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Bob Moses Make Electronica for You to Get Emo to

This Domino-signed duo went to high school together but they never talked, then they ran into each other in a parking lot and this happened…

There’s a fine line between sappiness and real emotion. Sad songs can often be way too corny to take seriously, no matter how honest the angle is coming from. But Jimmy Vallance and Tom Howie—who hail from Vancouver and now live in Brooklyn—make every emotional beat clear and precise. And their song titles can be pretty heart-on-the-sleeve: please note “I Ain’t Gonna Be The First To Cry” (below) which dropped less than a month ago and has already amassed over 100,000 plays. Although their name suggests otherwise, Bob Moses is an electronic duo putting out hypnotic deep house infused with organic instrumentation and vocals which illicit happiness, sadness, and everything in-between. They’re now a member of Domino Records’ murderers row of a roster and I sat down with the dudes to discuss Burning Man, feelings, and how they went from never talking to each other in high school to becoming friends in a Lowe’s parking lot.

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Noisey: You guys re-met in a Lowe’s parking lot in Red Hook, Brooklyn?
Jimmy: That’s correct!

I didn’t even know there was one in Red Hook.
Jimmy: It’s a very good one.

What were you guys buying there?
Tom: Our studios were actually right across from there. I had a studio on one side and Jimmy had one on the other side.

Jimmy: To get to the G train there, you can either walk the 90 degree angle, or cut through the parking lot and save like 60% of your time. So we walked through there, and bumped into each other. I was like “Tom, what the fuck man, what’re you doing here?”

So you guys knew each other in high school, were you guys bros then?
Jimmy: No, we had the same art class but he was a year older than me. So he was like, “We need to hang out.” He was a successful musician back in high school when he was a singer/songwriter. He sold records out of the trunk of his car, and made an EP and was a bit of a celebrity in the high school scene. I was DJing, but we never hung out or thought about making music.

Tom: It was always like Jimmy was the other cool music guy in school, but we were on opposite sides.

So your music has a lot of influences and different moving parts to it. Some parts are dancey and groove-heavy, but the vocals and lyrics have a lot of raw emotion behind it. Is it intentional, like lyrics decided beforehand?
Tom: It always starts as melody and harmony, so whatever the chord progression is. Usually what happens is I’ll start singing something, and then I’ll say something, but I really won’t know why I’m saying it. For example, our song “Hands to Hold,” I started saying, “Time, time, time is a poison,” and Jimmy said, “Dude, that’s good, just fucking work with that.” I don’t know why I said it. And then we’ll be like “What does that mean?” and then I’ll sing some other lines and we work it in. I once heard this guy say, “You have to write to figure out what you’re writing about.”

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Jimmy: We’ve never like written like a poem and threw it into a song, we always have to work the other way around. Try and let the song be and move out of the way, and put out the antennas and let the ideas come through the subconscious.

Tom: It usually comes out as like a relationship, and people think it’s a lovey thing, but I try to think about other kinds of relationships.

Jimmy: We always both have to relate to what we’re writing about. For us we have to come together and write something eclectic. We both completely understand what the whole picture is.

Do you think living together helps that?
Jimmy: It definitely helps; we haven’t known anything else. We haven’t been apart since then. Definitely sharing the same environment, coming from the same place, and experiencing the same things every day.

Tom: That’s just part of the chemistry too. I think all those things contribute to the chemistry. But to speak to the original question, the rawness and stuff is what we do. We don’t try to write lyrics a certain way. One of us might write a lyric a certain way, and think, “Eh, it’s too corny.” Probably because we loved growing up in the darker part in the 90s, where Nirvana would write really pretty melodies, and the lyrics would be super dark. I love a boppy melodies or something warm, but where it talks about something fucked up.

Jimmy: Sometimes it’s nice to write stuff that’s a bit more obvious, and sometimes cryptic. I get more excited when it’s something that makes people think or feel, because that’s what music’s all about.

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Gotta make it count.
Tom: Just a bunch of moody depressed, fucks. [Laughs.]

Jimmy: Yeah, there’s not enough sunshine in the northwest.

One of the things I’m most excited about is you guys played Burning Man. How did that come about?
Jimmy: The Robot Heart guys, we played for them here at a warehouse party, and they were like, “What’s it going to take to get you guys out?” And we were kind of iffy, but they gave us two tickets, and they said we were playing the Bus Burn night. So we decided to go, and bought a new controller with insurance because we had no idea if anything would survive. We taped everything up, and played, it was so much fucking fun. They put up the set, and that was a huge turning point for us. I think the set now has over 150,000 plays when we were relatively unknown, and that was really cool.

Was the crowd a lot different than what you were dealing with?
Jimmy: Actually not that different! Imagine everyone who wants to have a good time, all in one spot.

Tom: We’re two kids from Vancouver where everyone’s fucking stoned, so we were used to the West Coast hippie thing, and the East Coast warehouse party, so it wasn’t too weird. But everything was definitely on steroids.

What does a Bob Moses fan look like to you? A lot of your music is almost anti-genre, but where do you all fit into the grand scheme of things?
Tom: It’s a bit of a mystery, we just make music and it’s nice that people are starting to like it, but I don’t really know why. You just have to do what you really feel that’s awesome, and there’s probably going to be some other person on earth that probably likes it. It’s amazing being able to travel, and meet people that like the music, and can connect on a deeper level. Writing music’s a very personal thing, where you’re almost confessing. It’s like meditating in a way: it’s very pure and not contrived.

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Jimmy: One of the biggest things we talk about is that we’d never tell anyone how to interpret our music, nor what it really means to us. When I hear my favorite guys talk about what their music means, I’ll have interpreted as something else, and hearing what it means sort of, and it’ll sort of taint it for me. So we like to leave that open, people will come up to us and say what the song means to them, and we’ll think it’s awesome.

Tom: I think because music is such a personal thing, people you meet who’ve been genuinely affected, you sort of connect before you’ve even met them. You just see all these different people connect from different backgrounds, and it’s amazing.

Jimmy: Anywhere we go, it’s just surreal, like I won’t believe it when we write some little song, people listened to it all over the place, then we go there and tour. It’s fucking cool. All we want to do is connect. The bands I loved connected to me, and if I could do that for someone else, that’s it. That’s the dream.

John gets super emotional all the time on his Twitter. Follow him - @JohnxHill

First to Cry is out now via Domino

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