The name might suggest some kind of internal struggle, but Battleme tries to keep things intuitive, says bandleader Matt Drenik. “Other people have these interpretations of the name: ‘Are you trying to battle yourself with your pop songs and your loud songs?’“ Drenik jokes from his home in Portland, Ore. “I’m like, ‘Not really. I don’t know what I’m doing.’” When listening to Battleme’s latest, Future Runs Magnetic (El Camino Media), the idea that Drenik doesn’t know what he’s doing sounds far-fetched, with his bedroom-pop sensibilities somehow finding common ground with the record’s brasher rock songs. But the first Battleme tracks were very different. While still a member of Austin stoner-rock band Lions, Drenik recorded some country/folk songs under the Battleme moniker for Sons Of Anarchy. Drenik will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand-new feature on him.
Drenik: “So, you’re from Cincinnati?” I asked Rebecca Steele late one night. We’d just been introduced by a mutual friend and struck up a conversation about a tiny little shack of a store that used to be in Mt. Lookout Square called Wizard’s Wardrobe.
“Remember they had all those bahas,” she yelled.
Ah, do I ever. The store was owned by the acid-eating family of the neighborhood and adorned with trippy psychedelic wall hangings, crushed jewelry, bad tie-dyes and too much sage. It was a 12-year-old’s wet dream. Somehow we ended up here and I’ll always think of Rebecca as the first person in 20 years that actually remembered that place.
Eventually the conversation moved to art and music, and pretty soon I was in her studio space located in SE Portland, shooting some new PR photos last year.
“I’ve got this idea where I want to take a wall and crush it with colors and somehow paint you into it,” she said.
I loved the idea. And I knew that this wasn’t going to be some boring band photo. She was going to make a piece of art. And why not? If we’re not making art, what the hell are we doing?
She grew up in a neighborhood close to mine in Cincinnati and started obsessing with everything art, mostly photography, at the age of 11. Pretty soon it was all about Elle magazine and Ralph Eugene Meatyard.
“You know, he shot his family, mostly his kids in some of the weirdest, darkest, most beautiful moments around Kentucky in these old abandoned homes, sometimes wearing masks. There’s something about it that was so beautiful.”
Eventually she ditched the idea of Ohio and headed out west, where she developed a real sense of what I call “the eye.”
“You know, she just sees everything in color, more than most of us,” I tried to explain to my friend JJ one day.
What I really meant was that she has this ability of make anything a living piece of art, and that’s not an easy thing to do. In fact, it takes an insane amount of patience to see this shitty world in so many colors.
“I’m drawn to things that are uncomfortable or ones that don’t seem to immediately fit.”
By the time I was morphing into the wall, she was already on to another idea where she’d cover an entire canvas backdrop in old newspaper clippings and stand me in the middle with a single bulb hanging down from above, as if I’d slipped out of some bizarre 1920s speakeasy.
“Yes!” I yelled.
There’s something that happens to artists from Ohio. I don’t know what it is, maybe the Ohio river, but for some reason we all get each other, whether we want to or not. It’s in the way we talk, the way we see the mess of colors. And Rebecca Steele was my new favorite.
More art after the jump.
