, she’s been on everything. I mean the pandemic kind of squashed that a bit. We would throw a couple of songs with her on them that we had stashed away on an EP, and then I [would] try to pad out the rest of this stuff by myself. [Red Pants was] not nearly as good [as it is when] Elsa’s in the fold.
Tone Madison: All of the Red Pants material sounds really warm and deliberately lo-fi. Has the way you produce evolved past the four-track recording approach?
Jason Lambeth: Most of the full-length albums have all been [recorded on] Logic Express. It’s an early mid-grade [production software] between GarageBand and Logic that I’ve had on this computer that’s from, like, 2009. That’s the only program that it runs, basically. That and iTunes [Laughing]. I can export the songs to iTunes. So we do a few microphones on the drums and one microphone on my guitar. And then we record those basic tracks together. And then we can just overdub. I mean, we could overdub as many tracks as we wanted.
But I think there’s a carryover from doing stuff on four-track to keep it pretty minimal. I don’t use a ton of plugins. I just feel like that stuff gets kind of overwhelming. So I keep it pretty basic. At the same time, we do layer stuff as well. We did an EP last year where [we recorded] the basic tracks on the four track and kind of layered it in the computer a little bit. Sometimes it’s fun to just try to challenge yourself to record on tape. I would love to have a big eight-track machine or something, but it seems like it’s gonna cost a lot. And there’s maintenance stuff that I don’t know how to do [or] to keep up with.
Tone Madison: Going back to trust, something I’ve been thinking about lately is the interpersonal dynamic of having your bandmates be your friends. Depending on temperament, that familiarity can negatively or positively impact potential areas of contention. Have you had to navigate through any meaningful disagreement in Red Pants?
Jason Lambeth: I don’t know, it’s kind of like this dream situation where we’re both [typically in agreement]. I shouldn’t speak for Elsa, but I know I love whatever she tends to do. I don’t know. There’s never been a situation where I’ve been, like, [“I don’t feel like that should go there,”] because I can’t play drums to save my life. So I’m just so happy to have her around. And I can kind of see—when I present a song or an idea—if she’s kind of excited about it. So if she’s excited about that, I definitely want to go down that road. And sometimes if it doesn’t seem to take off, then maybe it needs some work. Or sometimes it’s just scraps. Having the years [of] knowing [each other and] being friends, I can tell when she’s excited about something. Or not. [Laughing.]
Tone Madison: Having that kind of enthusiasm as a barometer can be really helpful, especially when you know somebody well enough to see an idea clicking in real time.
Jason Lambeth: I mean, it’s kind of funny. Like, there have been songs like on the last couple of albums where I bring them in last-minute. I’m like, “Hey, I got some new chords. We could try this out?” And she’s like, “This is great, this needs to go on the album.” I’m like, “Okay, if you say so!” Like, let’s finish that!
Tone Madison: For this record, you signed with a label for the release and they’re putting out a vinyl pressing. This marks the second label you’ve worked with after getting your start self-releasing. How did that develop?
Jason Lambeth: Yeah, I had my own little tape label going for a little while once I started [actively playing and releasing music] again, and that was mostly just because I wanted to have a label name. Mostly so I could present it to the world. It seems a little bit more professional. But then I ended up releasing some other people’s music on that label. And then I worked with Paisley Shirt Records. They’ve branched out into vinyl [over the] last couple of years. But primarily, they’re known as a tape label out in the Bay Area of California. And I feel like that kind of opened the doors to work with Meritorio, who did this new album.
Tone Madison: Are you still running the tape label at all? Or is it taking a back seat?
Jason Lambeth: Once the pandemic hit, honestly, shipping things was so weird. And that really just bummed me out. I put it on the back burner. And then there’s just so much going on with having kids and work and wanting to make art and doing my own music that I haven’t picked it back up. I think if the right project came along at the right time, I probably would do it. But it just kind of depends. But I was shipping a couple of records out to a couple of friends. And it’s gotten even worse, price-wise, to ship things out of the country. It makes me not want to ever, ever run a record label again.
