From playing Baton Rouge college bars and house parties to crafting a debut album built on friendship, experimentation, and a shared love of rock ‘n’ roll, Nashville-based band The Bends are proof that there’s still something magical about four people getting in a room and making music together. In conversation with Atwood Magazine, frontman Hayden Field reflects on the bands he grew up idolizing, the surreal thrill of becoming part of one himself, and the creative freedom that allows every song on ‘If You Insist’ to find its own voice.

Stream: ‘If You Insist’ – The Bends

We gave ourselves the freedom to just let [each] song be what it needed to be, which I think is a theme of the album, and I feel like a theme of our band. From my perspective, each song is the song, and we don’t put too much pressure on the context it’s going to live in.

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In an increasingly digital era, we’re seeing a renewed reverence for what’s real.

The need to touch grass. The need for friction. The need to see people. All things resurfacing in response to the exhaustion of screens and isolation.

The other thing having a resurgence? Bands.

The magic of a homegrown, grassroots, boots-on-the-ground band is making a comeback, and as a music lover – which you are if you’re an Atwood reader – that’s something worth celebrating.

Bands are part of the reason music evolves. A group of people with different tastes, influences, and backgrounds come together and somehow create something singular. The safety and playfulness of making music in a band cannot be replicated. The mistakes that become the best parts of a song. The outros born from messing around. The harmonies that sit just right. This is the magic.

The Bends have this magic in spades.

Comprised of Hayden Field, Ian Marmande, Jacob Rhodes, and Chase Perkins, the band got its start during their time at LSU in Baton Rouge, cutting their teeth at house parties and college bars. A devoted college following, countless hours onstage, and an immense passion for music brought them from those early days to where they are now.

With an appearance on Zach Bryan’s Belting Bronco, opening slots for The Killers, Inhaler, Ole 60, and The Red Clay Strays, and performances at festivals including Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits, The Bends have arrived with their debut album, If You Insist (September 17 via Warner Records), a record that is a far cry from their college cover-band beginnings.

The Bends tap into all sides of themselves with this record. There’s the side that doesn’t take itself too seriously on songs like “Lebowski,” embracing the kind of looseness and playfulness we want from a band. There’s the softer, romantic side of “Keeps Me Going,” and the straight-up rock ‘n’ roll of “Off My Chest,” which kicks the album off. As lead singer Hayden Field puts it, “I feel like it kind of sets the tone of this is a rock band making its band music. I think that’s really important to us.”

And that’s exactly what If You Insist feels like: A real band making real music, in all the forms that it can take.

The good news? We’re all ready for bands again.

We sat down with Field just days before the album’s release to talk about making music as a band, letting songs become what they need to be, growing up with the bands that shaped him, and the strange, exciting reality of becoming part of one himself.

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:: stream/purchase If You Insist here ::

:: connect with The Bends here ::

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A CONVERSATION WITH THE BENDS

The Bends (Hayden Field): Good! Honestly, we played a bunch of shows last week that went really well, and so we were kind of focused on that. And so now I get some time off, I’m just like, I haven’t been thinking about it too, too much because I don’t even know. It’s our first album. I don’t really know how it’s supposed to go. So we’ll see how it ends up. I’m excited obviously for whenever it comes out, but right now I’m just waiting around. I’m not too anxious or nervous. I have too many thoughts on it though.

The Bends: Whoa. Well, I appreciate that. I think it’ll be interesting to see what people think of it because you never know. But I appreciate you saying that and I’d like to think that’s true. I like all the songs, but I’m pretty biased.

The Bends: Yeah, 100%.

The Bends: Well, awesome. Well yeah, also that’s another thing that maybe my perspective is skewed because I’m in a band, but it seems like people want to listen to a band and want to hear a band, but…

The Bends: You’re saying it, so I think it’s true.

The Bends: Yeah. Okay, awesome. Well, I think straight off the top, I think you kind of said it well yourself in a way. I feel like it kind of sets the tone of this is a rock band making its band music. I think that’s really important to us because I think, like you said, hopefully there’s people out there that want to listen to a rock band. I know that we all grew up, and I grew up idolizing rock bands. There were artists and there were solo artists where the music I enjoyed, but always idolized bands.

