by Jacklyn Lipscomb and Mari Washburn
Indie alt-pop duo Ginkgo Balboa is taking LA's music scene by storm with their uniquely mesmerizing, genre-bending sound that embodies a laid-back lifestyle built on good vibes and sunshine. Putting this signature style on full display with their recently released EP Balloon Duty, the project arrives just in time to give fans one last dose of serotonin to add to their summer playlists.
We were fortunate enough to catch up with founding members Mike Bednarsky and Ben Masbaum to chat about the band's history, musical influences, and all things Balloon Duty. Read our full interview below!
Alternative Lately: To start off, would you mind sharing a little bit about yourselves, how you guys met and how you got your start in making music together?
Ben: Well I can make this as long of a story as I want to, but you know, I was going through a divorce at the time. Mike was in the process, I think, of moving to California. Maybe he had been here already for a while. And then we ended up meeting each other at the California Beer Fest, which is essentially a giant music and beer festival. We were working logistics, so we were basically picking up a bunch of heavy things and carrying them from one end of a giant field to another for about 15 hours. It was a really fun time. It's a festival atmosphere and we got to talking, hanging out, and having a good time working, and we realized that we lived a five minute drive from each other. At the time, I was living in Van Nuys and he was in Valley Village. We just became friends before we ever actually started the band. I think we were friends for about a year before we even had the decision to start a band. We had been talking, Mike knew that I was a musician and had been playing and recording. I had been in several bands before, and I knew that he was a bit of a wordsmith and a poet. So I don't even remember how the conversation went, but we just kind of decided- Hey, let's form a band. Let's do something that these kids are gonna like, you know.
Mike: Yeah! I was kind of in the process of moving to LA- it was technically my second summer there. I moved in 2017. We met in 2018. But, you know, when you're moving to a new place, you spend time just getting ingratiated in whatever work you're doing and making friendships. So 2017 I feel like, was almost a solo vision quest, and then it expanded from there. When I did move, I was in the process of finishing up a solo album of folk music and I was just kind of having a quarter life crisis where I was living, which was my college town of Iowa. And it was the second time I was living there. In Iowa I was, you know, maybe looking at MFAs for creative writing, which is what I was studying, and like you said, poetry. I was working on this hops farm- this is a cool story, I promise. It's a little bit of a pivot, but I was working on this hops farm and I was learning about brewing beer. And I was like, maybe this is what I'm gonna do. Then I found out that Chris Cornell died and I was in the process of maybe thinking about moving to LA, and it shattered my reality of what music could be, especially when you're pursuing it professionally. But something called me to do it, you know? So, I had to end up here at a certain point. And then like Ben said, I like to think of our festival days as more glamorous because look what it led to. I just learned about this whole new industry of events and it's fun because it's just nonstop energy. And yeah, we became friends first. If we didn't do that, I don't think we would've been able to accomplish what we have so far.
Seems a bit serendipitous!
Ben: Yeah, being friends first definitely helped us even get to the idea in our head, you know what I mean? As Mike said, it wasn't one of those things where he or I thought separately, oh, I wanna form a band, and then we went out looking for each other.
Mike: We shared hotel rooms too. So, pre-touring or any band gigs, we knew that we wouldn't kill each other in the middle of the night.
Ben: Just maybe some cuts and bruises a little bit, but we wouldn't actually go full death, you know.
Individually, where did your backgrounds in music stem from while growing up?
Mike: I guess I'll go first. For me, it's weird because there were a lot of parallel lines. My dad is a jazz guitarist. I grew up in basically a New York City suburb where the musical theater and art scene is coveted and really appreciated. And it's about an hour out of the city, so if you go to a production, people will show up as representatives you know, Broadway, regional theater, whatever. Even though it was jazz and blues in the house, I had older brothers who were more interested in musical theater. So those two things converged, and I was just around it all the time. It's growing up, hanging out in our kitchen or something, my dad's downstairs in the studio basement and he's teaching guitar lessons and I'm hearing scales, I'm hearing trills. And it really develops in me, a love for music. I never thought of genres as something that wasn't unifying, you know? So for me it was always the idea that it's all important, all music. From there, I kind of thought, how are you going to rebel against your cool dad who plays guitar? You're gonna not play guitar. Which, you know, I learned a little bit eventually, but it's definitely a part of me that regrets that. But I focus on words, I focus on writing and breaking down syllables and alliteration and rapping and that kind of stuff. So I spent more time on what I was saying, and also vocal melodies and harmonies. I feel like I always had an ear for that. From there, I was like, how can I communicate these things to musicians because you can't just record acapella all the time. And thus began my journey.
