Episode 517: Dustin Payseur (of Beach Fossils)

The album-making process has always been somewhat contradictory for Beach Fossils. Front man Dustin Payseur has never suffered from lack of inspiration, with hundreds of unreleased songs to his name, but releasing an album has always been about getting things just right. The Brooklyn-based band has released three LPs of original songs in its dozen or so year existence. The strange and seemingly unending nature of the pandemic, meanwhile, presented the opportunity to do something altogether different. Last year, the band released The Other Side of Life. The record finds the group revisiting eight older tracks. It’s a kind of greatest hits, re-envisioned as piano ballads, played by early member, ​​Tommy Gardner. It’s fascinating and enjoyable experiment, as well as an exercise in what it means to strip a song down and build it back in a dramatically different form. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.