Off the Record

Plover 0:00
What's good everyone? You're listening to WKNC 88.1 FM HD-1 Raleigh. We are a student run nonprofit radio station based out of North Carolina State University. I am plover and this is off the record. Here with me today is BJ Barham, the lead singer of the amazing American Aquarium. How are you doing?

BJ Barham 0:16
I'm doing good. How are you?

Plover 0:17
I'm doing great. Thank you. If we could just have us to kind of start maybe by telling some about yourself. Who are you? Where are you from? That that kind of thing?

BJ Barham 0:30
Yeah, my name is BJ Barham. I am the lead singer of American Aquarium. We're a Raleigh band. We've been doing this for about 16 years now. I am an alumni of NC State University. And we're very excited to be back this Saturday night to headline Packapalooza on Hillsborough Street.

Plover 0:52
Oh, that's awesome. So we always from Raleigh. I know NC State's the thing. But was that like that? Was there something before that brought you to Raleigh?

BJ Barham 1:01
Yeah, I grew up probably an hour and a half west of here in a little town called Reidsville, North Carolina. It's about 15 minutes north of Greensboro. Yeah, I spent the first 18 years of my life in the tobacco fields of Reidsville, North Carolina. And then when I turned 18, I came to NC State. And I've been in the Raleigh area ever since.

Plover 1:28
Awesome. Um, I do like to ask people this. Where does the name American Aquarium come from?

BJ Barham 1:34
So there's a band from Chicago called Wilco. They have they have a record called Yankee hotel foxtrot. The very first song on that record is a song called I am trying to break your heart. And the very, very first line of that song is an American Aquarium drinker. I assess him down the avenue. I have no idea what that line meant a freshman through my freshman year in college, it spoke to me in a way that caused me to name a band. And here we are 16 years later. With the same band

Plover 2:10
name, and yeah, so it's a great name and a it's a pretty cool origin story. I've definitely heard of weirder origin stories in that. Yeah, for sure. You could find a good one. So you moved to Raleigh in around age 18. What What kind of transition is that like going from, as you said tobacco fields to less tobacco fields.

BJ Barham 2:29
It was. It was, it was a culture shock. I was a small town kid. Like a lot of people that come to state I was from rural North Carolina. And then all of a sudden you're moving to the state capitol. Not only are you moving to NC State University, you're moving to one of the cultural epicenters of the state. So growing up in North Carolina, I was surrounded by a bunch of people that looked like me acted like me talk like me, all of a sudden, you're you're thrown into truly a melting pot at NC State. And you learn that your parents weren't always right about everybody. Your parents weren't always right about people about that. You really learned about how little culture you had and regional North Carolina and you start forming your own opinions. You start growing as a human being, you start learning what you want out of the world. And NC State was a great place for me to not only learn about the stereotype that my parents taught me were wrong, but also start formulating my own opinions about the world around me.

Plover 3:36
That's awesome. Yeah, that must be great for forming a band as well. I'm sure he was able to like, branch out kind of into the Raleigh scene a bit, play some local venues and stuff.

BJ Barham 3:45
For sure. It really kind of helped me get my my bearings on Raleigh, because as you can imagine, moving here, I didn't move here. A lot of friends. I didn't move here. I didn't go to NC State because a lot of my friends went to stay. So moving here, it was kind of like a restart was the first time I'd ever been out on my own in my entire life. And so starting a band here, you know, my freshman year was really a way for me to one just have a friend base two. I was able to I was out. I've been I've been very fortunate to meet so many amazing people through music. And and it all started on Hillsborough Street.

Plover 4:25
How exactly what what part of Hillsborough Street was was that started it for you. So I

BJ Barham 4:30
hate to date myself. But all the venues I played on Hillsborough Street are no longer there. They've been torn down and replaced. I think you guys currently have a CVS on Hillsborough street right across University towers. That used to be a place called the brewery. The brewery was celebrated almost 40 years of music on Hillsborough street where every local band got their start. There's also a place called the Farmhouse right there beside The Brewery is where they were really kind of focused on jam Americana type music. But we played there many nights. The Comet Lounge was there. We played the Comet Lounge lounge. All of this is kind of Raleigh folklore at this point, because this would have been early, the early aughts of the 2000s. I went to state from Oh 2206. And so this is this is early 2000s. Raleigh, the landscape and topography have definitely changed quite a bit. Since I was enrolled in NC State.