Ben: Just to piggyback off that, it's also hard to rebel against your parents when they're basically encouraging you to do everything you're trying to use to rebel against them.
Mike: It made me wanna be in a more stable working environment where I'm like, oh man, I just wanna be organized. Maybe I should learn how to crunch numbers or something.
Ben: Yeah. My mom was a visual artist, a liberal artist, and my dad was a musician. So growing up, I was always around the arts and I realized at a young age that I had sort of gotten that artistic gene. I started out doing a lot of visual art, but when I became a teenager, I found music and yeah, started playing drums, actually originally in a band. And then eventually learned how to play all the other rock instruments, essentially. I started with guitar and stuff. And then they gave me a little four track I got for my birthday. It's like a four track cassette recorder that I would spend just kind of noodling around and basically making these entire catalogs of this weird, obscure music. I realized that I was really into the obscure stuff, not as much the poppy stuff. I got into a metal band, slightly after that. Then as you know, the digital age came and we're using non-linear editors or DAWs. I also do video editing too, now. But yeah, I remember getting Cool Edit Pro, which is like Adobe's predecessor to Audition, which, eventually became Pro Tools or something like that. I could be completely wrong on that, but yeah, it was just something that I always loved to do. When I moved to California, I basically quit all my bands that I was in and just continued to record and write music and stuff like that. Ginkgo Balboa is the first band that I've even been in since I moved to California. So it's really exciting, especially with this new album coming out. Things are progressing a lot.
Speaking of new music, you've just recently released your newest EP Balloon Duty. How does it feel to have the EP out in the world?
Ben: It feels amazing, right? It feels like right off of our shoulders now because we deliberate a lot of these songs that, I mean, some of them are years in the making since we started in 2019. I think the first thing we ever did was, I showed him six riffs or whatever, it was like eight songs. And then six of them made the first EP, the other two we kind of sat on for a while. Throughout those years, since 2019, we started sitting on a lot of music that we didn't really think was necessarily Ginkgo Balboa. and some of these songs needed some reworking to tonally keep us coherent or cohesive as a band, you know. So yeah, we'd sit on these songs and there's a lot of songs off Balloon Duty that we had since the birth of Ginkgo Balboa. I think “Helena Troy” is the only one we actually wrote.
Mike: Yeah. Like for real last year in 2022. In terms of when the first single came out and how we were feeling- I was down in Escondido with some friends, which is between here, LA and San Diego. And actually right as the Alternative Lately radio spot came out, I was with a bunch of friends and we were toasting to “Tie Me Down”, which is our first single from the EP. It felt good just to have a reminder of that external energy that people are buying into what we're doing emotionally and as listeners. When the first single ever came out, we had so many people that were friends mostly, that would come out of the woodwork and be like, heard this new thing you're doing, right? That would happen to you. And people will be like, what!? What is this? People will be really amped up and then after a while, they just get used to it because it's what you're doing and it's your life. Just like with anything else, you're not gonna wanna look at your friend's baby photos that he or she is posting all the time. So people, I think, they became desensitized to Ginkgo Balboa and just accepted it and moved on.
Ben: But I think we had a lot of mutual friends too, who were actually kind of surprised. We told them that we were gonna be in a band, and they were like: oh, that's cool. We encourage you, you know, go for it. Then we started showing them our songs and we had a lot of friends who were just really surprised. They didn't even know that we were really capable of doing much, which is weird. It's a weird testament, you know, when you have friends that really don't know a lot of your craft.
