Illiterate Light Get ‘Sunburned’ At The Press Room On Aug. 17

PORTSMOUTH, NH – Even though they’re only a duo, Illiterate Light is a band that surely packs a sonic punch. The Virginia-based band consisting of Jeff Gorman and Jake Cochran exhibit a sound that weaves in between the styles of electric blues and ’90s-era alternative rock with some folky elements mixed in as well. This is evident with their debut full-length “Sunburned” that came out at the beginning of the year and has since received widespread acclaim. On August 18 at The Press Room in Portsmouth, people will get the chance to hear some tunes off of the stellar release along with some newer material. Fellow rock duo Earthkit will be kicking off the evening at 8 p.m.

I had a talk with Gorman ahead of the show about the making of the new album, the obstacles that delayed its release, a really cool thing the band has been doing at one of the major music festivals in the New England region and some new music that’ll be out over the next few weeks.

Rob Duguay: Was there any specific vision going into the songwriting and recording process for “Sunburned”?

Jeff Gorman: Our first record came out in October of 2019 and that album was really written on the road. We’d been touring very heavily from 2015 through 2019, so every song was road tested and we found moments when they were really working live. For example, that would be like “Better Than I Used To”. A lot of times when we were playing it live, by the end of the song people were able to start singing the chorus even if it was their first time hearing it. We were kind of feeding off that live energy and then taking that into the studio.

Then of course a few months after that record came out, the pandemic hit and we quickly went on to writing “Sunburned”. It was a very different experience from our first album, it was written kind of in solitude without there being any live shows, which I know we weren’t alone in experiencing. We had never played any of those songs live prior to going into the studio, so we really took a step back and just said “Ok, we’ve never road-tested these songs so let’s just approach it differently.” We didn’t approach it like we were trying to capture our live sound, we approached it as if we were going into the studio and it was our playground. As a rock duo one thing both Jake and I have in common is that we’re both multi-instrumentalists.

I also play drums, I play keys and bass and Jake does all of this as well along with a bunch of percussion and other stuff. We just approached the album in a different way, we went into the studio to layer keyboards, I wrote some songs on the keys, we did a ton of vocal overdubs and we took any limitation that had been put on us through playing live and we stripped it away. We approached everything differently and that’s what we did. The songs weren’t written live, we just worked them out in the studio and we were really happy with some of the new sounds and themes that emerged.

RD: From listening to the album, I really liked the music that came out of it. With “Sunburned” coming out this past January, were you and Jake waiting a while on it after finishing the entire process? What was it like dealing with all of that?

JG: A lot of that came down to vinyl production. We’re still very much believers in putting our music onto vinyl and we finished the recording sessions in November of 2021 and we had everything mixed during the following December. The album then came out 13 months after that, which is a long time for us. I still love the songs and they’re still just coming to life now for people, but ideally in a perfect world it would have taken just a few months. We would have finished the record a few months later, but a lot of it was because vinyl production has been so backed up and once we had secured everything with the label it was 10 months until we could get the record pressed.

We had to be patient and what that has meant is that we’ve been writing other stuff. We got more material that’s coming out this year and next year, so we’ve just kind of moved on. We had this big gap before our second record came out and we decided to work on new stuff. I live in central Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley and I built a studio in my backyard that’s 450 square feet and for Jake and I we’ve been able to get a lot of good work done there. We’ve been recording, writing, demoing, rehearsing and shooting music videos, we’re very hands-on with everything that we do as a band.

During that waiting period, we just started working on the next thing. I can’t fully disclose what the next thing is at this time but we got a lot of new stuff and we haven’t announced it yet.

RD: Alright, very cool. For the past couple of years, Illiterate Light has been known for managing the Bike Stage at the Newport Folk Festival in Newport, Rhode Island where all the equipment is powered by people pedaling bikes. Who initially had the idea for it, how did you go about pitching this idea to the festival and how arduous is it to set the stage up for an entire weekend?

JG: It’s a labor of love. The quick history of it is 10 years ago in August of 2013, Jake and I had just graduated college. We went to school at James Madison University in central Virginia and we had formed a community of people down there where we were all essentially trying to live our lives on bike as much as possible. We’d bike around town, we’d go from Harrisonburg to Stanton which is 20 miles, we had these awesome big bike trailers for when we needed to haul stuff around town whether it was musical equipment, stuff for compost or whatever else. We were trying to do as much on bike as possible for environmental reasons and within that we were playing music together.

It was me, Jake and around 10 other close friends and one of our friends had the idea to rig up a little generator that was powered by bike. We’d set a bike up into a little trainer, we’d spin the wheels, we’d start pedaling and we would convert that direct current into electricity. We could power a small speaker or whatever else we could actually power with that, so that was pretty much the idea. It was just a bunch of college hippies trying to find some way to live off the grid and we did that for several years before we formed Illiterate Light and decided to jump in the van and start touring the country in a more traditional way. For years, we’d always said that we really wanted to find a way to bring the bike energy and vision into what we’re currently doing, so we played the Newport Folk Festival in 2019.

We played in Fort Adams and when we left the festival grounds, I saw 2,000 bikes lined up as we were departing. Jake and I looked at each other and we were like “Man, if we were ever to do something that was powered by bike, this would be the place to do it.” The spirit of Newport Folk felt right for it, the culture is great for having these conversations for thinking about the future, everybody is down for experimenting and that was when the seed was planted. Last year, I reached out to Jay Sweet who promotes and organizes the festival and I said “Hey man, I got an idea. We’re not playing Newport this year, but we want to bike out into the crowd after one of the main stage performances.”

