Wichita duo Geo-Joe (Georgia Sutton and Joey Lemon) releases the album “Where Did We Go So Wrong?” Friday, April 3.
The pair followed the annual RPM Challenge and wrote and recorded the entire LP across the 28 days of February, leaning on instruments they had in their Wichita home as well as some they had only recently acquired.
Lyrically, they focused their attention on current events, resulting in what they view as a protest album aimed at the Trump administration, writing in the record’s promotional materials, “The message is boisterous, specific, and unfiltered.”
They recently spoke about the process of writing and recording “Where Did We Go So Wrong?”
The following interview has been edited for length and for clarity.
You returned to the RPM challenge for this new album but this time you came up with some lyrical themes that are more politically charged.
Joey Lemon: Yeah. [Laughs.]
Georgia Sutton: Indeed.
JL: I think we knew, going into it, that we couldn’t avoid talking about what’s going on in the world because it just feels crazy most of the time and intense. It felt worth diving into. I came up with a creative prompt of sorts. I was very intentional about trying to choose a prompt from each side of the political spectrum. “What’s the worst thing about the Republican party? What’s the best thing about the Republican party? What’s the worst thing about the Democratic party? What’s the best thing about the Democratic party?”
Those all sort of ended up being woven into a patchwork of songs. There were non-political things in there as well: “What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve seen this week?” You get patchworks of lyrics that lead into some interesting starting points for what might be a deeper discussion.
GS: I haven’t been very vocal on social media. In person I’ll go on for hours. It felt like it’s not the right time, it’s way too late to become more vocal about the insanity of what’s going on politically and socially. It’s an important topic and it felt like a no-brainer as far as what to write about and what to lean into.
JL: I’ll say that a pretty standard question is, “What comes first, the lyrics or the music?” In this case we had a whole batch of lyrical starting points that were, very early on, things we knew that we wanted to incorporate.
GS: As far as themes but not specific lyrics.
How does this differ from the last time you made a record?
GS: The first time felt… Joey has no idea what I’m going to say.
JL: Nope.
GS: The first time felt really haphazard. It was our first time really doing anything, so it was, “Hey, can you play bass? Oh cool!” It was really rudimentary, basically starting from scratch. A lot of the process for that one felt like some random lyrics were happening while random arrangements were happening. We were doing different instruments at different times. It was about doing whatever made sense as far as the order of recording things.
This time Joey had a very meticulous schedule planned out from the get-go. “When are the lyrics done? When are the arrangements done? When is the rehearsal time? When are we recording specific instruments?” It really depends on the time of day because of where our studio is. We have to be respectful of the neighbors. What did we have energy for? When are parent-teacher conferences?
JL: I really leaned into my obsessive-compulsive tendencies on this and really just mapped everything out. It was pretty fun.
You had some new instruments this time too?
JL: The Moog [synthesizer] plays pretty heavily on I think three songs. We had an organ. It’s very much the same organ sound, it’s still a Hammond organ, it’s just a different Hammond organ. I think Georgia played a different toy piano.
GS: It was a different toy piano. We had a Rhodes [piano] on the last one and used a [Yamaha] CP-70 as well but it was really fun to have a different tone this time by using the Wurlitzer. It’s got a similar tone to the Rhodes but it’s a little sharper sounding. Good for recording, it’s way less muddy.
JL: We picked up a Wurlitzer I think is the exact same model as the one I learned to play piano on in college. It was in a big instrument room where I think there were 12 Wurlitzer pianos. You sit and play quietly in your headphones. We all hated it at the time. The teacher would chime in on your headphones and doing the teacherly thing. It’s funny that that’s the most desirable keyboard sound on the back end of this.
You have these sort, sort of interstitial pieces on the record. How did those come about?
JL: We signed up for the challenge to do a full record. By the rules, that’s 35 minutes. I’m a rule follower! We got to a point where we got about half the record done and I said, “I think we’re going to be about two minutes short.”
GS: Joey set up the four track [recorder] and said, “We need some interludes. They’ve got to be about a minute long.” I haven’t used a four track in a very long time so I needed a quick demo. I set it up and had a couple tapes going. It was kind of random. Whatever happened, happened and I think I came up with maybe 12-16 one-minute snippets. I wanted one to sound like church. Another was a minor key “Y.M.C.A.” It isn’t super obvious.
The piano is a little out of tune, it’s got its problems but take that A.I.!
JL: It was a little bit out of tune but I used my cassette four track and made it a little faster. It’s actually pretty close now. [Laughs.] As we worked them into the record, it felt like a meaningful statement to the record. A minor key version of “Y.M.C.A.” I don’t think I need to explain that. One of the titles is “Another Distraction,” about the 24-hour news cycle. I think the last one is called “And Then, Iran.”
We got done with the record and said, “Oh, we made this big and urgent political statement.” And then the big news thing happened. We bombed Iran. How do we even think about trying to keep up with things these days? We have this end statement that say, “That’s the next thing.”
And I’ll add one thing: This is a significantly more vulgar record than our past records. The first proper song on the record [“Anything You Like”] is just a bunch of quotes from our current president and it sort of sets the stage for the level of rhetoric that we’re going to use in a meaningful way. As so many people are not offended by what he’s saying, it feels almost comedic to be offended by the way we’re responding to it. We’re not quoting him to platform him. We’re quoting him to set the rules of engagement.
