“Never Leave,” the first new release from beloved ’90s Little Rock tweemo band Everyone Asked About You (Chris Sheppard, Hannah Vogan, Collins Kilgore, Lee Buford, John Beachboard and Matt Bradley) in 25 years, will almost certainly make you hungry for more. That’s partially because the EP only has four tracks, but it’s more so because the songs have a pungent, heart-on-sleeve urgency that briefly transfigures the world into something a little less harsh.
To exist inside these tunes is to be desperate but understood, occasionally even hopeful because someone feels things just as deeply as you do. Music like this is hard to come by, and it’s hard to get enough of. You’re going to want to cling to “Never Leave” like a lover.
Recorded at Little Rock’s Fellowship Hall Sound by Jason Weinheimer and mixed by North Carolina producer Alex Farrar (who’s worked with current indie giants like Wednesday, Indigo De Souza and Snail Mail), the lion’s share of the EP rocks fairly hard. Sheppard and Vogan’s charmingly dissimilar voices duel throughout over sometimes frantic and always sincere emo instrumentation. The standout track, however, is the tender, diaristic “A Vigil,” which begins with Sheppard alone in what sounds like a cavernous basement.
Atmospheric noise and a busy yet spacious interlocking of bass and clean electric guitar buoy his voice. A stray cymbal hit comes in here and there, but mostly the song remains rhythmically unmoored. “We lost another one today,” Shepperd sings, mourning Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old nonbinary high school student from Oklahoma who died in what was ruled a suicide after being severely bullied for their gender identity.
Despite the tragic circumstances, the song’s final refrain is both confrontational and compassionate. “What’s your endgame? / We’ve been here before / I’m not going anywhere / Blown open door,” Sheppard repeats over and over again, until a chorus of voices overtakes him and the “I’m” in “I’m not going anywhere” turns into “we’re.” It’s the epitome of chill-inducing and the aural embodiment of queer solidarity and allyship as it slowly but surely gains momentum.
“Never Leave” came out digitally on Monday and is available for pre-order as a 7-inch via archival label Numero Group, who also reissued EAAY’s previous discography on double vinyl last year. Ahead of the release, we spoke with Sheppard about how the new EP came together.
How does it feel to have new music out for the first time in a quarter century?
Wow, don’t put it that way, please. [laughs] It feels pretty normal in that everything about the last three years has felt really surreal. So it’s normal in its surrealness, if that makes sense. When we got together to rehearse for the double LP release shows back in September, I had been practicing our songs for the last year and a half. I love playing those songs, but I picked the guitar back up for our reunion shows and quickly fell back in love with playing. I hadn’t played in 22 years or so. Sitting down and just playing the same stuff that I wrote 25 years ago was starting to get a little tiresome and so next thing you know I’m writing new music.
When we finished that weekend of shows, we started to talk about what the next year would look like and I just threw it out to the group, “What if the next time we all get together, it’s not to play some shows and rehash the same songs we’ve done already for the last string of shows? Maybe we get together and write and possibly try to record.” And everybody was into it. Our band credo is if it’s fun and we’re available to do it, we’ll do it.
For me, it was very cathartic and enriching. It tickled my brain in a way that hasn’t been tickled in a long time — to go back to writing and structuring songs and creating lyrics and what not from the perspective of a 45-year-old when the last time I wrote a song I was 20.
Talk to me about the writing and recording process for the EP.
It turned out that 60% of the band was going to be in Arkansas already for the eclipse. It was pretty easy once we figured out that the eclipse was going to be our gathering timeframe. I tend to have a little more free time during the day than most of the rest of the band, so I started putting together ideas and song structures and chord progressions and started demoing those up on the Voice Memos app on my phone. With about a month and a half to go, I sent six demos of full songs and maybe 45 minutes worth of pieces of songs that I had written from roughly December to March.
