“Looper” – An Interview with Bryant Lawhorn of Drive Driver Drive

I used to have a really bad opiate problem when I was younger from 13-17 and would sit in my room and just listen to music and chain smoking Marlboro Reds high out of my mind on oxycodone or whatever else I could get my hands (or nose, rather) for hours. And again, through youtube, I stumbled upon the “Only Shallow” music video. I must’ve been 14 or 15 around this time, it was during covid lockdown. The opening snare hits and the lead guitar were so visceral, I felt like it rearranged my insides. I ended up listening to Loveless all the way through afterwards and it changed the way I thought about music entirely, specifically the more experimental tracks like “Touched”, “Soon”, and “To Here Knows When”. I started thinking about sound as more textures and ambience and less about hooks. Whenever I hear the intro to “Only Shallow” I still get chills. And that opened the door to other psychedelic bands like “The Jesus and Mary Chain”, “Spacemen 3”, “Loop” and “Primal Scream”. Right now I’m really into 80’s and 90’s neo-psych bands like The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Spacemen 3. I was really inspired on this next record by those two bands along with MBV. “Methodrone” and the “Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs to” compilation are in my daily rotation and have been for a while at this point. But overall I would say My Bloody Valentine had the biggest impact on younger me.

CMM-How did you start crafting your own recordings and developing your sound?

Bryant-I actually started using Bandlab on my IPhone. My first recordings date back to Oct 2023 and my first release was in Dec 2023. All of that has been long gone from the internet. When I started I would just put my phone in front of my amp and play, and I’d overdub tamborine and vocals on top of that. I rarely used drums in my early material, and if I did they were badly mapped and out of sync with the other instruments. I made albums in a ton of different genres though. I was making emoviolence, lo-fi screamo, minimalist “Velvet Underground” sounding stuff, sasscore, black metal, just music of all types. Some of it is still up on my bandcamp (“killing men with machines” and “Lovely Lovely Birds”). Eventually I started using Cakewalk and that opened up a whole new array of possibilities. It’s much more in depth. In my opinion all of the Bandlab stuff sounded terrible, but it was a starting point. I’ve learned a lot through trial and error, and the Bandlab stuff was mainly error.

CMM-You recently released an E.P. recently called “looper”. What was the recording process like and were there any particular pieces of gear you all used to get the sound you were looking for?

Bryant-I actually don’t have a big expensive pedalboard. Just 2 fuzz pedals, the TC Electronic Rusty Fuzz, which is a Boss FZ-3, or silicon Fuzz Face clone, the Behringer SF300, which is a Boss FZ-2 Superfuzz clone, a multipurpose reverb Joyo made called the Atmosphere, which is where I get my reverse reverb from, a MoVall Falling Star modulated delay, a cheap 2 knob Joyo JF-09 tremolo, a Joyo JF-07 Classic Flanger and my looper, which is the focal point of my board, the Ammoon Pock Loop, which is a dl-4 style looper. The order is Rusty Fuzz, Atmosphere, SF300, Falling Star, Classic Flanger, Tremolo, Pock Loop. All of these go in front of the amp. The Pock Loop, like the dl-4, has different playback speed options, 1/2 and 2x speed as well as a reverse function. The amp I use is a 150 watt 2×12 solid-state Fender Pro 185. A lot of people hate on the red knob fenders but this one sounds great to me. It has a really nice 60’s garage-like overdrive section, as well as built in spring reverb and a boost switch for more distortion, and it has a bunch of tonal controls that make dialing in tones very easy. Not to mention it can get insanely loud. I have to wear earplugs if I put the volume past 3. It has a built-in gain switch that can be set at either -16dB, -7dB or if you wanna get even louder, +4dB. I use a guitar sustainer called the sound stone, it’s like an ebow but at a fraction of the price. I don’t have a bass, so I play bass lines on my guitar and transpose them down an octave on Cakewalk, which is a free to use daw I’ve been using since May 2024. The interface I use is a Focusrite Scarlett Solo 3rd Gen, which has a single XLR and 1/4 inch input I use for DI guitar and faux bass. The only mic I use is a Shure SM57. My electric guitar is just a cheap Squier Bullet Strat and my acoustic is a Guild A-20 Bob Marley custom. It’s safe to say I’ve taken the saying “use what you’ve got, do what you can” very literally. If I had to estimate, my guess would be that my entire setup costs no more than $900. Most of my gear was bought used, and I’ve saved a lot of money going that route.

