Let Ray Bull Change Your Life

Not to be dramatic, but Ray Bull changed my life. That’s actually the least dramatic way I can put it. I’d showed up way too early for their 2023 show at piano’s—earlier than Ray Bull themselves, actually—and was standing alone in the corner when they started setting up their merch right next to me. I offered to help. They accepted. They left to prepare for their performance. Stationed next to their rack of t-shirts emblazoned with things like You’re at a Ray Bull show! And Venmo Ray Bull $1,000 on eBay, girls naturally assumed I was in charge of selling their merch. And so I sold their merch.

Weeks later, manning the merch booth (officially this time) while they opened for Rebounder at Bowery Ballroom, I’d go on to truly meet Gutes for the first time, launching us into the orbit of instant friendship that circled around planet Byline. It’s been nearly 3 years to the day since the accidental merch moment. Now, Ray Bull is back with their new album, Please Stop Laughing—an incisive collision of love and longing steeped with a hang-dog sense of humor. Ray Bull is a duo serious about their lack of self-seriousness. Visual artists first, musical artists second, Aaron Graham and Tucker Elkins use their second album as a sonic canvas to layer pleasure and pain, sincerity and sadness, finding their footing in a style distinctly their own.

Ali Royals: I have so many questions for you, but let’s start from the top. What’s your first memory of each other?

Tucker Elkins: Aaron doesn’t remember this. But I remember meeting Aaron because he was a senior when I was an underclassman at Cooper Union, and I thought his art website was really cool.
I saw him at one of our school’s art openings and was like, I'm just gonna go up to him. I said, “hey, I like your website a lot,” and his friend standing next to him was like, freshman fan club.

Aaron Graham: My first memory of meeting Tucker was at a fancy Uptown gallery opening, but not for school. There was some party we crashed down the hall blasting dance music, but nobody was dancing. Suddenly, there was Tucker dancing wildly. He looked 13 years old dancing with these 50 year old art collectors. I remember thinking you were pretty cool.

AR: Walk me through what went down between watching Tucker dance like a madman to deciding we're gonna make music together.

Aaron: A whole lot of time, honestly. It wasn't until years later that the actual musical connection—let alone spending any sort of time together—happened.

Tucker: I remember I was like, oh, It'd be cool to be friends with him. I remember I asked you to help me with my website. I would come over to your house, and we'd have beer and chill. But there was no music in the air at that point at all.

When did you find yourselves having the conversation of I think music is something I want to do?

Aaron: It was at another gallery opening in Bushwick. I don't remember who said it first, but one of us said: I've been making a lot of music, and the other said: oh my god, me too. We started sending each other demos, then that turned into, we should just mess around and work on stuff. It wasn't even collaborative in the very beginning. We were both working on separate projects. Tucker was really excited about his songs and wanted to play them live.

Tucker: I was already friends with Fletcher, who’s now our drummer. And then suddenly it was me and Aaron. He just joined somehow. We were gonna play a live show of all my really old stuff. And then COVID hit.

AR: Perfect timing.

Aaron: It honestly kind of was, because we had to change gears from focusing on a live show. It really created a moment for us to actually make stuff together and really go all in—like, wait, this is a project we're gonna make together.

AR: At what point were you calling that project “Ray Bull?” How did that name for the duo stick?

Tucker: Aaron had pushed up a cool cover for a Ray Bull album that didn't exist—a red guy on a red floor that said Ray Bull sex + emotion. And I just remember seeing that and thinking it looked cool.

Aaron: We had been kicking around names and nothing felt good. “Ray Bull” was an old art alias I used to make these fake digital paintings, and I really liked it but wasn’t going to suggest it, didn’t want to impose my own thing on the project. But one day Tucker was like, what about Ray Bull? So, we went with that.

AR: Was there a specific moment where you both were like, we're really doing this for real?

Aaron: Our song The New Thing Dies had a moment. It made us feel like, maybe this could be possible. We decided that we were going to do this as a real thing. Our first album was more of a fun project. There wasn't really yet the intention of like: this is it. At some point we realized that we can't be building this huge following, putting so much work into it, and not have it be our main focus.

AR: You haven’t put out an album since your first—Baby Mode in 2021. What was the first moment you felt like hey, maybe we have a new album here?

Aaron: We had amassed so many demos we were drowning in them.

Tucker: We knew there was an album buried under the ground, we just had to dig it out. We were navigating the frameworks of the music industry—having a whole team instead of just doing things all our own. Then suddenly we were like—what are we doing? We should just make an album.

AR: How did you decide on the title Please Stop Laughing?

Aaron: It’s the name of one of the tracks on the album. We hadn't even talked about it that much, and Tucker thought it would make a good title. I was immediately like, yes. Please Stop Laughing just matched our sentiment, this idea that we're always looking for the joke in something, even if we feel kinda emo about it. It's both funny and brutal to ask somebody to please stop laughing.

AR: What do you want people to be laughing at?

