Lowertown Interview

Late night interview with the leaders of the Ugly Duckling Union outside of Cat’s Cradle

Photo Credit: Ahron Frankel

Lowertown is a testament to friendship and the places it can bring you. Olive Osby and Avshalom Weinberg met in their sophomore year of high school, where they quickly began to write and perform music together. They have been inseparable ever since. With poetic lyrics and a unique blend of indie rock, grunge, electronic and lo-fi, the band has continually stood out from the crowd. As their tour comes to a close and a new album approaches, the band reflects on all of their past and present success, and all that’s to come in the future. 

Welcome to North Carolina! How was the show? 

Olive:  It was great! It was awesome. So much fun. I had a blast. 

Avsha: It was really sick. Everybody came out and moved. It was awesome.

How does it compare to the other shows on tour so far?

Olive:  It’s hard to beat Atlanta 'cause we're from there. Every time we pull up, people go mental. But this was a good one. I'm really happy with how many people came out and moved around and shit.

Avsha: It’s our first time headlining here too. To have this many people come out to the show, our first time with a full band too, it's pretty awesome. 

How has the tour been so far overall? 

Olive: It’s been one of my favorite tours ever. I feel like as people, we've worked on ourselves a lot and grown as [people and] musicians. At this point, I feel very self-assured and myself as a musician. I feel way more confident and powerful up there.  I feel like I had to prove myself all the time and that I was never good enough. I had a lot of imposter syndrome, but this is the first tour with Lowertown where I’m like “nah, I've earned this, I'm here and what I'm doing is good.” The people that come out feel like they're on my side; I don’t feel like I have to win anyone over.  I've been watching the Fugazi movie a lot - that’s been one of my biggest inspirations, [with] how they act with the crowd and their energy. We’ve come into this very powerfully and mindfully, so it’s been an awesome tour. 

Avsha: It’s been my favorite tour ever! We’ve been touring since the beginning of 2022 - we’ve had four tours [since]. We’ve done a lot of trying things out, seeing what doesn't work. Now, I think we have something that is sustainable and works really well in terms of a dynamic with the band - how we drive and keep our sanity. 

You started out in Atlanta, grew up in a really great music scene. Did that influence your sound at all? 

Olive:  Definitely. I feel like we wouldn't be the people we are if we grew up anywhere differently. It’s really cool because it's such a scrappy scene. The community is so important. There’s not a lot of infrastructure for industry stuff with the kind of music that we make, so I feel like everything that happens is by the people, [especially] young people. It’s not very transactional in the way where I feel like moving to New York [is]. There’s a lot more opportunities for upward mobility with your career, but I feel like people just do things [in Atlanta] for the love of it. It’s not about the money or the clout a lot of the time, it’s just about creating. It was a very welcoming space and, very luckily, a safe space to be as a young woman, which is really cool, ‘cause I was really dumb and naive when I was a kid. I'm glad I was very sheltered in the scene where people had no tolerance for bullshit. I just feel like people were a lot more experimental there because it feels like there's less stakes. It's also a very political place to grow up; you sort of grew up learning that music and art has an impact outside of the aesthetics of it. It really can do a lot of good for communities, bring people together and teach you about a lot of different kinds of people. It’s one of my favorite cities in the world, there's nothing like it in my opinion. 

Avsha: I always talk about Atlanta in the context of somewhere like New York, [because] Atlanta has such a rich artistic scene. The only difference between Atlanta and New York is that [Atlanta] didn't write about themselves all the time. They didn’t self-mythologize, they just did the art they wanted to do and didn't care if it left the community. There’s so much interesting stuff there, so when you spend a lot of time there, you can find a lot of really, really cool things. A lot of cool art scenes and music scenes. The same thing happens in a lot of smaller, more current scenes too. It’s very rich in that way.

The band has undergone a lot of change in the last few years. You moved to New York, had your first independent release since your first album with the Skin of My Teeth EP. What has all that change been like for the band structure and for your music? 

