When all three members of Menomena join me over Zoom from their respective homes—keyboardist-guitarist Brent Knopf and bassist-saxophonist Justin Harris in Portland, Oregon, drummer Danny Seim in, as fate would have it, Portland, Kentucky—everyone is all smiles, cracking jokes and oozing warmth. It’d be an understatement to call the sight uplifting. After Menomena released four inspired, unpredictable art-rock albums in the 2000s, Knopf left the band in January 2011 to pursue other projects. Something was a little off, a working friendship soured, but the two-piece Menomena still released another album, 2012’s Moms, and ended the ensuing tour with a hometown show in 2014. Then things went quiet.
Now, suddenly, here they are, together again and clearly very happy about it. “Taking this break from music and then getting back into it now with my two favorite musicians on Earth has been really awesome to see that this whole thing still exists,” says Seim. Still, they’re reluctant to call it a reunion, as Menomena never technically called it quits.
Seim relocated to Kentucky in 2015 after his wife got a residency position, they welcomed their first kid, and he focused on other work: his solo project Lackthereof, the collaborative band Pfarmers with Dave Nelson and the National’s Bryan Devendorf, and a job as director of the Louisville children’s museum Adventure House of You, where Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s Will Oldham and My Morning Jacket’s Jim James also lend a helping hand.
Knopf stayed busy under his solo moniker Ramona Falls and teamed up with the National’s Matt Berninger to form El Vy. Harris, meanwhile, joined Bloc Party on bass for the majority of the past decade.
While these outlets provided new creative paths, everyone in Menomena agrees that nothing has brought a comparable spark to playing together. “Menomena ruined me for anything after,” laughs Harris. “It wasn’t as musically fulfilling for me to just play bass anymore, because, in Menomena, what the three of us are doing is a juggling act.”
When The Insulation EP appeared on Menomena’s Bandcamp last month, fans were treated to three Mines B-sides. The title track and “Copious” were released previously, but the last song, “Caravan,” was only recently unearthed from the band’s archives. There’s something magical about hearing all three of them singing back-to-back on the EP and ending with Knopf, his higher voice always graceful yet illusive; a missing ingredient finally returned.
Menomena are unveiling more previously unreleased songs, too. An expanded edition of Friend and Foe, the first in a series of digital archive reissues, arrives today with 10 bonus tracks, three of which—“Golden Gate,” “Lochness,” and “Lone Ranger”—have never seen the light of day. The expanded edition of the album also boasts Magichat, their behind-the-scenes mixtape originally released as a download via Pitchfork in 2010, and all of the music from their 2006 EP Wet and Rusting.
“Seeing how amazingly resourceful, scrappy, and fearless Danny and Justin are really opened my mind [when I was younger] to try things yourself and not wait for permission,” says Knopf. Menomena are still following their intuition. They’re scouring through dust-covered hard drives, cobbling together more digital reissues slated for this summer, and, as of this past March, getting together in the same room to rehearse Menomena songs for the first time in 14 years—all of which they discuss below in an interview that’s been edited for length and clarity.
Brent Knopf: It was so fun to get back together for the first time in 14 years and feel the songs come back. It really makes you marvel at muscle memory. It also made me wonder what percentage of my brain will be forever allocated to Menomena songs.
Danny Seim: We’ve just had the one rehearsal and it seemed like one big instrumental jam because we haven’t set up a microphone yet.
Justin Harris: It felt really good, though. What Brent said about muscle memory—I only listened to maybe half of the record to figure out certain things, because of time restraints, but jumping into songs that I didn’t even attempt to play once until that night, and then just halfway through, how stuff just comes back to you and you remember how to play it at one specific part. But more than that, it was just enjoyable to look over at Brent and Danny, just doing what they do, and it was just very—just a lot of nostalgia. It was a nostalgia rush. I was surprised by how well both these guys played. And I’m surprised by how horribly I played. Actually, that was not a surprise.
Seim: I think there’s only two songs on that first album that we’ve played since Brent quit, so everything else was this little time capsule. Our live performances got so much more involved since that album, like a juggling act that went from bowling pins to chainsaws real quick; all of a sudden, both Brent and Justin have, at any given moment, five different instruments going at once. And I’m just sitting trying to keep time and sing. But this album really felt like a simpler era where there’s a bit of juggling, but it’s just all this cute, little, early twenties stuff. It was very charming. To look around [during rehearsal] and see those two guys, like here we all are? I was feeling really grateful through it all.
Harris: It means Brent does a lot of work [laughs].
Seim: It seems more like archeology at this point. It’s been hilarious to see what happens when I try to plug in my 2012 laptop and hook it up to my FireWire cable to access my drive. Everything hasn’t been opened in over a decade. We were all Pro Tools guys back in the day, and, come to find out, Pro Tools has never done a great job at making things easy on people to relaunch their music careers. You open up these old sessions and there’s a billion tracks missing and we can’t remember the song title we were operating under, because now the song title is something else, but it started as a veiled sexual reference or something silly back in the day. So this comes down on Brent, because Brent has always been the most technologically gifted of the three of us. And now Brent might regret ever agreeing to this.
