Lace Up Your Workbooks: An Interview with Boca Chica’s Hallie Pritts
Boca Chica used to be a Pittsburgh secret. The local band, led by Hallie Pritts, began with a promising EP in 2005 and debuted its first full-length album, Transform into Beasts, in the summer of 2007. And now, with the release of their second full-length album, Lace up Your Workboots, they’re definitely not a secret anymore. Describing the band’s sound proves difficult to music critics and reviewers, who often resort to an “everything but the kitchen sink” description of their genre: folk, indie, country, alternative, Americana, and (my favorite) orchestral twang pop. I would describe the band in other terms, not based on genre at all, but based on affect. The sensations invoked by Hallie’s music are multiple and utterly visceral. “Lake Erie,” the first track on the new album, is both devastating and uplifting, and “The Hourglass Waltz,” the last track, reminds me of how I felt before my high school prom.
I sat down with Hallie in August of this year, about a month before Lace up Your Workboots was formally released, to talk about its debut.
Kelsy Burke: Let’s start with your awesome new album. Why did you decide to use the song, “Workboots,” for the album title?
Hallie Pritts: Lace up your Workboots? Well, for the last album we did a similar thing where the title was a line from one of the songs, but it wasn’t the title of the song, so I sort of kept that tradition up. The line is from the song, “Workboots,” but not the name, and I thought it fit pretty well because I’ve been working really hard at the band and the album.
KB: Can you talk about this album in contrast to Transform into Beasts and the one before that? How is this one different?
HP: Well, the first one is kind of barely an album. It’s an EP that we just recorded in somebody’s house and it was all live, and I like the songs on that album still, but it’s kind of out of print at the moment. We did everything by hand—burned every CD, hand-stamped them. So it was definitely like our beginnings. Transform into Beasts was like our first real album, and there are some similarities to this one. The artwork from the album, we used the same artist from last time. The guy, his name’s Joshua Welsh, what I did for this album and the last one is while we were recording all of the tracks, I sent them to him and he created the art inspired by the album, and then turned it into the album cover. And [Lace up your Workboots] has a lot of production and a lot more orchestration. I mean the last one had a fair amount, but this one had like ten people playing on it, a lot of strings. I guess in Transform into Beasts we basically had the songs worked out and went in and we recorded them and then added extra things, but with these songs, this one was a little more epic in its production.
KB: And did Chris McDonald have a lot to do with that?
HP: Yeah, definitely.
KB: I see his name all over the album, in terms of production and the music itself. How did he get involved?
HP: He’s a friend of mine, and I actually went on tour right after the last album came out with [his band] Cuddle Magic. I went on tour with them as my band, and so we recorded a track together during that time that made it onto this album, that’s track nine. And it was just really fun, and I always liked Christopher; he’s like a genius, and pretty much amazing. And he moved back to Pittsburgh for a while. He was in Boston for a long time, and we had just lost our guitar player, so he was like, “Oh, I’ll play,’ and I was like, “Sweet.” And then we ended up talking about recording the album together and he agreed. And it was really cool working with him. I have him listed as a producer because a lot of the stuff was his idea; he was very influential in this album.
KB: And how did you decide on “Oh, Magdalene” (Track nine), specifically to play with Cuddle Magic for the album?
HP: On tour with them, they backed all of my songs. And this one we played, and it was a new song at the time, and I hadn’t really worked it out with my band here. And it just seemed like a Cuddle Magic song. We played it, and it just really worked out. We recorded it one night at like 2:00am in their studio, and it was all live pretty much, the vocals and everything—there were just a couple of things that we put on, like the flutes, later, but everything else was totally live. And it just turned out really well, and I thought about saving it to do something with it, but then I thought, ah, I’ll put it on this album.
KB: So it seems like, at least from the time of Transform into Beasts, you’re playing with an almost entirely new group of folks, with the exception of your drummer and Susanna Meyer.
