Phabies deliver indie pop bops for bummer times
The Grand Rapids band level up on their sophomore album The Curse of Caring with help from an impressive production team
Ever since she was a young twenty-something intern in New York, Phabies singer/songwriter Laura Hobson was told the key to success in the music business is collaboration.
The advice she first received from producer Steve Ladd proved to be prophetic in describing Hobson and her Grand Rapids indie pop band’s second full length The Curse of Caring, an album that includes a production team boasting a who’s who of indie rock and country artist credits on its collective resumes.
Primarily recorded at Sabbath Recording in Cincinnati, Ohio, producer Jake Merritt helped Phabies assemble The Curse of Caring’s stuffed roster, including mixers Adrian Olsen (Foxygen, Fruit Bats), Jeremy Ferguson (Cage the Elephant, Be Your Own Pet) and Sean Sullivan (Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers).
Hobson and crew were joined by studio musician Agustin Escalante on guitar and synths along with Phabies’ Garrett Stier (bass, guitar, synths), Andrew Deters (guitar), Joshua Holicki (drums) and Max McKinnon (synths) along with a plethora of others, making The Curse of Caring an “analog” indie labor of love with many different sonic fingerprints on it.
Hobson, who writes songs and lyrics for the band, said she has learned to let go of her creations and leave them in the hands of others she knows will help elevate them, like she did to pleasing results on The Curse of Caring.
“When you give these (songs) away to people that you trust, or who you know will do an amazing job, you get back things that make you so happy,” Hobson said of the team who helped make The Curse of Caring. “I just love their ears and what they come up with.”
Stier joked the band was concerned there wouldn’t be enough room on the album jacket to fit the names of everyone involved in the creation of The Curse of Caring. The multi-instrumentalist said he was happy with how the crew working behind the scenes were able to add little twists to the band’s songs, crediting Merritt for bringing together a group who knew how to augment its sound appropriately.
“It's just been fun to kind of give (Merritt) the opportunity to reach out to other engineers that he's wanted to work with, and just sort of create this,” Stier said. “(Olsen) is a person that we know we can send him a song, and he just knows exactly what to do, what parts to pull out and how to just sort of create this really warm envelope around what we've recorded.”
The result of this indie-centric production braintrust is a breezy and catchy set of nostalgic indie pop tunes, combined with acoustically driven, theatric indie folk. Released Friday, June 13, The Curse of Caring is a level up album, a mix Hobson hopes fans will remember fondly someday down the road, despite the obvious, unavoidable feeling of despair that runs through the album and the present moment.
“I want it to be maybe something they listen to and they have the best summer of their lives and it's just like in the soundtrack,” Hobson said. “So, 15 years from now, it creates a nostalgia for them when they put it back on and it's correlated with happy memories.”
Hobson is always trying to find that kernel of hope in moments where it can be hard to find them on the The Curse of Caring. Much of her anxiety for the present moment is aimed at the state of the climate. It’s an album fixated on the instinct to mend, nourish and transform, both in human relationships and in humanity’s relationship with the natural world, she said.
Songs like theatrical album opener Blooms of April balance Hobson’s desire for cooperative growth in the “garden of perennial hope” with a more grim present reality with the refrain:
So who’s gonna save us, who’s gonna heal us now?
When all of the world and everything’s upside down
Hobson is very committed to this topic, in her songwriting and in real life, she says, participating in a climate group and reading authors like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Douglas Tollamy extensively. Like the climate group, Hobson said Phabies’ songs don’t seek solutions, but understanding.
“It's not there to solve any problems, but it is aware of them, and kind of asking the questions and hoping that people who aren't really aware or maybe choosing not to be aware -- it kind of sneaks music into their ear as a way to be aware, I hope,” she said.
While it doesn’t offer easy answers to life’s complex problems, what The Curse of Caring does offer are catchy songs destined to land on a plethora of indie centric streaming platform playlists with a noticeable progression in the strength of the band’s melodies. The Bloodletting’s irresistible guitar riff and intentionally big breakdown to the chorus lighten the load of the song's message about the art of letting go and knowing when to fold in a relationship. The message feels central to The Curse of Caring on what might be the band’s best song to date.
I Care For You pokes fun at the fears of big city life in a Jenny Lewis-esque pop jam that also instantly ranks among the band’s best. Inspired by Hobson’s encounter with a woman complaining about there being “too much city” in kids these days while she was on a mushroom foraging hike, I Care For You vows to stay true to its title in what feels like the most natural candidate for a breakthrough single on the album.
Be Kind Rewind invokes an ‘80s retro pop vibe aiming to go back to the good times in a relationship, sprinkling in a few VHS-era nostalgia references in Chappell Roan-esque (another key inspiration for Hobson while making the album) verse structure, ultimately coming across as a slightly poppier Beach House.
Whether it’s the more acoustically-driven album centerpiece Tell Her or the indie pop gem Do You Love, The Curse of Caring is an album often driven by confessing love and emphasizing urgency, despite being structured with an easygoing flow and deliberate pacing.
“I have always felt like I chase the thrill of figuring out how to write certain ways, and so I really savor writing different types of music,” Hobson said. “"As far as having them both (upbeat and low key songs) on the same album together, we tried to at least organize it in a way that felt like it made sense, or to give people little sonic rests after some of the bigger songs.”
Regardless of where Hobson’s care is directed, the songs contain enough clever production tinges to go with their strong melodies to make The Curse of Caring among the strongest Michigan album releases of the year.
Stier says he hopes the pop catharsis of the music on the album will be enough for people to relate to during times of great uncertainty.
“I hope that this music creates memories for people, that it creates good experiences or it creates maybe some type of words or sounds that help people through certain situations, whatever that might be,” he said.
You can catch Phabies live on June 20 at the Solstice Festival in Grand Rapids and on July 12 at the Pyramid Scheme, where they’ll play in support of the new EP released by Grand Rapids band Low Phase.