It’s a classic situation for any GW music student: You’re walking through the Phillips hall basement and through the paper-thin walls of the practice rooms, you hear someone absolutely killing it. Whether they’re singing, playing a wind instrument, string instrument, drumming, or whatever else, they are shredding and you just have to get a glance at them. (Maybe it’s someone you know!)
But then you look at them, and they look at you, and you don’t know them. So you walk away, questioning your entire existence, and it’s always super awkward when you pass that person in the future.
Luckily, when bassist Zach Blankstein met drummer Jared Gozinsky this way in the fall of 2017, it was still early in their freshman year when any stranger was a potential friend. So the two became friends and went on to become the GW piece of the puzzle of the Boston-based pop band Couch.
I started listening to Couch in 2019 after a random Spotify recommendation and instantly loved their music and their vibe. Infused with elements of rock, soul, R&B, jazz, and funk, their music is redefining what pop means. When you turn on Couch, you get to enjoy a fun fresh pop sound with danceable rhythms, but also more complex melodic and harmonic structures. Couch takes listeners to creative places that pop stars playing it safe at the big labels won’t always go.
As it turns out, I would also end up having a personal connection with the band. When I got to GW as a freshman I was surprised to learn that Jared and Zach had just graduated from GW and that they had been a part of the pep band that I had just joined!
Given my longtime fandom and my connection to them through GW Bands, it was an absolute honor and pleasure to catch up with three of the band’s seven members: Jared, Zach, and lead vocalist Tema Siegle. We talked about their beginnings, their new EP “Sunshower,” their headline tour, streaming and social media, and some of the trials and tribulations of being young musicians.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Matt: What’s the backstory of Couch? What brought you all together and how did you all get started?
Zach: Most of us are from the Boston area, and a few of us knew each other from playing in a different band in high school. At the end of high school and the beginning of college, I think a lot of us were looking for a similar type of musical outlet… We were listening to a lot of the same bands and started to hang out during breaks since we were at different colleges. But when we would come home we could all see each other and meet up and started to write and arrange some music. No gigs at that point, but we just really clicked with this group of people.
Jared: I mean Zach and I met at GW obviously, but it’s kind of a funny origin story. I was practicing in Phillips by myself the first or second week of my freshman year and then in the corner of my eye I saw somebody peering in the window, and there was Zach. And then I think that kind of scared him off and he kind of ran away and then shortly after I was done practicing I was in the music office and then he came in and was like “Were you just practicing in the practice room?” And then we started, you know, talking about all the bands that we listened to. Then we became good friends and musical collaborators and now here we are.
Z: It was like that moment in School of Rock when Jack Black is watching them in music class doing this eyebrow wiggle. It also happened to line up with a time when the band I was in at GW, our drummer was heading for a semester abroad and we were looking for a drummer. And here is this freshman absolutely kicking ass in whatever room is next to B160 and yeah, what a great time.
M: What different musical experiences did you all have while in college? How did all of that time apart shape who this band is now that you are all together again?
Tema: No one in the band actually majored in music. I think we’ve got some minors. I came the closest, studying musical theater and maybe [Saxophonist Eric Tarlin] with his double major at Berkeley. I don’t know – it’s funny to me that none of us were studying it and yet we still had all this stuff to offer just given our training prior to college. Especially considering the music we were consuming during the pandemic and during our time at college.
I was a musical theater student earning my BFA and so for me, my vocal training from college shows up in a lot of what I do with Couch and even some of my acting classes I think. Character study and script study; understanding the arc of a narrative is really important to me. And that’s something that we think about when we’re writing songs. “What’s our goal lyrically? What’s the story we’re trying to communicate? What’s the want and the need and how do we get it, or how do we feel at the end after we’ve gone through this whole emotional journey?” So that’s something that I’ve brought into my work with Couch, personally.
J: Yeah, I think a lot of us come from similar training. Many of us are jazz-trained but also have a lot of classical experience and I think a lot of those shared experiences makes music collaboration easier. But that being said, all of our own listening preferences may be slightly different. Having seven people in a band creates a lot of avenues for different creative ideas which I think serves our music very well.
Z: I’ll add Jared and I spent tens of hours playing and just jamming at GW. We could pretty much always get a practice room when we needed to and the school was really great about those permissions and everything like that. I think Jared and I came into Couch together with a pre-established really strong musical relationship. We don’t really have to look at each other much. We can kind of just anticipate what the other person is going to do and that’s from like three, four years at GW just really connecting there.
M: What was the process like of making your sophomore EP, Sunshower? What is your strategy to promote your music? With streaming platforms and social media still being so young, how have you learned to utilize those tools to grow your audience relatively quickly?
T: I mean you pointed out these platforms are young, but I think our youth works in our favor. We’re familiar with new promotional strategies that people are using just from what we see on TikTok and Instagram and we’re learning as we go and implementing it ourselves.
