No Skips: Godcaster’s Judson Kolk goes song-by-song through their S/T record ahead of White Schoolhouse show

Godcaster. // photo courtesy the artist

In our series No Skips, we sit down with an artist or band and go track-by-track through their latest release. For some of us, the banter in a concert where a song gets explained is our favorite thing in the world, and we’d just like to keep living in that. Every song has a story, and these are those stories in the order you’ll encounter them on the record.

Podcaster has made waves since arriving on the scene in 2018 with the now well-famous and held-in-high-regard live set. With two favorable Pitchfork reviews, a feature on NPR, and trips to SXSW and Pitchfork Music Festival, they are now ready for their first trip to Kansas.

Just a few days before their show at White Schoolhouse in Lawrence on Friday, June 14, we sat down with Judson Kolk to discuss their second LP Godcaster, influences on his writing and their music, what’s up with those 10-minute tracks, his recent foray into spaghetti Westerns, plus more.

The Pitch: Tonight is your first time playing in Kansas I believe. I have honestly never been to the venue you’re playing in Lawrence on Friday. Are you excited for the show?

Judson Kolk: Yeah, definitely. We actually just got into Kansas. We’re playing in Wichita tonight. This is going to be the first time playing in Kansas.

It’s always cool to do the first one in a new state. I think we’ve done most states at this point, other than obviously Alaska and Hawaii. I think we’re checking Kansas off on this tour and then I think there’s maybe two others, which is kind of wild.

How was playing overseas last year? I saw you guys played a number of dates, including the Pitchfork Music Festival.

Yeah, that was really fun. That was our first time over there. There were high highs and low lows, just as far as the shows went. We kind of went around the countryside and the UK and played some interesting shows around there. It was cool seeing everything. I had only been to France before, so it was really cool.

Why do you think people are responding to you guys? For people that have listened to you and are into this style, they seem to love it. I’ve heard great things about your live show.

I think the live show has historically done pretty good because we’re all kind of just exploding the whole time. For whatever reason, that seems to kind of connect to the general public, in a surprising way. We’re always kind of surprised. The last record has some pretty taxing songs and we’re kind of surprised at how good the reaction ‘can’ be at times. The performance, I guess, is the driving factor there. It’s fun to see people move around and shake their ass.

With this second record, you seem to be aiming for more of a metallic sound compared to your debut. Is this something you’re more interested in sonically at the moment? There is certainly no flute on this LP. What inspired that?

Maybe COVID had something to do with it, I’m not sure. We ended up just going heavier. I think one of the things I can cite about the inspiration for it is that the first one is like a pop record pretty much, and we did a bunch of touring on that one, played tons and tons of shows. We would kind of mess with the set quite a bit towards the end of playing all those songs. We would sort of take these two-minute pop songs in the middle and just kind of explode them and go off on some terrifying passage, and the audience seemed to connect with us doing that. So I think I was maybe thinking about making the songs just those parts and seeing if we could craft around that.

I don’t really know why they ended up being so long, that’s just sort of how it shook out. We would do that quite a bit, we would just sort of go off into these repeating little sections. And sometimes I would break down crying during those. They could be kind of emotional, I thought. I think maybe I was, even subconsciously, going for that with the writing of the self-titled.

“Diamond’s Shining Face” opens with a new look for you guys, like I mentioned. It erupts into some later Deftones-like screams toward the end. If you guys had a “radio song”, this would probably be it. What about this is different in the live setting?

For this one, it’s pretty much the same live. We’ve had a few tours where I think it’s been exactly the same instrumentation, but now on this one and the last one, we have these new keyboard setups, so I guess that’s slightly different than how it would sound. Some of the other songs on the record we’ve really sort of dissected and they sound pretty different, but that one’s more or less the same. I like to try to change the vocal delivery in some capacity every show. But yeah, that one sounds the same.

Talk about the songwriting process for this one specifically. I won’t even attempt to ask about specific lyrics for any of these. What are your intentions with how you phrase everything? It feels very absurd and challenging.

