Tower's PULSE! Debuts The Bergamot's 'Make It Last' Single & Video With Nathaniel Hoff & Jillian Speece

Indie-Folk-Rock band The Bergamot are usually based in Brooklyn, New York, but during the pandemic they were invited to retreat to an empty house in Sedona, Arizona. There they proceeded to play live-streamed concerts for 100 days straight. It shaped their interaction with fans and their current work, building on their 2019 album release Mayflies.

One of the most immediate outcomes of the performances was the demand for a new song called "Make It Last" to be played again and again. Tower's PULSE! is very pleased to debut both the "Make It Last" single and video today from the two founding members and songwriters of The Bergamot, husband and wife team Nathaniel Hoff and Jillian Speece.

The Bergamot are known for their creation of a peace movement called The Unity Collective, and a project which took them to all fifty states, which will result in a documentary in 2021. They are also known for the positivity of their music and their message, as well as their tendency to experiment with musical directions.

Both Nathaniel Hoff and Jillian Speece spoke with us below about the debut of "Make It Last", how they managed to keep moving forward with their music during quarantine, and why they feel makes it everyone's responsibility to instigate positive change in the world.

Hannah Means-Shannon: You have been incredibly busy in recent months.

Nathanial Hoff: Yes, if I spend eight hours working on edits, that’s a down day. But since we’re not on tour and we’re in one location, it feels down-ish. We’re still trying to keep our plates full.

HMS: That’s interesting, it’s like you’ve transferred the pace of touring onto a fixed location.

Jillian Speece: We were at SXSW when Covid hit, and we wondered what to do. We were mid-way through an album cycle. So we created the Hundred Day Happy House Concert series, which started on March 17^th, and went for 100 days straight. That we continued once a week, but we cut that down from every day to work on new music.

NH: I’ve spending a lot of time writing and in the studio, and I found that in the days that I didn’t want to write, I really had to come up with something interesting to start the writing session and pursue it the rest of the afternoon. But it turned out that sometimes those were some of the best sessions. Right when you get right up against that burn-out line, sometimes you have to stay in that space, as frustrating as it feels sometimes.

HMS: Yes, maybe you’re getting to some deeper layer of yourself at that point. In some cases, you might be negotiating with yourself, and you’re figuring out something you actually do want to work on, something that can motivate you.

NH: Exactly. Or a lyric that you had, but hadn’t really spent the time to finish out the idea. It’s been a time for that.

HMS: A third possibility is that you don’t realize how close you are to breakthroughs sometimes. You can get really tired at the end of that process, but sometimes if you keep going just a little further, you might reach that goal.

NH: I think that’s really well said. Over quarantine, that has resonated really true. There’s some reason why you keep going and that’s where that breakthrough happens.

HMS: To ask kind of a big question, doing the 100 live performances and working on so much music right now is in keeping with the ethos of the band so far. Positivity seems to be a really big thing for The Bergamot, both in terms of sound and in how you operate. How far back does that go for you? Was it a process of realization?

JS: That’s a really cool question that, actually, no one has ever asked us. For one thing, we met when we were practically kids. I was 15 years old, and Nathaniel was 17. We met in high school. It was a time in our lives when we were growing our wings out. At tha point, we both didn’t realize how much we needed each other in different ways. Nathaniel has always been very grounded and methodical. I’m more of a butterfly spirit, more freeform.

We both didn’t know how badly we needed that balance. I needed to understand the darkness more, and he needed the light. If we hadn’t met, we wouldn’t be the people we are today, and creating the music we are creating today. He focuses on going further in music, asking “How can we dabble a little in the darkness and come out the other side, stronger?” Whereas I bring this essence of asking, “How can this become a positive thing?”

We have a song called “L.A.” and that’s been one of our most loved songs and also one of our most critically acclaimed songs. It’s about this girl, Ellie, leaving L.A. and it has this hopeful tone to it, but it’s a little bit darker. It’s this blending of positivity while focusing on the rawness of life. It’s important to both of us to always give people hope. It’s very easy to forget that when we’re living in times like this. We have always said to each other, “When we’re making music, we want to bring people a positive vibe.”

