Getting Personal with Motel Breakfast’s Jimmy Drenovsky and Photographer Michael Heinz

Interview by Jimmy Drenovsky and Michael Heinz

Photographed by Michael Heinz

Motel Breakfast, a true Midwestern band, with members split between Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison, is set to release their self-titled debut album next month. Ahead of the release, we’re premiering their single, “Strangers To Ourselves”, an upbeat track that speaks to the inner battles one can have with themselves. Jimmy Drenovsky, one of the songwriters of Motel Breakfast, sat down with long time friend and photographer, Michael Heinz, to chat about the single and the process of putting personal music out into the world. You can find the single below, along with a collection of photographs that Michael captured over the course of recording. Motel Breakfast’s debut album will be out on February 7th.

Michael Heinz: What's the biggest thing you hope people feel when listening to the debut?

Jimmy Drenovsky: Hopelessness. [Laughter]

Michael: In a word?

Jim in my studio before we recorded the interview.

Jimmy: I guess that wasn't the question— I hope that whether you're a music person or a lyrics person or whatever it is that you perk up to initially, hopefully you capture the emotion and the honesty of the songs. Whatever you grab onto you grab something substantial.

Michael: I could see that when I was watching you guys record it, I felt that. That there was a lot of excitement and there is a lot of improvisation.

Jimmy: It's improvisation, but also with a fine attention to the detail. How do we distill down the truth of this? While also having it be these larger body productions and making big arrangements when the song calls for it and sparse ones when it doesn't.

Jim, Drue, Conor, and Jess of the band with their biggest cheerleader, Keith.

Michael: I think taking a block of wood and putting it through five different levels of expertise. That's how I saw it from when it was demoed to when you were workshopping it together. To when you were talking about it together, arranging it together and then when you put it together. It’s a lot of different ways that I saw these songs packaged. To see the finished product is pretty fabulous. So approaching the release, what has been your emotional journey with the music? And I guess what I'm asking is —whenever I make a photo, for instance, one hundred times out of one hundred times, I hate all of the photos on a roll of film I shoot. I put it away and I don't look at it for like a month and then no one gets to see it. Then I pull it out a month later and I'm very excited to see them again. It's a new thing.

Jim and Jess at the cottage during the band trip, pretending they knew what they were doing recording demos.

Jimmy: As we were finishing the album, all you do is listen to different mixes and new parts of the songs every day. You’ve stopped listening to other music. You might go back to certain playlists again to pull yourself out of that headspace, but you can't help but be just totally consumed by what you’re recording. So you’re consumed by all of the tiniest details of your own music, and you get excited about it, and then you fall in love with it and you get angry about it and you get angry that your vision isn't being realized the same way. And then you get to where you were hoping and you finish it and you listen and you're proud. But then you circle back and you're like, but what if that doesn't come across to people? Thats out of your control at this point. So for me, a big part of the anxiety surrounding this release is how much we didn't cut any corners. Up until now, we've put out an EP, put out two singles, but there's always been a little bit of corner cutting to be like, we just gotta have something for people to hear. This time we slaved over the details, we made the best album we possibly could today. And so the bigger part for me comes from if that doesn't pan out, then our best simply isn't good enough. There is nothing left in the tank that we could have done better, in my opinion, with this album. This is the first real moment of putting ourselves out there.

The band in the throes of the most nervous I'd seen them before a show with their hometown crowd.

Michael: It was always a fun thing for you guys to get together and to play on weekends and on holidays and it was a fun thing just to do. And as you guys started playing more shows and being together more and getting to know each other better, now it's like, no this is an actual representation of who we are and we finally have gotten here. And I mean, you're saying, you know, this is the best we can do. And if people aren't happy with it, that's a pretty interesting perspective to have at this juncture.

Jimmy: Yeah. Which is scary. That's terrifying to me.

Michael: Well, it's very vulnerable, right? You have it on record, you're like, this is the best we're going to do today. So I think it's interesting that whenever you put that out into the world, you basically tear off all your flesh. You're just all muscle. Everything can touch you.

Jimmy: If we're doing that, there's not much muscle on me.

Jess givin me kissies while they record at Treehouse Studios in Chicago.