We were going to bring a bike trailer with us and on that big bike trailer there was going to be a big sound system. We wanted to bike out into the crowd, plop that down, have a few people jump on the bikes and then do a 15-minute crazy rock show with this PA that we would be carrying. That was our initial vision and Jay got right back to me saying “Hey, this sounds very interesting, let’s talk some more about it.” We had a phone call not long after that talking about how much we could actually power by bike and hosting a small pop-up stage for the weekend with artists performing throughout the festival. Jake and I realized that we couldn’t power an entire stage by bike, but if we supplemented it with solar energy and solar panels then we could have a whole little stage that’s powered by both the sun and by people riding bikes.

We were really attracted to that vision and that idea, so we brought a bunch of solar panels, we got a bike endorsement Jamis Bicycles, we set up six bikes and we made this whole little stage without ever touching power from the grid. It is its own little floating universe, we organized it and we made it happen. Last year was our first time doing it, it went great and we were invited back this year so we did it again and it went even better after making a bunch of little tweaks. People come and they jump on a bike for about three to five minutes while watching the stage and there’s artists that people love like Valerie June, The Ballroom Thieves and folks like that who are great musicians. Their fans are 10 feet from them and they’re gently riding a bike, we give everyone an ice cold yerba mate or ice water and through pedaling they’re providing the electricity for artists for that show.

We think that’s a really cool concept, people get behind it and it went really well this year. We don’t know if it’s going to be a staple or what we’re going to do with it going forward, but I love to see artists and fans working together to create something really unique, really beautiful and really meaningful. Newport Folk has given us the keys to be able to do that, so we’re really thankful for them.

RD: I actually was at the festival this year and last year so I’ve seen it work in person in its real form and I think it’s very cool.

JG: Thanks.

RD: No problem. When it comes to operating as a band in all facets, what’s the most complicated thing you and Jake deal with as a duo and what’s the easiest thing to deal with?

JG: The answer is probably one and the same. I love making decisions together, I know it’s such an unsexy answer, but if you have five people living in different cities, experiencing different stages of life and with different needs like the way some bands operate, it can be hard to make decisions. It’s difficult to get momentum and get the ball rolling, but for Jake and I it’s so nice for us to be able to really trust each other. It’s just the two of us and if somebody has an idea, it’s pretty easy to put it into motion right away. We just shot a music video a few days ago and we went into it having a general loose concept while telling my buddy who has shot a bunch of stuff for us in the past to show up to a warehouse.

Jake and I packed up a ton of lights and a bunch of gear and we just figured it all out on the spot. That sort of thing is amazing because it’s just us and also living in central Virginia, we have a great community both in Harrisburg and Richmond. It’s really easy for us to just take on a project and roll it to completion. We did a pop-up show before Newport because I wanted to test out the solar panels and the bikes. I called a friend that runs a brewery down the road and we did the show for free out in the parking lot after I got the word out that morning.

300 people showed up at 7 pm at a brewery to help us figure this thing out. That sort of small thing where we know everybody, people dig our band and I feel like we matter in this community is one of the best things. It’s one of the easiest things that we have going for us and then there are other times where I watch all the shows in Newport, some of my favorite bands played there this year. Seeing a five-piece band where everybody is so dialed in, everybody is so good and they have the manpower for it, when we get up there as a duo we cover a lot of ground but I have to admit that there’s plenty of times where I get jealous and envious. I wish there was a five or six-person band and we had some extra manpower up there, so that’s one of the things that we come up against.

I wish that we sometimes had more people on stage to carry some of that with us so I can do a guitar solo without having to play bass with my feet at the exact same time. It’s all good though, I love what we do and I’m happy with being a duo.

RD: That’s what ultimately matters, but I totally get what you’re saying. There’s so much room you have to fill as a duo that other bands don’t usually have to when you have other members.

JG: Yeah.

RD: You just mentioned how you guys have a new song coming out soon along with a bunch of new material being unveiled over the next few months. Without giving too much away, what are some details about the song and the music video for it?

JG: The song is called ‘Don’t Settle Down” and we’re also putting out a new EP on September 15th and this song is the first single off of it, which will be out on August 25th. I’m sure that nobody really thinks about it like this, but it’s important for me to give a little disclaimer that we’re very much a record-based band and an album-based band. I love albums, I love bodies of work that are 30 to 45 minutes, but we’re also living in a new era of the digital age. We’re writing more often in our studio, so we want to be able to put out music a little more frequently and not press everything to vinyl. We’re starting to embrace putting out singles digitally along with releasing EPs and things like that, we’re really feeling all of it out.

This is one of the first times that we’re embracing a release like this one. A lot of the songs were recorded during the making of “Sunburned”, they were ones that didn’t 100% fit into the album but we still really love them and we’ve been looking for a way to put them out. We’ve kind of remixed some things, added a few little tracks to stuff and just tinkering on these tunes that have been floating around. They’re like these little islands, each song is kind of like its own little world and the first one that’s coming out, “Don’t Settle Down”, I’m sure that we’re going to be playing at The Press Room in Portsmouth next week. It’s a heavy rock song, it’s probably the heaviest song we’ve ever done and it’s very much fuzz guitar driven.

It’s just a song about people standing up for what they believe in. I’m very much about living out your values, so the song encourages people to go for it and go for what they care about. If that’s political action, if it’s starting a company or even starting a garden, go for it and live your life to the fullest. It’s a really heavy song, the music video is going to be performance-based with Jake and I going crazy in this warehouse and I can’t wait for people to hear it.