Photo credit: Brit O-Brien / Instagram
Words by: Sam Walker-Smart
If there’s one thing the American duo Outside Air understands, it’s the importance of taking a step back to reevaluate what truly brings happiness. After spending their entire adult lives performing in the experimental pop outfit Sure Sure, guitarist Charlie Glick and drummer/producer Kevin Fazard have reconnected and ventured out on their own. Released in October, their debut Forever carries a distinctly autumnal vibe. It’s a rewarding listen that encourages appreciation for the little things in life. In an interview with CONE, Charlie discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic and time spent on a vegetable farm helped spark their new musical endeavor.
“In 2020, I kind of lost my heart with Sure Sure, in a very unexplainable way. I had been doing music my whole adult life, and I had this strong urge to see what else life held for me. So that started this whole journey towards starting Outside Air,” Charlie explains. “This involved working on a vegetable farm in Washington and almost going to grad school for poetry. But then I decided not to do that because Kevin and I simultaneously started to have ideas about making new music together. That just sounded more fun than going to Syracuse, New York, and dealing with long winters and being held up for three years.”
During this time, Kevin built his own studio, treating production like learning a new instrument. He was eager to start creating once Charlie returned to the LA area. “Charlie and I have always had this friendship within a friendship of Sure Sure. We have this rhythmic backbone, and there are a lot of parts of music that we see similarly,” Kevin tells CONE. “We started making stuff together, and it was very natural. It felt like reconnecting with an old friend. Then Charlie moved down here, and we finally had enough time and space. Honestly, we recorded a good chunk of it really fast.”
A sense of freedom and carefree fun is certainly noticeable when listening to the album’s thirteen songs. From the uplifting pop of “Sweaters in the Summer” to the atmospheric textures of “Like Grass in the Wind,” it’s a debut filled with good-time jams. “It was really fun starting Outside Air because I hadn’t spent that much time, just 1 one-on-one, with Kevin writing,” says Charlie. “There was something really transparent about the whole process, from writing to recording. It was easy and effortless.”
Both members appreciate that without time away from their previous outfit, they would never have had the energy or focus for this latest chapter. “It was fresh again,” says Kevin. “You take a break, and I was working with a lot of other people. Then suddenly, I was like, ‘You know what I miss? I miss when Charlie does this thing or that thing.’ You appreciate each other. The whole album wouldn’t have happened without that long break.”
“It was basically three years,” adds Charlie on their time apart. “That’s a fucking long time. Yeah, personal growth happened. I think a big part of me wanting to leave Sure Sure was that I needed to see who I was outside of Sure Sure because it had become this big thing in my life. I had to think for myself to set out on my own to see what life was like. That is where a lot of this music, and the feeling and the lyrics of the songs, kind of came from—this break that we took. Even the skills that we, especially Kevin, acquired in that time in terms of production, mixing, and piano—are important. It sounds amazing.”
Despite the positive tone of the music, the duo’s songs are the result of their quest to find joy and purpose in a chaotic world rather than a conscious effort to record something that would pair well with a Sunday afternoon. “Part of why I stopped doing Sure Sure was because the joy was gone,” Charlie explains. “Then you have the soul-shattering reckoning with the state of the world with the pandemic. I went through a very dark period because of how dark things were getting.”
Kevin elaborates, “Maybe it’s cool that the album sounds joyous. I mean, I do feel joyous when I listen to it. If I had to try and reverse engineer it, the joyousness, I think it’s this kinetic energy you get off of me and Charlie when we’re specifically playing drums and guitar together. It’s fun because we’re trying to get a rise out of each other.
Despite the personal connection to the songs, the band isn’t afraid to get a little conceptual. This is evident on the single “The Painter,” where a picture found at a farmer’s market gave Charlie some unexpected inspiration. He holds the colorful painting up to the screen and waves it as he explains, “It’s by some German immigrant from, I think, the early 20th century. We tried to do some research online and couldn’t find much about him.”
“For some reason, I was just playing guitar, and I imagined a painter living in his castle, on the river, under a mountain with glaciers on it, which reminded me of where we were living in Washington,” Charlie continues. “The whole thing just came out of this painting. I was imagining what this individual had gone through. Perhaps it was a really tough period of life, and he lost pretty much everything to something unnamed. There are references to catastrophes. Like he’s painting a war, and he’s lost his home. But I deliberately left it open.”
With new music already lined up for 2025, we thought we’d leave Outside Air with some hard-hitting questions, namely: What kind of beverage does the band’s sound match?
“I don’t know if this is frowned upon in London, but there’s a London fog.” says Charlie, “That’s a tasty beverage. I mean, it’s just milk and tea. It’s sweet, carefree, and it’s got a little bit of the sophistication from Earl Grey tea. Easy, breezy, and sophisticated—but stealthily so.”
Sounds like a perfect match to our ears.