The new album from A Place For Owls, How We Dig in the Earth, is unassuming in many ways. The lower-case stylization of the title, the self-release distribution model, and especially the air of positivity and politeness among the band members contribute to a humble, warm glow surrounding the record’s release. But being down to earth and winsome can sit side by side with heavy themes and disparate influences, which makes How We Dig in the Earth a rewarding listen that reveals its layers progressively, even as its emotions hit hard right away.
Perhaps this is all a way of saying that How We Dig in the Earth is decidedly an emo album from an emo band who wouldn’t want the designation any other way. My conversation with vocalist, rhythm guitarist, and primary songwriter Ben Sooy, multi-instrumentalist and producer/engineer Nick Webber, and lead guitarist/background vocalist Daniel Perez (who also contributes trumpet and banjo), reveals how this album fits into the group’s branding as an emo band, illustrates some of their shared influences, and chronicles difficult seasons in life.
Revisiting the perennial discussion about the stability of emo as a genre is a fitting place to start. After all, this is a subgenre in whose name wars have been fought. Forty years and many waves after emo’s beginnings, I’m curious to know how the members of A Place For Owls, who intentionally promote themselves as “Denver Emo Band A Place For Owls”, see themselves fitting into the expanse that includes everything from Rites of Spring to Anathallo and beyond.
I bring up Sunny Day Real Estate and the Promise Ring, two groups whose relationship to the emo label has been notably contested, sidestepped, or moved away from by the musicians. That A Place For Owls takes the opposite tack—leaning into emo—is to some degree, according to Webber, “tongue in cheek”, yet also a vital part of their musical identity.
Webber explains, “At the end of the day, what we’re doing is emo-tinged in ways. But it’s basically like loud folk songs in a lot of ways- the aesthetics of just different ways of playing guitar and picking out guitar tones. And then just being very, very earnest, you know. Like a lot. There are elements of the lineage that I think we really subconsciously and consciously kind of pull from.
“That’s just a lot of the most formative music for us as a band,” he continues, “like second wave and then revival kind of emo stuff. It also honestly helps us find a lot of community, and it’s helped us kind of [find a] niche. Because I think if you’re marketing yourself as an indie rock band, that’s like such a big tent, right? Sometimes, people hear our music and don’t even think of classifying it as emo. We’re probably closer to the heart of indie rock.”
Still, while Webber points out that his band is “not like shredding, tapping and stuff most of the time”, some of their contemporaries, like Ben Quad, have gotten a lot of exposure for steering into that direction. When I mention Ben Quad as an act that successfully integrates those other elements as signatures of their sound, Webber recalls that Ben Quad “asked us to open for them on their tour with the Singaporean emo band Forests at a DIY space in Denver called Seventh Circle.”
At first, Webber says, A Place For Owls wondered about the compatibility of the different bands. He explains, “It was one of those things where it’s like, does this make sense? And it totally made sense, you know. But at the end of the day, we both call ourselves emo bands of some kind, but it’s pretty different expressions, you know.”
Perez says his contributions to the band include “some banjo tracks and some trumpet here and there”, which further distinguishes A Place For Owls from the conventional emo sounds listeners might expect. Perez, who has been making music with Sooy for two decades and whose logistical role he characterizes as being the “Dad” of the group, points out both 2024 releases—the excellent EP Pt. 2 and How We Dig in the Earth—feature banjo.
I remark that Pt. 2 was a highlight of the year’s first half and very much in the tradition of Sufjan Stevens‘ Seven Swans, which is not common territory for rock music these days. Sooy makes it clear that the influence is overt, saying, “Sufjan Stevens is, I think, one of the artists, that the Venn diagram is a complete circle for A Place For Owls, where every member of the band is a diehard fan. And through the ages and iterations, we all find something to love. But Seven Swans, for me, has a particular place in my heart.”
Beyond Stevens, there’s another rock veteran whose presence in the Place For Owls story solidifies the group’s emo branding, or rather, determined it in a direct way. Sooy recalls, “We got a chance to meet Dave Bazan from Pedro the Lion when he played Denver. He walked into the same pizza restaurant that we were at before the show. All of us are collectively, like, pooping our pants, and just like that’s Dave, that’s Dave Bazan.”
Sooy says that emo was a centerpiece of his conversation with Bazan. He continues, “I talked to Dave about emo because- and this made my whole week, or life really; I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m in a band called A Place For Owls.’ He goes. ‘Oh, yeah. Denver Emo Band A Place For Owls.’ Then he was like, ‘Actually, I went to your Twitter, and I think you changed it to “Denver rock band”. So, are you no longer an emo band, or whatever?’ Then, the day after Bazan said that, I went back to the Twitter profile and changed it back to “Denver emo band”.
