Written by Luke Dumpert
Aramis Johnson, frontman of the Tacoma alternative-rock group Enumclaw, talks about a track-by-track analysis of the group’s new album, Home in Another Life. While the album may be new, he’s learning there is more to life — tours, personal struggles, and mourning the death of his youth.
The quartet’s latest effort is a tender album that makes the listener feel as though they’re the only one experiencing what the band is laying down; a cohesive record that takes inspiration from each track’s ability to create something entirely different, sonically that blends each style and difference from track to track into one whole thing. Aramis and I spoke via zoom, Aramis in Los Angeles and me in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Luke Dumpert: So, we’ll start with the first song, I’m Scared I’ll End Up All Alone. The narrator of the song kind of begs the question, “What do you do if you can’t make me new?” How did you approach the lyrics? Did they stem from any internal reflection or were they meant to kind of provoke thought within the listener?
Aramis Johnson: I think it was more of a self-reflection kind of moment. That’s actually the last song that got written for the album and I wrote it right when I got back from tour. It’s crazy when you go and you’re like, damn, I just spent a month in this foreign land. And now I’m back in my living room. And yeah, it was just like looking back on a bunch of stuff – I was dating a girl at the time, and she came and met me at the end of the European leg, because she was European, and we visited a bunch of her family out there. And then we broke up right after the trip. So, it was just kind of like just looking back on that whole period of time.
LD: The track, Not Just Yet, is about your uncle who was recently diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Was the realization of your uncle Mike getting old, as you put it, a shock?
AJ: My friend came over last night for dinner, and we were watching YouTube, and we were watching this Pearl Jam CBS Sunday morning special. At one point in the interview, they mentioned that Eddie Vedder is 60 years old. And we were both like, “What the fuck, Pearl Jam is in their 60s.” In my head, Pearl Jam is my age and it’s like I never thought my uncle Mike was my age, obviously, but what the privilege of youth is that so many people become frozen in time, and I think as you get older, you start to realize that, oh, my mom’s not 35 anymore. She’s actually 55 you know? At least for me, I’ve never really looked at the adults in my life like that. As I’ve gotten older, there’s just been more and more stuff that’s made it harder to preserve that thought, if that makes sense. Where it’s like, “Oh, no, these people are getting old.”
LD: It’s a hard realization to come to terms with. Was the writing process for Not Just Yet cathartic or was it more difficult?
AJ: Honestly, it’s really funny because it’s the fastest song I wrote. We literally wrote that as the guys were packing up after band practice, and I had the guitar part. I just wrote it right there in like five minutes. It wasn’t even something I thought about. It just fell out of the sky. That song was the way you hear it on the record, like in five minutes. I didn’t really think about what I was saying until way after the fact.
LD: Let’s move on to Sink. I know you were suffering from writer’s block before you wrote it, and I just want how this song helped break it.
AJ: I was having really bad writer’s block for some reason. I don’t know why, but I hadn’t written a song in like five months, which is unheard of and a really fucking long time. I came across open G tuning and I’d never played with that before. At the time, I was living in this house where the kitchen was being remodeled. It was one of those things where the guy who owned the house was doing it all himself. What was a two-week job, he made it like eight months. So, this kitchen was constantly under construction and for some reason, I was playing my guitar in this kitchen after we just put the sink in, and I just wrote that song standing in front of the brand-new sink that we had put in.
It was a turning point for me because so much of the song relates to times in my life when I’ve just gotten stuck on something, like fixated on this thing that it becomes this immovable object. I think, when I wrote that song, I was finally like, all right, enough is enough I want to let all this shit go. When I wrote it, I became way less constipated, like songs started flowing out of me and life just started flowing in a really cool way. Maybe it’s because I got a new sink in the kitchen, but I don’t know.
LD: It’s funny you bring up the open G tuning because when I saw you guys play in Fayetteville, I noticed your rhythm guitar parts have a lot of open chords.
AJ: Yeah, it’s open G capo five and it’s just all bar chords because I don’t really know how to play guitar. I just like freestyle and whatever I can do to come up with something interesting.
LD: Spots, tell me about how this song was written.
AJ: That one’s not an open G, but it’s in a weird tuning. I just call it like the Aramis tuning that I wrote most of Save The Baby in. But I got invited to this songwriter retreat with a bunch of artists from Seattle. This was probably two summers ago, three summers ago. And it was on Orcas Island [in Washington state]. On Orcas Island, there’s this resort called Del Bay. And it’s right on this beach on this island. And there’s all these cabins and there’s a spa. We got to go out there for like a week and they put us up in a cabin, our own individual cabins, gave us meal vouchers, and kind of just let us hang out for a week. They let us turn this yoga studio into our HQ and we were all just hanging out in this yoga studio, dicking around. The homie, Claudine, had this acoustic guitar that I just started playing.