Plover 5:39
Yeah, as much as I love CVS out of an, I would say a bit of an upgrade. Yeah, I'm getting nostalgic for some venues I've ever been to that sounds amazing.

BJ Barham 5:49
It was it was really great. It was kind of a bustling part of Hillsborough street where you know, just about any night of the week, you can go see a band. And now you know, it feels a little bit more cookie cutter. It feels you know, in the name of progress, they build more housing more cuz that all used to be a big parking lot behind that CVS. That was just where kids can especially freshmen could purchase parking spots. And now it has just been filled in with housing.

Plover 6:20
Yeah, that's that's great. I know there's been a lot of housing lately. I No idea. There was such a rich history underneath there. It's sort of under underneath the foundations there. And hey, you know, maybe if one of these CBD shops goes down under a new venue could come up and then we could be right back into it.

BJ Barham 6:40
That would be wonderful.

Unknown Speaker 6:41
That's the dream. Yeah. Speaking of Hillsborough Street, y'all are playing Packapalooza. That's that's the big ticket item coming up soon. Yeah. Have you been to Packapalooza? Was that something you went to a good amount of state?

BJ Barham 6:54
The last Packapalooza I went to ludicrous was the headliner. So this would have been back in the like I said the early aughts of 2000. So I saw ludicrous at our one of the last backup losers I went to before I was touring full time.

Plover 7:15
And I'd be like peak ludicrous. Right? Like Like that was like his era. That's crazy.

BJ Barham 7:19
Yeah, we're talking peak Ludacris. We're not talking about like throwback old time, or ludicrous. We're talking about, like in his prom.

Plover 7:29
Um, so yeah, so if you want to let people know like, what's the vibes going to be at Packapalooza? What time are you going on? And what which part of Packapalooza. Should we all kind of direct our attention to?

BJ Barham 7:38
It's going to be an all day event. They're shutting down Hillsborough street right in front of the bell tower. It's an all day event. It's family friendly. It's free. They're going to have booths and activities set up for kids and families all up and down Hillsborough street, but it kind of culminates around 830 They're building a stage right in front of the bell tower. So right between Jubala and the bell tower, there'll be a big stage. And we play that stage from 830 to 10 o'clock.

Plover 8:07
It's amazing. Yeah, I know that if we try to be between Jubala and the bell tower during that time, anyone listening can can be over there too. But packable is obviously that's a great place to play. And that's really cool to hear. You've also played a lot of other really cool places. I believe you played the Ryman this year. That sounds amazing.

BJ Barham 8:25
Yeah, we we headlined the Ryman for the first time back in June. We've we've got to check off a bunch of really kind of historic rooms. We played the 930 club in DC the Troubadour out in Los Angeles, the great American music hall in San Francisco for a bunch of rednecks from North Carolina we're we've got we've we've got to see a good chunk of the world and we're very thankful for that

Plover 8:50
y'all are doing pretty okay yeah. What does it feel like like those especially the kind of venues that like are just they're so like tied to the history of the music in them that that must be really cool to like walk among kind of the the great artists who were there before the any of that like significance like hit y'all like on the stage?

BJ Barham 9:10
Oh, for sure. When you walk into the circle at the ramen Are you know, last summer we made our Grand Ole Opry debut. When you walk into that circle and realize who stood there, it's kind of haunting, you know, the Ryman Auditorium has been there for 130 years. So almost every artist of any significance, either on their way up or on their way back down, has played the ROM and so when you walk into that circle, you realize you're kind of It's a rare air. You're standing in a place that not many people have been able to stand and perform. So it's kind of a heavy feeling. But once you get the show go and you know, it's just it feels like another show. Muscle memory kicks in. Reflexes kick in and you just play the show but at You're walking out to that stage it definitely does hit you that the weight of who of who has been there before you? For sure.