So I think an example of that is, with our first EP, we did put out two songs in advance as singles, but we kind of kept them on the down low until they were out. This time around we were leaking the songs, using them in clips on our socials to give people a taste of what was coming so that they were already vaguely familiar with the songs before they even came out. And that’s just one example of how we’re learning the kind of new release strategy that pop artists use these days.
Z: Yeah, it’s interesting trying to not let those platforms and ways of releasing and promoting influence the art at all, because it’s so easy while you’re creating the music to think “Oh, if we did this thing this could make a great video or whatever.” And sometimes it’s nice to lean into those things if the end result would align with what our creative goals were in the first place. But other times we just want to make the music exactly how we want to make it and then after the fact take the final result and figure out how we can reach the most people with it.
I think it’s a climate you see across socials, there’s some stuff that you see up there that was, you know, “Oh the sped-up up version of this song that’s already been released” is clearly for the purpose of a viral sound bite somewhere rather than maybe the most artistically fulfilling choice for that artist. And there’s nothing wrong with that, it works. I think since the band was born in an era of social media, we don’t really know how to be professional musicians outside of that era. As things are evolving, we’re always trying to figure out how much we immediately want to lean into something versus sort of just staying completely true to our creative process and letting the promotion follow on the back end.
M: As you guys continue on your tour and prepare your DC show, I was wondering how you adapt your music live? Every band has a different vibe and a different way of translating your compositions to a live performance. How closely do you honor the sound of the studio recording? Do you see a concert as a place for your fans to experience all of the music they’ve been jamming out to more or less how they have heard it, or is it a place to realize your music in a new way with improvisation, reharmonization, and rearranging?
J: It’s been actually an interesting process because some of the songs that we have on the Sunshower EP, “Alright” and “Let Me Hold You,” we’ve been playing live for a while. They originated more in a live setting than they did in a studio intended for streaming platforms. There’s a lot of workshopping we’ve been able to do with some of the stuff that we’ve released as of late. But then on the contrary there’s songs like, you know, “(I Wanted) Summer With You,” “Jesse,” and “LA,” and those more originated as like straight to streaming and then we kind of come back at a later time and go through, “so how do we adapt this for a live setting?” So I think those are two interesting avenues that we’ve learned how to navigate as we start to tour more and play more live shows
Z: Yeah, we try to not limit ourselves when recording and producing. There are more horn parts in the recording than horn players we have on stage. We try to be somewhat limitless when we’re recording and just create exactly how we want it to sound and then it’s a really fun process to scale back and go, “What are the essentials of this arrangement?” Or you know, we’ll have 11 Temas singing some giant vocal harmony on a recording. Unfortunately, we don’t have 11 Temas on stage, although maybe in the future…
J: Maybe some awesome hologram stuff.
Z: But you know, so then maybe the horns will take that extra Tema part or something like that. It’s just a fun creative exercise for us to look at our music and see what the essential parts are. Then the next time we go to create a song, we’re a little bit more mindful of what felt like the major components in previous music. And then maybe we start there and build around that for those future songs.
J: It’s also been really fun to see how people react to the different iterations of the songs at the live shows. Different parts being played by an instrument that maybe wasn’t what the recording has. So that’s kind of a fun thing about adapting things to be part of a live show originating as a studio recording.
T: I think we’re in this interesting position where we’re really leaning into the pop band identity in our recordings. Experimenting with production and adding way more layers than we can create live, but we still honor the live band sound at our shows. We’re not playing with tracks, that’s really the main thing. And we’re just instead trying to be creative with how we can translate our pop recordings to a live setting. And so I think live sometimes we actually feel a bit more like a rock band or a funk band because we lean into those sounds.
M: What music influences you all as a band as a whole, and specifically on the new EP?
J: We just put up our inspiration playlist. So those are very specific examples of songs that inspired different aspects of different “Sunshower” songs, but as I kind of alluded to earlier, I mean with the band of seven, there’s a lot of internal influence. There’s a lot of influence of just our own musical histories. There’s people that maybe have more EDM-type instincts. Some have more straight-up pop or jazz instincts. And there’s a lot of, you know “Oh, have you heard of this song from this artist” and it’s like “No I haven’t” and then there’s kind of that collaboration there. And I think that’s one of the perks of having a band on the larger side is you have all these like internal influences, along with the artists that you come across on your own time.
Did I just crush that question?
M: Yeah, I think I think you nailed it completely.
Z: B+
The next question I asked was less of a question and more of a monologue of a conversation starter.
