Boyish are Back in Town
⤏ IN CONVERSATION WITH VIVIEN ADAMIAN
⤏ PHOTOGRAPHY BY HADLEY ROSENBAUM
⤏ MAKE-UP BY ALI SCHARF
⤏ STYLING BY FAYE ORLOVE
You know that one friend that makes you feel understood? The one you don’t have to explain anything to? The one that makes everything seem clearer, simpler, less scary? If you’re Boyish, Mica comes to mind. Their new EP — My Friend Mica — is gently intense, tender, and ultimately really hopeful.
I talked to Boyish over Zoom in the midst of their tour, which had just ricocheted them off the west coast and back east. India Shore and Claire Altendahl have been bouncing around for a few years now, from parents’ houses to moving into a New York apartment with all of their closest friends, and finally settling for the moment in Los Angeles.
VIVIEN ADAMIAN: How has the tour been treating you?
INDIA SHORE: It’s been awesome!
CLAIRE ALTENDAHL: It’s been really fun going to San Francisco. We were just in Seattle in July. We really love it and I’m excited to see Vancouver, too, because we’ve heard so much about it being a really awesome city.
VA: That’s super exciting. I want to ask about the new album, My Friend Mica. I was really drawn to the title because I was like, does everyone have a friend named Mica and they’re just a universal presence?
IS: Honestly, yes I think so! [Laughs]
VA: That song stood out to me on the album. Can you tell me more about the writing process or what the album is about?
IS: Yeah, we also have a friend called Mica [laughs] just like everyone else. They’re a person who has made such a massive impact on both of our lives. Especially for Claire. They’re just a monumental, amazing person. They changed our lives a lot over the past year or so. I’m from New York and I forced Claire to move to New York with me a couple years ago. We met Mica there and they just had a massive impact on us.
CA: When we first started writing the EP, we didn’t really know what we were writing. We were just writing about day to day stuff, but eventually it became clearer we were writing about our living situation in New York. India and our manager [are] born and raised New Yorkers. They were like “You got to be out here for the band. We could do so much stuff if you finally leave Minnesota!” So I said,” fine fine.”
Our manager Nicole had already been living in an apartment in Bushwick with three other roommates. The apartment right below them opened up with four bedrooms. We moved in with two other friends. It just didn’t doesn’t seem like an opportunity that was going to come by that often, so we started as an eight person commune.
IS: We had a full Friends situation. [Laughs]
CA: We were making family dinners every night, just back and forth. The poor people that lived on the bottom floor were probably like, “What the actual hell is going on here.” It was such a special era in our lives. I don’t think I'll ever live in a situation like that again — especially not in New York City — where I can be in an apartment building occupied by mostly my friends.
And we met Mica who was one of the first friends we had that used they/them pronouns. [Mica] really guided me on my journey of accepting my trans-ness and wanting to use nonbinary pronouns. That was something I had always been really fearful of using because I was sensitive to the response of other people when they misgendered me. Mica was like, “Why is that a problem?” and I’m like “Yeah [laughs]. You’re so right for that.” Mica showed me — this sounds really dramatic — but who I wanted to be, especially in terms of my gender. I owe them so much for that, and when it came to naming this EP, it felt right to name it for our friend.
VA: That sounds magical. India, did you have a similar type of relationship with Mica where they helped you feel validated?
IS: Mica is the most special person I know. [They] really just had a huge impact on how I see the world and carry myself through the world. [Mica] came into my life and rocked it.
VA: Distance can be one of the hardest things when you’re collaborating. How did you manage to work together before you lived in the same space?
IS: It was really tricky because we met at the same college, so we were used to being close. Then during COVID, Claire was in Minnesota and I was in New York at my mom’s house. It was a lot of sending things back and forth and I eventually — when it was safer in June or July — flew from New York to Minnesota and stayed there for the summer. We wrote a lot in person because it was really hard to do it not in person. I stayed at Claire’s parents house for three months [laughs].
“Mica showed me — this sounds really dramatic — but who I wanted to be, especially in terms of my gender. I owe them so much for that, and when it came to naming this EP, it felt right to name it for our friend.”
— Claire Altendahl
VA: That’s awesome. Do you also enjoy being in the audience? Have you been to any performances recently that you feel that same catharsis?
CA: I actually don’t really like going to concerts [laughs]. This is like a horrible thing , but I don’t like big crowds. [I find them] super overwhelming. Like music festivals, I’d rather be anywhere [else]. But anytime I do see someone live, I become obsessed with them. I went to see Mitski in June and ever since then every morning I’m doing [Mitski’s] moves all the time.
IS: I saw Phoebe Bridgers at Forest Hills and that was the best night of my life. I’ve never felt anything more cathartic. I was literally crying the whole entire time. Someone was like, “Are you good?” I was like, “Just ignore me, look past me.” I’m going to see The 1975 in November. I can’t wait. I saw Harry Styles and cried during that too. I’ve seen some good shows. I saw Charli XCX.
VA: Do you feel like you absorb things from other performers?
