Drug Couple - "No Legged Dog"

We’re excited to share, “No Legged Dog,”  the second single from Drug Couple’s forthcoming EP, Choose Your Own Apocalypse. The Brooklyn-based duo of real-life couple Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson and Becca Chodorkoff wrote and recorded the EP back in 2016 before things got… well… really bad. However, they could feel it in the air that some terrible shit was about to go down. Mirroring the climate that we’re living in, Choose Your Own Apocalypse, is a collection of songs about finding someone special to share the end-times with. It’s set for release on August 14th via Papercup Music.

“No Legged Dog” turns up the psychedelia with some buzzing guitars and a stewing noise that matches the spirit of the moment. The song is another great sounding track with lots of classic indie rock influences that Drug Couple lovingly embraces, including the witty lyricism of Liz Phair, the fuzzed-out guitars of Painful-era Yo La Tengo, and the subtle political bent of R.E.M.

In advance of the single’s release, I had the chance to catch up with the duo via e-mail to chat about how they’ve been spending their time, their take on the end times, and more:

You’ve been in Vermont for most of quarantine. How have you been spending your time and what’s it been like?

Yeah, we came up to Vermont for what we’d planned to be a long weekend, on March 13th, and that’s exactly when shit hit the fan so we just never left. 

We’ve just been living out this apocalyptic scenario that we’d imagined happening long ago. Our plan was always that we would flee disaster to Becca’s family home up here if something really bad ever happened. It was a little odd to have our contingency plan become reality, but we’ve ended up having a really beautiful experience during quarantine. 

We built a recording studio in the barn. We’ve been going on a lot of walks in the woods, appreciating dogs (in particular, a deeply strange Golden Doodle named Luna), Miles has been building recording equipment, Becca’s gotten into watercolors...

What’s the experience been like recording in Vermont cut off from the usual surroundings of New York City? Have you found yourselves able to get more work done? What have you been working on and have your surroundings influenced your recorded output?

Miles: It’s been fucking liberating. I’ve been a “New York Artist” for 20 years. We so don’t want to be a Brooklyn band anymore. We want to be a fucking AMERICAN band. Who may or may not be coming to your town to party down...but that’s beside the point. I used to BE from Brooklyn, but my city got co-opted by the internet trash machine and now we’ve been shat back out raw and naked into the country... I feel stinky and glorious. Fuck. It. All. There shouldn’t be bands from or in Brooklyn anymore. It’s a disingenuous and faded Xerox of what came before. Young white people cosplaying artists. The sound of the city is, RIGHTFULLY, Power 105 and Hot 97. Take your guitars, practice spaces, sweaty amps, and go home girls and boys...it’s over. It has BEEN over for a long fucking time.

Becca: Yeah, in terms of recording, what we’ve been working on definitely sounds like where we are. Which is better than where we were...

You recently released “Protest Song,” which is a very powerful and straightforward critique of our current political landscape and many of the systemic issues plaguing America. When did you write and record the song? Were there any events in particular that inspired it?

Miles:  Protest Song grew out of and samples an entirely different song I wrote and recorded back in 2014. It started turning into what it is now sometime around MLK Jr Day in 2016 when I started toying with the idea of writing a song exploring the idea of shared moral responsibility in society and how it is often gleefully abdicated under the guise of “following the rules” whether those rules are laid out by God or the government...that was the high minded part. The rest is just a contemporaneous detailing of the shitty consequences of structuring a society that way: such as the corpulent, soggy french fry of a human being that currently resides behind the Resolute Desk captivating us all with his staggeringly grotesque ineptitude and inanity.

Your next record, Choose Your Own Apocalypse, has an overarching theme about finding someone special to share the end-times with. Things are pretty fucked right now, but you actually started work on this release back in the summer of 2016 before things started to sharply decline.  Did you really feel that very dark times were brewing? How do you feel now that they’re here?