And so that song in particular felt like this very clearly is a rock band from the start. The drumstick clicks and the one, two, three, four, that’s also another pretty, what’s the word?

Maybe I’ll think of it, but the song starts as one, two, three, four. So that was another reason where it’s like that kind of works as the start to the whole album. And also I think it’s one of those songs that it’s different in a lot of ways than this music that we’ve put out, but I think for the most part it stays true to the music that we’ve put out this far and who we are. And it’s just a little bit of an elevation and a little bit of a more mature take on what we have been doing. So I think it’ll introduce where we’re going, but also won’t catch anybody too sideways. And also had the name of the album in the second verse. A couple different reasons why I felt like that this feels like the right fit to open up the album.

The Bends: Well, so I started playing guitar because I was listening to “Snow” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers when I was 13.

The Bends: Yeah. That’ll do it. I was like, that guitar riff, I was like, “That’d be cool if I could play that. Let me figure that out.” It was pretty difficult, so it took me a while to get there.

But it was Chili Peppers, then about a year or two into guitar, and I loved John Frusciante, the guitar player. Then it was Nirvana, of course, caught me at the right moment at 15. And then whenever I was 16, I found The Strokes and never been affected by music in that way. And unfortunately, but it’s just the way it is, nothing will ever grab my attention like whenever I listened to The Strokes for the first time and listened to them constantly, pretty much nothing else for I think about a year and a half.

I’ve gone through my Spotify, the year-end Wrapped, 2017 it was, 2018, only Strokes on it or Julian side projects. And then that led me into being in college and starting this band, and now I’m older and I don’t obsess over bands and idolize them quite the way I used to, which is kind of sad because it was so fun. But now I still love band music, but I also love solo and side projects and just weird stuff.

The Bends: Yeah, 100%. I’ve thought about that and talked about that a lot before. It’s so strange. I was told growing up that I couldn’t be in a band. And I believed it, of course. And then next thing you know, it’s happening. So I’m like, God above or luck or whatever it is, I’m thankful.

The Bends: Well, hopefully that too, but I’m not going to say that.

The Bends: I mean, to talk about this song, the main thing I would say is it’s the oldest song or idea on the album. I had written the first verse in college, and it was probably about a year and a half ago at this point. So that was the first thing.

And then I moved to Nashville, it came up and there was a different version of the song, but it had that first verse and some of the melodies for the pre-chorus and chorus. And then the band started playing it live, and it was really fun and energetic. But then sometimes you lose a little bit of luster for a song and it kind of went away, but we knew it was good.

I had to really workshop lyrics for it because the lyrics were bad at first.

The Bends: Well, I appreciate that. And really, I guess, yeah, the verse was written a year and a half ago, the chorus a year ago, the guitar riff part six months ago. This song was all over the place, getting worked on for a long, long time. The lyrics were worked on throughout that time before it got recorded. And so the band and I had tons of time to sit with it and figure out exactly how we were going to piece it together.

I think one thing I tend to do lyrically is write songs that could be interpreted as being about a relationship with a girl. But this song is actually about a struggling friendship and the awkwardness of feeling like you have a bone to pick with someone, but never wanting to have that conversation about the things they’ve been doing that have upset you.

And especially as a guy, it’s pretty hard to have those conversations. That’s why I was like, with my thin skin, would it come off wrong? So it’s about that and the song before, “Off My Chest.” It’s definitely about relationships, but then it also could be about the album itself and the band itself, us feeling like we need to get this off my chest. So that was just another thing that when we were talking about lyrics, it’s important to mention.

The Bends: Yeah. All these things that you’re saying, I mean, hopefully everybody gets the thing as much as you do. I know you’re very intently listening and you get this.

The Bends: Yeah, I got to get in a robe and drink some White Russians.

The Bends: We’re waiting for the album to come out to play it live, so that’s one thing, but I’m really excited for it. It’s going to be, I think, my favorite to play live. And yeah, it’s fun.