I’ve been trying to…did that come out a year or two ago? I had been trying to get into narrative lyrical writing, but not in a way that’s kind of overly conceptual or tacky because I don’t really like that. More so in a way like Paul McCartney or Harry Nilsson, who will have little vignettes. I’ll just kind of have these little characters. So “Diamond’s Shining Face” is very much that, there are characters and a scenario and a whole plot. That’s definitely something I’ve been working on, and I’m continuing to do.

I heard somebody call “Vivian Heck” stoner blues. What are your thoughts on this. This dials back the aggression from the opener a tad, until the end. The vocals here remind me of early Gospel a bit.

Do you guys play this live? I’m assuming the climax is a big crowd moment.

I would definitely not categorize it as “stoner blues” [laughs]. It’s not that. I was getting into a lot of spaghetti Western music, listening to a lot of Bruno Nicolai and Ennio Morricone and things like that. Even Lee Hazlewood. It doesn’t really sound exactly like that but that’s kind of maybe the background. I guess Lee Hazlewood would be a big lyrical inspiration for me, too. He’s fantastic.

That is a big crowd moment. “Vivian” is one of my favorite ones on the record.

Are you guys mainly playing the new LP live or are you mixing up Long Haired Locusts, too?

We’re not doing any of Long. We have a new single that we’re playing now and we’re also doing a cover. But yeah, it’s mostly the self-titled.

“Didactic Flashing Antidote” is the first of two 10-plus minute cuts. Long Haired Locusts didn’t really dive into that at all and has a much shorter average song length. You seem more focused on the idea of pacing a full-length record instead of creating a collection of songs. You transition into what feels like interludes after each song.

That one comes from the same place as what I was just saying. I don’t think it really comes through in the music but the inspiration is sort of from spaghetti Westerns, lyrically and musically. We’ve talked a lot about how the song’s supposed to feel like work because it’s so long and repetitive. We were learning the song and practicing it and we were like “Oh my goodness, everybody’s going to hate this”. This is the one where everybody’s going to walk out for a cigarette or whatever.

It seems like it’s just the opposite, people are really engaged with that one, which was really surprising. But there’s a lot of opportunity during that entire song for big performance moments, so we do a lot of that. Everybody’s really milking it the whole time. I think it’s just easy to get stuck in your head because it’s so blunt.

“Albino Venus” feels mysteriously folky. Was this idea always to have something like this and “Pluto” after the wide-ranging, longer tracks?

Yeah, I guess it’s for the contrast, it just kind of makes sense to do for a breather.

Was it eight tracks more so because you have the long ones and you have about a 45-minute length? Or did you just only have eight in mind?

I think we always have more than enough songs and it’s just the ones that work the best. We had a few songs that we thought were going to be really good. We never demoed before this record, but we demoed a bunch of songs that didn’t make the cut. We had a few demos that we thought were going to be the winners, the good songs, and they ended up not being, which is kind of funny. We haven’t had any experience properly demoing, so that was a new thing.

How did the instrumentation come about and what is going on in the background here? Everything feels pretty subtle and you really have to turn it up if you’re listening on speakers.

I think it’s pretty pulled back. That was also kind of a last-minute song. While we were recording, I was like “Hey, we could just pop this one on there”. I think there’s singing saw in it. There is a keyboard; not sure what else. That might be it. Xylophone. I got Von Kolk a singing saw for her birthday, and she was going to learn it, but she never really learned. But she played it on the track.

Talk about the production on “Death’s Head Eyed Hawkmoth”. It feels pretty unique compared to the rest of the album. This one’s a jam.

I remember one moment that was cool was the upright piano, a really janky sounding piano. That was kind of a cool spark for the song, I feel like it adds a cool attack. As far as everything else, that’s guitar, bass and drums. Bruce Edersole, who plays guitar in the band, and I tracked tons and tons of guitars, layering each one. Or at least like two each, playing a line or something, doing a lick in that song.

Where are you going with “All the figures wrestling figures”? Are your hooks trying to encapsulate some sort of surreal imagery?

