Los Angeles band Belle and Chain played an intimate acoustic set last week at Meow Wolf and KSFR caught up with the band’s guitarist and writer-producer Davis IL and primary vocalist and songwriter Spencer Grammer backstage after the show. You may recognize Grammer's voice from her work on Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty. Here the duo tells us about how they craft songs and Grammer shares how she fell in love with New Mexico years ago.
Grammer: I was here in 2017 and I was working on a TV show Graves, and Nick Nolte was the star of that show. I played a PR person, kind of like a Kellyanne Conway. And I stayed here for two months and drove all over New Mexico. I fell in love with the landscape and the geography. I just found it to be so vibrant and beautiful and vast. And in thinking about it, I really wanted to capture the sound of the West, so our songs are in that vein. I wouldn't say it's country music, but it is very similar—it feels like Western Desert Rock.
KSFR: And you were saying earlier that you haven't been playing music that long.
Grammer: So it kind of came to me later in life, which just goes so you can kind of choose your own adventure in life. I started playing because I got stabbed in 2020 in New York, trying to break up a fight—which I also don't recommend—but it severed my median nerve and two tendons. It took me about a year to get movement back in my hand, and I still don't have feeling. I was told by kinesiologist to start playing guitar to help heal the nerve.
IL: He didn't say accordion or kazoo? He said play guitar?
Grammer: He just said play an instrument. And that led me on this path. And then after a couple years of playing, he (bandmate Davis IL) saw me putting covers up on my Instagram, and then we met as friends at a at a party.
IL: And then we jammed at a show.
Grammer: But after the show, everyone asked if I had a band and I said, "no."
IL: But it's LA, so it's a bunch of musicians saying, "Well, let's start a band!"
Grammer: People asked if I write a music, and I didn't but then enough people asked me, and I was like, maybe I'll just try writing music and see how it goes. And it was really fun. I come from a storytelling background. I started in acting. I went to film school, actually for directing, but I do a lot of writing. And music is like a way faster way of making a mini movie, without all of the expense of making a movie. You can just write a story really quickly, and you can test it out in front of a live audience and see if they like it or not. And so it became a really incredible path for me. So here we are talking to you, all because I got stabbed.
KSFR: Learning to play an instrument is a lot different than writing songs, especially as well as you do. So tell me about your process for songwriting. Do you start with lyrics or melody, or how does it work?
Grammer: I've written with partners recently who know more about music theory than I know, but I understand structure really well. I think of music kind of like math. I feel like it's a very simple equation. I danced most of my life before I did acting. My mom was a dancer on Broadway, and my dad's an actor, so I've always been around music and performance. So I understood the structure of what a song is and then you just kind of follow that formula. You put the chords together, and then melody kind of came easy from that. And I’ve always been a writer.
IL: She's able to find a melody. I think you either can do that or can't, or you find people to do that for you. But she can find a melody within the chords. She just needs the framework. And then she's got tons of lyrics, like she said. So she's a good storyteller, and I think that's why we gravitated towards that medium of like folk and country. Like the song we played first tonight "Laila." Really listen to those lyrics; it's almost a Dylanesque arc. It's not just a pop song.
Grammer: As a creator being in different mediums, I've realized I really couldn't tell in the moment if something was going to be good or bad. Sometimes on my worst days, I was better. And to go with that, to really listen to the audience and trust the people that you collaborate with. And that was very early on in my career. But then as I've gotten older, and I did things like make short films, I realized that the things I thought were amazing in those movies weren't that amazing. And I had to let them go, too. And so you learned to, as they call it, "kill your babies" a little bit. And music's the same way.
The process of failure is really the process of of creativity and art, it just makes you better and better.