We have two very, very early songs that we have videos of and relearned how to play from our first show ever, and then we have a batch of songs that we halfway finished recording that we wrote after the LP [Let’s Be Enemies]. So we went back and forth on whether or not we would revisit that work and finish it so that we could close that chapter, but by the time we all got together, we were more engaged in trying to write something new. It’s been interesting to go back and look at that old stuff. We never had set lyrics for any of that work, so the idea of trying to go back into that headspace was pretty challenging.
We all got together the day after the eclipse and Everett Hagen — we were roommates back in the ’90s and now he’s in the local band Or — offered up his house to us for writing. We moved into his living room and came out with about six songs finished, or good enough to go into the studio with. We did that over the course of three days.
We only had three days in the studio, which for us is luxurious — I think we recorded the entire first LP in two and a half days — but still, this being our being our first time in a studio with proper computer software, we didn’t want to overshoot and underdeliver, so we decided to target four specific songs.
How did writing and recording as a band feel different than or similar to how it was when y’all were teenagers?
Any time we get back into a room with each other, it feels like we’re 19 again. We’re back to goofing off and joking all the time and constantly riffing and having fun with each other. We really enjoy playing with each other and it’s just fun to turn on the amps and see what comes out of us. So from that perspective, it was very straightforward, very much exactly as it was back in the day.
On the flip side, what was really different about it is that, while I don’t think any of us take what we’re doing more seriously than we did back when we were teenagers, it feels like we have to take a bigger chunk of time out of our day-to-day to be able to do this. We knew we had hard deadlines that we needed to meet. One of the reasons we targeted that April timeframe is that it was about as late as we could go and still possibly have a physical release for our tour coming up in October.
In the ’90s, if we didn’t finish something, we’d be like, “Alright, let’s go back and work at Pizza Cafe for another three months and save up enough money so we can get back into the studio and finish what we were doing.” Whereas in this situation it was like, “Well, we live in six different states and four different time zones and who knows when we’re going to be able to get back together in a studio setting to finish this, so let’s make sure we get it done.”
We also wanted to make sure we were doing something that we were really proud of. Back in the day, we weren’t really concerned about whether or not people liked us. Now, it’s not that we’re concerned about whether or not people like us, it’s more that there are people that like us and we know about it, which we didn’t know about back then. [laughs]
How much were you trying to make a record that sounds like a continuation of the music you made in the ’90s?
None of us felt beholden to making anything that sounded like what we’ve done before. And if you listen to our catalog, there’s kind of three distinct sounds that happen between the first 7-inch, the second 7-inch and the LP. They all sound like they’re from the same band, but they have a diversity of sonics, so we weren’t super concerned about that. We figured — being the same six people, and Hannah and I having the same voices, and using the same instrumentation — it’s going to carry over.
I actually think it sounds fairly different. We’re certainly not writing music because we’re trying to cash in on the fact that we have some newfound interest. We’re not just trying to replicate what we did before. We’re six people who are good friends who forgot that they really like to play music together.
My favorite track on the new release is “A Vigil.” How did y’all decide to arrange it so sparingly when the rest of the EP is more rock-based?
I was hoping we would end up putting that together as a full band song. When I play it, it doesn’t feel like there’s a challenging time signature or changes or pauses that are different. But also, when I play it, it’s just kind of coming out of me.
I wrote that song three or four days after Nex Benedict passed in Oklahoma. You watch the news, you turn on the TV, you turn on the radio, you scroll your social media or whatever, and it’s like, “transgender ban here” and “attack on queer people here” and “this queer person has taken their own life” and “this queer person has been dismembered and thrown in a lake.” I’m fairly regularly feeling some sort of distress. Why can’t people just realize we exist? Queer people exist. It’s not like I’m out here making new queer people. Queer people exist. We can’t be legislated away and we’re not some kind of perversion. I had a realization the other day: I work with teenagers and kids every single day and I have for the last 20 years. If some people in power have their way, I’d be labeled as a sex offender just because of the fact that I’m openly gay and work with kids.
There’s a lot of heaviness and weight to the song. And so as we started rehearsing it, it quickly became very clear that it made more sense for it to be something a little more sparse.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.