For Luke Rathborne, of the band Rathborne, music is not an external object but rather an almost uncontrollable subconscious force. Hailing from Maine, Luke moved to New York at the age of 18 and immediately planted himself in the music scene with 2011’s After Dark. Following with several EP’s, Luke formed a full band and released SOFT in July of 2014. Since then, his brand of introspective, un-genre-able rock music has found growing success, leading him to open for The Strokes at SXSW and go on tour with Noah and the Whale.

I was fortunate enough to speak with Luke about his creative process, musical influences, where his music is going from here, and his odd comparisons, such as the “the punk Huey Lewis”.

I know the title of your recent album (SOFT) comes from the opening track, but the album is anything but “soft”. How did you choose this as your title?

Luke Rathborne: I was thinking about the title being different, messing with your expectations a bit. There’s this overall idea of it being kind of delicate, with the photo on the cover, and the idea of how you can have rather loud things and also have them be coming from a place that is vulnerable. I especially found with more hard-edged music that it is about finding some kind of quiet. Some of those feelings you get from listening to a pastoral folk record you can also get from being in this very loud, overpowering space, almost like that band Swans. He always seems to do that, Michael Gira, where he just pulverizes you with these really loud things, but you know that it’s coming from a very emotional place. I guess it’s just messing with that idea of having a loud type of music so it’s not emotionally available, which isn’t true.

What definitely came across was this idea of the deceptiveness of the title, because your previous work has mostly been acoustic, soft music. Does that tie in with you now having a full band?

I had a record that was called After Dark, that was a while ago now, but it was more folksy though it had some rock songs on it. I guess I don’t really know when the switchover happened. I just met this drummer at some point (John Eatherly of Be Your Own Pet), and it was kind of like being on a roller coaster ride, so I started playing with him. But to be honest, now when I go back and listen, I’m like “whoa, this is a pretty high tempo.” In a way, you forget that you were playing at 200bpm or something like that. Some people who knew the music before give me funny comparisons, but I like talking to someone who listened to SOFT first and then went back. People seem to respond well to just this, without the preconceived notions and baggage. They can just say, “Oh, I like this”, and then go back and explore the older stuff. (Laughing) Someone once described me as “punk Huey Lewis & The News”.

It’s interesting you mention the comparison, because you do have identifiable influences that you somehow mix into one cohesive sound. How you take these and make a new sound that is completely different from your previous work?

Yeah, for me the most important thing is always creating something totally new for myself. That’s just always the way I’ve operated. I’m hoping to release this new record that has some of those songs like “I Can Be One” and some of those more orchestral songs. The focus for me is creating something totally new, that’s the thing that is the most interesting and what I naturally deviate towards. I like to surround myself in this totally new thing I’ve never experienced before. That becomes part of the challenge too. You look at a song like “Soft” and I remember at the time doing it, it was just supposed to be that kind of idea of going really far into extremes in terms of the sound and the riff. When you turn on Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf”, it kind of has that sound when someone coughs and then all of a sudden it’s really heavy. But also like The Stooges’ “Funhouse”, which intentionally has yelling and yelping, to just have that feeling of having something heavy while being funny. I’ve heard people say my music is like T. Rex on the guitar, which I am fine with, but then you have this chord progression that is also calling back to grunge. It’s almost challenging someone as in “do you think this is one whole record?” My answer is “I don’t know”, which makes it fun when people sit down and listen to it as a whole album.

I think the comparisons are going to come naturally when bands have the standard guitar-bass-drums setup, but you keep us guessing as to what each song will sound like. Is that something that just happens naturally?

First off, the record was made very quickly because there was not a budget. The bulk of it was done in five days at this pretty cheap studio. We do everything live, but there’s only three people. The way I talked to the producer who I recorded it with, Emery Dobyns who did Battles and Antony and the Johnsons, was adding a fourth dimension. It’s that surreal feeling that starts to push everything beyond the surface or reveal more going on underneath. That’s when some of the synthesizers started coming in and when we started referencing wildly different periods of time. I remember thinking that the arpeggiated synth at the end of “Last Forgiven” was a “Take on Me” sort of thing, very 80’s. Recording is like getting on this ride you want to go on, then you start pushing everything in this scary direction where you don’t know what’s around the corner. There’s a danger to it because I know that none of this may be marketable music. Someone told me, “the people who make every song sound the same do pretty well commercially,” and I was very confused by that. It’s a really subconscious thing that you’re trying to put out there. Like Jeff Tweedy (of Wilco) said recently, it’s like trying to keep track of what your subconscious is doing and bringing that into reality.

You say you’ve been working on new songs. Are they completely new as you say you like to do, or are they more in the vein of SOFT?

I feel like with SOFT, someone could listen to a specific track say, “well the person who made this song clearly likes ‘Don’t Go Back to Rockville’ by R.E.M.” or “he listens to Big Star”. With the new record, it’s almost an ode to a teenager who gets really into music and has a specific aesthetic they like. Hopefully, in a sense, it justifies all the time I spent growing up listening to music obsessively, as I know lots of people do. When you grow up like that, you have that moment where you say to yourself, “holy shit, I’ve spent a lot of time doing this.”

Will the new record then act on your personal influences you had or more objective ones?

I hope to bridge the gap between an experimental approach, as with this last record, and becoming more personal. Some of the songs on SOFT were abstract or about characters. The song “Deal” isn’t about personal experiences but little bits about characters, whereas before I have written about really personal experiences.

With this last record only having been released this summer, what is the timeframe for the new one?

I mean, it could come out in two months, but it’s about figuring out when’s the best time to do that. So many times it’s up to the label, but the last record I released on my own. I was hoping to have some more support behind the next one, though I can’t say enough how enjoyable it is to do everything yourself. You look at someone like Matador Records, they have been around for so long and they understand independent music in a way that a major label doesn’t. They get something about how to connect a vision of one person and curate it to an audience. If I hear about a record coming out on Matador, I automatically want to check it out because I trust the things they do. So while there are advantages to putting out your own stuff, it can get quite expensive too. I just got a booking agent, but I’m the one who goes to the vinyl mastering to make the plates, which I then take to a record plant in Brooklyn, after which I pack them into a van and send them out myself. There is something awesome about doing it that way. Sometimes I’ll even put a note in the sleeve that just says “Thanks for buying this”. If I was 15 or 16, that would really blow my mind if someone was that involved.

Lastly, regarding your show next Tuesday at Bowery Electric, can we expect to hear some of the new songs?

Oh absolutely! There will be a lot of stuff of SOFT, but definitely a lot of new material.

Luke Rathborne can be seen with his band Rathborne on Tuesday, December 9 at Bowery Electric. The show starts at 8pm with tickets for $10 at the door.