As for the EP, all 3 songs will be on my upcoming album “heaven on the brain”, and have been made in the span of 2 months. On “Looper” I used the rusty fuzz, spring reverb and distortion from my amp, the MoVall modulated delay, and the Joyo Atmosphere on the church setting, with moderate wetness and decay. The synth that starts at 4:23 was made using the Kevin Shields feedback sampling technique. I recorded guitar feedback, put that into the sampler in my daw, added an Airwindows plugin called starchild, which is a sort of droning, non-linear reverb, and programmed a sequence using the built-in step sequencer. It sounds way different than if I was to use a digital synth, much more lively. On “Cocaine Girl, Cocaine” I used reverse reverb from the Atmosphere fully wet and at low decay, modulated delay, and my amps built in distortion. I double tracked the guitars on this one, using the boost control on my amp for higher gain and tremolo on one track. For “interlink’, I sent reversed 2x speed reverse reverb loops through my Fender Mustang LT25 practice amp, that has built in FX like chorus, fuzz, reverse delay, different amp models etc. and distorted them to all hell and added an old anti LSD propaganda film sample over it with a telephone filter and a lot of reverb and delay along with some indian gamaka samples. The looper plays an integral part in this song and it does all the work for me. I used the Mustang LT25 from the beginning of my recordings up until The Drive Driver Fucking Drive Experience as an audio interface, which i didn’t have at the time, using the built in USB port. I would just plug a cheap Behringer mic with a 1/4 inch input into the amp and crank the gain and compression and scoop the low mids, boost the highs and EQ in Cakewalk. In my daw I use the free Valhalla Supermassive plugin for delay and reverb on my vocals and guitars if they’re too dry. For drums I use the free SSD5 sample pack and program drum patterns using the step sequencer. If I use an actual non-feedback synth, like an organ or pad, it’s from the free Surge XT plugin, and I play it either using the $25 Akai LPK25 mini midi controller or I sequence it. On my next album, “heaven on the brain”, I use a lot of different percussion, like bongos, tambourines, and shakers. I even play some flute on a couple of tracks.

On Track 4, “god is ecstasy”, I messed around with a warped middle eastern influenced string record I found in an abandoned house and put a bunch of effects on it to get this really weird hazy droning sound in the background, and that is on top of an acoustic guitar, an organ drone, bongos, tambourine, feedback synth and shakers. I made that song around early May this year, and it’s been a challenge, more so than my other stuff which is all made in less than a month, to really get what I hear in my head out into the laptop. This album has gone through many iterations, and it has taken months to make, which is way longer than all of my others. At first I was gonna call it “The Peoples Acid Republic Commune” and it had a completely different cover but I went through some personal stuff, that being the death of a family member I was really close to as well as a breakup, around the end of August and decided to change it to “heaven on the brain”. I think it’s fitting considering the different sounds that can be found on the album.

CMM-If you could do a score for any film director, who would it be and what would the film be about?

Bryant-If i could score any movie, it would be a Tarantino film about Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd coming to America for the first time during the summer of love, set in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. There has been speculation going around for a while that Syd ingested a potent psychedelic amphetamine called DOM aka STP (meaning serenity, tranquility and peace) and that is what triggered his behavioral episodes and downfall. As someone who has gone deep with psychedelics, I would not be surprised if that is the case. I think a film detailing these events in the style of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” would be great. I love “The Piper at The Gates of Dawn” and I’ve been interested in hippies and mid to late 60s psychedelia in general for a long time and would love to make more music that invokes the feel of that time and place. So I would pick either that or an indie movie about Spacemen 3. “Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs to” could be an awesome name for a film or documentary.

CMM-Anything coming up?

Bryant-Yes! I’m releasing a full-length 1 and 1/2 hour album called “heaven on the brain” soon. The main influences are The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Lovesliescrushing, My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream, Spacemen 3, and all of those combine to make a hazy, dreamy, psychedelic, narcotic tinged atmosphere that goes further into the unknown than any of my previous endeavors. There’s a lot of ambient influenced and shoegaze-y stuff going on. I even made a few folk influenced songs as well. It’s the spiritual successor to my album “Dick Bong and His Intergalactic Substance Abuse Orchestra”, which I consider my best work. I’m really proud of how it came out, and I’m excited to share it with the world.