Becca: We came up with the title for the EP as we were joking about how doomed society seemed to be from every direction. At the time, we were looking ahead at the 2016 election, at society’s tepid response to the self-inflicted damage of climate change, to persistent racial and socioeconomic disparity—basically, it was like, it all ends in disaster no matter what, so pick your poison. 

Miles: I personally feel like the precipitous decline was already well under way, there’s just a dominant class in this country that is so ensconced in privilege that it was totally blinded to the rot festering at the core of the grand experiment that is Western liberal democracy. Just as many black people were getting killed by police in 2010 as today, the favors of the American economic system were just as titled towards those who already had means and away from those without. I, personally, was 100% unsurprised by the victory of Donald Trump.  Now, could I have predicted exactly how 2020 would unfold? Of course not! But I’ve long believed we were teetering on an unsustainable precipice.  What’s crazy is that everyone is so consumed by the health, economic, and civic tumult in this society at present that I think a large portion of the populace has been “distracted” from the fact that our planet is a ticking time bomb and that our leaders still somehow believe capitalism (a system predicated on unlimited growth being practiced on a forum [earth] with decidedly limited resources that looks way too much like cancer for my liking) is going to produce “innovation” that will save our sorry asses.

You finished Choose Your Own Apocalypse years ago. Why did you decide to wait until now to release it? How does it feel to finally be releasing it?

Becca: We didn’t wait for any particular reason, just because that’s how things worked out...but it ended up being weirdly topical right now. So it feels like the right moment.

What was the process of writing and recording Choose Your Own Apocalypse like?

Becca: We recorded CYOA over a long period of time. It was sort of in the margins of our schedules—whenever there weren’t people working at The CRC, we were in there recording. So it was nights, weekends, stretched over months. 

Miles:  Well, I’ve made a bunch of records over the years and in some ways this one was the most fun….it was also the most protracted owing to the circumstances Becca mentioned. It and Little Hits were originally just one 16 song album which, frankly, seemed absurd to release as a new band that mainly existed as a studio project and no one had ever heard of. It also tracks pretty closely with the first year of our relationship along with all the giddiness and volatility that suggests. It was really our first foray into writing music together, and my first in writing with a partner in about 20 years.  Looking back now it seems like a beginning, our writing partnership has grown and improved in the years since and playing with Pastor Greg for the last few years has helped us cohere as a “band” a bit.

The first single from Choose Your Own Apocalypse, “2027,” does center on the aftermath of an apocalypse, but I feel like you wouldn’t realize that unless you listen closely to the lyrics.  The instrumentation and your voices are both bright and joyous - it’s not dark at all.  Was that deliberate? It almost sounds like you’re aware of your fate, but you’re accepting it. Was part of the message about trying to accept the situation and/or make the best of it?

Becca: Everything is terrible so we might as well have fun!

Miles: Exultant darkness has always kinda been my jam. It’s a survival mechanism.  I’ve actually been through some shit, I’m not Billie fucking Eilish over here.  I was telling Becca’s parents at dinner last night “when you spend your whole life living in darkness it’s actually very easy to see the light.”

We’re all missing live shows these days. What songs from the new EP are you most looking forward to playing live?

Becca: A lot of these are old songs that were in our set for a long time, and we stopped playing them live because we got sick of it. Honestly, it’s so uncertain as to when we’ll be able to play shows again, we might not end up playing any of these songs live. We have a lot of new material that we’re excited about, that we’ll probably be playing when we get back to shows. Or, who knows, maybe by the time we’re playing out again we’ll be sick of that, too, and onto the next thing. 

Miles: I hate live music.

What have you been listening to while quarantined?

Beck’s One Foot In The Grave, assorted Will Oldham, Bill Callahan, Uncle Tupelo, and Froggy 100.9—Vermont’s Country Superstation. 

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Check out Drug Couple on Bandcamp. Follow them on Instagram and like them on Facebook. Their music is also available on all streaming platforms, including Spotify. You can also revisit Drug Couple’s November 2019 appearance on Look At My Records! in the archives.