The Bitter Chills (Mint 400 Records) pay tribute to a heavily traveled North Jersey road on their new album, Highway 21. The Jersey band, whose sound mixes rootsy Americana textures and melodic indie pop, recorded this nine-song collection, their third, during an introspective period dominated by the pandemic. We had a chance to catch up with lead singer Matt Cheplic to discuss the new album which is available everywhere today!
Why the name “The Bitter Chills”? Wasn't it something different previously?
I formed the band with Pietro Ciliberto (mandolin) as Crazy Morgan. We taught together at the time, and we knew a student whose name rhymed with that. We were a small, acoustic act, but then the band evolved and took on new members. We were considering a new name, and the phrase “Bitter Chills” came up in a weather forecast. It struck me as a perfect contradiction, this idea of relaxing or chilling through music while also harboring bitterness or sadness that surfaced in the lyrics.
With the release of "Feel-Good Songs for Feel-Bad People" it was more funny, and this album seems a shade darker but has still got wit. Can you explain why?
The simplest answer is probably that the pandemic has stirred up a lot of gloomy feelings and created so much frustration and disharmony. But I think there was also a natural evolution happening in our music, regardless. Our first record was pretty overtly silly across most of the songs, in a way that owed a lot to They Might Be Giants and the early Barenaked Ladies albums. On Feel–Good Songs, a darker quality started balancing that humor, and I think Highway 21 just builds on that progression. Still, as you allude to, there’s a lot of fun with language, and the record is far from humorless.
What was the recording process like and what the band has been up to through Covid? Were any of the songs a challenge to record or write?
Writing is always difficult. Even the songs that come together very quickly tend to have that last 10% that I wrestle with in my head for weeks or months. Covid definitely slowed down all band activity and made recording pretty challenging. We weren’t playing shows, we were trying to keep safe, keep our loved ones safe, so even getting everyone in the same room at the same time was practically impossible.
This is why the album is called Highway 21. Obviously, there’s the Bob Dylan allusion there, but the pandemic had people living these ultra-localized lives with less travel, less exploring of new places. Route 21 is this main artery I live near and drive on constantly, and it felt like the right symbol for a collection of songs that grew out of bouncing around this little path of New Jersey over and over.
This album also follows up the Splendid Engine (Singer Matt Cheplic’s solo effort) project, which was notably more indie pop, did you inject any of that into this record?
The Splendid Engine record was a lot of fun to make, and I am working on a follow-up. It was a departure, because it involved a lot of experimenting with sounds, loops, collage-type ideas that would feel out of place with The Bitter Chills, which is more about a classic sound. But Neil [Sabatino] and I, while recording the Splendid Engine material, did happen upon some subtle things – certain guitar, bass, or keyboard tones, for instance – that we returned to. It’s nothing too attention-grabbing, but you can hear some overlap there, sonically.
Why the Disney classic "It's A Small World" in a minor key?
I constantly play this little game with myself, whereby I sing a major-key song in a minor key. Sometimes I’ll do it out loud to annoy loved ones, like changing “Happy Birthday To You.” One day, I started doing it with “It’s a Small World,” and it sounded great to me – as if the song were SUPPOSED to be minor and dark-sounding but got changed at the last minute to sound more palatable for people.
And in a weird way, the song ties up the whole album very nicely. As I was saying, it’s felt like a very small, local world the past few years. But more globally, it really is a small world in sobering ways: irresponsible decisions in one country can destroy the quality of life elsewhere on the planet. A handful of people infected with a virus can fly to another continent and not even realize they’re spreading that virus. People influence each other’s lives, physically, technologically, emotionally, in rapid ways that would have been unthinkable throughout most of human history.
In songs like "Piling Groceries" we get a glimpse of your younger self just learning guitar, are any other songs autobiographical, and how true to life is that song?
That song is almost entirely true. My first guitar was a Strat copy bought from an older guy at the Pathmark where I worked on weekends. And I really did follow this stupid impulse to strip the red paint off its body. It really did wind up in my trunk for a while years later, and one day I found myself putting bags of groceries on it and having this strange, uncomfortable sense that I was literally smothering my teenage optimism with the unglamorous baggage of adulthood.
That said, I rarely aim to write transparently autobiographical songs. It’s more interesting to me to start with some element of experience and then let a song evolve more creatively, to allow people a chance to interpret the language and images as they want. After all, everyone uses social media to display every thought and event they experience, so writing songs in that vein feels uninteresting and unnecessary to me.
What is your favorite track on the album?
That’s a tough question. But I’d have to settle on “Your Mother’s Heart.” It has a really fun, raucous energy to it, and more importantly, it features the most people playing on it, including Nicole Scorsone, a great fiddle player you can hear on a few tracks. So, that song sounds like a party to me – a bunch of people playing and singing, which is an experience we’ve had precious little of.
What's up next for the band?
Hopefully, playing music in front of people. It seems like things are slowly opening back up again, but at the same time, there are venues that closed permanently over the past few years, and it’s not like our society was supporting a ton of great live music venues, anyway. Aside from that, I have some video ideas I’d like to pursue, as well as some less conventional content for the web. Mostly I’m just looking forward to people hearing this record.