“It’s another layer of something new and vulnerable for us”: Inside Greyhaven’s new album Keep It Quiet

As Louisville heavy crew Greyhaven unveil their third album Keep It Quiet, frontman Brent Mills talks us through every song on the record…

“This song kind sort of snaked its way onto the album. I wrote it in my bedroom one day, maybe four or so years ago, as an attempt to write a Radiohead song and it just lived on my laptop. When we were trying to gather more sounds and textures to flesh out the record, Johnny [Muensch, bass] had asked me about any songs I had on my computer or that I was working on. I was going through a few tracks and this one played and everyone agreed that we should do something with this. We brought it to Will [Putney, producer] along with the rest of the songs and he immediately placed it as the first song, which none of us remotely considered and we started thinking about it and it just made so much sense, especially after deconstructing the ending and having it fall into the next track. Other than the big blowout at the end, it stayed surprisingly unchanged from my original GarageBand version so that’s a pretty cool little thing for me personally.”

“This feels like the real moment the album begins and you’re in for the ride. I think you start to see the direction we’re going as well. It wasn’t a conscious thing, but I feel like we were experimenting with really big choruses, which feels funny to say because that’s usually an obvious thing but it’s not something we’ve focused on as much before, and this song sets you up for that. I think it just felt natural to have all these chaotic moments pay off that way, and it’s more fun for me to sing over something that’s a little more straightforward here and there. This song also really plays up the theme of having a conversation with myself, playing with two perspectives, two voices, two ideas coiling around one another. The ending of the song is the most obvious nod to this but it’s happening throughout the whole record.”

“This is purely a song about separation. Death or distance or even emotional distance from someone. That space. That feeling of longing to reconnect is where this song lives. There’s a million different scenarios I could pull from where that’s applicable and I feel like I’m in that space so often, it must have just needed to be expressed. I feel like we had a hard time figuring out how to start the song and eventually landed on me taking the lead on the intro, which is just feels like another layer of something new and vulnerable for us.”

“This is another one we took a minute to figure out how to begin the song, so we enlisted our good friend Evan Redmon to come up with intro beat and we couldn’t be more stoked on how it turned out. Again, just trying to experiment with new sounds and textures around the thing we already do, and I feel like it breathes a bit more life into the whole album. The song is pretty combative, in all honesty. It’s me being a bit frustrated with myself by holding back and not being completely open and honest. So it comes from a place that’s relinquishing control and maybe even being a bit bitter about it for the sake of art being genuine and truthful.”

“I feel like we had this song for a really long time. There was a period before the EP where I think we were really in this mode and we were writing a lot of this more melodic, picked out parts and I’m a bit bummed some of those songs didn’t get to the finish line because Nick [Spencer, guitar] was writing some really beautiful stuff. Of course the whole mood of the album would be different but who knows, maybe one day. But this one did make it and I’m so happy it did. Early on I had the idea for the chorus and I knew if we pulled it off right, it would sound huge and nostalgic and it just had this emotion to it even before I put words to it. I think you can tell when a song has that potential if it’s still moving the dial for you with purely the way it ‘sounds’. I don’t think I need to explain the meaning of this song, it’s right there.”

“I remember struggling with this. We had the record finished instrumentally and I was back home for the month of February to finish up lyrics so I could fly back up in March to record my parts. I was sitting at the table and Nick was at my house and I remember talking to him about how difficult some of the lyrics were for me, and he just gave me that assurance to let go and stay honest and write the hard shit. This song kind of kicked off the sense of urgency and honesty that carried through to everything else but it really was that moment where I threw my hands up and said, ‘Okay, here we go.’ It’s a weird song for us – I feel like it has all the elements we’re used to writing but there’s this ‘something odd’ about it that I think we all love so I knew I really wanted to do the song justice, but it fought me the whole way through.”

“I honestly can’t believe how this song turned out. I say that because this is another one I’ve had sitting on my computer for five-plus years. Sometimes we used to sit around and just play acoustic and mess around with ideas, and most of the time they never turn into anything significant but it’s fun to do. This one, I had written forever and Johnny always championed for it to be a Greyhaven song, and we tried a few times but it never felt right. It really wasn’t until we got to the studio and Nick came up with the chorus riff that it began to come together. I remember him hitting these chords and feeling like, ‘Yes, this is going to be awesome,’ and then Will says, ‘Now throw an off note in there and make it like Alice In Chains.’ I knew that was going to make finding the chorus so much harder for me but he was right – the moment I heard it, I knew that’s what we had to do. The song has changed so much from the demo version I would play for myself to version on the album, it’s almost unrecognisable and I think that’s pretty awesome how music can evolve when you give it the right amount of time and collaborative energy.”

“I think this was the last song I finished lyrics for. It honestly feels kind of like a blur. I couldn’t begin to tell you where I was pulling from, I think it’s purely an emotional release. I do remember demoing this with Johnny and Nick back in February and the chorus came to light in one of those sessions. I look back at that moment feeling like some of the holes in the record were really getting sorted out because the first time that melody happened we all looked at each other and were like, ‘Yeah, this is it.’ I usually write so closed off and isolated that they don’t even know what I’m about to do or say in the studio until they’re hearing playback, and this record had so much more collaboration on ideas and sharing lyrics and getting feedback in real time. Having never done that and having such a positive experience from it, I feel like it gave us all just that much more of a connection to this record.”

“This is another one I felt like really came together during the demo sessions in February. Johnny and I tried about a billion different things before this started to take shape, and ultimately it got to the finish line the night before I tracked it in the studio. But the bones of it definitely happened with us just shooting out ideas. I know the ending was a moment where I felt compelled to do this off-the-wall part and I was pretty insecure about it. Showing it to Johnny the first time, he kind of said exactly what I was feeling: that it was definitely different but something we should lean into because it was cool. I feel like that’s been a theme on the whole thing, is that we wanted to take a lot of risks and just do something that we can stand behind and feel like we pushed ourselves to get there.”

“This is another super-old one for us. It feels like I’ve been writing this song for three years and it’s taken on so many shapes, but I’m really proud of how it finally turned out. I think so many times during this process I wanted to retreat and run away from it, and I kept having to force myself to see it through and trust I would make it on the other side of it in a better light than the one I was standing in. I think there’s a lot of that message in this song.”

“I think this may be collectively our favourite song we’ve written as band. From the very beginning it just had a vibe to it that it was going to be so much fun once it was finished, and I think we were correct – especially now playing it live and seeing the crowd reaction to it. It’s a lot of fun, even if that chorus kicks my ass. I also love this song because it’s essentially just a really dark love song and the lyrics came to me really fast. I wrote the whole thing in an hour and it felt like I was just channeling something. It was pretty obvious it was going to be the last song on the album so it was paramount we made it feel that way. We had a lot of conversations about how to send it off and I think the way it just feels like the song is being set on fire at the end was everything it needed to be.”

Keep It Quiet is out now via Solid State

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