Honestly, I was trying to rip off this Alex G song that wasn’t out yet; this was right before the newest Alex G album came out. I was watching live Alex G videos and they played that song Miracles and I remember being like, “fuck, this song is so good.” So, I just tried to rip it off. It was like another thing where the whole song just kind of happened in like 20 minutes in the yoga studio. I then came home from that trip and I showed the band. We were playing it live for like a year, we don’t really play it anymore. But it’s a song where I wrote it on guitar but I don’t play guitar on it. Nathan [Cornell] and Eli [Edwards] kind of took what I did and split it into two. That song is cool to me because it was the first song that I wrote that I didn’t play guitar on, even though I wrote the song on guitar, which I didn’t really know you could do until I did that song.
LD: You told Interview Magazine that you had still written I Still Feel Bad About Masturbation while recording your debut, Save the Baby. How long did the other tracks take to come into shape?
AJ: Dude, it took so long. It was really hard to write all these songs. So, I would say if I wrote I Still Feel Bad about Masturbation, that’s December of 2021. I didn’t write I’m Scared I’ll End Up All Alone until like June of 2023. So yeah, like over two years.
LD: It was really a work in progress, this new release.
AJ: Well, yeah. So much happened. Up until recently, I couldn’t write songs on tour. If you’re on tour for like half of the year, that’s six months of no songs and then you have six months of very condensed time, when you’re home, to write songs. Right now, I’m not really writing a bunch of stuff because I’m trying to live more so I have stuff to write about, you know what I mean? It’s like that corny cliche where you have your whole life to write your debut album and you have a year to write your follow-up. It was like that where it’s like, fuck, it was every time something crazy in my life would happen, it would be like, “here’s a song” and that would turn to “all right, I need something else to happen to have a new song,” where beforehand, I could just think about everything that had ever happened to me.
LD: I understand that feeling, I don’t know how the Beatles ever put out like three albums a year.
AJ: Dude, I don’t know. Maybe if I was making as much money as the Beatles, I could do it but when you have to, go to work and stuff it makes it way harder.
LD: Let’s talk about Haven’t Seen The Family In A While, I’m Sorry. How did you reach the consensus of when the song was done?
AJ: Honestly, that’s a great question because when I first wrote it, there was no breakdown; there was no slow part. It was just verse, chorus, verse, chorus. I took it to band practice, and we felt like the song was good but it immediately became apparent that it needed something extra. Sometimes you just know the song is not going to be able to get the job done without something extra. I think at that band practice when I brought the song in, I just added that part in practice and then after that it was done.
LD: All of the singles that you released like Grocery Store felt very varied from one another. Was that part of the intention when putting together the track listing?
AJ: We knew for sure that Change was going to be a single-like right away. Other than that, we didn’t know what the singles were going to be. We thought that maybe Grocery Store would be a single but still weren’t sure. A huge reason Not Just Yet became a single is because when I started to share the album with my friends before it came out, that was everybody’s favorite, so it was like one for us, one for them. Grocery Store wasn’t as warmly received but it was also one of those songs where people were really, really excited about it for a really long time and so it got an extra little push.
LD: I’ve noticed that all of the singles you released are very anthemic.
AJ: Yeah. The goal with the single is to be like, “Wow, I just heard like Change, Not Just Yet or Grocery Store for the first time, and I really fuck with this.” These are bigger songs that you can kind of play in the car. But then, that person might hear Sink and be more sold. If you hear Sink out of context, it might not do as much for you as it does in the context of the record. All those songs, I think, can stand on their own with or without the album collectively.
LD: Yeah, exactly. They build off one another.
For the song Change, what came first, the lyrics or the music?
AJ: The music. I was in LA at the time; this was before I moved here. I had set up a bunch of sessions, which are like a big LA thing where you just go to somebody’s studio that you’ve never met before, and you try to make a song where whatever happens with the song happens. I had gone and I’d met up with these guys and we just didn’t really vibe. No shade against them but they didn’t get my sense of humor, I don’t know, we were just not the same kind of guys. While I was in there, I had written the guitar part for Change. I was staying at my friend Greg’s house [at the time] and I went over to his house afterward and I was like, ‘bro, there’s a song here I need to finish this song today.’ But I didn’t want to write it at the session because I didn’t want to write it with them and for like an hour, we were just kind of throwing everything we can at the wall with nothing really working.
I decided to slow it down during the verses and that’s when I came up with the verses. had done something that was similar to the, “would you want me to,” part and [Greg] kind of just took that and ran with it and came up with the “change!” part. Two days later, I had a different session with this other producer, and I was like, “Oh, I wrote this song the other day with my friend [The producer],” and I demo-ed it out and added the little breakdown part together and then boom Change. It was like the first time I’d ever written a song with anybody else and that was a crazy experience in its own right.
