Barbara & Ethan Gruska Turn Family Ties Into Sweet, Sweet Music
When the legendary John Williams is your maternal grandfather and your father (Jay Gruska) is an acclaimed songwriter who wrote for both Michael and Janet Jackson, you might say that music is in your blood. But for brother and sister duo Barbara and Ethan Gruska, that was just the beginning of their musical journey, and not until after Barbara had already toured the world (drumming with The Bird & The Bee, Jenny Lewis, and Benji Hughes) did she and Ethan decided to come together and form The Belle Brigade. After a series of electric shows around their native L.A. (including being the final artists to play at Spaceland before it became The Satellite) began building the buzz for their self-titled debut album, the siblings Gruska sat down with Buzzine in the Hollywood Hills for a delightful chat about surreal biblical stories, microphones that say ‘Frank’ on them, and the best drum sound ever recorded…
Stefan Goldby: Let’s begin by dismissing the white elephant in the room: Siblings in a band…let’s break this down. Are you more like the Gallaghers? Or is it the Osmonds? The Carpenters? The Jonas Brothers, perhaps?
Ethan Gruska: I don’t know – I haven’t met any of them, but I assume we are far stranger in our personal lives, and talk a lot more gibberish to each other…
Barbara Gruska: Pure gibberish. I don’t know – if the Jonas brothers only spoke Klingon, then maybe that would be us. [Laughs]
EG: Then we could probably relate most to them.
SG: A little more seriously, you did grow up in an incredibly musical family. You have a grandparent that composed the music that my kids run around my house humming pretty much all day. And with a father that is a renowned songwriter, with a recording studio in your backyard, that’s not exactly a typical upbringing…
EG: It’s lucky.
SG: Did all of that make you more, or less likely to be musicians yourselves?
BG: More.
EG: Definitely more.
BG: I understand the question, though, because my rebellion was, “I’m not gonna do this!” because I was so surrounded by it, but ultimately it was definitely more likely, just because it was…
EG: So natural…
BG: Yeah. Every grown-up that we saw coming through the house was a musician, so grown-ups were musicians, so our future…
EG: As a grown-up…
BG: Was to be a grown-up. [Laughs]
EG: Yeah, it’s like grown-up equals musician.
SG: But what was that like on a day-to-day basis? Did you hang out in the studio with your dad? Were you shooed in or shooed away?
EG: Definitely allowed in all the time. Everybody that my dad worked with was always very nice and very welcoming to our young energy. My dad used to let me go in and plunk around: One time Barbara accidentally erased 30 minutes of music!
BG: [Laughs] Someone taught me how to make drum sounds on a keyboard…
EG: Yeah, he would let us do stuff like that…
BG: And I just went in and I started pressing buttons and stuff, and his studio assistant went, “Er…Jay? Barbara just erased half an hour of music.” And I just went zzzzzzzzip outta there. [Laughs]
EG: Immediate time-out for herself.
BG: But mostly it was amazing. My dad worked at home. We could come home from school and go and see our dad…most kids feel like they have to wait for their dad to come home to see him, but our dad was there, so that was a big plus for us, and I know that he intentionally put the studio in the backyard so he could be around us while we were growing up.
SG: But it wasn’t a headlong rush for you two into The Belle Brigade. Barbara – you went off on your own with Jenny Lewis and many other musicians. Was there a moment when you were out playing with those other people that you went, “I should be doing this with Ethan?” How did The Belle Brigade start?
BG: To answer your first question, no – I had never thought that. I was always just living my dream playing drums for other people, and one summer a couple summers ago, we just decided to play together. It was a decision that we made, and it all happened pretty fast. Pretty natural.
SG: Give me the circumstances of that decision…
BG: Sure. I’ll try to make it as romantic as possible. [Laughs]
EG: Yeah, it’s not easy because it sounds…
SG: Creepy?