Mike: It's all relative. What I wanted to say in short was: We're happy that these songs are out, and they're kind of like a shot in the arm in terms of our vision and what we hope to accomplish. It's a sequel, so it's just a lot of those same party vibes, but a little darker, a little more introspective, and everything is thoughtful, you know, all the decisions that we make.
And as artists, you work so hard in the moment, but then you need something like the release of these projects to remind people. We totally understand! Branching out a little bit, where does the EP title come from?
Ben: That's all this guy. It comes from his beautiful mind. We were talking about it in my kitchen, right? And I don't remember exactly how it came about, but we had talked about the cover art before we even talked about the name of the EP. We kind of were tossing around a few ideas and then one of them was a clown. We have a friend who is a very eccentric artist, and he has these tanks, I think they're probably nitrous, but we used it on the cover as a helium tank, but there were no balloons. I think the idea was like, well, here's a clown who his only job is to supply the party, and to supply the favors at the party, and he was on balloon duty and he failed to deliver the balloons. That was the mindset there. At one point, one of us said “balloon duty”. And we both were kind of just like, Hey, that's cool. I like that.
Mike: Yeah. It's definitely something you wrote. I latched onto it, and I was like, okay, I think this is gonna be the EP title, or it's gonna be used for something. And then Ben, you were being modest that you weren't sure if you liked it or wanted to use it. But then I kept bringing it up. It's funny because the band name kind of started the same way. We had a whole list of ideas and Ginkgo Balboa was something that he came up with years prior, right. And it was something we kind of sat on. Butthe backup EP title, the idea I had was some of the freeways here in LA when you're coming off and then you go onto one of the thoroughfares, it says, “wait here” as you're emerging and driving to a light. It says, “wait here”, so you read it in that order. But I always read it as, “here, wait.” I thought it was kind of cool. Very nineties, I don’t know.
Ben: Those signs on the road are really, really distracting for people with ADD because you always read it backwards.
Mike: Yeah. It's like, whatcha gonna tell me, wait for what? And then you stop.
Ben: Wait, no, come here. No, wait, no wait. I don't think the road can make up its mind!
Diving a little bit into the song creation process, do you have a specific method or structure for creating a new song, or do you just kind of feel it out as you go?
Ben: Well, usually the song process starts in the studio. It's not one of those things where we go into a rehearsal space and say, Hey guys, check out this riff that I wrote. Which is sort of the way it usually gets done in most cases in the bands that I've been in. But we’re giving into this new way of writing music. It's sort of a more commonplace now to just write in the studio. Oftentimes I'll sit in front of my DAW which is my digital audio workstation. For anyone who doesn’t know, it’s basically an editor and I just sit in front of it and mess around with different sounds, different pianos, different tones. Eventually while you're doing that, I'll use some made up riff that I came up with in my head, and if it really sticks, then that usually turns into something that we could use in Ginkgo Balboa. So that's how it usually starts. Sometimes that has to do with like, maybe I'll cover a song that's a big song, and then take that as the framework for a new song, and change pieces here and there until it's a completely different song altogether. That's one of the methods. From there, it's pretty varied, right? Wouldn't you say? Where we go from there is kind of varied.
Mike: Yeah, definitely. Ben oftentimes will create the exoskeleton of the song. There will be a main riff, or in real time we'll decide what we do and do not like about it from the melody, to the tone, to the length of the song even. And we're a lot better at it now, but when we first started, we were still learning about each other and how we handle these sorts of things. And especially-
Ben: Getting to know the band's sound too!
Mike: Exactly. We couldn't always articulate certain things we wanted, but I think it's more of a science now. We'll use the word married all the time. Like, oh, I'm married to this. I need to do this thing vocally. Or, I'm married to this guitar. For example, without revealing anything, we're working on a couple of new songs now, and we're talking about two guitar solos, one in the beginning and one in the end. And I'm like, well, I kind of hear it here because there's a build both vocally and with the melody you have, and then there'll be times where we’ll want to add a bridge that's a completely different key, you know, just to keep things interesting. We try to put it all under a microscope and envision how people will listen to it. We don't just wanna make music, we wanna package it. It's not content. We don't wanna use a gross word like that, that takes all the heart out, but we're cognizant of every little step and how it may be perceived.