Olive: I  feel like we're both people that don't like to be told what to do. We also started doing music professionally at a very young age and have always been about changing and evolving. I feel like every phase of the band has been what it should be. It's been so amazing to have the resources of a label, but we also missed a lot of stuff about being independent. There’s just a lot of bureaucracy around a label, that needs to be there a lot of the time, but we just don't mesh well with. Things take longer - you need a lot of approval to run through a lot of things. We were also just young and we didn't understand how the money of being a band professionally worked.

Avsha:  It's also really easy to build resentment when you start really early with an authority figure [with] something that's supposed to be creative. We were given a lot and we had so many opportunities and doors opened because of what the label offered us when we were young. But we reached a point where we were like, “it's time for us to do our own thing.” That was also two to three years of trying to get our footing, figuring out what we want to do with the band, and how our friendship has developed and what it was gonna be. Now that we don’t have a label, we can do this out of fun. That’s kind of what the new album is about; it spans over two or three years. It follows the direction of our friendship since we left [the label] and moved out [after] living together.

 Did you expect your music to get this big when you started? 

Olive: No, but I’ve always had big goals. I feel like my way to be happy in life is to have big dreams, but not big expectations. Ever since we started the project, I've believed in it. I've always had a big vision for it because I think what we're doing is so special. I feel like the artists that do go far really do believe in what they're doing. This is a bad way to put it, but you have to feed into your own bullshit and the world that you build, because nothing has importance unless you give it importance. Especially art - it's a subjective thing that you create out of nothing. It’s really awesome, especially since we haven't put out a full length project in almost three years, to tour the United States and have so many people come out and care so much. I expected the tour to be cool, but I didn't expect it to be this crazy. All the shows feel so rewarding and the turnouts have been awesome. I'm very, very touched at where we're at right now. I feel very proud of us. I always feel like I'm so old because I've been doing it for a while, but I'm not old at all - we're 23, you know? We just started doing this very young and have been doing it for a while, so it feels really nice to see things pay off and feel like they're worth it. Avsha and I started this band not expecting immediate success ever. I feel like we were like, “we'll do things our own way and if we do get success, it'll probably be a slow burn.”

Avsha:  Most of the people who we like [get successful] after they die. So I [was] just like “we'll do this for like 40, 50 years.” I think that's also the thing with me - I always felt that I was gonna do music all the time and it didn’t really matter that much to me if it picked up. I was like “hopefully at some point, someone will listen and resonate. But it's always gonna be what I'm doing, so I might as well do it and then see if something happens.”

 If you could go back to your younger selves and give them any word of advice, what would it be?

Avsha:  Take your time. Good things don't happen quickly. You also don’t really want good things to happen quickly because success and positive things are a bubble. If it doesn't grow naturally, it will pop, and you will be so much lower than you were at the beginning.

Olive: No one cares as much about you as much as yourself. I used to be so self-critical and I used to never think I was enough. After every show, after every song I put out, I would always feel some sort of imposter syndrome and that I would never be accepted or respected. I was always just very self-conscious about my appearance and all that. I didn't get into music to be perceived for my physical self, so I used to worry a lot more about that. But no one cares as much as you do, you're in your own world and in your own head all the time. When you mess up, it's not as big of a deal as you think. It’s better to laugh at it and make it funny, or just not care.

When I'm talking to people about Lowertown, one of the first things that always comes up is the lyrics. It's a little jarring at first. What does the writing process look like for your music? 

Olive:  It's changed over time and it's always changing 'cause we get bored of doing the same thing. If you approach every song the same way, you're gonna get a lot of the same thing. I started doing poetry before I did music. Avsha has a big background in classical music and is a very talented instrumentalist. We started out with me having more lyrics and him having more instrumentals, and then putting them together. Now it's a lot more collaborative and symbiotic. Now, sometimes I'll start with a prompt or I'll start with a feeling. I'll just write an insane amount of stream-of-consciousness stuff or insanely long spoken word pieces or poems. Then I'll [keep] refining and revising until I like the way that it sounds. 