Setting aside for a moment the humorous theological metaphor involving David Bazan benevolently watching over a generation of musicians he helped to create, this interaction between the veteran and a newer band led to reflection about what emo is at heart. According to Sooy, “He’s a thoughtful dude, and it prompted a pretty interesting conversation where Dave was like, basically, ‘if you’re singing songs with emotions, I think you should feel comfortable [using] the label emo.'”
In Sooy’s view, “that should be all music. It’s an emotional experience. But there are certain songs that hit harder than others, and certain bands that hit harder with that. We’re heretics in some ways with this. I call Counting Crows an emo band. You know? Big feelings, and it’s so effing earnest. So that, to me, is what the heart of emo is. You can have twinkly, tappy guitars. You can have quiet verses and screaming choruses. You can do all the like, touchstones, but really, what it’s about is: Does it make you feel something big? And not even big sad. Sad is a part of it. Does it make you feel something transcendent and big? And that to me is, I think, one of the reasons why we like calling ourselves emo.”
Thus, A Place For Owls locate the essence of emo in the feeling the music creates, and the search for feeling unites the musician and the listener. Webber points out that there is a personal element to making music like this: “We’re trying to help ourselves feel the things that we need to feel.” I ask them to describe their attention to the emotional arc while sequencing their albums, noting that some memorable classics, like the Hotelier‘s Home, Like Noplace Is There, seem to deploy the cathartic mode immediately rather than building toward it. Is it sometimes difficult to know how to thread the emotion into the sequence of songs that make up the album?
Sooy says, “Yeah, we’re big album guys and think a lot about the sequencing, and we think a lot about- the cliche way to say it is, ‘the journey’, you know, that we’re going to take people on. We certainly thought about that with this record, and I think we thought about it with the first full-length that we did. But the first full-length, honestly to me, feels more like a collection of songs. It’s a collection of songs that we wrote. So, there’s cohesion, and it feels like all from the same band. But this, this second record, we agonized over track sequencing and where the peaks and the valleys are.”
Considering the emotional and musical peaks and valleys is part of getting to know the shape of the album, and Sooy acknowledges there are formulas for such an approach. “You know, somebody online talked about how a heavy record is a W, and it should be, you know like it should be loud, quiet, loud, quiet, loud [tracing the shape of a “W” in the air]. But then, if you’re more of a chill band overall, which I think A Place For Owls, we lean in this sort of rock world and the emo world a little bit more- we like the quiet as much as we like the louds, right? And we like the beauty. So, if you’re a ‘chill band’, it should be an M. Right? So, you should start really low, and then peak and then low, and then peak, and then end on a low. We didn’t totally follow that on this record. But we still think about the peaks and valleys and kind of the ride and where you’re at emotionally. We tried to give some emotional relief.” Webber says the songs that play more like “gut punches” necessitate that emotional relief.
One feature of A Place For Owls’ style that is prominent in How We Dig in the Earth is the use of gang vocals, which Sooy notes have been present on every band release and are recorded “live, all together”. For a group that enjoys existing in the softer, quiet moments, gang vocals might seem at odds with the “chill band” approach, but they are a central part of these songs’ effect. How do they know when to use them?
Perez explains, “A lot of these songs, as we’re kind of working them out, you can imagine three, four, or five of us with acoustic guitars sitting in a room, and we’re all kind of like trying to find parts and trying to find our place, trying to find things to add. In some ways, I think that naturally gives us moments as we’re just workshopping the songs in raw form. It gives us little moments like, ‘that could be cool to do a gang vocal part there,’ because that’s sort of how a lot of them start, and then we scale back. And we, you know, work parts out and change things up. But I think that’s part of it, and I don’t know that I’ve necessarily thought about it that way before, but just the fact that we get together and we sing, and we yell, and that’s sort of how some of these songs are born, I think, has informed our use of gang vocals in a lot of these songs.”
One influence for this approach is the Brighton band I Feel Fine, which Sooy points out exclusively uses gang vocals. He says of I Feel Fine, “We were just so drawn to that sound. It sounds so emotionally resonant, and you want to sing along, and it’s like how people have experienced music historically before recorded music. People, whether in a religious setting or a communal setting, or whatever, just sing together. This is how we encounter music, so gangs feel primal in that way, but we scaled it back. We were like, well, it might feel like we’re ripping off I Feel Fine because that’s something that feels distinct about them, and then it doesn’t actually work on everything.
“But on the acoustic song on Pt. 2, ‘My Own, Pt. 2’, that’s mostly gangs. It’s really chill and beautiful acoustic music. But the vocals, even though we’re not at the top of our register, so it doesn’t feel like we’re yelling, but we got all in the same room and recorded the vocals all together. The main thing I love about our band is the community and its friendship aspect, and so, gangs feel like an auditory representation of that friendship.”