NH: I think, for me, bringing hope and joy in music is not just something that we’ve created. The first paper I ever wrote as a young kid was on Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead and the LSD scene in San Francisco during the mid-60s. My musical influences go from Gerry Garcia to Nick Drake. It started at a young age, this idea that music can be a very powerful thing to shift peoples’ attitudes and demeanors.

So many great bands have led by example.

We try very hard not to create anything that sounds too much like anything else we’ve ever heard, though. We want music to be diverse and explore. So in our music we’re trying to bring an uplifting vibe, but also tells stories that can be meaningful to people.

HMS: It’s interesting when you mentioned wanting to do things that are different, because there is some danger as genres become increasingly combined that we might end up with things that just all sound the same. There are pros and cons to that situation, because you might be freer to mix musical traditions that haven’t been combined before, but it is a question of how to remain distinctive in that environment.

JS: We talk about homogenization in music a lot, making sure that we are creating things that come from our beings, you know? There are a lot of people out there in the industry who hear a hit and think, “We have to make a song that sounds like this, and it has to get on this playlist, and be a certain number of minutes long…” If we all start doing that, you’ll literally just start getting a bucket of homogenization. You want a rainbow, really. You have to keep rolling.

NH: This idea of unity and being one is interesting, because we went on the Unity Collective, driving across fifty states, and we realized that when you look at the cultures that were the most homogenized, those were the most damaging cultures. One of the things that we learned was that diversity, as difficult as it is, is actually the best way forward for any culture, any music, always trying to take into account different opinions and ideas. Diversity is what keeps a culture going.

There’s this possibility of “mono-thought” now because we’re all on iPhones, we’re all on Netflix, we are all feeling the same things and having the same conversations. Because we’re being told we should feel a certain way. Ultimately, people are not thinking independently, they are letting their phone tell them how to feel today. We are sponges of the world around us, even in music, but giving us limited options of what to think or feel actually eliminates diversity.

And we have differences, too. Sometimes I’ll play something for Jillian that makes her stomach turn.

HMS: Well, if you never cross that line, I guess you don’t know where those lines are.

JS: Oh, there are lines! It’s funny because I’m a songwriter and Nathaniel is a songwriter, we are intimately together, and we are always pushing each other to the best that we can be. But sometimes I sit down and listen to a song, and think, “That’s the shit”. Or another time, “This song has potential.”, or “I could not follow this at all.” We want to keep each other on our toes.

NH: Musically, one of the interesting things is, it’s like a diminished chord. If you just play it, people think it sounds awful. But if you play it at the right moment, it can be this amazing, musical moment. Those are the kinds of things we try to do in our music all the time, trying to find that space where something works that otherwise would not work.

HMS: Experimenting is an adventure. I guess if you’re always content, there might be a problem with that.

JS: That’s true! We like to say, “If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space!”

HMS: That’s a good one! I’ve never heard that one. You mentioned the Unity Collective, which brings up another big question: What makes you feel responsibility to take up causes and social action? Is it that you feel that way as individuals, or do you feel that being involved in music brings that responsibility?

I know that’s a bit of a minefield as a subject.

NH: I was thinking about this because when you just look at me on a superficial level, I came from Indiana, I’m Caucasian, I’m middle class. What can I say that hasn’t been said? When you start looking at it as trying to improve the world around you, you realize that you have to improve yourself and do something along the way that can improve things for other people as well. What do I know about diversity and the challenges that people face?

But everyone has to go on a journey to better understand the world around them. When you start with that, you realize that amazing people are all over the world, from all walks of life. It’s because they care. They put themselves out there. They decide to give a fuck about the world at large. Making the world better is trying to grow and understand the people around you. But as a musician, as a doctor, as a teacher, we all have this responsibility. We have to all start by doing something, and that may lead to a better reality.