EG: Exactly. It’s not romantic in that way, but it sounds more surreal than it actually was. We were on a family trip to Israel with our temple, and we were on a tour, and we hated the tour…
BG: Loved Israel; hated the tour.
EG: We just wanted to do our own thing and live by our own ideas and just kind of…
BG: Explore on our own.
EG: Yeah. And one day we just decided to skip out on the tour and we had a guitar, and we were right by the Jordan River…
BG: On the kibbutz in the north of Israel…
EG: So that’s how…very romantic. So we just spent a day singing harmonies…
BG: It was like a scene from the Bible…
EG: [Laughs] Yeah, exactly.
SG: Genesis? Armageddon? Something in-between?
BG: Well…
EG: We’ll see: It all depends on this interview. [Laughs] No, I’m kidding. But we just decided… We were singing harmony on one song, and we had both been writing on our own for a couple of years, and we just together were like, “Let’s just do it together.” We had already kind of had the seed planted in another way where I helped her record some of her songs in Sacramento, and I got to sing on a few things, but we just decided together then that it would just be a lot of fun to do it this way.
SG: And that fun led to you recording at the famed studios in the Capitol Records Tower at Hollywood and Vine…
EG: The first day of recording at Capitol was probably the best part of the recording process for me, just walking in there and having that history be so within the actual building and within the people that work there…
BG: Microphones that say, “Frank” on them…
EG: And “James” for James Taylor – all these idols. Nat King Cole’s piano, which is what that piano is. It was like a dream. We grew up in L.A., we’re from L.A. and we drive past that building all the time, and I always thought, “Will I ever go in there and just see it?” And I did once with my dad – him doing a strings day – but to go in there and work on our record was…unbelievable.
BG: I had never before felt like, “Oh, I’m experiencing the best day of my life right now,” and that’s the only time of my life that I ever felt that, and it really truly was.
SG: So no pressure there, then…
EG: Actually, no…
BG: It was too surreal to feel pressure. It was too much of a dream. It just happened, it went by…
EG: And the team that we had made it so easy, and the people that we’ve surrounded ourselves with, by fate and luck and choice, have just made everything…
BG: My favorite part of the whole process was sitting down behind the drum set and, in my headphones, hearing the best drum sound that I’ve ever heard recorded. [Engineer] Csaba Petocz just is a genius, and the sound that he brought out of the drums inspired me so much, everything that I played. So I’d never experienced something that professional before, and there’s no going back… Everything sucks now. [Laughs]
SG: Let’s be specific for a moment. Tell us about the album’s first single, “Losers.”
BG: It’s a pep-talk to ourselves.
EG: Hopefully we tried to make the lyrics as straight forward as possible. There’s nothing too cryptic about it, but it’s just basically about stuff that we feel every day, that I think everybody feels, of just being afraid to suck and being afraid that other people might be above you, or feeling like you’re above other people, and just getting caught up in envy and jealousy, and just trying to relieve yourself of it. Just kind of like a mantra.
SG: There’s more to music than being in a studio, and there’s more to your band than the two of you. Can you tell us about recruiting other people into the Brigade, and then taking your music on stage?
BG: Our live band and a lot of the guys that recorded the record with us are friends of mine from ten years ago. I’ve been playing with most of these guys for years and years, and the reason why the record sounds the way that it does is because of all of these different influences. All of our friends – everybody’s flavor, everybody’s taste, everybody brought something to the table. If Ethan and I made this record alone, it would not sound like this, and in my opinion, it wouldn’t sound as cool. And they made it really exciting for us.
Everyone has their own bands, we all play in each other’s bands, so it’s just amazing. Bram Inscore on bass; Aaron Arntz on keyboards; Blake Mills, on the record, plays electric guitar; Harlon Silverman, in the live band, plays electric guitar – he recorded with us on the record as well; Mike Finnigan, who was our neighbor growing up, who is a legendary B-3 player and played on Electric Ladyland…and with Joe Cocker – he came down and played on a few songs on the record, so that was a dream. I play drums on the record, but my friend Mike Green plays drums for the live show, and we switch off on a couple songs. He’s amazing. We always kind of subbed for each other’s gigs when we were out of town, so it was really cool.