I see people having to charge like $10 for a tape and then you’ve got to charge five to six dollars for shipping. And it’s like, wow, that’s as much as I was paying for a CD at Borders back in the day. I totally get it but it’s not something that I really want to do. I like to be able to charge like five bucks for a tape and four bucks for shipping. But I feel like those days are kind of gone now.
Tone Madison: It’s dispiriting! But paired alongside operations winding down at the tape label, it seemed like the pandemic opened up some time for you to indulge in other creative projects. Past music, it seemed like you were becoming increasingly prolific as a visual artist. Have you noticed any commonalities in the way you approach creating visual art and creating music?
Jason Lambeth: Yeah, with collage stuff, I feel like a lot of it’s luck [and] finding things. I feel like it’s kind of the same way with music, because technically, I don’t know what [I’m doing]. I’m not a trained musician. I don’t think of myself as a musician. I feel like I barely know what I’m doing [when it comes to] recording. So it’s all sort of happenstance and sort of falls into place. I feel kind of lucky that things come out sounding halfway decent. And with a collage, stuff that really, really lines up. Sometimes you find this perfect cut out or something. I like to incorporate some mixed media, like, painting. And a lot of that is like, abstract backgrounds or whatever, which I [feel is often] up to chance as well. I could see how those things correlate, I feel like they’re all in the same big pot and getting mixed around. I tend to use lyrics and song titles for artwork, and things cross over.
Tone Madison: While we’re on the topic of visual art, you’ve been helming a series of really interesting DIY music videos. Conceptualizing those has to take restraints into account, what does the process for creating those usually entail?
Jason Lambeth: If we go from this album, there’s this video for the song “Watch The Sky” where it appears like I’m walking forwards. And everybody else is going backwards. And I thought it’d be cool if it was down on State Street, with the Capitol in the background. And so that was the concept. I thought it worked well with the song and then I have a friend named Jem Fanvu, she plays in this band Vacant Gardens, and she did one of the songs for me. She also did another song on the last album, so I kind of give total creative freedom to her in exchange for doing some album artwork.
Sometimes [I’ll try] my hand at stop-motion stuff with a lot of the collage stuff. And then, at one point, I could get my kids to be involved. [But] my 11-year-old is getting older, I don’t think that she would want anything to do with it now. But I still have my seven-year-old [who] might be into [being in] something. [Keeping things contained is] definitely all out of necessity. It’s all edited in iMovie and shot on phones. Even the stop-motion stuff is shot with my phone and loaded into iMovie. It just gives me the rainbow spinning wheel to eventually export. I always kind of don’t want to [pursue making music videos], but then I really get into it whenever I finally do it.
Tone Madison: You were talking about how your approach to songwriting integrates a bit of reliance on luck. Are you coming to the table with a concrete outline for songs and then coloring within those parameters or are you relying more on loose, free-form jamming to dictate structure?
Jason Lambeth: It depends on the song, but a lot of it is kind of all of that. There are times when I would, especially with this album, try to come to [practice with an idea]. Elsa and I usually would get together, like, every other week, and I would come to practice with an idea. Usually a couple of chords, nothing else, and we would kind of see where it would go. Then I take that back home, and figure out from there what the song was. and then the next time we [practiced we] would kind of have a song. But then I would also be showing up with, you know, more ideas.
With this record, once we had a solid amount of material, I just started recording every practice. We had our three microphones on the drums and one one mic on the guitar. So anytime we were doing a take of anything new. I was recording that. And so I think that that contributes to the looseness that you’re talking about. Sometimes when we [would] record in the past, like when you hit record, it’s like, “Okay, this has to be the take.” There’s all this pressure if you’re in a studio, which I can only assume [is] kind of crazy. So there’s none of that. It felt like we were just playing the song for the fourth time. And now this take that we’ve done is going to be on the album or something.