HP: Well, yeah, Matt [Miller] was the drummer on Transform into Beasts and he was the drummer on this new album, but he’s not playing with us anymore. We switch up people a lot. I’ve been calling ourselves a collective at this point because it’s not really like a standard line-up. I made a list a while back of everyone who’s played with Boca Chica, either on a record or live, and it was like over 30 people. And I kind of like doing it that way, having a revolving cast of people. That’s what we’re doing for our CD release show, it’s going to be like a whole new band (laughs).
KB: So how does that affect the music itself?
HP: Um, we’re really versatile, depending on the band. Recently, like this last year, our live shows were more like a rock band line-up, which we hadn’t been before. It was me and Susanna [Meyer], and then Jeff Baron playing electric guitar and another Jeff [Ryan] playing drums and we kind of turned into a Southern rock band for live shows, which was really fun, since we hadn’t done that before. Before that we were mostly playing as a trio, with me and Susanna, and we had a cellist [Lisa Campbell]. So it was really like soft, and kind of like chamber pop, but it was all the same songs. So, I kind of like playing that way, because, for different shows, you never quite know what configuration you’re going to see.
KB: How did Jeff Baron [of the Essex Green and the Ladybug Transistor] become involved?
HP: I guess he just moved here a little over a year ago, and he was working at a radio station, and he called me up one day and was like, “Do you want to play on the radio station?” And I was like, “Okay, sure,” and he was like, “I like your band, if you ever need a guitar player…” And at first we didn’t, and I didn’t know who he was, so I was like, “Umm, we’re kind of full right now, but that’s cool, we’re always switching it up…” And then I kept talking to him more and more and then was like, “Yeah, you should be in my band.” So it was sort of totally random.
KB: Well it makes a lot of sense that you have so many people involved to produce so many different sounds because it seems like all of the reviews that I’ve seen about Boca Chica can’t quite describe your genre, so they usually either resort to a really long list—Americana, folk, country, whatever—or I’ve seen some that just say that you’re unclassifiable. So do you think this album either adds to that inability to be classified or do you think it puts you more specifically into a genre?
HP: Well, no, I don’t think we’ve really committed ourselves to a genre with this one. I feel like if you listen to each song individually, you could listen to the last track of the album and then the first track of the album and it would sound totally weird, but I feel like as a whole, they do fit together. I feel like we’re still Americana, but we have a lot more experimental stuff going on in this, so I don’t know. I’ll be interested to see what happens in the reviews, to see what people say.
KB: Do you consider this album to be a pivotal point for your musical career or for you band? I guess what I’m asking is, what’s your plan with this album?
HP: This one is getting a pretty big push. We’ve been around for quite a while, and I feel like with every album and everything that happens I get more, I don’t know, I learn how to make things work in music, as much as you can, which isn’t necessarily that much. I learn and I get better at it, so I’m making a big push for this one. We’re working with Shut-Eye Records out of Atlanta to do promotion and stuff, and so it’s a lot more professional than our other releases have been, with a more concerted effort to make it work.
KB: Are you planning on touring outside of Pittsburgh with this album?
HP: Yeah, I don’t have dates at the moment, but yeah.
KB: And how will you choose what band to take with you?
HP: Basically whoever wants to come (laughs). Yeah, I really don’t set off with an idea, even for shows, I’m not like, “This one I want to be a rock show, this one I want to be a folk show,” I sort of say, “Okay, I’ve got a show, who wants to play?” It’s less stressful that way, and more fun.
KB: So what do you think are the differences between live and recorded music?
HP: Playing live is kind of a wildcard. There’s always something going on…you’re off-key because you have no idea what you’re singing because the monitors aren’t working or the amps are up too high, but that can also make for cool stuff. But with albums you can do what you want with it, you can be freer to be over the top, that’s the beauty of tracking. The other thing about this album is that the way we did it, we started from the beginning to do it this way, it has kind of a live feel because we recorded basically all of the band--the bass, drums, the electric guitar, and the cello--we recorded it live, all in one take, which people don’t usually do, but we did it over at Machine Age in Polish Hill, so it’s like a live show, and you can hear the little inconsistencies, which I really like. I definitely didn’t want it to sound too polished. So then on top of that, we went in and recorded tons more stuff on top of it, so it has a really orchestrated feel, with a live imperfect sound, which was really what I was going for.