LD: I know you’ve worked with Chaz Bear on the These Are Some B-Sides release, did that influence Home in Another Life at all?
AJ: I mean, not really because the collaboration with Chaz was so casual, we just kind of hung out for a week and recorded some songs. I wouldn’t even say those songs are finished, if anything they feel more like demos that were recorded by somebody famous.
LD: I read somewhere that your label at the time was demanding you put something out, right?
AJ: Well, they paid for us to go down there, like paid for our travel expenses. When we recorded these songs, even though we weren’t super happy with them, they really wanted to put them out because it’s like if I made a song with Beyonce, it could be like the worst song in the world. But there’s no way people on your team aren’t going to be like, “yo, you have to put this out,” even if it’s dog shit, just because you made a song with Beyonce.
LD: It’s about what value you bring.
AJ: Yeah.
LD: For the song Fall Came Too Soon and Now I Want to Throw Up, musically, how did you approach building the mood of the song to complement the kind of intense feelings conveyed through the lyrics?
AJ: I think that song came out the gate really moody. The guitar part for it is really moody and that song took a bit longer as a band. It was one of those things where if we tried to take it out of that tonal space, it just wouldn’t have worked. We tried to really change that song and make it a bit more pop-y and accessible. At one point, I wanted to change the hook. I just felt it wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be, but anytime we took it out of the zone it’s in right now, it just didn’t work and so we just kept it in that space.
LD: The song title alone seems to almost invite a reaction. Was it important to you that the title stands out in a certain way?
AJ: It was a double entendre where it’s like a play on words about somebody I was seeing at the time and it was the end of the summer. Like when there is this mourning or grief, I feel in the air or melancholy when summer is over and sometimes that feeling is very anxiety-inducing. I think about that a lot because to me, the end of summer feels like the beginning of the year because school is starting, it’s just time to get back to regular life and so I wanted to do something that played on that idea a little bit, I guess.
LD: It’s like that American Football song, The Summer Ends. That’s the song I listen to when I’m getting in that mood of like, “Alright, real life is kind of starting to kick back in again.”
Can you share the story that initially kind of inspired the creation of This Light of Mine?
AJ: To me, that’s the most personal song I’ve ever written. I wrote it after this girl that I had barely been seeing had told me that she was pregnant. We had an abortion and it was one of the most humbling experiences in my life because I think just being a young person and having the ego that comes with that, there’s like so much of this, “oh, that’ll never happen to me,”’ vibe about everything. But then you get older and you realize that anything you think can’t happen to you can and will happen to you.
For a long time, it felt like something I wanted not to talk about. But then as a cautionary tale, it made me really want to talk about it because before it happened to me, I thought it could never happen to me in a million years. That song was just me in the thick of that situation. It’s a similar song to Spots where I wrote the guitar part that Nathan plays, but I don’t play guitar on that song.
LD: How do you feel that your relationship with songs on the album like I Want Some Things For Myself has changed since putting it out?
AJ: Before we put out the album, there were songs I was a bit concerned about putting out into the world just because they felt so much more personal to me than everything we had done before. But I think since the album’s out, I feel like a different sense of pride and freedom associated with all the songs. I feel like I Want Some Things For Myself is one of my favorite songs on the record and it’s super lo-fi and not produced in the same way that all the other songs are. When people say they like that song, it really means a lot to me, you know? The way that people have told me they’ve resonated with certain songs on the album has completely changed the way I feel about all the songs personally. Music is so self-indulgent so it’s nice when other people can partake in it, and it becomes less about you and more about them.
LD: With each of the releases you’ve put out, you always have these little anecdotes. On the first record at the end of Paranoid, you say, “The music, the words, the guitar, the melody, it all means so much to me.” What turns you on about music?
AJ: The way in which it can take you to a place. I went to a show last week and I saw this band called After and I thought it was really cool like trip-hop. But there was a point in the song where I got goosebumps because it was real. Like there was something about it that was genuine, and it just takes you to a place, whether it’s the way it feels when you’re six deep in the five-seat Honda Civic going to the lake with all your buddies, the windows are down, and the sun is shining, and you know your favorite songs playing. It’s like music and smell is the same because a smell and a song can take you back to the place where you heard it for the first time, or you smelled that smell for the first time. I think in life you need those reminders to help keep you grounded.
LD: How would you describe Enumclaw’s sound on this new record?AJ: I don’t think we’ve mastered the Enumclaw sound, but I think this was the first step and shaking the baggage away of what we thought we had to sound and what we thought we had to do. I think right now our goal with each record is to just get closer and closer to being able to create a sound that is fully transparent of who we are as people because, in a perfect world, as an artist you want to connect with like-minded individuals and I think Save The Baby is a great album but I think this album is a much better depiction of who we are as people.