Avsha: It didn't start out that way, but it ended up becoming “let's hang out and make music together.” We would sit down for hours in my basement in New York and just be like, “let's just do like the first thing we think about and see if it's a bad song. If it's a bad song, [scrap it], and if it's something awesome, let's do it.” That’s kind of how a direction formed for the new album. It was completely different from the way we've written before because it's been so collaborative. Olive is much more of a personal writer, she likes to kind of be on her own. Even now, when she records vocals and stuff, I usually leave the room. But still, it’s the most collaborative we've ever been. 

We’ve talked about it a lot, but another very important part of the music is obviously your friendship. What has friendship and community meant to Lowertown? 

Avsha:  We met at the end of 2016 and it’s kind of become everything [for us]. We were just best friends for most of high school. All of the things that were happening to us - how close we were, how much we love to make music together, the opportunities we were getting in junior and senior year - was such a unique experience. You look for people who you can share the experiences with, so we’ve ended up relying more and more on each other. We were going through some most pivotal years of our growth together; from ages 16 to 23, so much happens to you then. Having somebody that's there the whole time is good for so many things. You're growing and you're changing. It has become such a major element of our lives. [I have been] navigating how to have a close friend for a really long time. It’s good, it teaches you about life in general - how to be around other people and how you’re gonna spend 50 years with the people around you. It was special to be able to start doing that when we were like 16 or 17, finding a person where you're like, “okay, we're gonna be best friends forever.” [You’re also] making music with your best friend who's now your colleague, then it becomes something completely new. If you need advice, if you're struggling with something, there's not really anybody you can go to to get advice from. You have to figure it out and it ends up leading to a lot of really difficult things. But you learn [together], and we’re closer than we've ever been. We've figured out how to make it a really sustainable and happy friendship. 

You have a new record coming out in the fall, Ugly Duckling Union. Talk about the record!

Avsha: It’s definitely more varied in sound. I Love To Lie was a pretty angry album - there's a lot of hurt in it and a lot of the strife that we were going through at the time. I love that album and I think that as our discography grows, I think people will come back and revisit it and love it. I'm coming back to it now and saying “there's a lot of stuff in this that I originally didn't really like that I love now.” But this one is definitely a lot more gentle, it's less angry. It’s more about the things happening around us rather than ourselves, which ends up becoming [about] us and our friendship. It’s not as raw -  it's just like more processed and healthier thoughts about your feelings. [It showcases] the roundedness of our relationship, which is humor and strife and joy and sadness. We recorded and produced it all ourselves in my basement - it’s the first time we've done that since Friends. It’s a return to that kind of songwriting and to that freedom. It’s gonna be awesome.

Olive: There’s a lot of humor in it. It’s more of an aerial view of yourself than being inside of your body, if you know what I mean. But it does have some of the similar sound to our previous stuff too. 

What do you hope people take away from the album and your music in general?

Avsha: Not to take themselves too seriously. Appreciate joy and the people around you. 

Olive: I hope they feel [something too] - there's some deep tracks on there that hurt. I hope they feel seen, and definitely appreciate the people in their life. It feels like a very powerful album 'cause we did do everything ourselves and I think it sounds really good. If no one gets you, you still do shit, ‘cause people actually do fuck with you. I didn't think this many people would get us and [that we would] connect to this many people. That just shows you that you never know the impact of what you're gonna do. When you’re creating, just do before you think. The more you think about things, the more you can destroy. Self doubt destroys a lot of beautiful things that come from your subconscious and from your immediate feelings. 

Any final words? 

Olive: We'll probably be touring again for the album when it comes out. That will probably be early next year, ‘cause we need to [regain] sanity. Avsha’s probably gonna be dropping some solo music at some point too!

Avsha: Shoutout North Carolina. Y'all rock, I love to be here. Shoutout the album - stream Ugly Duckling Union when it comes out. Lowertown for Life. 

You can stay in touch with Lowertown at the links below: 

Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple Music | Website | YouTube