Ben: Yeah, it can be a grueling process, but we don't really realize that until the process is done. We worked extremely hard on it, but we had a lot of fun doing it, you know? And I think a lot of that comes down to the writing process and really putting it under a microscope, as Mike said.
Do you feel like your experience in the industry has made an impact on your project as Ginkgo Balboa? And in what way?
Ben: It's almost like I've had to relearn a lot of stuff, like what has happened in terms of promotion and playing shows. All of that stuff's different. I, and Mike can attest to this, I'm really bad at social media and promoting that way in general. It's just not one of my things that I gravitate towards. Mike is really good at it, and thank god, because without that I wouldn't know the first thing of how to promote our stuff. I'd try to do it like I did back in the old bands and even then, that was a lot of hard work that didn't pay off most of the time, you know what I mean? And that's no different than nowadays. A lot of your hard work oftentimes doesn't pay off in the arts because there's also an element of luck to it. Obviously, you have to work hard at it and you have to have some amount of talent. But still, you're not gonna get lucky without all that hard work and the talent and the willpower.
Mike: Yeah. I think a background of being around music and then professional musicians, it's weird because there's so many different types of it. For me, it was almost like a mathematical thing in terms of the environment. I was around musicians who would read music, and that's pretty much how they seek to understand. There's the whole argument that there's different schools of thought in terms of listening to each other or just keeping your head buried in the sheet. Music and theory and all that stuff is important. I know that's not promotion, but it's like when I was raised in that environment, you have to focus on how much you enjoy it and making it for people that will just enjoy it anyways, versus turning it into something marketable.
I appreciate what Ben says about me and social media there, sometimes it's like, it's fun and it's motivating to have some BTS content. I do enjoy it, but you look at some pop singers who are recording content and bits and pieces of things they wanna share every single day. And I'm not one of those people. I get exhausted by it. If it were up to me, and maybe Ben feels the same way, I wish we could just do a four track, you know, record something live even, and then just send it out to people and then they'll take care of the heavy lifting from there like the old days. It's good and bad at the same time. You can be easily disappointed if you meet the average person who doesn't take music as seriously from a listening perspective, it's just like, oh man, you're just listening to this at the pharmacy because it's playing. If no one was playing it to tell you to listen to it, you wouldn't be listening to it. You know? But that's a whole other can of worms. I need some bourbon for that.
Ben: That's interesting though, because we have a lot more choice in what we hear nowadays, but before the internet and radio, we only listened to what we were told to listen to, right? If you turn on the radio, you have a choice of three genres, but they're all playing the same five songs all day. There is a saying about restriction breeding creativity. It’s kind of one of those things where if you're not given all of those choices, I think there's probably some opportunities there for some creativity, I guess.
Mike: Yeah. From a listening perspective, if we had no actual professional stake in what we were doing, I think it's an incredible time to be a fan of music, because honestly, you can take your DSP, and Spotify is the one where I've used most often, and you can take a song that you like and make a radio station based on that song, or based on the album that it's from. Those are all different things because it's pretty good in my experience, like picking up on artists that sound like that particular song, you know what I mean? You can customize what you want to hear and I think that's really important. Seeing a band sticker on a streetlight, you know, as you're walking down the street and then looking 'em up and Oh, I can listen to their music immediately. Those kinds of things bring me great joy as a listener, but you don't know if those artists are ever going to be able to benefit from what you're doing.
Ben: We’re given these algorithms, right? And it almost seems like we have the choice, but at the same time, I'll go to a coffee shop and I'll hear all the music that's in my playlist, and I'm thinking, oh, I learned about this stuff through Spotify organically, but everybody else got the same song. And then I'll talk to other people who say, oh yeah, we really love that band. So you can still find a lightness and that's one thing I thought was not gonna be present in digital music.