The LPs central metaphor is as important as the musical influences and vocal style. Though How We Dig in the Earth is not a concept album, the lyrical content and the process of making the record are replete with references to gardening. One of the singles, “Broken Open Seed”, is an especially engaging use of the agricultural metaphor, also seeming to allude to the Parable of the Growing Seed/the Seed Growing Secretly, though in reality, springing forth more from a recent experience in the singer’s life.
Sooy says, “It struck me that a lot of these songs were written after my wife and I went through a pretty difficult experience where we were trying to get pregnant for the longest time, and then we had a miscarriage, and so the planted seeds both meant the ‘I really wanna have a baby with you.’ But it also meant any work you do to plan for the future. Dan, before he bought his home that he and his wife live in now, they rented in a neighborhood in Denver, and things were getting insecure.”
He suspends the story to acknowledge Perez, “I’m going to just tell the story for you, Dan, because it just like, it kicked my ass.” Sooy continues, “I remember sitting down to dinner with Daniel as the sowing season was coming up. They didn’t know because of some insecurity, like “Our landlord might sell our house. We don’t know if we’re going to be here in the spring. We don’t know if we’re going to see the fruit of the work that we would do this fall to plant our garden again.” They really like to plant both edible things and beautiful things in their garden. And Daniel and Jennifer just basically said, ‘You know what? We’re just going to plant those seeds anyways because no one knows the future.’ It just struck me as such a metaphor for any sort of hard work that you would put into the world.”
This metaphor extends to creative work and inspired an album that concerns hope and loss, Sooy says. “You don’t know what yield you’re going to get from it. But you can’t get a harvest without planting a seed, right? And so, also with us going through that difficult experience of going through a miscarriage, we realized that the same action to dig a grave is to plant is to plant a seed. You dig in the earth. And there’s that parable that Jesus has of, like, unless a seed goes down into the earth and dies, it can’t live again. And the only way to new life is through the Valley of Death, right? The only way to get to all the fruitfulness we all want in the future is through suffering and uncertainty. That became the primary metaphor.”
Sooy sums up the point of the metaphor, saying, “The thing is, you gotta have hope because if you don’t think that things are gonna get better, then why are we doing any of this?” Webber quotes from the album bio, offering a succinct phrase that describes the sound and theme of the album: “These songs walk a tightrope between breakthrough and breakdown.” He also cites a lyric from another Denver band, Overslept, who have used similar imagery in a memorable way: “So let us look chance in the eye / Be resolute in knowing / You can love every single seed and lose your garden to the seasons.”
A Place For Owls is releasing How We Dig in the Earth through their own label, Broom of Destruction Records. Perez is frank about what initially motivated this decision. “To be totally honest,” he says, “no really big indie labels asked us. So that’s a factor. But you know, we love what we do, and Ben alluded to this earlier, like the core of this band is a friendship. It’s a place where we can express ourselves creatively, write music, and record music like we love what we’re doing. If a label wanted to come alongside us and help us do that, great. But that’s not really the primary goal. The goal is to write songs with our friends and put them out there in the world, and hopefully, they impact people and touch people’s lives.”
Another reason for self-releasing, the band members say, is the freedom this approach offers. Putting out the album on their own terms allows them to be unfettered by so many outside considerations. Sooy describes other situations they’ve encountered that illustrate the complications of label release schedules. “We’ve had friends that have had their whole release schedules shelved or delayed because it didn’t work… within the label schedule. We’ve got a split that was supposed to come out before this album… but the vinyl was delayed, and things logistically just didn’t work out. We had to bump it all the way until next year.” With how we dig in the earth, he says, “We liked that we can set the pace. We’re not having to rely on an external decision-maker to figure out what our rollout is.”
Though there are occasional windfalls, such as the money earned from opening spots for Switchfoot and Foxing that paid for merchandise and this album, label finances are not as attractive as some might think relative to how a band of this size could benefit from the deal. Sooy reasons, “Going to a label because they’re a bank that you can take out a loan from that, then they own fifty percent of it just doesn’t make sense any longer. And all of us are married; all of us have day jobs.
“We go on tour if there’s a sick opportunity to do it, or if we just want to, for fun, do a ten-day, DIY-booked tour of the West Coast, or whatever. But we’re not trying to make this our full-time job. We’re doing it for the love of it and because there’s a sense of ambition that we have in our category of just like, Dad Rock, or whatever, you know: Can we be as ambitious as possible doing music as a side hustle? But really, it feels like for all of us. Other than just being a husband and a friend and doing the primary relational things that we are called to do, the music feels like our primary calling for everybody in the band.”