Michael: So specifically about this single that you're releasing, “Strangers To Ourselves”, what makes it unique within this kind of massive musical climate that we're in today?

Jimmy: I think this is a song that we did fairly well. I think this is maybe one of the best examples on the album of the music echoing what the lyrics are trying to say. There's this kind of intensity to the whole song, but it has an eb and flow. The whole thing is about a questioning of your own sanity, not knowing how to trust your own mind almost. With the music, there's a push and pull. There's a steady acoustic guitar playing the whole thing through. We kind of add pieces and pull away pieces as it goes. I think that you can listen to it and feel the anxiety that I was hoping to pervade.

Michael: There certainly is a certain anxiety to it.

Rare moment from the conception shoot of Motel Breakfast.

Jimmy: If you don’t like to feel anxious when you listen to music, this song may not be for you.

Michael: It's true. But, you know, until you said the words anxiety and then we talked about the key changes and everything like that, I think it's construed as a more positive song. It doesn't sound anxious until you are told that it sounds anxious. So now people might be like, oh, now I may not listen to this. It breaks down, and then you're like, oh, fuck and it builds up again and again. It's kind of a heady song, it's all over the place, but I think it could be construed as a pretty happy song.

Jimmy: If you aren't listening to the words, I can see how you would make that conclusion based on the melody.

Michael: What's one song that you can't stop listening to? That you just keep returning to.

Jimmy: “If It Takes a Lifetime” by Jason Isbell, the one that I sent you two days ago.

Jim on the phone with our dear friend Sawyer whilst on my inaugural band trip to the cottage.

Michael: That was a great song. It sounded like a country version of a Whitney song. I mean, that might just be my Whitney-colored eyeglasses right now.

Jimmy: Which you wear all the time.

Michael: Pretty much all day every day.

Jimmy: It's a wonderful song. Jason Isbell is such a good songwriter. He's such an honest storyteller and explorer. The whole song basically is surrounding the idea of like, I'm not doing that great, but I'm gonna get there if I kind of keep putting one foot in front of the other. He makes everything feel very approachable. It feels like it could be you. Even so, one of the most interesting parts of this song lyrically that I noticed was he mentions the line “tryin’ hard not to get lost in my telephone” or “spend too much time on my telephone”. I am paraphrasing, but it felt very culturally relevant, especially for someone currently looking for ways to numb their mind.

Jess and Drue yelling about probably nothing.

Michael: How much of your songwriting is just honest to goodness truth and not really worrying that much about rhythm or rhyming, you know, specific words and stuff like that?

Jimmy: In an attempt to answer that form of a question, I would say it varies and it's hard to answer for Conor, who's the other principal songwriter, as far as lyrics go. I would imagine he's more picky. But for me, I can extrapolate. Like for “Strangers to Ourselves”, the song that we're putting out now, is a song with a theme that is very central to something that I've experienced personally, especially in the past year of my life. Where I've gone through dealing with actual anxiety issues and panic attacks, it’s been a totally new beast. That all happened after the writing of this song — I closed the song saying “I ain't insane, but I ain’t myself / I ain't insane, but I need some help”. It's something that to me at the time sounded good and it sounded like it was reaching at the idea of something, but now it resonates. And now I'm like, yeah, I'm going to therapy every couple of weeks. I had to realize and confront the idea that I'm not going to be necessarily calling myself insane or mentally unstable, but I'm not all figured out and I can't do it on my own. So I wouldn't say this song was born of honesty. It was more born of an idea. When you feel like you're not yourself lately and you don't know why and you don't know how to contend with it. On the flip side, a song like “Torches” is a very honest song to me. When I started writing it, the first couple of lines came about and I realized that my subconscious was kind of talking about this relationship that I had just recently gotten out of. Once I realized that and confronted it, it was very important to me to get all of the words right, to be honest and truthful to the way I experience and live with that relationship with a person that I still hold very dearly. So that song, every word mattered because every word felt like I was writing a truthful story. And for “Strangers to Ourselves”, words take on meaning, it was the idea that I was writing to.

Michael: It's interesting, you're living this life where, you know, you may have these moments where you're feeling sane, but you're not. Yeah, I don't know. That's convention. We're all doing our best.

Jimmy: We're all doing what we can.

Keep up with Motel Breakfast and Michael.