Plover 10:06
Yeah. You mentioned a lot of really cool shows that just now what would you say is maybe your favorite show you've ever performed if you have one kind of just on the top of your head.

BJ Barham 10:18
So keeping it Raleigh centric. The very first sell out show up late in Raleigh. I was a sophomore in college, and we sold out the brewery right there on Hillsborough Street. And, and I hate to glorify the brewery, the brewery was only about 150 200 cap room. It wasn't this giant concert hall. But it was a sign that we were becoming a band. You know, when when 200 kids were willing to show up on a Friday night and pay a $5 cover. It was this it was a start. It was a pat on the back. It was a it was a reassurance that we had made the right decision to start a band and start touring. So I would say one of the biggest shows in my career happened extremely early in my career. And that was the first time we had a sold out show in Raleigh. Raleigh became home. Every single show, and every show with thanks for coming. We're American Aquarium from Raleigh, North Carolina. It's part of the fiber of the band. It's part of who I am. It's built into my DNA now. So it means a lot to me that very, very first sold out show here in Raleigh.

Plover 11:21
That's amazing. I love the local connection there. And often those like small venues can be like the most like fun engaging ones. So I'm glad that was like a formative experience for y'all. Packet below Palooza as you mentioned, is is an outdoor event, is there any difference like playing indoor versus outdoor shows in terms of like the vibe, like from an artist perspective, I know like going to them, it's obviously very different.

BJ Barham 11:42
The only issue, like our sound guy is is the person that worries about that the most. playing outdoors, obviously, there's a little bit more of a sound restraint because you're having to play to open air instead of you know, four walls. So he has to approach it differently from a sound point of view. But for us as a band, you know, a shows a show, I've played indoor and outdoor shows my entire career. They tend to be a little bigger, when you're outdoors more, you can obviously put more people on a shutdown Hillsborough street and you can let's say somewhere like the Lincoln theater. So it's gonna feel nice, it's gonna there's gonna be a bunch of kids there. And we're extremely excited. Those outdoor shows tend to be a little less intimate, but also Greta on a much grander scale. They're a lot of fun.

Plover 12:32
That's really cool. And this isn't your only show. You're going to be touring a lot of other places. I heard you're playing some festivals that how are you feeling about the rest of your tour? That seems really cool. It's great.

BJ Barham 12:42
We're there's four legs of this album release tour, and we're we just finished up the second leg. So we just finished up a three week run out on the West Coast. We're getting ready. We got two weeks off. And then middle of September, we hit the Midwest for another two week run. And then we head to Europe for three weeks in February. So we're all in all, I think we're doing 4445 States this summer. So we're kind of hitting everywhere. I think we're missing North Dakota, South Dakota, Maine, Rhode Island, a few other states and we apologize to those folks. But I think I think we covered quite a bit of ground. That's

Plover 13:25
That's quite the road trip. Europe's really cool. Do you know where you're going in Europe?

BJ Barham 13:30
Yeah, we fought with the tour starts in Paris. And then it's we got France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands. Scotland, England, Wales, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Germany.

Plover 13:47
Okay. That's an almanac right there.

BJ Barham 13:51
Yeah, a good chunk of Europe. Apologies to Spain, Portugal, Italy and Switzerland. But we're hitting a good chunk of it.

Plover 14:00
Maybe next time. Yeah. Just as a British person. Oh, we're in England playing exactly. Sorry.

BJ Barham 14:06
So we've got a show in Manchester. We got a show in London. We got a show in Brighton. We got a show in Glasgow. And up in Scotland. So yeah, I think we're only in England for four or five days. There might be a Liverpool show. I have to double check the schedule.

Plover 14:25
That's awesome. My whole family's from Manchester. Oh, awesome.

BJ Barham 14:29
Manchester is a fun town. Really good food. Really good nightlife. The folks in Manchester have always been extremely contest. It's great.

Plover 14:38
Let's see. So I suppose is in a couple of days. For anyone who's listening who who might want to go How would you kind of describe your sound just like from from the lead singers perspective, like like what is the sort of tagline of American Aquarium?

