Billboard Style

Artist

Billboard Style
Agent

Ben Haslett
Based

New York, USA
Label

Good English Records

Images

Pull of the Moon is the debut record by Billboard Style, a new iteration of a long-fruitful creative partnership. Ben Guterl (Forth Wanderers) and Dan Howard (Victoryland) met for the first time over a decade ago, at a house show in Maryland where their respective bands shared the bill, and serendipitously discovered they would both be attending Oberlin College in the fall. Over the years, with other bands and projects drifting in and out of the picture, the two made several albums of wacky bedroom pop together under the name Ben Special; Guterl wrote, sang and played guitar, while Howard drummed, produced and mixed.

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Billboard Style

“When you’re 22, you can decide, ‘I’m gonna figure out some way to pay somebody five to ten thousand dollars to make my record, or I can spend the next five to ten years figuring out how to do it.’ So we’ve kinda been doing that. It’s very DIY,” says Howard. “Now we’ve spent a lot of time working in the studio together, in our own place, figuring out how to make records. So I feel at this point we’re pretty proud of the records that we make.”

With their confidence growing and their collaboration morphing into a more solid partnership, the duo decided it was time to start afresh as Billboard Style. The songs on Pull of the Moon were written and produced across several years; some of them began as Ben Special songs that felt too good to just throw on Bandcamp, waiting for a more purposeful home. Previously in more of a back-seat role, Howard began to write more and even sang some lead vocals. “We share the load pretty equally now,” says Guterl. “We’ve developed that trust as collaborators, where we can let each other breathe in the studio. I’m less protective of the songs I bring Dan, and if he has an idea I just sort of sit back and let him fuck around with it.”

While he was writing, Guterl’s long-term relationship was hitting a rocky period. After ten years together, four of them long-distance, he started to spiral as he questioned what it all meant and where it was all going. The title Pull of the Moon refers to the Saturn return that Guterl had heard so much about going into his thirties. “It felt like there was some presence over me that I didn’t understand. It was very astrological and mysterious. I was just [constantly] sitting in my backyard, looking up at the moon.”

On opening track “Meloxicam”, born out of this period of angst, Guterl runs through a list of questions to a lover — “Do you dream at night? What’s your favorite snack?” — that grow steadily more longing and existential: “What’s that thing about you that I still can’t seem to define?” There’s a theme across Pull of the Moon of this curiosity, bordering on obsession, with what love is and how it keeps us under its spell. At different places on the record it’s a spreading infection, “a kind of sickness”; a fire ripping through fragile flesh kindling; and “a nasty cold, the kind you can never shake.” “There was this amazement of love’s power to keep me in this situation that’s making me unhappy, and whether that’s a burden or something beautiful,” Guterl says.

Guterl’s fascination with that simplest and most classic of themes mirrors his songwriting instincts; while Howard’s production injects some off-kilter textures, most of the songs themselves are immediate, melodic and melodramatic. “When we were doing Ben Special stuff, the songs got a bit too cerebral, like I was trying to figure out how to write the best song,” says Guterl. “And now it’s sort of stripped back. I just wanna write songs that make you cry. I was thinking about the feeling of being on the bus to middle school and having your headphones in and looking out the window. That was a big theme of this record, getting back to that.”

The romantic waltz of “I Am A Man,” for example, is driven by fizzy synths and crooning guitar tones. Guterl ponders on the experience of loving the same person since he was a teenager: “How could I have guessed you’d burn a nine-year hole in my chest?” before returning to the simple, sweet refrain that could be from a ‘50s pop song: “Golly, there goes that girl.” Elsewhere, there’s the uninhibited rock-out of the self-titled second track “Billboard Style,” which is anchored by an earworm riff on top of headbang-inviting bass and drums. And on the softer side, there’s “Jelly,” a vulnerable acoustic ballad about the aftermath of a brief breakup which Guterl and his partner went through. It has a warm, untouched quality, like a spontaneous demo with little extra production until a lush backing embraces the track towards the end. “I hate for a record to just sound all the same,” says Howard. “I like it when it’s really jumping around a lot, I think that’s way more fun. Some of these things you might not think would be on the same record at all, but I just don’t think you have to be wedded to genre or to palette.”

If Pull of the Moon sees Guterl and Howard formally introducing themselves as Billboard Style, it’s also a testament to the freedom and imagination that they’ve been cultivating together for the majority of their adult lives. Says Howard, “This album was made over so many different instances and times in our life. It’s an imprint of all the time that we have in our days, and how we structure them and make sense of them, and make meaning out of them. That’s something that we will continue to do forever.” Guterl adds: “I feel like you can hear our growth together as friends and as artistic collaborators. And it’s nice to have a stamp of that. You grow with your friends over time, relationships evolve, and there’s not really anything tangible to reflect it. That’s what’s so beautiful about making music, I think, it’s this emotional snapshot.”

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