No Longer a Secret

By Tre Martinez
Contributing Writer

Fargo indie rockers Secret Cities are quickly gaining traction in the genre. Rave reviews from the likes of Filter, Stereogum, Paste, and top-dog review website Pitchfork, recommend their debut album “Pink Graffiti”—you know, if you like music. HPR sat down with lead singer Charlie Gokey to talk about North Dakota, psychedelic rock, and Brian Wilson.
High Plains Reader: Could you speak a little bit to your background as band? How did you guys come to know each other?
Charlie Gokey: That’s the first question we get and the answer is always long, and involved, and honestly not that interesting, I feel like, for people. Marie and I [met] at band camp, I guess, is the long and short of it. We met at the International Music Camp in North Dakota, on the border of North Dakota and Canada. She lived in Williston, and I like being able to say that to a North Dakota publication, because this is the only place where I can say that and people would know what I was talking about. She lived on the other side of the state, I lived in Fargo. We kind of hit it off, so we ended up trading tapes through the mail for a while, just sort of adding to each other’s stuff with a four-track and then, a few years later when we were gonna start touring, we added Alex, our drummer, who we met on the Internet, and that’s pretty much how we came about.
HPR: The sound on this album is both familiar and unique. You can definitely hear a wide range of influences. Can you speak to those a little bit?
CG: Yeah. Of course, psychedelic music, both first generation and the sort of stuff from the ‘90s, like from Elephant 6, were big influences on us. It was sort of Elephant 6 that brought Marie and I together in the first place; we both really loved that stuff and didn’t know anybody else who did, so naturally we started a band. I guess other things that sort of came into play was- I love those girl groups and the general strange, melancholy sound of that that’s also jubilant, in a weird way. Also just a wide variety of stuff that I sort of discovered over the five year germinating period for this record, like Italo, actually. Italo disco was a big thing for me for a long time. I don’t really know how you could mash that flavor in with those others that I was talking about, but I sure tried.
HPR: Pink Graffiti has a definite flow to it. It isn’t Pink Floyd every-song-begins-the-next, but it definitely feels intentionally structured; and maybe removing some of that structure might take away from it at points. With that in mind, how do you feel about the idea that most music in this day and age is purchased track by track based on thirty second samples from iTunes or Napster?
CG: I feel a little bit like a curmudgeon saying that that doesn’t really appeal to me that much, the idea of the album as a dying art. I feel like every band has at least one good song. The album is where you stand or fall on your merits. It’s probably because I grew up with the Elephant 6 sort of thing, where every song does sort of melt into the next, and the idea is to make something that’s a unified whole.
HPR: You mentioned earlier that you guys formed around breaking through the distance of North Dakota. What is the songwriting process like for you guys?
CG: I don’t know. It’s always almost varied from song to song. A lot of the time either Marie or I will come up with something and send it to the other person and they’ll take it apart and put it back together, in a way. These days, I’ll be writing something and stop in the middle of a bar and think what comes next should be something that Marie wrote for strings or something, because she’s a master of the arrangement. Mostly one of us has sort of a core and the others do to it what they will.
HPR: And by the way, the arrangements are spectacular.
CG: [Laughs] I’ll let Marie know, I’m sure she’ll be flattered.
HPR: Your sound as a band is reminiscent of the psychedelic rock you mentioned earlier, but it’s also got a lot of indie rock from the turn of the century; it’s chamber-esque and very guitar-driven. Is this at all in specific defiance to the current electro indie that seems to be in chic, with bands like Cut Copy and Animal Collective going more electronic?
CG: I don’t know that it was really in reaction to that. Honestly, for the first two or three years that we were working on this- it took five years because we basically recorded it three times or so. We made albums and scrapped them, and the first time we really threw ourselves into making the album, it was a lot more electronic, just because that’s the kind of music that I was discovering at the time, not necessarily indie rock electronic, but Italo disco and just straight up dance music. But we ended up tossing out a lot of those elements because electronics made it too easy to change things, if that makes any sense. When you can just click a button to edit a song so radically, it was impossible, at least for me, to resist that temptation. So in the end, the organic nature of the album is almost a result of our creative process.
HPR: Continuing on the theme of the modern indie scene, how do you view being reviewed, and being reviewed favorably, by the goliath that is Pitchfork?
CG: I don’t know, the review seems nice enough. I wish the rating had been a little bit higher, but it was nice. I’ve had a few months to digest it. I was told that we were gonna be reviewed months ago, plus we had stuff out of Spin and other things like that which sort of dulled the impact a little bit, but it’s something that I’ve wanted for a long time and it’s nice to be acknowledged by what feels like the establishment now. Especially sort of coming from the margins like we do, in the Midwest.
HPR: And they didn’t exactly downplay the whole Midwest angle, either.
CG: No, no. I was actually thinking that we should work something into our stage show where we all come out in plaid with a piece of hay or wheat or something like that between our teeth and make comments about the proliferation of horseless carriages in the region.
HPR: And, of course, talk about the weather.
CG: Yeah, yeah.
HPR: This is a little bit of a free-for-all type thing: what do you have to say about Brian Wilson?
CG: [Laughs] I have a lot to say about him, I guess. I’ve told this story a few times but the reason he sort of came to play in this record is that I ended up meeting him, more or less. Well, not really meeting him. I talked to him, he didn’t talk back. He was finding a record at a Borders, and I felt compelled to go because I had written about him a little bit in school, and his music meant a lot to me. It’s my earliest childhood memory of music is that stuff, so I went and stood in line and finally got a chance to take a look at the guy and he was just so old, just so old, and he seemed so defeated by life that he would not acknowledge anything that was being said to him. It was just shocking and kind of awful. That happened right around the time we were starting the album, so I guess that experience worked it’s way in.
HPR:What about the color pink? You have three tracks on the album with the word “pink” in the name; as well as, of course, the album title.
CG: Pink is a color that I just sort of realized I loved a couple of years ago. The title comes from the name of a synthesizer sound that I figured out, but it ended up meaning a little bit more after a while. The color pink seems like it’s kind of beautiful and confrontational all at once, in a weird way, depending on the context, and that’s something that I want my music to be.
HPR: What do you have to say about the concept of youth?
CG: The concept of youth is where I’m at right now. I’m pushing through my mid-twenties right now and I’m not 100% sure whether I’m a grown-up or not yet, so it’s something that I end up thinking about as my life is in transition; as I go to grad school, or as I am now taking a year off from grad school to play music, how much of a grown up am I?
HPR: With the success you’re experiencing right now, I don’t know if you need to grow up quite yet.
CG: I don’t know. [Laughs] We’re not super famous, but when we are I’ll fly back to Fargo from my private island in the Caribbean in my gold-plated jet every year.
HPR: Sounds good, I look forward to it. Anything else you have to say to HPR readers and to the world?
CG: Gosh, now the pressure’s on. Keep on rocking? I don’t know. I’m just glad to be interviewed by the High Plains Reader. I’ve been reading it since I was a kid and I appreciate the attention. It’s kind of close to my heart.
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Listen to the HPR Podcast of this interview on Divshare.