BJ Barham 14:52
It's so hard to kind of pigeonhole what we do. We always tell people we're punk rock kids and play country music It's it's loud. It's fast. It's 20 it's a pretty energetic show. It's we're at the end of the day, we're a rock band with a pedal steel guitar. And like I said, anytime you have somebody with my twin singing It's gonna sound like country music. But it's a it's a high energy country rock and roll thing. I think it falls under the all encompassing umbrella of Americana these days. But yeah, it's we're a rock band from North Carolina. So it kind of sounds country.

Plover 15:37
Yeah, I gotcha. Yeah. Those are really cool labels. Yeah, I've never like really personally understood like country versus Americana. It's always been a weird one to like dissect, like where one ends and one begins, but I'm glad they're umbrellas that that fit your very unique and really cool sound. Do you have any, like you mentioned, your your show is very, like high energy and show focus. Do you have any songs that you like, kind of performed that aren't really on on any of the major services just kind of like have like, as like a live like, kind of staple?

BJ Barham 16:07
So yeah, we've got, you know, we've been fortunate we've been doing this for 16 years. We got 16 records in 16 years. And so after, you know, a decade or so, songs start rising to the top, you start realizing that some fans want to hear songs more than others. And so our set is kind of a kind of a career spanning, you know, kind of the biggest songs of our career, you know. So there's songs like casualties and burn sick or die, and lonely and easy. And wolves is going to be a big hit at NC State. Those losing sight of 25 Those are some of the big, big tracks. That kind of we're always staples in our lab show.

Plover 16:52
Nice, nice. Um, as you mentioned, this is coming off of an album tour. I assume there's gonna be some album stuff in there, but also like, I was looking on your album and forgive me if I pronounced this wrong. Chicamacomico. What exactly is that because I know that is referencing a specific location.

BJ Barham 17:13
Yeah, that's a North Carolina reference. That's actually out on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It's modern day Rodanthe North Carolina. So it's the northern tip of Hatteras Island. It's where I wrote the record. I went out there for about a week and a half. In February of 2021, kind of a desolate time of year to be on the Outer Banks. Nobody's there, all the home. All the homes are boarded up. It's kind of a ghost town. It's, you know, direct opposite of what it is right now. It's a hustling and bustling beach town, welcoming families. But in the wintertime, it's kind of a ghost town. And so I went out there to write this record. And I kept seeing the water tower still says Chicamacomico. They changed the name of the town back in the 70s to make it easier for the United States Postal Service. USPS said that Chicamacomico was too hard to pronounce and too hard to spell. So they changed it to Rodanthe. Chicamacomico is actually an Algonquin word for sinking sand. The Algonquins were the the original people that settled that area. And so it's kind of a tip of the hat. It's a record about loss. And so not only is it about a record about losing my mom, and a miscarriage, and a couple of friends committing suicide during the pandemic, but it's also ultimately about a town losing its identity and the name of progress. So I wanted to tip my hat to what it used to be pre 1970s. And yeah, that's why the album's called Chicamacomico.

Plover 18:48
Thank you for mentioning all that. I assumed actually recording it in Chicamacomico did influence a lot of that I if you're there was the setting kind of like playing off of your proverbial quill pen.

BJ Barham 19:04
Yeah, yeah, it's jet North Carolina. Geography plays such a huge role in my writing. I write about where I'm from, I read about the people good and bad of where I'm from small town America. And, you know, a lot of its social observation, a lot of its kind of being in love for being, you know, being in love with certain aspects of being from the south, but also learning how to call out the bad things about being from the south realizing there's a bunch of accountability that we still need to have in the South. Realizing that not every piece of history we were taught in our grade school was correct. And just trying to write a lot of the wrongs that are still here in the south. And so North Carolina is the only place I've ever lived in North Carolina kind of takes a a central seat when it comes to the background and the settings and my songs and so there's a lot of mission throughout my career. rear of the Piedmont of Blue Ridge Mountains of the coastal areas of North Carolina and the Cape Fear River, the Dan River. Raleigh itself, the oak city, the banner that we play in front of every single night says American Aquarium, oak city rock'n'roll. So, we take pride in where we're from, we can also admit, missteps, from where we're from, but we also take a lot of pride in where we're from.

