That’s a great story. Where did the band name come from?

SB: The silent member of the group is Tatiana McCabe, a video artist and visual artist. She’s studying at SVA right now and she does all of our videos and all of our art, photography and everything. I saw that I needed a visual partner in the group. She’s someone that I was very close to and who wanted to be involved in this family operation. And she came up with a name. She was riding her bike on the beach and the beach was wide enough that she could close her eyes, and she knew that her boyfriend needed a band name…[laughs] and she gave me a good suggestion. Superhuman Happiness.

I know you said you wrote a lot of the songs before the band, but now that you have the name and you’re writing new songs, do you try to reflect that name through the music?

SB: Well I think the reason she thought that name would be good was that it’s kind of the occupation of what I’m interested in with the music, which is seeking rapture. I want to feel the ecstasy, you know. I want to be within the mathematical ratios of God. I think the things that make music beautiful are the things that make plants grow, the things that bring the tide in. And I don’t attempt to understand it, but I am definitely addicted to it. And when I realized what it is about music that inspires me, I realized that I have to serve it, and I have to try to channel it and celebrate it with as many people as I can. And that includes celebrating it with my band on stage and celebrating it with an audience. It’s a religious experience.

That’s an interesting approach.

SB: I would like to underline that the current vision for the band is that while I’m a leader, I’m operating a team of creative forces. My desire, my drive, is to create something greater than I could ever make alone. Something that absolutely needs the creative incorporation and engagement of every single person on stage, and Tatiana, and the audience, and friends. And I want that means to reach out. That’s the idea.

I want to get away from this idea that there’s a genius out there—that there’s this person who did it all himself, because that’s bullshit. We need to be proud of things as a culture, not to be divided by them, you know what I mean? I was reading Robert Palmer’s liner notes on the Led Zeppelin box set, the one with all the crop circles that came out years ago. And he said something that was so profound to me. He said that our understanding of publishing and songwriting is based on old Tin Pan Alley shit, and that it’s completely outdated. And his vision, in the efforts of our current culture—now he wasn’t even talking about hip-hop when he wrote that, but if you think about the power and the weight of a record like It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy, or any record that’s been heavily sampled, you can feel that, and you can feel that maybe this art is bigger than us. And it’s bigger than an idea that one person had. And it’s enrapturing our souls—which I believe is the purpose of the thing. It is something that I could never come up with on my own. Everyone in Superhuman Happiness is there because they offer something very, very important to the creative process. The band is run that way as a functioning business and as a creative entity.

So when you’re writing these new songs, are they collectively written with the each of the band members bringing their own ideas to the table or are you still the main creative force behind the writing?

SB: For the most part, I try to avoid anything being brought to the table. What I want brought to the table is perspective, is gist. I want everybody coming to the table naked. But at the same time, once they’re at that table, we’re changing lyrics, we’re changing melody, we’re changing forms, and we’re changing ideas. It’s a new way of writing—at least it’s new for me, and I believe it’s new for everybody else there—it’s an intentional collaboration, you know what I mean? I mean, there’s ebb and flow, but it’s very intentional in the way that we’ll start out with certain classic exercises and then we’ll transfer those to rhythms and then we kind of sit back and wait and improvise a little. And then we try another exercise, and then we’ll try a vocal exercise and see where that goes, you know? And then a hook will jump into somebody’s head.

Basically, the same way a think tank works, or people will I don’t know what they call it…the bull pen…where you get everybody together, you throw ideas around, you have a head writer who’s moderating things and kind of breathes in subjects and guides the project, but you’re working with writers, you’re working with composers, you’re working with creative people. And so that’s how we’re collaborating. Ideas are brought in, but we work with them. I would say it’s virtually impossible to take anyone out of the puzzle. The record we’re working on now, it’s collaborative—intentional collaboration.

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