SG: Ethan – as the relative newcomer…how is playing live for you?
EG: It’s hard for me…this is my first experience really playing live. I did a few things in high school, but just for friends at talent shows, so the stage fright is not necessarily the thing. Actually, it is. It’s hard to tell, because I’m also a perfectionist…we both are. But it’s been a great response. The people that we’ve gotten to play for have been a lot of friends that are really supportive. They’re moving around and…
BG: They know the lyrics and stuff. [Laughs]
EG: People that you don’t really know that come back and have learned some of the lyrics – that’s like the most exhilarating feeling that I feel so honored by. And things like that bring out a good night. I’ve definitely played shows where I started off really nervous and, by the end of the show, just because of the crowd and the energy, it gets brought out of me, like a good, happy, fun feeling.
SG: I love seeing a band that’s comfortable enough on stage to take a moment between the songs; I love that you bring up ‘the shirt guy’… How much of that is a deliberate attempt to make a show, and how much of that is just “This is who we are and this is how it goes”?
BG: I think it’s an even combination of those two things, because we could also just get up on stage and get lost in the music and not talk, so we are making an effort to make it fun for everybody, but at the same time, it is who we are. We’re goofy and…
EG: We’re failed comedians at the same time.
BG: Yeah, we’re struggling comedians…
EG: That’s what we’re really trying to do. We’re just trying to somehow make a little bit of a name for ourselves, and then just become a stand-up comic duo.
SG: What do you hope that someone who’s never seen you play before walks away thinking?
BG: It sounds boring, but that they had a good time and that they felt that we’re being genuine, because we are. And I just want them to have fun.
EG: Me and Barbara, when we write, you never know if it’s going to work or not, but the goal is to reach people. Making this record, writing this record, we wanted people to hear it and to feel it too, so that’s always the goal for us – for people to feel what we’re feeling and to try to get into other people’s minds and hearts, and that kind of thing.
SG: Where do you hope you’re going to be in a year? Bearing in mind that we’ll play this back to you in a year, and string you up with it…
EG: Under the ocean.
BG: [Sings] Under the sea… [Laughs] I don’t know. Hopefully on tour… Hopefully making our second record! That would be awesome.
EG: I’m in total agreement. That’s what I want to do. Everything is just geared toward the next record, because that’s the most fun that we get to have, is making the records. And live too. I hope that, in a year, our live show is just really tight and really fun like it’s a real show and…
BG: …that we get to be more dynamic with the live set, because we have a couple ballads, and we’ve written a lot of new stuff. It would be really nice to have not just a club show, that’s like 45 minutes of just trying to keep drunk people’s attention and have fun. It would be nice to have an opportunity to play the entire record and have some guest musicians come out and strip everything down and then build it up, and have more of a canvas to do that kind of more expressive show. That would be really cool. But mostly record the next record… [Laughs]
SG: Finally, what’s the best thing about being The Belle Brigade right now?
BG: Probably being brother and sister.
EG: Yeah, the thing that is always the best about my life, which is that we’re related and close, and we make a good team.
BG: We’re each other’s comfort zone. We get into fights and we get into arguments and disagreements and stuff, but we talk everything out and it’s like having your best friend in your band, who is also your family, so that’s the best part of the band for sure. And all of our band members – all the guys in our band – they are literally like our brothers from other mothers, so it’s a family affair.
EG: And we have so much support from people on the end of the gig that we don’t really know about, which is just more of the business and the more management – we have such great management, and the people at the label are very supportive, so we’ve been really lucky, and that’s something that I really appreciate right now, is just all the support. We’re new; we’re just starting out, so it’s really really nice.
The Belle Brigade’s self-titled debut album is out now on Reprise/Warner Bros. Records.