Aaron: It's probably our biggest struggle—like, our impulse is to make something kind of silly or stupid or funny. But we put so much time and effort into the things that we do, and we want to be taken seriously.

Tucker: But then it's like...for pretty much every musician honestly, you have to promote yourself, to whore yourself out a little bit online to survive. It creates a weird cognitive dissonance. That's kind of what Please Stop Laughing makes me think about in a way. It's like, we're doing this silly stuff on purpose, but also there's something universally painful in the process of it. But we're obviously, like, posting mad funny shit. You can laugh at that.

Aaron: There's so much music in the world that's just so remarkable, that getting anybody to pay attention can be so difficult and crushing. But I think we’re due as a culture to talk about this process of social media promotion, and what’s happening to art as a result. Obviously phones are ruining our brains, but I don’t think we can’t yet grasp the effect the phones are having on our art.

AR: Do your creative practices and rituals differ between writing music and—I hate to just call it content—but, making content. I really do feel like some of the promotional stuff you're putting out is truly just art, though.

Aaron: Writing music for me feels much more like—it's kind of like hippie dippy, but I really feel we're receiving it somehow. The fact Tucker and I lived together for so long created this incredible environment. It felt like there was some magical element to how the melodies and lyrics were just coming to us.

Tucker: For the content side of things, we’re using our art brains. We’re utilizing these visual tricks we’ve developed, these ways of making things, to promote the music we’re making now.

AR: Are there any lyrics on the album that really do make you laugh?

Aaron: There’s lines that Tucker has from Pain and Missouri. “Saw you in your cardigan, can I use your card again? Can I watch TV while you sleep?”

I always chuckle at that. Or in Marry a Skater, I laugh at “Go start your family / Work at Morgan Stanley and rot / Save up for the yacht.”

Tucker: Aaron and I both lead with humor in our writing. There's always a humorous element in the song, even if it's not laugh-out-loud funny. It can be used to undermine your own sense of self-seriousness. Honestly, sometimes humor makes things more devastating.

AR: When you're writing music, are you always writing from a personal place or experience? Or are you taking the point of view of a character, or a caricature of yourself?

Aaron: I feel like it's somewhere suspended in the middle. I never feel like I'm sitting down and writing diaristically. I try not to be too self serious—creative parts stop working when you get too close to that. I'm just writing abstractly and trusting the feeling.

Tucker: I latch onto something I find interesting, and then follow it wherever it goes. If I’m talking about something really specific, I always feel compelled to mitigate it, or confuse it, to keep it a little bit challenging somehow.

AR: What's the weirdest thing that's ever inspired like a song or a lyric?

Aaron: A weird way I get inspiration is if I'm hearing a song in the car for the 1st time that I've never heard before, I'll hear the beginning of a melody line, and then frantically turn it off, because I hear how I want it to end, and I don't want to hear how they end it. Eventually I’ll listen to the whole song, and hope it ends differently, so that I can use my own version.

AR: On an entirely separate note, if this album had a smell, what would it smell like?

Aaron: probably the soap that was in the studio that we were like recording it in. I don’t know. It’s kind of like, what does your house smell like? When you’re so close to something, you don't really know. But you know what your friend’s house smells like. So you’ll actually have to tell us what the album smells like.

AR: I’m actually wearing the shirt I got at my first ever Ray Bull show at Piano’s—it says you’re at a ray bull show. How would you describe a Ray Bull show to someone who’s never been to one?

Tucker: We don’t know. We’ve never been to one.

Aaron: I honestly have questions about that myself. I’ve performed at one! But I’ve never been. Is it fun when we talk between songs? Is it painful? Hopefully people think the merch is fun.

AR: Do you have any crazy new shirts in store? I remember selling so many of the shirts that said “I think Ray Bull is literally Pierce Brosnan.”

Tucker: We didn’t go too crazy, but we do have a cricket shirt. I beat Aaron at a thing and now he has to eat a cricket on stage at every show. 
And he's embracing it and made a cricket shirt to honor that he's gonna do it.

Aaron: I did just get my crickets in the mail yesterday. I got a bunch of flavors: salt and vinegar, bacon, sour cream and onion.

AR: What does the space between finishing an album and releasing it feel like?

Tucker: Nausea and panic. Like eating crickets.

AR: And what's the best feeling about putting it out?

Aaron: The permission to start thinking about the next thing. We're always hungry for pushing our own limits of our weirdness, our eclecticness.

Tucker: There’s a sense of relief in putting this album out. For me, at least—

we hadn’t put out an album in 4 years or something. It felt like there was so much weight in what that was gonna be. It felt like a heavy statement to break our silence or something.

AR: Who would play Ray Bull in a biopic?

Tucker: Paul Mescal would play us both. But not like in the Parent Trap, where it’s a great editing trick. He would have to run back and forth between both spots, like a weird psychotic breakdown.

AR: Honestly, that sounds like the perfect Ray Bull movie. Last question: if there was one thing that you really wanted the world to know about the album, what would that thing be?

Tucker: Probably that it's out. But it's no big deal.