Audio paintings

Baltimore’s Ponytail has garnered significant acclaim for their explosive live shows and arty, energetic, punk-inspired rock.

Fresh from recording their second album, Ice Cream Spiritual, Ponytail embarked on their biggest U.S. headlining tour to date. The Vanguard chatted with drummer Jeremy Hyman and guitarist Dustin Wong by telephone earlier this week to chat about their music, growing recognition and the art of “parapainting.”

Daily Vanguard: How did Ponytail get their start?
Jeremy Hyman: We were all in a parapainting class at [the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore]. Our teacher randomly assigned bands the first day of class, and we got put together. We had to perform at the end of the course.

DV: What’s parapainting?
JH: It’s anything that’s parallel to painting, or similar to it, which can be anything. Like, cooking, eating, walking, music. Anything can be painting. All those things can be compared to a painting, or the process of painting. That was kind of what the class was about—the blurring of art and life, and music being kind of an easy step toward that.

DV: Had any of you played in bands before taking the course?
Dustin Wong: Yeah, Jeremy, our drummer, was in a band called Audiorapist, and in this other band called Built In Screen, and Ken’s been in a few bands. I’ve been in two bands, too. I was in Ecstatic Sunshine and in a couple other guitar duos, and in this kind of concept band in Japan, where we used cell phones as like, backing tracks and stuff. We’d download classic rock songs and sing the bass lines instead of the actual melody lines.

DV: Do you think about your music from a painting standpoint?
DW: You can think of it that way—each of us as a different color, maybe, and what would emerge from that.

DV: Baltimore’s music scene has been getting a lot of attention lately. Has it changed at all since it started getting prominent?
JH: Well, some of the warehouses we used to play in have been getting noise complaints. People have been a lot more active with noise complaints. We think developers had sort of an eye on some of the buildings we used. So, maybe some gentrification, but everyone is hoping that with the recession some of the development is going to fall through, and we’ll be able to do what we want with the spaces again.

DV: You guys have been getting a lot of attention, too.
JH: Haha, we don’t really notice. It’s awesome that so many people want to come to our shows. And we’ve gotten to tour a lot, which is awesome. I’m really honored that people want to hear what I have to say. But nothing’s changed for us, either. Baltimore is so cheap that we all have pretty minimal day jobs.

DV: Do you have any projects planned after your tour?
JH: We’ll be working on a new album when we get back, we’ll probably spend most of June and July just writing.

DV: What does your writing process look like?
JH: Our writing process is pretty typical. We get together—one of us will have an idea, and it just goes from there. We build on it, jam out, improvise. What we do a lot of times is we record what we’ve worked on that day, and then send it out on e-mail so that everybody can review it, and each one of us can kind of refine our own part. And when a solid part kind of gets written, we kind of work around that. What comes before? What comes after? Is this the beginning? Is it the end? We kind of build a song that way.

DV: Any projects coming up other than working with Ponytail?
JH: Dustin just released a solo album. Although he’s been working on it for like, four and a half or five years. We’ve kind of gotten to watch it grow, over the course of the time Ponytail has been together, which has been really cool. Me and a friend are planning on releasing a 7 inch of remixed music, like, DJ stuff. Nothing too fancy—I’m really excited about it though! But it’s not going to be anything crazy, just a different version—not like bass to the floor or anything. We’ll see how danceable it really is.

DV: Do you try to write danceable songs with Ponytail?
JH: In some ways we do and some ways we don’t … we never really set out to make dance music, but we want to feel a certain way when we make music—something between dancing and really raw expressions with our body. The movements Molly makes on stage, and the rest of us make with instruments—it’s all kind of based on what a body does naturally, and the sounds and movements we make when we interact with our instruments. It’s not like a ballet, or something. It’s closer to like, modern dance, or painting. 

We just write our music to suit our needs, and we want to be joyful, so we try to make music that makes us feel that way. And we all experience that differently. It relates to each of our instruments, and to each of us personally, and it’s really changing all the time.