Plover 20:25
Yeah, it's great. Yeah, you definitely feel like locate the specificity of the location, like adding to the music in a really cool way. How would you describe Chicamacomico, kind of in the context of your wider discography is that is it a departure from what you normally do? Is it kind of like a continuation with a specific theme of the kind of sound you you'd like to bring out?

BJ Barham 20:47
It's very much a departure. Usually, we're kind of a big, bombastic, anthemic rock and roll band. And this record is almost all acoustic guitar. It's all really hushed. Like I said, I was processing a lot of loss. In 2021, I guess I lost my grandma, I lost my mother, within two months of each other. Me and my wife lost a child. I lost two years of touring. And then I lost three friends to suicide during the pandemic. So I had a lot of loss to process. And this record is me processing that loss. It feels hopefully it feels like you're sitting down with a friend to talk about it. It's an acoustic guitar, with very, very light band accompaniment. And so it's kind of a departure, but the songs as far as the honesty, the transparency, the vulnerability. Anybody that's familiar with my writing, sees how this kind of fits in the catalogs is still the same guy writing extremely open, honest songs. sonically, it's a bit of a departure subject matter. It's still pretty right on brand for what we do as a band.

Plover 22:01
Yeah. And there were some standout songs. Of course, from there, how would you describe, like picking like, what singles to just kind of represent that very intimate, kind of almost cut, very cohesive album? You had wildfire? And all I needed? How are those the like, the ones that yeah, this is going to represent kind of the whole vision of this album, the

BJ Barham 22:21
two records that don't depress everybody that hears them the first time. They're the two relatively upbeat songs on the record. All I needed is the main single off of that record. And it's because it's one of the only hopeful songs on that record, it's about music, being able to heal. Finding a song at the right time with the universe delivering a song right when you need it the most. I wrote that song about turning on the radio after my mother's funeral, and hearing a song that that I can only describe as a song that she sent my way. I can only describe it as the song The Universe put in front of me on purpose that day, I needed to hear that that exact moment. And it's funny, I hope everybody has that story about the universe sending you a song when you need it. Like when you turn the radio on, you're like, oh my gosh, this is this is about me, this has to be about me, this is exactly what I'm going through right now. And you become very thankful for music in those in those dark times. And so I wanted to write kind of a hopeful, joyous song about the salvation of hearing songs and then pulling it out of of the gutter. And so that was why that song was the first single off the record is because it's a hopeful song. It's an anthemic song about the soul saving power of music.

Plover 23:42
And that was definitely a very, very relatable song for sure. Sort of tying into like the whole thing at the creative process i You mentioned, this is a much more of a you focused project, but just in general, how do you kind of approach like, scientists does the songwriting influence the tone or does the kind of like a riff or some sort of sound approach influenced the songwriting generally,

BJ Barham 24:09
for you, it's all it's all lyric based. For me, I write most of the lyrics first, or at least start the lyric writing process. And then once the lyrics start forming, there becomes a natural melody in my head, it starts to show itself and once I have a natural melody, I can then kind of bang out a skeletal sketch of the song on an acoustic guitar. So I can have just simple chords, chord progressions. It kind of accompany the melody and then then I bring it to the band and that's kind of where the magic happens. The band really flushes out the songs. If I'm bringing a skeletal version, they are definitely the muscle that gets added to the songs. So that's what takes every song from being kind of a three and a half minute folk song to kind of a big rock and roll song. That's all the band, the band, the band gets the song after. I've, you know, I've written the lyrics I've played through it, I'm happy with how the song feels on an acoustic guitar. Because at the end of the day, I think the truest way to tell if a song can stand on its own two feet, you have to be able to play it on a guitar piano, one instrument and a voice if the songs still mean something, then you've got a really good root. And then you can build on top of that, once you have that foundational like version of the song that you still really like. Anything you add to it, it's just gonna make it better.