It’s not inauthentic, but it’s a big joke, the whole idea. I feel like it’s pretty worn on its sleeve. It’s about when your roommates go out of town and you have the house to yourself and you’re going to do whatever you want. So I think it is kind of fun in that way to not take, because it’s so easy to take yourself so seriously as a lyricist. What am I going to say? What’s my prerogative here? So that one slapped that pretentiousness in the face, which I think is fun.

I love The Clash, Wire and some of those bands. It has that beat that feels very British punk. That’s one of my favorites on the album for those reasons. It feels a little, it’s fun lyrically and it feels a little British punk.

The Bends: Yeah, so I think it’s got the, like you said, nostalgic romance theme to it. And this one is overtly like, yes, this is about my ex-girlfriend from high school. And it’s just in my mind, I had written a lot of these, I’ll send the band an idea and it was that first verse again, she was waiting tables, I was sneaking out, and the band really liked that lyric.

They were like, I think the same way that you’re saying you can visualize it is there’s some imagery there, which I do think is nice and helps somebody latch onto a song very quickly, which is nice. And also, I think it was important to. It’s directly from my life experience and it’s kind of literal and it’s about being young and in love. So I feel like there’s definitely a little bit of a time limit on how many of those songs are singing that type of song.

I was like, let’s definitely want to get one of these out there. And I already feel, I’m 24, I’m singing about my high school girlfriends. It’s already pushing it a little bit in my mind, but yeah, I guess I just wanted it to have that coming-of-age feeling. That was my favorite stuff growing up, John Hughes. And so that means a lot that you feel like it has that quality to it.

And the band just had a lot of fun. The chorus got kind of big and we had fun with the outro. There’s a cello.

The Bends: Yeah. I think to me, that was one of those moments where I was like, “That’s really cool.” We were in the studio just using a cello randomly. It was very fun just because I feel like that’s what your favorite bands do. You hear the stories, they’re in the studio and somebody’s like, “We should throw that random instrument in there.” But also, it just works so well.

To me, that guitar part, acoustic guitar that Ian’s playing is, to me, immediately I was like, “Yes, that kind of sounds like a clock. It’s like a ticking, talking thing, the way the guitar is being played.” And so it does feel like. And it’s talking about “Young Love”; a relationship I had seven years ago. So it is after you’re going through the memories of all these things that are happening, then it’s at the end of the song, you’re looking down at your watch and like, damn, that was seven years ago.

The Bends: Thank you. I appreciate that.

The Bends: We all really like that song. That’s one of the songs. I don’t think I changed a single lyric from the original demo idea day of writing it to the recording of it, which is so far opposite of every other song.

Musically as well, the whole thing just resonated with the band, even though it was. It’s strange because it’s very different than all the other songs that we have. We knew it was a strong song, but the question when we were recording was how are we going to do this? Are we going to try and push this song into the box of what everything else is, or are we going to let it live in between what it wants to be and what else we’re doing?

Eventually we just decided to go all the way with our producer, Sam, and record in one live take. We were all live in the room together, trying to make it Otis Redding or something. There’s that Leon Bridges and Khruangbin EP Texas Sun, and it’s not country guitar licks, but it’s like a Western…

The Bends: Exactly, Americana. So it was fun to just, we gave ourselves the freedom to just let that song be what it needed to be, which I think is kind of a theme of the album, and I feel like a theme of our band. From my perspective, each song is the song, and we don’t put too much pressure on the context it’s going to live in.

But then I’ve heard some people say that have listened to the album that they feel like it’s cohesive and works together, so I guess it worked out. But yeah, we all love that song. I hope you’re right about the girls liking it, and it’s very different, and I’m proud of the fact that we let it be different.

The Bends: Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

The Bends: Yeah, we play in Baton Rouge, and then the next week we head out, I think Wednesday is the first show in Boulder. Then yeah, we’re gone for five weeks, I think it is, doing the West Coast. So we’re all super pumped. Nice. We’re excited. We love traveling, going to a bunch of places we’ve never been, so blessed to be doing it. We’re pumped.

The Bends: Well, seriously, thank you for the time. This was enjoyable.

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:: stream/purchase If You Insist here ::

:: connect with The Bends here ::

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 © Cole Silberman

If You Insist

an album by The Bends