I thought people would just find songs organically, but they were the only ones who were really listening to the music. I feel like the algorithm at least has gotten to the point where it's still giving us, and this is a good and bad thing, but it's giving us all sort of the same kind of catalog in a way. And the good thing about that is it still brings that togetherness feeling. I think for a while in the digital age, that was kind of going wayside, but the algorithms are figuring that out. That mentality needs to come back. That sort of camaraderie with people, you know, having likeness and similarities in their music tastes.
There are quite a few collaborations on this EP. How did those come about?
Mike: We always like to collaborate. The first one that comes to mind, because we haven't worked with her before, would be Amy Ehrlich going by the name Morning Sun. She's someone that has been in our corner for a long, long time- even down to Facebook being the top fan. I think it has a little badge next to her when she comments. She's an incredible singer and she has a lot of soul. She was on Broadway for some time and the production of Rent. We've been discussing for year after year about collaborating. We would always say to her, we don't know when it will happen, but when it feels right it will happen. And then it did. We actually recorded and wrote a lot of that in real time with her, specifically in mind for the parts that she sang. So that's a different way of doing things for us. Kristopher Keesling, who is our live guitarist, wanted to showcase his specific sound on “You Decide.” And Stephanie Luna Gray does the voicemail at the end of “SIMF”, she's an incredible singer and she has a solo record out from 2020. But yeah, she does a voicemail and it is muddled off purpose so it doesn't showcase what she's capable of musically, but it's cool because it kind of teases the new album she's working on.
So we are Alternative Lately, and we would like to know what you have been listening to lately!
Ben: I have this playlist open right now, I call it Looking Up 23. It's all with songs that have kind of come up, and I always put this in quotes, “organically” in my suggested playlists. So there's a lot of Sports, Tennis, Jungle. We're huge Jungle fans.Washed Out, Miami Horror. That's a lot of the stuff that I'm listening to right now. Also, I go back to the stuff that I was listening to a couple years ago, like Toro y Moi, Porches, Neil Francis ,and STRFKR going back further. Those are also influences too, not just songs and bands that we're listening to, but definitely influences as well.
Mike: You wouldn't hear this in our music, but I'm a big fan of Horse Jumper of Love. I love all that, slow core, kind of sleepy rock music. But Horse Jumper is like the current flagship band for that genre. They have a new album that came out a couple months ago, EP I think actually. I’m really enjoying that. Spill Tab is another, she's super cool. Then there's the overlap. But Neil Francis all the time. I love JORDANN. He's also super cool. Night Tapes.
Ben: Blood Orange. Remember? Blood Orange!
Mike: Blood Orange, always Blood Orange. Yeah. I'm trying to think about who has new releases out. It's pretty much Horse Jumper of Love and Spill Tab for me.
Wrapping things up a little bit, what can we expect going forward from Ginkgo Balboa? Do you have any more future music releases coming up or any plans to dip into live music or anything like that?
Ben: Well, we don't have any dates set for the music that we're releasing, but we do have a few songs in the works. Hopefully one of the songs might even be out by the end of the year, so that would be cool. But you know, no promises made.
Mike: Yeah. In terms of live shows, our last show was like a Balloon Duty sendoff back in June, and we're talking about having a college tour set in place, so hopefully we can play at some universities toward the end of football season or something.
Ben: We had a little hiatus from playing music over the summer, which is not the best time to go on a musical hiatus, but, you know, that's just how our schedules kind of worked out and stuff. We still have jobs that we have to do, so-
Mike: Yeah, it's ongoing. In my mind, I'm like, oh, Balloon Duty just came out so we don't have to go in the studio for a long while. But realistically, you're always three steps ahead of where you need to be.
Ben: And technically we're always in the studio anyways. Like in the last month, Mike was away for work. He was outta town but we'd still keep in contact, and he's still in the studio. We just send each other music anyways for the most part. We don't live too far from each other, and so we still meet in person and stuff, but we have a Google Drive that's got all of our upcoming music on it and that we have it to where we can access it from anywhere really.
Listen to Ginkgo Balboa's Balloon Duty EP Below!
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