It’s a traditionally humid evening as I wait outside The Biltroy, Chapel Hill band Megayacht’s Hillsborough studio. Their warm-up jam leaks through the side door of the ranch-style house; a groovy progression with post-rock flair. As it fades, the door swings open and Mitch Bennett cheerfully welcomes me in. The band’s space is comfortable and free of distraction. They settle on and around a grey futon while I set up my equipment.
Megayacht was born of the long-time friendship between its four component members, centered around Chapel Hill and the anything-goes slack-rock dream of the 90’s. Attacking the Rust, their first release, features fully-formed singer-songwriter tunes fleshed out by the full band. In contrast, their newly-released record Out of Bright is a study in collaboration, ideas discovered together and refined together. It’s the triumphant shout of a band discovering its voice. Self-recorded and self-mixed, this sophomore effort is a testament to their growth as songwriters, collaborators, musicians, and engineers.
I sat down with the band to talk about the enigmatic character on the cover, the origins of “Megayacht”, and how the new album came together.
How did Megayacht come together?
Mitch (vocals/guitar): We all came up in Chapel Hill in the 90’s, going to college and playing in bands. I moved to Atlanta for a long time, then came back five years ago. We started Megayacht, and we’ve been playing ever since.
Kevin (guitar/vocals): We played in different combinations of bands all that time.
Mitch: These guys [Frank and Matt] played some blues and some harder stuff; Kevin put his guitar in the attic for a couple of years.
Kevin: Let it marinate up there.
Frank (drums): Before Mitch moved, he and Kevin and Matt were in a band for a few years.
Kevin: Chapel Hill, basically; we all came back here or never left.
Matt (bass/vocals): But we’ve known each other a long time, like Frank and I knew each other when we were twelve years old.
Tell us about the new album!
Mitch: It is called Out of Bright. We like to name things from our lyrics because we can never agree on a name otherwise, so Frank scours the lyrics until he finds something that sounds like a good album title. [To Frank] Is that a good answer?
Frank: Yeah, it’s true.
Mitch: That’s how we got our name too, and also the last album. We just like the sound of it.
Were you surprised that the name Megayacht wasn’t already taken?
Kevin: We were not surprised because it took us six months to come up with a name. We had a lot of sheets of sticky paper in Frank’s garage, just list after list of possible names. We would take them home, research them, and go [throws up hands] they’re taken. We were excited to find one that was not.
Mitch: We did all that, found one name that wasn’t taken that we liked, in Megayacht. We like that it’s big and preposterous and that no one had it. My son just started a band, and they chose the name they wanted. It turns out you can have any name you want; it doesn’t matter. You can still be on Spotify if you call yourself Led Zeppelin.
Kevin: There’s a little confusion with people expecting yacht rock.
Matt: Yeah, we played a show one time where they were expecting yacht rock, and we did not deliver.
Kevin: It was still good.
What’s this record about?
Mitch: The first record [Attacking the Rust] was stuff that we were writing when we were apart, stuff we had demoed that turned into songs. This one was more about us taking time to put things together that were coming from all of us. What it’s about is confusing to us; we felt like it flowed and was one cohesive thing. We were just listening to the record for the first time the other night-
Kevin: -first time in months-
Mitch: -and we were like “wow, that’s a lot of different styles back to back.” Just after a smashing, punchy, guitar-driven thing, we’ll do a sad country duet, but I like that it’s a little chaotic.
Matt: I would love it if you could find a theme in our album. If you could pull that off, that would be amazing.
That’s range, man.
Matt: We’ve been playing all kinds of different genres since we’ve been together and I think this album feels like “us”. We don’t really stop and say “that song can’t be Megayacht”. Unless it’s really ridiculous, then we have another outlet for that.
Mitch: If it’s too ridiculous, it goes to Reluctant Beating Incorporated.
Is that a band I should interview?
Mitch: It’s a secret band that I probably shouldn’t tell you about.
Kevin: We didn’t have a purpose with this one. I do think the interesting thing is that a lot of these songs came from pre-practice or mid-practice; just throw a phone in the middle and play. We have hundreds of recordings, so someone will pick it up and bring it forward a month later like, “This is great, where did it come from?” And it was on the Google Drive.
Mitch: Or we become another band that we call ZZ Floyd, just jamming too long, six-minute horrible jams.
That’s cool, they can’t all be tight. Was Out of Bright recorded here?
Kevin: Yeah. [motions at the surroundings] This is The Biltroy, a property that I bought three years ago, named for the guy, Roy, who used to live here. My wife was like, “This is not going to be Megayacht headquarters,” and I said, “No.”
It [Out of Bright] was all recorded here. We get the song down playing live, then come back and record here. It’s loose; Frank doesn’t play to a click track, and we’ve never been on the grid with our tempos. We come in late at night, we come in on weekends, we spent one three-day weekend camped out here in the winter to wrap up. We spent a lot of late Tuesday nights banging it out.
How does your wife feel about it?
Kevin: She’s great with it.
Matt: We’re very grateful for Debbie.
Mitch: We recently booked a show that turned out to be on her birthday, and she was like, “OK.” She’s an amazing person.
Matt: We’ve never had anything like this before until Kevin got this space. We had Frank’s garage, which was cramped. It was great to get started, but this is such a nice place.
Mitch: With studio time that we’ve done in the past, you have to do everything so fast and make all the decisions, and they never change. We can rework stuff in here as long as we want.
Who mixed the record?
Mitch: [motioning to Kevin] This guy.
Kevin: I’ve gotten into mixing in the last three or four years, especially. I’ve always been the guy who mixed our stuff over the decades, and I was always really bad at it.
Mitch: You’re the best of us.
