TC: How did you start playing music?
Cory: Um, well, when I was a kid I had piano lessons and I was in the chorus at school and stuff. But I never really played any music beyond that until I met Marc, and he was like, “Hey, we should start a band.”
Marc: “If you’re going to hang out with me you’re gonna have to.”
Cory: “If you’re going to be my girlfriend you’re gonna have to start a band.” He said you can be the singer, and I said okay.
TC: What else do you do? What are your other artistic pursuits?
Cory: I do a lot of visual art, so that was always kind of my main focus.
TC: You went to Pratt, right?
Cory: Yeah, I went to Pratt for printmaking, so I do a lot of printmaking and drawing and sewing and all sorts of stuff. But yeah, I was never really focused on music as my main thing until we started doing Lizard Kisses.
TC: Marc, do you come from a musical family?
Marc: Not at all. When I was really young my mother pressed piano lessons on to me which...
TC: Leads to some vivid imagery?
John: She forced you to do it?
Marc: Yeah, actually my teacher quit on me. When I was like eight I never practiced, and then at one point she was just like, you don’t want to do this. So that kind of tainted my experience on learning to read music and play music conventionally. Then I remember when I was eleven or twelve or something I asked my mom to buy me a Squire pack, but I never played it. I didn’t play until I was like nineteen or twenty.
John: You didn’t start playing guitar until you were twenty?
Marc: Yeah, seriously.
John: That’s fucking funny. I seriously thought that you’d been playing since you were like...
Marc: Nope.
John: A little adolescent.
Marc: And it really took me meeting someone who showed me open tuning. Open tunings kind of changed the way I saw my guitar. When I didn’t know how to play guitar, I would play in front of the mirror and try to mimic chords and it just never connected. It didn't mean anything to me. I don’t know. I played bass a little bit before that, so the one-note kind of thing made sense to me. I started playing a little bit more when I learned open tunings and started seeing shapes and then playing with John in the last five years.
TC: What about open tunings made it click?
Marc: It was the fact that I could just hold one string down and it would change the whole chord, and I can move that around. I mean I play in standard now. So I’ve translated that into bar chords or power chords and minors and stuff. But it was just the fact that it made it seem less hard than I thought it was.
TC: Broke it down to a simpler form.
Marc: Maybe seeing an instrument in a different context than what you’re used to changes the way you might play it. After that realization a lot of, like, two chord progressions turned into four chord progressions.
TC: Cory, how did you and Marc meet?
Cory: Um, we...
Marc: This is a good story.
Cory: We met at the Guggenheim Museum. We both worked there. I worked in the gift shop and Marc worked handing out audio guides. And then one day he came into the gift shop and he bought some stuff from me. He bought—I remember what he bought...
Marc: This silver backpack.
Cory: He bought a silver backpack.
Marc: It was like, a children’s backpack.
Cory: It was a little mini backpack for kids and he bought it and he was like, “Oh, I work here.” And then I was like, “Oh, well then you get an employee discount.”
Marc: And then our romance blossomed.
[All laugh.]
John: Fountain of love.
Marc: I had a bunch of coworkers telling me about Cory and they’re like, “Dude, she’s really hot.” You know, so I went into the gift store and I was like, woah. But actually I have uh... It’s almost our five-year anniversary.
Cory: What do you have?
Marc: I have that poster.
Cory: Oh yeah.
Marc: So, John and I used to play in a band called Innocuous, and this was kind of Cory's and my first date. I invited her to this show.
Cory: Yeah, he came back into the gift shop and invited me to see Lower Dens.
TC: Oh man, I love Lower Dens. You guys played with them?
John: Yeah, I’m from Maryland. Jana Hunter’s my sister.
TC: Really? Word.
John : So we toured with them a while.
Cory: Yeah so that’s...
TC: How you guys met.
Cory: Our story.
TC: That’s a good story.
Marc: Yeah, totally.
TC: Very cute. It all started with a silver backpack.
Marc: Yeah.
Cory: Yeah. I wonder if you still have it.
Marc: I still have it somewhere in the storage room over there.
TC: Well, let’s hear how you guys started to make music together.
Marc: So, we were together for a while and then I went on tour. I quit that job at the Guggenheim and I went on tour with John for a month and Cory went to...You went to Haiti, right? Or you went to Cuba?
Cory: I went to Cuba and then Haiti.
Marc: So we spent a month apart, or a month and a half. Then when we got back we decided to go to Cory’s parents house in Vermont. I always romanticized making a record in a cabin or something. Or just isolated somewhere. This seemed like a good opportunity. It was cool, we spent about two weeks there making music. We had skeletons of songs beforehand and chord progressions. When we got back we realized we had completed a few tracks and that was kind of the catalyst.
Cory: Well, that summer, before he went on that tour, was when you said “Oh, we should start a band,” and I was like, “Yeah, totally!” You know I didn’t think it was going to be, you know, necessarily a serious project or anything, but then when he came back and we planned our trip to Vermont we got more into it.
Marc: I’d written a lot of instrumental music, and I could hear vocals but I couldn’t sing. So I had all these little things that I’d been working on aside from Innocuous stuff with John. I remember writing a Lizard Kisses song, because on that tour we went on and recorded a demo after we were done playing in Virginia. I brought it to Cory, and once we recorded the basic tracks and started to do overdubs it sounded really full. I remember when we played it and then your mom was like, “Oh, wow, this isn’t..."
Cory: Yeah, she was like, “This sounds like a real song.”
Marc: Yeah! “Sounds like a real song.” Because we had all these weird songs at the time that were, just, really weird.
Cory: We were just having fun and experimenting. It was really exciting because it was such a new and different thing for me, too. I’d never done that before and no one had ever pushed me to do it before, you know?