Yeah, that song is about being able to see very, very far and see through the Earth. That’s during the bridge. Looking down into the Earth and seeing people and animals moving around and wrestling. That’s kind of something I’m interested in. Massive figures. I like the body.

Was the idea to always have two bigger cuts on the album? How did “Draw Breath Cry Out” come about? I heard this feels different live.

“Draw Breath” we’ve changed quite a bit. It doesn’t really sound very similar to the record. They both just sort of ended up being that long. Like I was saying earlier, they’re kind of built out of these big, crushing freak-out jams that we were doing. That one is quite a bit shorter when we play it live now. We were having a lot of trouble connecting with people playing that song. So we’ve changed that around quite a bit.

The ending here feels very rooted in early Pink Floyd stuff. I really enjoy their first record with Syd Barrett. I kind of think about you guys as a reincarnation of those days as a band, with a reimagining of the sound. I also hear some Black Midi in the instrumentation and harder guitar riffs. Is early Pink Floyd something you have in mind when constructing songs?

I guess so, I love Syd Barrett. I really like Syd Barrett Floyd. Jan Fontana, our bassist, kept saying that, too, when we were recording, that this is pretty “Piper at the Gates of Dawn”-esque. That’s cool.

“Pluto Shoots His Gaze into the Sun” feels like it could get lost in the shuffle because it doesn’t sound like an actual song the record compared to everything else. How do you think about it?

I really wanted to have a super, super sincere, just pure beauty song on the record. Maybe for the contrast of everything else being this giant, hulking machine. So yeah, I guess it’s there for contrast. That’s one that everybody really likes live. We always say, if the show’s not going too well, it kind of turns around during “Pluto”, or “Didactic.” People will get it for whatever reason when we do either of those two songs. We play it every show.

How long is your guys’ set? Are you playing 10-12 songs?

It’s 45 minutes on this tour. With “Draw Breath,” we’ll do it sometimes and not others. I think we’re going to maybe do it at the Lawrence show. We do that when we headline or when we have a little bit more time. But yeah, that’s one that’s been trickier to pull off live for whatever reason. It just kind of doesn’t really click. We usually don’t do both “Didactic” and “Draw Breath” during the set.

A lot of people feel like “Gut Sink Moan” has the most in common with tracks off Long Haired Locusts. There is an edge here that isn’t really there on that album, though. What are your thoughts on this?

Yeah, that makes sense. I remember thinking it felt like a Long Haired Locusts song, supercharged. The guitar playing and lyrics are similar, even.

Do you look up what people are saying about you online? Or is that something you’re not interested in?

I think every once in a while we’ll poke around. I don’t do it so often, though. I get my feelings hurt. On this tour in Chattanooga, we were playing with of Montreal, and the next day some guy found our Instagram and said “That was the worst show I’ve ever seen. Thanks a lot.” Or something to that effect. And I thought that was pretty great that he had to go out of his way. It’s pretty awesome. Maybe he actually meant it, maybe he just kind of wandered in. I don’t know if he was talking about both us and of Montreal. But maybe it was a joke.

Was this always going to be the closer?

We were toying with ending it with “Draw Breath” or maybe even “Didactic”. I think we did talk about it and we were just like “We can’t just do the thing where the last song is the longest song”. And “Gut Sink” kind of seemed like it had somewhat of a finality to it, as well. I think we did quite a bit of deliberating where the songs should be on the record.

I always end my interviews by asking an artist what the best thing they’ve listened to lately is. It can be something that just released or something that came out all the way back in the ‘60s.

I have two. I can think of maybe two songs. And now I’ve got to remember the names. “Some Velvet Morning” by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood is one of my favorite songs. And I’ve been listening to “Without Her” by Harry Nilsson, which is song that has been blowing me away for some reason.

Are you more of a song person than an album person?

Yeah, definitely more of a song person. I think I used to be more of an album person, but now it’s kind of, for whatever reason, more interesting to get fixated on a song to me, and kind of just milk it for all it’s worth. Really study it.

Godcaster plays White Schoolhouse on Friday, June 14, with Blanky and Wyla. Details on that show here.