Kevin: I was the best of us, but I spent hundreds of hours of tutorials and classes to learn the basics of EQ and compression, and it makes a world of difference, more so now with digital plugins and replications of hardware that are incredibly realistic sounding. Frank and I were listening to the test presses the other night, and afterward we put on our record from two years ago, and sonically it’s very different. We’re learning all the time.
It sounds great, good job, Kevin. Who mastered it?
Kevin: We had it mastered in Durham by Mike Westbrook at Material Mastering. Mastering is its own school of thought and technique, and it’s too much especially after you’ve heard the same song 500 times. Mike’s fantastic, so great to work with.
Agreed, Mike is a gem. What are your favorite songs from the album?
Matt: My favorite is “Misophonia”. It’s one Kevin came up with and brought to us, which we expanded. I don’t know, it’s a jam. I really like the groove at the end; it gets me going.
Mitch: I like to play “The Shape” because Kevin’s doing a lot of hard work and I don’t have to. It’s just fun to sing and play.
Kevin: That is a fun one to play. You have a really nice guitar solo too.
Frank: I like “Impossible”. It’s got a 12-string, which we’ve never had before, which was fun to incorporate.
Mitch: You play some lovely drums in that too. He [Frank] learned to play drums by listening to KISS growing up, and now he’s doing finesse work on a quiet song. We never would have done that two years ago.
Kevin: I would go with “Impossible”. There’s a song called “When the Wave Comes Down”. We got this guy to play a horn section – I played some MIDI horns on it – he came in and laid down this incredible brass ensemble, and I love the way it sounds on the vinyl. Horns on vinyl sound so good to me. But “Impossible” is the one that’s been in my head the longest.
You had a few guests on the record. How did that come together and how did it go?
Matt: Our friend Creighton Irons plays keyboard on two of the songs. He’s the musical director at Woods Charter School and a phenomenal musician. He’s so enthusiastic, he comes in like, “Give me what you got”-
Kevin: -he’s not prepared, he’s anti-preparation-
Matt: But his ear is so good he’ll come up with stuff on the fly.
Mitch: He just takes his shirt off and rocks out and lays down perfect takes.
Kevin: He came over one night and laid down parts on a lot of these songs. We didn’t use them all, but they’re mixed in there.
Mitch: Mary Johnson Rockers is an incredible singer; she’s the woman doing the duet “Putting On a Show”. What is the name of her band?
Kevin and Frank: Nantahala.
Mitch: She just has an amazing voice, and I love how it blended, so she was brave enough to come out here at night. We’re hoping she’ll join us sometime to play it live.
Matt: She came in very prepared, pages of melodies.
Kevin: She came in with handwritten notes.
Frank: Who’s the horn guy?
Mitch: Horn is Kelly Pratt. He’s this awesome guy, lives in Chapel Hill, but he’s played with Father John Misty. He just took the recording and sent us three perfect parts. He still went back after and made them even better.
What were you listening to while making this record, as opposed to the last one? What’s in here?
Kevin: A lot of Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, Waxahatchee…
Frank: You have a lot of Pinegrove in you too.
Kevin: Yeah, old Pinegrove. I know you were listening to a lot of Michael Nesmith and the First National Band, Neil Young.
Frank: I stick with the classics.
Mitch: A lot of the things Kevin said, New Pornographers, I don’t know. I feel like we have influences from growing up that come out in a weird mix. I was very into They Might Be Giants, I loved Huey Lewis and the News so much. I feel like some combination of those two affects every melody that I come up with. These guys [points to Matt and Frank] were listening to so much KISS.
Matt: That was an early phase.
Kevin: What about the last year and a half, Matt?
Matt: When we were starting to record this, I was listening to The Cars a lot, trying to get that in my brain, to keep it pop-forward. I was like “we need to do more dance-y stuff”, and then I don’t think we did. I remember saying that at the beginning.
Mitch: We set out to make a dance record and totally failed.
Matt: Failed completely. I’m stuck in the past with my listening habits. All the stuff I’ve loved forever: classic rock and metal.
Tell me about the album art.
Matt: That guy on the motorcycle is Frank’s dad.
No way! Who took that photograph?
Kevin: We don’t know.
Frank: This photo has been passed around my family for 40-some years. My mom and dad used to go on motorcycle trips in the 70s. I brought it out one day thinking we should do something with it. I wasn’t thinking about album art, but it ended up being the artwork.
Matt: We didn’t know what it was going to be, then Frank brought the photo up and everybody agreed pretty immediately.
Frank: We’d seen it before, we had discussed music or something-
Kevin: -it’s the coolest photo of your dad.
Matt: What do you think he’d think of the album?
Frank: I’m not going to say what he’d say about the music-
Matt: -”this is not the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band”-
Frank: -”this is not Charlie Daniels”-
Mitch: But he’d be proud of you.
Frank: Yeah.
Matt: It’s a good tribute to him.
Mitch: And that’s when Megayacht cried.
Very cool. Winding down now, is there anybody in the local scene that you want to shout out?
Mitch: I love that Twin House exists. You go in, and they’re so nice and really helpful and don’t make you feel dumb. I feel like we’re so lucky to have a store like that. Even in Atlanta, they don’t have a store like that.
Kevin: I love our friends in Three Body Problem and Erie Choir that we’ve known for so many years. I love to go see them and get inspired by their music.
Frank: John Howie Jr.
Kevin: John Howie Jr., he’s going to open our record release on August 15th.
Frank: We’ve been watching him for thirty years.
Kevin: I don’t know why he’s not a superstar.
Matt: I love playing with the Dynamite Brothers. And I like Rob and the Local 506.
Mitch: Also Berkeley Cafe, Medium Heat, WCHL, and WKNC. And Blank Tapes.
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