M: My philosophy has always been for ambitious careers like music, is that if you could see yourself doing anything else than being an artist, you should probably go do that something else and make art a hobby, or at least not something you rely on financially. Myself and many of my friends have found ourselves in this conundrum where we are passionate about music, but there is no kind of guaranteed stability in the near or even long future, and I wanted to see how a band of people not far from our age approached that challenge and took the leap of faith. I wanted to see how they navigated, both practically and personally, the various instabilities of music as a career, and the huge sacrifices you have to make as people and as a band.
Luckily enough, the bandmates responded eloquently to my rambling and gave some great insight into their experience with personal finance and making a living while being a full-time band, and challenged my notion of what is possible in 2023.
J: I think, at least, I hope, that there’s a growing possibility in the world in which it’s possible to have a standard job and also be a musician. I mean most of us in Couch do hold fairly average, you know, nine to fives. I’m actually at work right now, and Tema is as well. I work in hospital administration in the cancer hospital here in Boston and I think in today’s world it’s actually more possible than ever for employers to make positions that are compatible with a busier lifestyle. I mean my job is hybrid for example. Tomorrow and Friday we’re going to be traveling to Bridgeport and Philly as a part of the Sunshower Tour and I will be working 8:30 to 5 on the road as we load in and whatnot.
So I think– I hope we can kind of attest to the fact that maybe it’s not just musician or bust. I think there’s a lot of stress that comes along with that and it’s not easy to do. I just hope people can start to realize that maybe it’s not all or nothing. And maybe they can look at some of us and be like, “Okay, well, it doesn’t seem impossible.”
Z: I think it’s important like Jared said, COVID opened up remote permissions for so many jobs that wouldn’t have had that before. And that’s been so incredible for Couch as a small business for our financial position because the majority of the band isn’t relying on income from Couch to sustain themselves. So when that’s not as big of a factor, we’re able to pursue more ambitious touring goals early on and allow our growth to hopefully expedite because we don’t need to take all of the money from every show and put it into our pockets. People can sit comfortably enough from whatever’s going on outside of Couch for the time being to allow us to go do a 20-city headline tour right now and come back with money that we can invest in future music and even more professional marketing. We’ve gotten so lucky with this timing. I’m not sure how we would have approached this in 2017 or something like that.
I think too it’s important for there to be, at any given time, at least one or a few people thinking about the band, so if people are at work then other people are focused and working on the band. I don’t think, as any small business, it can’t just be on pause at any given moment. There always has to be forward momentum, or else it’s going to start to slide down the hill.
T: I mean not surprisingly, to do this, you just have to be prepared to make some sacrifices. You talked about friends who maybe picked a different career path because they might want more financial stability. And that’s obviously the big one, you know. Pretty much everyone in the band after graduating chose to move back in with their parents for some duration of time, so, you know, that kind of independence of moving to a new city, that’s something we sacrificed. Financial stability is something that all members have sacrificed at various times.
This is also still a business and like Zach said you have to treat it as such, so having long-term goals is important. But I personally don’t have a five-year plan. I don’t have as formal a trajectory as some of my peers might, and I’m comfortable with that, but I think that’s another thing that some students might have to let go of.
M: Do you guys have a favorite song or moment from Sunshower? Any cool easter eggs or hidden moments that you appreciate? Production things a listener might not realize, tracks that are super buried in the mix, or even like a songwriting or process story?
T: One of my favorites right now is “LA.” I shared in an interview we did earlier this week that something special to me about it is that Zach and I started writing that without knowing that it would be a Couch song. I didn’t think it could be initially. I didn’t think it sounded “Couchy” enough, but this year we really experimented with our sound and started to push beyond the genres that we’ve been in, the instruments that we’ve been using on previous recordings, and we made it Couchy. Because we expanded what it meant to be a Couch song.
Z: I feel like Couch used to just be something you could sit on, and now it’s become so much more.
J: I’ll also double the “LA” appreciation. As a drummer, you don’t often get to contribute motifically in a song and I think “LA” was a unique opportunity for me to contribute a little bit more than just laying a foundation for the group.
Z: In terms of musical nuggets, for each of our songs we put up the layers that make up those songs on this website called splitter.fm. I just uploaded the new EP yesterday, and you can dive into every part that goes into these recordings. We leave little notes about you know “Oh, this sound is a combination of x and y,” fun moments about writing or the recording sessions and it’s a really cool look behind the curtain. For most bands on Spotify, you just hear the composite, you hear that final song, and you can’t really dissect it. It’s really fun to let our listeners get a look behind the curtain and see what’s really going on in these new songs.
M: Is there anything else you want the people of GW to know?
Z: Jared shall we? Ready one two three four…
Jared and Zach proceeded to break out into the GW fight song.
J: We just want to say Raise High!
You can check out all of Couch’s music streaming on all music platforms. Their tour hits the West Coast, Denver, and Texas before the year ends. Those dates, along with all of their band info, can be found on their website couchtheband.com.
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