Red-winged blackbirds, Northern cardinals and Mourning doves are all birds you can commonly find in Wisconsin.
They’re also the titles of songs on Lifer, a new album by Madison-based band Quokka.
Aaron Grych, the lead singer, producer and songwriter for the indie rock band, says the new album combines his love for birding and music, while also telling stories through a bird's eye-view.
Lake Effect’s Xcaret Nuñez spoke with Grych for this month’s Chirp Chat to learn more about Quokka’s new album.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Creating a project solely around birds isn't something you've done before. What inspired you to create this album, and why did you title it Lifer?
So I first got the idea for it, I think it was in two fold: A couple of years ago, I released my last album Until the Tide Returns, and that was a pandemic album that was very much based, like every other pandemic album, around feelings of existentialism and dread, but I was thinking at the time that, I was only really writing about myself and the things that I was feeling and those emotions. So I wanted to make something a little bit more unique than just the usual run of an album of whatever happens to be going on in a person's life at that point in time.
I thought about what I could do to make it stand out a little bit more, to make it a little bit more unique, and align it with things that I love as well. And I was just making an instrumental one day, and I needed something before a progression change, just some sort of sound. And I thought, “What if a loon call went in there? What would that sound like?” And I put one in and it sounded better than I thought it would. And that made me think, can I connect these things that I love, birding and music, and make it into one product that is really a reflection of myself? It's both a deeper dive into that side of things, into the personal side of writing, but also something that's trying to capture the interests, feelings and experiences of other people as well. The name Lifer itself comes from the fact that I am a Wisconsin lifer — I’ve been here all my life and probably will be — and it's the name of the title that you get on the Merlin app when you see a new bird.
I want to ask you a little bit more about that, the personal side of things — What's your relationship to birds? Have you always admired them?
I was, like many other people, a pandemic birder. I got into it first because, like everybody else, you have a friend that says, “Hey, do you want to go outside and look at these?” And that friend is actually the person who's done all my album art, a very talented watercolorist named Spencer Bierman. His page, Birding For Your Convenience, first got me a little bit more interested, but I started going out on more walks during that time… and trying to notice the world around me a little bit more — subvert my attention and try to pay more attention. That's really when [birding] started to get to me.
I want to point out that each track in the album is named after a bird that you commonly find in Wisconsin. Why did you decide to write about these specific birds?
I chose the birds for the songs in the album because I wanted the bird calls that are looped into every instrumental to be ones that were at least somewhat recognizable, like the [American] robin and the [Common] loon, the [Northern] cardinal, to try and have a little bit more relatability to it. As well, there were other things I wanted to fit in there, like the noble Flamingo, the unofficial city bird of Madison — it’s the name of the soccer team there, and also the flamingos that washed up on Lake Michigan a few years back — but a flamingo call was not something that I would call recognizable, so I tried to keep it to a frame of knowledge that would be accessible.
Something else that I love about this album is that each song is written through the perspective of the bird the track is named after. What was the songwriting process like for you?
Pretty much for all of them, it went in a similar direction. I would start off with an instrumental that I found to be interesting. From there, I would just try to either fit in lyrics or see where the energy took me, see what kind of vibe I was getting from it, if it was something that was big and energetic and angry, or something that was a little bit more laid back, and just try to attach stories to it along the way.
A lot of the lyrics try to make bridges and parallels between the different experiences that we share with other living things in the world. I love a Red-winged blackbird, it's my favorite bird because, for me, it marks when warm spring starts to really kick in. But I know that it's not the most loved bird. It's kind of a jerk, I'll admit it. It's known for swooping at people and trying vigorously to protect its nest. I think of it as a person growing up in this world and trying to find somewhere that you can call your own, that you can carve out for yourself, is a difficult process as well. So I have a little bit more empathy now, when I'm walking down the street and I hear a bird start to swoop at my head, just knowing that they're looking for a lot of the same things that we are.
Quokka’s new album, Lifer, comes out on July 25. You can also see the band perform their new album on August 28 at the High Noon Saloon in Madison.
Chirp Chat’s Bird of the Month for July
Male Red-winged blackbirds are recognized for their bright red and yellow shoulder patches that stand out from the rest of their glossy-black feathers. Meanwhile, female Red-winged blackbirds are a subdued, streaky brown color overall.
“[Red-winged blackbirds] are most commonly found near water… and they're very territorial about [their] nests,” Grych says. “So when people are walking around during nesting season, if anyone — any shape or size, person, dog, milk carrier, etc. — gets nearby, they're going to let you know about it. They might swoop at you, they might hit you, they might just yell. But they're a wonderful, I think, a little bit misunderstood, bird.”
