Nap Eyes

As the front man for Nap Eyes, he and his bandmates (Seamus Dalton, Brad Loughead, Josh Salter) have cultivated a sizable catalog of critically-acclaimed albums marked by Chapman's freewriting lyrical style and the band's intricate-then-intimate arrangements. Through it all, Nap Eyes has charted its unique course with seemingly little concern for anything other than its own interest.

Somehow they've reached even further in on The Neon Gate, the latest longplayer from Nap Eyes. According to Chapman, the space created by the pandemic might have been the thing that muted their last album's release yet it also gave way to wide-open fields of exploration on their newest one. To hear Chapman tell it, these last few years have felt deeply the sunny and shadow sides of a world sheltering in place.

Analogue: It’s always been clear that you feel quite a bit of permission to go wherever you want musically with Nap Eyes, but that seems even more true, if that makes sense, on this new album. Is that a pandemic thing? Does that even feel congruent to you when I say that?

Nigel Chapman: That's, that's a very good question. And yeah, I'd say definitely. That's pretty accurate, because the timing, as for many musicians and people in many fields, it was bad. Bad pandemic! [Laughs] And so we just kind of got ground to a halt right as our fourth record was being released, which was like March 27 or something 2020.

We were on a string of dates and we were supposed to do 50 shows. The first bunch of them were with Destroyer, which was exciting. On day seven, we had to cancel the tour. We all got sick, and we had to go home from Atlanta. Then all the momentum kind of ground to a halt.

Over the course of the pandemic, two parallel threads occurred: one which was probably largely experientially negative and another which was maybe positive and fun. The outward thing would be the negative side—all of the career momentum, or any kind of interest in the band, or ability to generate income, and therefore reinvest that into band activity, and so on. That dried up in a pretty major way.

That was, I think, existentially and vocationally tough for all of us because we have been trying to do this for our path. We chose to do this music thing.

Then, on the other hand, there was a kind of interior space. There’s sort of no deadline to finish work, and you could kind of try out some things. It was like ‘Oh, there’s a lot of time suddenly,’ and it’s a lot of introspective time because of restrictions on socializing and so on. Because of that, I think that we started to make up some kind of different music.

I think also because of being cooped up in a small apartment for a bunch of time, I was trying to maybe instinctively use the songs therapeutically to make things bigger, in my mind and imagination or something like that. Just trying things out.

Analogue: By the way, speaking of that pandemic experience, do you feel like Snapshot never got a fair chance?

Nigel: Yeah, I guess so. It didn't give us any bump at all, like past the level we had before with the modest success that came on previous records like I'm Bad Now or Thought Rock, which came before. And probably part of that is due to just not getting a chance to promote the album and so on.

Analogue: You mentioned the space to be able to try some things out. I feel like that’s always been true for the band but here you reference it like a sliding scale—like even more permission felt than before. It’s just never felt like you were all that concerned about conventional norms on what a song should be or has to be.

Nigel: It's an interesting idea, but I don't know how to exactly land an answer about that. I really like the idea that songs shouldn't have any fixed boundaries on them. It’s a ‘they should do what they're gonna do’ kind of thing.

In a kind of stubborn way, I don't think I would have the capacity to write something that is intentionally universal. It's something that I've kind of avoided, probably for fear of failing at it or something. And also, making up or exploring things that come up idiosyncratically are cool things to express with art—even if it makes it sometimes oblique or obscure, I find it pretty interesting. At the same time, I also really like some hooks or things that give some payoff to a song.

So I have more patience for pop songs typically than things that are super avant-garde or something like that. Sometimes I'm not totally happy with where I'm landing on that spectrum, but you do your best to work with circumstances and keep trying.

Analogue: What does ownership of these songs look like for the band?

Nigel: Yeah, it's a great question. It's very collaborative.There's something in this that necessitates a collaborative alchemy or working together in a kind of way where even if I wanted to push an agenda through, I can’t. I can have certain hills to die on, but I'm only allowed so many. It's been very good for me, even as a human being, as to work with my bandmates.

I think especially at the level of song selection, I might send them a bunch of different demos or things, and then Seamus, Josh, and Brad would gravitate towards different songs. And maybe even there's one that I'm like, ‘You guys, this one though!’ And they're like, ‘No, no, no, no.’ There’s a give-and-take there. And eventually, I'm like, ‘Fine, we can work on this one that I think sucks, but if you guys see this, that’s fine,’ and vice versa.

For this record, they had to be pretty creative to make the arrangements interesting because there’s a monotony or sturdiness in the actual chord structures of the songs and they're pretty long. So yeah, I think the band did a great job. Everybody is just approaching things from their own perspective and bringing ideas in and helping to hone things a lot. That's a gift.

Analogue: What song underwent the greatest sort of metamorphosis from to where the band took it from where it was?

Nigel: There are a few. For example, the opening track, “A Tired Starlings,” started with a rockin’ electric guitar loop, kind of lo-fi and bad sounding that I had made, and then I composed the lyrics over that. Then when we were together, we rearranged it and made this acoustic arrangement. We're all playing live together, like Brad and Josh are playing acoustic guitars, and Seamus was playing that electric. And then we incorporated a little bit of the original arrangement with us playing it live but electrified that kind of just weaves in and out in certain sections of that song.

But other songs too. “Demons” is really different. That was originally all keyboard-based. Like that loop didn't have any guitars in it. I think a lot of them really did change a lot. “Tangent Dissolve” changed a lot. Yeah, “Icegrass” is the only song that probably wasn’t composed in this way,if I'm not mistaken.

Analogue: I saw the long European run, by the way. Is there a good history for you guys there?

Nigel: A little bit. Yeah, like, we've been over there three or four times since 2016 or so. And yeah, it’s amazing. I love Europe, of course. It's so beautiful there. And yeah, in the UK, we have some fans. I think in other countries, like Germany and Holland and so on, it’s exciting to play these shows. And hopefully, yeah, to make more fans. We're going to Spain and Portugal for the first time this trip. So that's exciting, too. We've never been to those countries.

VISIT: Nap Eyes