Knopf: Yeah. The boring aspect of this is that there’s all these scraps of songs that were discarded or contenders for the album that didn’t quite make the runoff. They exist as these little echoes of themselves as bad MP3s. It wasn’t a no-brainer to share these things with the world because we, you know, curated our record on purpose. But Barsuk said super fans might like to hear more behind-the-scenes, making-of-the-record stuff. It becomes a task of finding sound files that aren’t terrible, reconstituting these scraps or B-sides, and having a crazy conversation about who has which session, how do you tell which one’s newer, and is it mixed? But, oh wait, we’re missing files, so we actually can’t export it. It’s just a lot of that. But on the bright side, it’s slowly coming together and Danny was on a tear during the Mines era. So there’s a lot of really awesome extra songs for Mines and some other really fun stuff for Friend and Foe, too.
Seim: Brent says that flatteringly, but I always say there’s not much glory in having the most songs that got rejected from the album.
Knopf: Well, look at George Harrison!
Seim: [laughs] Thank you, Brent. Thank you.
Harris: This is all done over email threads, too. So Brent’s done, what, 95% of the legwork for these re-releases? Lots of email threads, or emails just in general, where—I don’t know about you, Danny, but for me—you maybe answer the ones you want. But Brent’s responsible. He answers all of them. And that’s, uh, oh yeah, why did you quit Menomena again, Brent? [laughs]
Harris: For me, it’s been all nostalgic and positive. It’s not like any of our albums came without their trials and tribulations, but I think where we were at in life mentally, emotionally, and whatever our maturity levels were at that moment probably dictated everything. To be removed now 20 years on from that record is interesting because, I don’t know about you guys, but I have a hard time remembering any of the trials or tribulations. I’m just enjoying the fun of the music.
Seim: Fun Blame Monster, in particular, I remember listening back to that while we were making our later albums and being pretty embarrassed of the sound quality. I’ve always tried to record with any given crappy format that I can figure out, but I remember trying to make a conscious effort to improve the fidelity from album to album. I think we can all say that. So when we got to the Mines era where we were starting to get digital recording dialed in, Fun Blame Monster sounded so amateur hour to me. Now all these years have passed and listening back it’s become more endearing. Instead of listening to songs like, Oh God, I wish the drums didn’t sound like they were recorded with one microphone in my dad’s woodshop. Now I’m like, I wish that woodshop still existed with that one key microphone so we could do that again. It’s fun to hear it all as a complete piece.
Knopf: I do remember a lot of what was happening back when I made that really painful decision to step away. So when I go back and listen, especially to Mines-era music, it’s really emotionally tricky for me. I would describe it as one person’s problem-solving was another person’s pet peeve. The more pressure there was, the more the problems needed to be solved, the more it just spun around and sped up. On one hand, it’s tricky for me emotionally to hear these old songs from the Mines era, but, on the other hand, they’re great. In the middle of the night at, like, three in the morning, Danny’s B-side is on repeat in my head and I’m thinking about how cool this is and what an incredible artist! Revisiting it now gives me a lot of emotional breathing room. Before there was all this pressure and my dreams were wrapped up in this thing that felt like a crucible. Now I can just be grateful. Like, wow, we worked together on so many collaborations and made some stuff that is really special for us. Like Danny was saying, listening to the debut record, I still marvel at how little we knew about what we were doing in terms of using music effects in software. I had no idea how to use a compressor, but the songs resonate and I still find them very compelling artistically.
Harris: We don’t have any plans beyond this show at the moment, but let’s just see how it goes. We’ve talked about possibly doing it up in Seattle, just kind of keeping it regional maybe. I’m open to anything.
Knopf: I remember Danny saying that, with where life has taken us all, getting back into the tour van seems really, really improbable, and I would agree with that. We’re gonna start with this one show. If it goes super well, I’ll be surprised if I don’t imagine us doing another show for Friend and Foe. But the short answer is no, just this one show. It’s interesting, when we first got together to talk about this stuff, Danny was like, “It would be a shame if we don’t play together one more time.” And I was honestly not open to it when we first chatted about it. I was more interested in making just one more song together. This was over a year ago—the three of us got together at Juan Colorado, right?
Seim: Yeah. We met at a lot of strip mall family restaurants.
Harris: That was kind of the initial probe of should we play a show or whatever. That’s what you’re referring to, right, Brent?
Knopf: Yeah! It was really funny. We chatted and just got caught up on each other’s lives for the first, like, three hours. Then the restaurant was kicking us out and the last 45 seconds was this hurried bit of business conversation, like, “Should we play together ever?”
Seim: “Yeah, no. Probably not. See you next year!” [laughs] But then early next summer, Brent came in like, “All right, I’ll give you guys five rehearsals.” And we were like, “OK! That’s good! We’ll take those and roll with it!” Even if that was all we got, I’d still be really happy about this.