JS: For me, it was one of those moments where you just look around and see that people are in pain. There’s a lot of anger, there’s a lot of frustration, and ultimately, in order to give a damn, you have to care about people. You have to say, “I wonder why there is an issue here, and I wonder what I can do to be an agent of love.” But in order to do that, I had to love myself. I had to learn to love myself better so that I’d be giving from a bucket that’s full.

That’s embracing who I am. It’s not judging myself, it’s not comparing myself to photoshopped females and males in magazines. It is saying, “I am good enough, I am worthy, I am loved, and I’m going to go out there and make a difference.” If I can help one person heal their pain, or help transform a situation through a song that can transcend time, then ultimately, that’s my goal as an individual on this planet. I want to help heal people, heal the Earth, and protect the animals as well. If we’re not asking how we can help, then we are ultimately failing each other and we’re failing ourselves as well.

HMS: Caring is a modeled behavior, and it transfers between people very easily. I think with musicians there is an amplification there, and a greater reach, that often leads to a sense of responsibility.

A lot what we’re saying and talking about is stuff that comes up not only in your behavior as musicians, but in your actual songs. One song that we’ll talk about is “Make It Last” which is debuting with this interview. I heard that you played it quite a bit in your livestream performances because it had a huge response from your audiences.

NH: It really did. During quarantine, we were just having fun, and that went from basic, everyday activities to trying out new material. One thing I liked about “Make It Last” was that, even though we were playing it in a very casual sense, the focus of the entire audience went to that bridge. People would comment and say, “Play it again!” We’d get requests to open with it. It was an electric response. It reminded me of our days busking, and it was one of those tunes that every time you played it, you got a little crowd going. It’s doing the same thing in a virtual way. There’s a moment in that song, talking about the world taking care of us, when people have a visceral reaction to it.

That was what we were thinking about when we were deciding which song to release first out of the 37 or so songs I’ve been working on. We have to get back to this idea that if we can start taking care of each other, we can start taking care of the world around us. It’s our time to step up and rise to this challenge. That’s the way we have to start feeling, rather than curling up in the corner.

I told Jillian, I draw inspiration from the weeds. When you pave a parking lot, what is going to be the first thing that cracks through and breaks those lines? It’s going to be the weeds. This is the time for people to rise up, and say, “No”. We will find a place to grow and we will make the most of it. We’ll make a world that’s way better.

HMS: I like the inevitability of the weeds. We’re here, we’re alive, and life is a very powerful force.

JS: It’s that, and it’s choosing life. If you choose death, you just curl up into a ball. I’d rather try and fail than not try at all. That’s where we need to grow.

HMS: I think one of the interesting things about “Make It Last”, firstly in terms of sound: it takes things into a different mental space. It takes the listener away from ordinary reality. But also, it turns things on its head. If it’s a parent-child relationship between the natural world and humans as the children, it turns it around and says, “Now we’re going to be the protector.” And I think that will come as kind of a revelation to a lot of people to hear someone think like that. To put it in those terms is surprising.

Lastly, I think it puts everything in a bigger perspective. It’s not about what happened five minutes ago on the internet, it’s about a bigger global perspective, which is very therapeutic and helpful for pretty much anyone right now. That may explain some of these reactions you encountered when playing the song live. I think you’re going to see some of the same feedback and reactions when you release the single.

JS: Thank you so much. We appreciate that. When we were playing online, we had a new fan in Bangladesh, Jessie, getting up to hear us live at like three o’clock in the morning. He loved this song. Every time he’d ask, “Please can you play my song?” We knew it was “Make It Last”. That type of energy was happening behind a song that means so much to us. Taking care of the planet is so important to both of us. I’m plant-based and that’s very important to me, and Nathaniel is the ultimate thrifter. It’s doing whatever you can and we’re getting that energy from our fans, too. It makes us hopeful that we can make this last, together.