IS: That’s how we’ve been trying to learn stage presence. We used to watch YouTube videos of people’s live performances and ask each other what was working. It’s such a hard thing to figure out how to be engaging. How do I still feel like myself? Or should I not feel like myself? Or should I have an alter ego character? We are always tying to find what the balance is, how to be a good performer and enjoy what we’re doing. I really struggled with that for a long time. I was terrified and I would just stand behind my mic stand and stay there. I did a weird marching move for three years. I feel like it was really helpful for me to study what other people were doing. I’m still figuring it out. The more I do it, the more comfortable I get. [I’m] getting more —I’m walking around the stage now. I can do some more things.
CA: Stage banter is still another thing. Every show I go to I’m like, “What are they going to say?” Because that’s by far the hardest part of performing for me. It’s honestly what crosses through my head half way through every song is, are we going to have to speak after this? [laughs] You’re racking your brain for anything of importance to say and the song ends and you’re like, “hello” for the fourth time. It honestly — and India says this all the time — feels like a comedy routine.
VA: Are there any producers or artists you would want to collaborate with in the future?
CA: The 1975 is a big one for me! We love their production and they’re just geniuses at what they do. They’re so good.
IS: I’d love to figure out how they produce vocals. That’s life's biggest mystery to me is how are they making that sound like that? Phoebe Bridgers would be amazing. MUNA.
CA: If MUNA offered to help us produce a song or even collaborate on a song, I’d lose my goddamn mind.
IS: There’s a lot of people that I would be like absolutely, yes!
“I can feel when a song is ready to come out. I can physically feel it. When something’s ready, I know it. “
— Claire Altendahl
VA: To get more into the nitty gritty of your process, do you feel things have changed in your production with your latest album?
IS: Our production definitely changed on this EP. I think we got better at producing. I hope. At least I feel like we tried to take away some of the tricks we learned on We’re All Gonna Die. [We] try to challenge ourselves to expand upon things we’ve learned, and not reuse the same techniques over and over again.
CA: Our crutches.
IS: Yeah! It was a lot of starting with guitar and voice, [and] making sure a song can stand on its own before going into Logic or Ableton. Producing it first works really well for us. We can ask, “Is this a good song at its core?” before we make it sound cool.
CA: We both write really well with a reference in mind or a feeling in mind. I want to sit with my guitar, but I like to have it amplified. I like to sing through a mic so I can get the feel of performing and imagine what a song feels like all together. I think India works really well from a “I need a drum groove, I want a synth going and then we’ll write on top of that” method. Together it works really well! It helps the most to want to write a song that sounds like an existing song. We’ll listen to it, and figure out what’s going on. Having that sense of direction is huge. We work really well from there.
VA: So there’s a combination of pre-planning and research, but also spontaneity.
CA: It’s weird. I feel like you can feel when a song is ready to come out. It’s really odd [laughs] but I can physically feel it. It kind of feels like heartburn, literally stuck in your upper stomach. It sounds like I’m describing a massive burp, but I feel like that in a weird way. When something’s ready, I know it. I just need to get it out of here.
VA: And it’s a beautiful burp! You touch on a lot of tenderness in My Friend Mica, but also difficult breakups, heartbreak, and nostalgia. How did you cope?
CA: Nostalgia is a great word for it. I was really really sad about leaving Minnesota. Those feelings of wanting to be somewhere else when you’re in a new place made me write from a place of my youth. I channeled a lot of what I felt when I was growing up, trying to get a bunch of those feelings back and really take a look at my whole life.
IS: Definitely. Not to make it pandemic-y, but everyone sort of reverted a little bit to their childhood. I was living in my childhood bedroom. It was unpacking a lot of that, just writing about things in real time as they were happening. [That] was the biggest focus of this EP — the last year and a half of our lives — but I feel like we didn’t really see that until the very end. We finished “Legs” — which is a song about our living situation in New York — knowing we were going to be moving by the time we finished the EP. It was like looking back at this situation we had while knowing that it was coming to an end.
VA: That is a huge transition. How do you feel about performing right now? What’s the transition from just recording a studio album and doing live performances?
IS: It’s my favorite part of the process. It feels like the work part is over and performing is my vacation. All the hard work is done and now I get to go enjoy what I’ve made and see if it’s affecting people. It’s so fun to perform live. Especially after two years of not performing at all, to be able to come out of the pandemic and be like, “I tour now, this is my job.” I’m so grateful to get to do it. I’m having so much fun!
CA: It’s been amazing! Like I said before, I write from a place imagining what it feels like to perform, to play live. I think I’ve always been really obsessed with playing on stage and hearing music in that environment. It’s just been such a blast, and I’ve noticed recently I’ve been very in each song lyrically when we perform. I keep seeing where we wrote. There’s a lot of songs we play on stage where suddenly I feel like I’m back in Minnesota. When we play “Legs” I can see New York. That’s been really new for me, actually. I used to feel so aware of the audience. Now, suddenly, it’s like this shift has happened. It’s really cathartic. It feels very therapeutic to just play our music and let it release into the world and let it diffuse.