So that took a long time to get all finished up, but it was a nice way to work. And we didn’t have any sort of deadline or anything. We were just sorta going at it for a long time. But yeah, there are times when I come in, when I just sit down and write a song, which is amazing when that happens. And yeah, there’s definitely times when I’ve got a song title, and I want to write around that as well. But I don’t know, I never really set out with like, a grand scheme for a song like: This one’s gonna be a long, lengthy noise jam or something. Or this one’s gonna be a minute and a half. It’s just whatever happens, really.
Tone Madison: When it comes to narrative, on an album-to-album basis, is that something you have a directional intent for or is it something that takes place via a collage of what material works best.
Jason Lambeth: Yeah, it’s kind of the second option there. Especially with this one, we recorded about 20 songs, and what really made the cut was what was the newest and freshest and most exciting [songs]. Because I think most of it, I wanted to have some of these songs documented. [To show] that they existed. And they can live on my hard drive or whatever if they need to, but because there’s some stuff that dates back [to] pre-pandemic that we recorded, but it doesn’t feel as exciting as the newer stuff. I try not to repeat myself. Lyrically, I feel like lyrics are just hard to come up with, you know, like fresh ideas. And I’ve always tended to kind of bury my vocals [in the mix] anyway. So maybe they’re hard to hear.
Tone Madison: So even with the new songs garnering the most excitement personally, it does sound like you keep around castoffs from other recording sessions that matched up with past releases. And there have been quite a few releases since 2020.
Jason Lambeth: Yeah, the Bandcamp is out of control. I tried to scale it back this year, you know, like, I’m not Robert Pollard. We don’t just throw everything out there. When we started [prepping this album], I thought we were going to use [some of those older] songs and I thought we had like a specific album that was going to be made. But we just kind of kept going and going. Then I think there’s like four or three or four songs that were done [over] the last few months or so. Recording [it all], they just felt better. Like better songs. I don’t know. And I shouldn’t be mean to the old songs, but [you know].
Tone Madison: Yeah, it’s an interesting dynamic. Musicians always seem to favor new material, but that can come as a result of being practiced and having a greater awareness of how to mold something to better suit your sensibilities. Older songs can still surprise you and they’ll always warrant consideration, but there’s always an extra jolt of excitement in dealing with something new. When you hit on something that feels good, it can be completely reinvigorating.
Jason Lambeth: Then you throw in the old stuff [where] we’ve played those songs a lot. A lot. So by the time you come to record it, there’s a little bit of, at least on my part, a staleness feeling. I also like to try to record them earlier on, [when they’re] more exciting to see, like, “Okay, are we going to make it through the song?” Because it’s still like an infant, you know. Like, “Are we gonna make it through? This is the fifth time we’ve ever played this.”
But to get a great take out of it is always really exciting. So I kind of chase that. I think that’s maybe something that Elsa would argue with me [on]. Like, “Oh, we could get a better take, technically.” But I don’t know, sometimes there’s just something in the air where [the freshness of those songs makes it] so much better.
Tone Madison: We touched on this a bit before but Red Pants has, historically, been a really prolific project. Are you already eyeing next steps?
Jason Lambeth: I don’t know. Elsa and I are getting together this weekend to practice and it’s kind of weird to be going in with nothing. We played one show this fall. We were scheduled to play another one and we got sick and had to cancel. So the last several times we have gotten together, I’ve been practicing for shows. So now it’s like [the band’s] coming in with a pretty clean slate. I mean, there are a couple of those [older] songs in the can [that] I would like to release at some point. It kind of depends on what other people want to do. If there’s a label that wants to work with us, [and] what we’re all up for. It’d be nice to just keep on releasing stuff at some point.
Tone Madison: Were you angling to play more shows?
Jason Lambeth: Yeah. I would like to. It’s harder because I’m older. And not in my early 20s. And as much as I used to love playing Mickey’s, midnight shows are really, really hard. And I have kids, so we have to get a sitter, to have a backup. There’s just all these layers that go into it. But if anybody’s got an afternoon show where they need some noisy rock two-piece band, that seems to be a nice spot for us. We [once] did a backyard show that was in the afternoon. It was really nice.
