The Pains Of Being Pure AtHeart

Wed 18th May, 2011 in Features

New York Indie-Pop quartet The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart have a ridiculously long name for a band who devote their time and energy to crafting tight and concise pop songs. Their recently released second LP, Belong, is a stellar effort chock full of great big Indie-Pop anthems. POBPAH lead singer, Kip Berman, caught up with FL to talk about indie, shoegaze and timeless pop music.

Hey, Kip. How’s it going?
Good, man! We’re in Chicago. We played here last night, and we’ll play here again tonight!

How was the show?
It was really fun. We’re on tour with a band called Twin Shadow and it’s been great. We’ve played Coachella and a lot of fun shows all across the country. It’s been great to play two shows in the same city – we can hang out and eat hotdogs and stuff.

I caught some of that Coachella performance on the YouTube stream. What was that whole experience like for you?
It was probably more comfortable watching it via YouTube than actually being there! It was hot! It’s in the middle of the desert, but it was so much fun. So many great bands played, and the experience of playing in front of a huge crowd of people is really exciting. Luckily I didn’t have to watch us perform – watching us on those huge video screens would have been awkward for me!

I went to see Bob Dylan at the Blues and Roots Festival here in Byron Bay last weekend, and he actually requested that there were no cameras on stage.
It’s a pretty different kind of experience. I went to see a band in December, and I was sitting so far a way that I caught myself watching the big screens. It reminded me of watching the live DVDs that I own of that band at home.

What I really enjoyed about that Coachella performance was the out-and-out vibrancy of your set. It was surprising, because in doing research on The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, the one idea that kept appearing was this references to ‘shoegaze’ music and Smashing Pumpkins comparisons. How do you feel about people putting those sort of labels on your music?
It’s funny because it’s wrong, but I don’t care. It’s not for me to review people’s reviews or anything like that. People can say what they want: I know who we are and what we represent, and I don’t need to put a label on it to make it explicit. We’re a pop band and I write pop songs and we play them with all of our hearts. You know, whatever. But the Smashing Pumpkins, though – I love that band!

It’s really interesting that you say that. I’m personally really into that whole aesthetic of pop music – do you think we’re seeing a resurgence of pop?
There’s something timeless about pop music: I don’t know about it for a commercial standpoint, but the way that I see pop music is that the things that make a song good in 1965 are the same things that will make a song good in 2015. There are things that feel like they could exist in any era – to me, that’s what pop represents: music that exists outside of its era. I feel like if you played Robyn in 1972, they’d still think it was cool.

I don’t know about you, but something that I finding really perplexing at the moment is the expansive fanbase that there is for bands who attach that ‘Indie’ or ‘Twee’ prefix to their pop music. Has it become cool to be indie?
I don’t know what that word represents besides the fact that a record is released on an independent record label. To me, the hyphenation of music detracts from the idea that music should be good on its own terms – not how it’s distributed. Some of my favourite records are on RCA and Columbia. Bob Dylan recorded for Columbia, but it has no bearing on the quality of his songwriting. The hyphenation of all of that stuff; looking at the back of sleeves to see who paid for the record … it’s sort of missing the point that good records are records that can exist on their own.