Plover 25:38
Yeah, that makes sense. Just like the the themes being able to stand on its own. That's really cool. Point of, of the songs that you play. Um, you've not just been releasing an album recently. You've been releasing a lot of slappers, bangers and twangers pieces. I know those are not I've kind of been across your whole career. How did you kind of pick which songs to put on there and to kind of be that sort of inspirational piece during, you know, a time where it was less inspirational to make people slap their legs and banging their heads?

BJ Barham 26:18
Yeah, it's, it's. So those two volumes Slappers, Bangers and Certified Twangers Volume One and two, respect. Were kind of an homage to the music I was listening to growing up. Most of us were raised in rural towns, we were raised on FM 90s country and the early 90s. We're all about the same age. We're all in our mid to late 30s. So the early 90s were kind of a influential time, it was the first time I was really internalizing music I listened to on the radio. And so during the pandemic, me and the boys, I've been threatening the guys for 10 years to make this these records. But I've never had the time to do it. And so if the pandemic gave us anything that gave us ample time, and so probably six or seven months after the pandemic started, me and the boys hadn't seen each other in, you know, six months. So we got together in the fall of 2020, and we recorded some of our favorite 90s Country hits, kind of the tip of the hat to the music that kind of influenced our youth. And then once we finished that, we realized that everyone was kind of needing that shot of nostalgia in the midst of the pandemic. And so both of those volumes were wildly wildly successful for us. And it was just something fun to do in between what because we had just released a record in May of 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic. So it wasn't really time for us to release another album of original songs. So it gave us a break. But it also gave us you know, something fun to do in the interim.

Plover 28:06
That's That does sound like a lot of fun. I'm sure that a lot, a lot of really cool memories associated with that, that were kind of brought back by like hearing that songs again. Oh,

BJ Barham 28:15
for sure. It's one of those things where you know, a song that you haven't heard in 20 years comes on the radio, and then you realize that you remember every single word to it. And then you and you ask yourself, like what part of my brain did I store this in to where, you know, 20 years later, this song seems like something fresh and brand new. It was a lot of fun. It took me right back to riding in the back of my dad's truck on the way to, you know, the grocery store or something and listen to cassette tapes. And, you know, it brought back a lot of really great memories, making those records.

Plover 28:47
That's awesome. I, I know those are things that are very specifically tied to the pandemic, but I'm sure the fans will want to know, is there a volume three coming? Is there any kind of compilations

BJ Barham 28:57
there is not a volume three, Volume One and two. They were very much time in place record. Again, the only reason we made those records is because we had a lot of extra time on our hands. We weren't touring. We weren't recording. So it gave us an excuse to get together and play music. And I will always look back on those records as kind of Time and Place records. They will always be associated with the two years we had off for the pandemic. Yeah.

Plover 29:26
Yeah, you've definitely been playing a lot of music right now. And that's, that's great that you've been able to get back out there in the wider world and do that. Um, yeah. Chicamacomico is is of course the culmination of many, many years of albums, including some are like for example, lamentation is where you had a lot of specific allusions to like current day America a lot, a lot of social focus on that. How do you like tie kind of current events and like, wider themes into standard kind of ways of making songs like Like, varying Songwriting with things you want to say about current events.

BJ Barham 30:07
There's a there's a fine line to do it right? Without feeling like you're forcing stuff down people's throats. I hold very strong in my convictions, I'm not afraid to stand up for what I believe in. Thankfully, my mother instilled that in me at early ages to be as loud as I could about the things that moved me. Since 2016, I've been a lot more outspoken about the things that move me not just I used to just write about relationships and my personal life and life on the road. Since 2016, there's been a lot more social observation, there's been a lot more me trying to deal with kind of the duality of the South, me trying to put into words that love hate relationship that so many progressive southerners feel toward where we're from the region we're from. And so, I think it's important

Plover 31:07
I really appreciate you for being here and also for any listeners out there really appreciate you for tuning in. And you can check out all the interviews we do here at wknc.org/podcast and click off the record up. We're gonna keep it going here. I'd also check out our brand new DJ calendar for the fall semester and find out what your favorite DJ is doing right now. I've been Plover. I've been here with BJ Barham of American Aquarium on WKNC 88.1 FM HD-1 Raleigh.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai