Alex Burnet moved in closer with his phone. “Here,” he said. “I know you’ve heard it before, but listen to it again.” With that, the familiar opening notes of the Full House theme song came playing through. “Listen to that, those are six movements right there. That’s a great pop song,” Burnet said.
“Yeah, we’ve been talking about that song a lot lately,” Sam Carlson said with a laugh. “We’re influenced a lot by TV theme songs.”
Burnet and Carlson are two of the four members of Laundry Day, a band that also includes Alexa Ambrose on drums and Kuki Kooks on bass. Burnet and Carlson sat down at Three Sheets on Elm Street to talk about their newest record, It’s Cool, It’s Whatever (“it got said a lot,” Burnet said) which is being released on Sept. 4. Though, as Carlson joked, it has been done for longer than it took them to make it.
Though It’s Cool also took some of its inspiration from more fleeting sources. “Honestly, I have always loved the music that’s used in television,” Burnet said. “It’s so cool. I like pop songs. We all like pop songs. We spent a lot of time actually talking about TV music while we were working on this record.”
“We spent a lot of time watching movies too,” Carlson added. “The studio that we worked in has an extensive VHS collection so we watched a lot of, like, Kevin Costner, and old sci-fi movies. We watched The Postman and The Fifth Element. I’d like to think of us as the musical version of The Fifth Element,” he said with a laugh.
“Oh God, I wish,” Burnet said.
“The musical equivalent,” Carlson answered with another laugh.
“We wrapped the master on my birthday last year,” said Burnet, “so it’s been done for a year. When you put out a record, when you release it, when everyone gets to hear it, you can’t take back the way they heard it. It’s got to be done correctly, all the pieces that you need have to be there. That’s something that I feel like I messed up with in a lot of other projects, the rush to release, because it’s hard. It’s hard to sit on … watching everybody else put out records around you. The hardest part for me personally about making a record is not playing it for people.”
“It’s kind of good that we waited as long as we have to actually release it because at this point pretty much everyone knows the songs that are on it. I don’t think there’s anything on it that people who have been coming to our shows wouldn’t already be familiar with” added Sam.
The four members of Laundry Day have been playing together since 2014, when the band put out its self-titled first release. Burnet and Carlson have also helped each other out personally during this same time. Burnet lived with Carlson at a place called Taco Hut on Orange Street, where some of the songs on this record first came to fruition. But Taco Hut “promptly burnt down” right after Burnet moved into his new home, he said, so Carlson then moved in with him — “a back and forth crashing” with Burnet living in the house Carlson lived in alone for a while.
“We’ve spent a lot of time together,” Carlson joked.
“As a lyricist everything I write is about where I am when I’m there and the bulk worth of this was written more or less when I was without house sleeping at Taco Hut,” Burnet said. The city Burnet lives in thus influences the music “tremendously,” he said. “Discount,” the fifth song on It’s Cool, “is definitely about New Haven” according to Carlson, including a Whalley Avenue “name drop.”
Burnet wrote all the lyrics for It’s Cool, excepting those for the song “Blunt Guts,” which were written by Carlson. “Alex is typically the wellspring, more or less,” Carlson said. “He’ll come to the group with an idea, and we’ll, as a group, kind of complete the idea.”
“I’ll come in with three chords and a melody and three chords and another melody
for the chorus,” Burnet said. “And then the timing and the structure, the heartbeat, the breathing come in. I always like to think about it like an organism. I’m pretty good at making a skeletal structure and some ligaments, and then from there it’s got to have skin and organs.”
“And hair, not too much hair,” added Carlson.
“Skin, not too much skin,” Burnet responded.
“Not too much skin, no,” added Carlson.
Two Guitars
Laundry Day involves a bit of wish fulfillment for both Burnet and Carlson, as somgwriters and musicians.
“For me it was a good opportunity to play with different guitar sounds because this was the first band that I’ve gotten to play electric guitar in in my life,” Carlson said. “It kind of started as an Alex solo project that I was helping him with, and I played some accompanying instrumentation on that. Then we found a drummer, and the drummer wasn’t me.”
Being on guitar, for Carlson, meant being able to explore how he wanted to play the instrument and what he wanted the instrument to sound like. “There were definitely a lot of weird chorus‑y sounds and different styles of playing on the record that are, on my end, kind of me figuring out what I should do on each song,” Carlson said. “The whole thing was kind of like in a state of play.”
“I’d also like to, on that note, mention that everybody in the band except me has been or is a professional drummer,” Burnet interjected. “People say ‘Alex, do you know any good drummers?’ and I say ‘yeah, three of them.’ I got one playing guitar and the other one playing bass. I can play drums now though.”
“This is the band I wanted to be in when I was 15,” Burnet added.
Burnet met one of the producers of this record, Yannis Panos, while playing with him at a Ceschi show back in 2015. Panos expressed interest in working with Laundry Day on a record. Burnet also asked producer Bill Readey if he wanted to record a track with them, and Readey ended up engineering the record and co-producing it with Panos.
“If I want anybody to take away anything from this record, it’s that personally I wanted it to play through like a record,” Burnet said. “I wanted it to sound … like it was done in a day. And it basically was.”
“The actual recording of it just happened over a couple of sessions” Carlson said. “We did the whole band kind of live in the room together and then went back and overdubbed guitars and lead guitars, just to minimize the bleed, then we went back and did vocals and spent the rest of the time just mixing and mastering. I think we probably finished tracking the whole thing in about a month, most of it taking place in one day. And here we are two years later! Done!” he said with a laugh.
Which brought Burnet back to his discussion of TV show theme songs, and how it illuminated his own approach to writing Laundry Day’s songs.
“The thing about music written for TV is that … at the end of the day it’s short and concise, and you know where you are or you know where the character is in a matter of thirty seconds or less. You know what the mood is, the setting, the time, the place, the attitude. Everything is kind of established in the first thirty seconds. It’s not just the immediacy of it, but also the brevity of it. I think the longest song on this record it is like three minutes.”
“Yeah, it’s basically a bunch of pop songs,” added Carlson. “It’s all verse-chorus kind of radio-ready pop songs. They just happen to be played with really gross giant guitars.”
“Which is fun because, I mean, who doesn’t love a dichotomy?” Burnet said.
What kind of TV show might Laundry Day provide a theme for?
“Totally sitcom,” said Burnet.
“A sitcom that’s like a buddy comedy type of thing,” added Carlson.
Carlson also mentioned that Laundry Day already has a couple of new songs in the works. They are thinking of calling the next album No Look Beer Toss.
“Then we can make a video of a bunch of beer tosses!” Carlson said.
“Yep. Behind the back, all kinds,” added Burnet. The makings of a sitcom episode were already right there.
Laundry Day celebrates the release of It’s Cool, It’s Whatever at Cafe Nine on Sept. 4, with the Backyard Committee and Elison Jackson supporting. The show, which starts at 6 p.m., represents the kickoff party for Manic Mondays, a series of Monday evening shows at Cafe Nine. Admission is free.