Hailing from Grand Rapids, Michigan, The Crane Wives, made up of guitarists/vocalists Emilee Petersmark and Kate Pillsbury, bassist Ben Zito, and drummer Dan Rickabus, have been making music together since 2010, but haven’t always had the committed and adoring fanbase that they have today. They’ve earned those fans by always making the music that’s always felt right to them. People started gathering outside of the Englert Theater hours before the doors even opened, and by 6:30 PM, the line to get inside stretched down blocks along East Washington Street.
With their new album Beyond Beyond Beyond set to release on September 6th, and with their song “Arcturus Beaming” releasing just days before the June 8th show, the folk rock band is showing no sign of slowing down anytime soon. Ahead of the fourth show of the band’s current tour, they sat down with KRUI’s Livian LaVine and Harry Epstein in the Englert’s greenroom to talk about their inspiration, their process, their community of fans, and how far they’ve come together.
Interview has been edited for clarity.
Harry Epstein: To break the ice, how’s the tour been going?
Ben Zito: Good!
Dan Rickabus: Good! Day 4, yesterday we played Prince’s birthday, at the venue that they filmed Purple Rain in, so that was a good thing.
Emilee Petersmark: He didn’t curse us, so that’s good.
Dan: We’re not haunted by Prince.
Ben: Word’s out on if he blessed us or not, though. He’s a benign Prince, so we’ll see.
Emilee: If he was neutral, I’d take that as a win.
Livian LaVine: Have you been able to check out Iowa City at all? See the Arts Fest?
Kate Pillsbury: Oh, that’s what’s happening? Yeah, we’ve only just loaded in, and then sound checked. We just got done with the sound check.
Ben: Two hours ago, got the stuff in.
Emilee: We usually see everything from the window of the van on the way in.
Harry: Did it look nice?
Emilee: It looked really nice! I went to the comic book shop next door, which was great. It’s nice to be able to get these little moments of humanity in.
Livian: Elephant in the room, you guys just recently released new music with your song “Arcturus Beaming”. What was some of your inspiration behind that song?
Kate: That’s a big question. That song was kind of a convergence of a long period of survival mode, and the coming out of that into more of a hopeful era. It’s a song about coping with the overlap of those things. The grief of losing something, but also the hope of a new future. I don’t know how deep to go into the influences.
I used a little bit of Plato’s allegory of the cave for inspiration for that song. And obviously the star Arcturus is a huge influence on the song. That’s the fourth brightest star in the sky, and it’s based off of a conversation that I had with someone about like, “What if there are aliens out there, looking at our sun?” And it was just like, “I need to fit that into a song!”
Livian: What did the songwriting process look like for that piece, or for other songs on the upcoming album?
Dan: It was cool to hear about Kate’s process because you had to just trust it, and for us that was like one big poem, nothing repeats in it. So I think it’s really fun because Kate’s guitar part holds it down, and Ben’s bass part creates the energy and rock-solidness of it, and as the song progresses, every time there’s an instrumental, Emilee and I go a little crazier, so there’s this release feeling in the instrumentals. But that’s more in the arrangement side of things. When we write, usually Emilee or Kate will write the chord structure, lyrics, flow, verses, and choruses of a song, and then we’ll all build it out. But this time, writing this new album, we tried a lot of different stuff. We just tried to challenge ourselves and try stuff.
So, we have a song where the main guitar riff, Ben wrote on an acoustic guitar and kinda passed it around. We have stuff on this album where I had a chorus and a beat for a song, and then Emilee wrote the verses. So, for this time I think we got back to like, when we were first a band, we would do, “Oh, Emilee and I are writing a song, but we’re imagining Kate singing it,” and stuff like that in the early days. But in the middle period we didn’t do a lot of that, so we kind of brought some of that back. One of the songs, Kate wrote for me to sing, so it’s all this trading around.
Kate: Also, when we released our first album Safe Ship, Harbored, immediately after our album release show, we went to a little cabin and worked on new music. We were so invigorated.
Ben: Literally the next morning! Partied all night after the show, then got up and drove.
Kate: We were so youthful! But we decided to summon some of that, because y’know, we’re older now, and we each have our own houses and our own lives, so we said, “Let’s have a little retreat together.” So this past July, that’s where we worked on a lot of the music for this album, including Arcturus. We just hung out in a cabin and did what we called it a “hot tub retreat” with some songwriting on the side. We just hung out and bonded and worked on a bunch of music, I think seven songs?
Dan: Mhm, seven at the first retreat, and then we did another retreat in December that was shorter, where we did two big songs, and then two of the other ones kind of were old. Well, not old, but from this era where they didn’t belong anywhere yet, so we got them up in fighting shape and added those two. So, there’s 11 tunes.
Harry: As you kind of mentioned, it’s been a long time since the first album release. How does that feel?
Ben: Weird.
Dan: Weird.
Emilee: It’s odd. It makes me feel very aware of how long we’ve been doing this. I think when we started the band, there wasn’t any expectation of what we had envisioned for the long-term future. I think we were all just in it as long as it felt right and comfortable, and so long as the pieces fell together, everything aligned. But to look back and realize that you’ve been doing it for 13 years is kind of like a “wow” moment. I don’t think I planned on doing this for over a decade, but it’s a huge part of our lives, and it’s really cool to see that there’s been a real evolution between album one and album five.
Kate: We’ve been through so much life parallel to each other, really enmeshed in each other’s lives, that it really is like a marriage of a kind. All of our partners, and all of our life kind of overlaps, and we really have to work with each other to make sure that we can shape a future that works for everyone involved, and I don’t know, I think there’s something really special about that.
Livian: You mention as well the evolution between album one and, this is now album five I believe, how do you think your sound has changed between some of the last music you’ve released and now?
Dan: Last music?
Livian: Like, maybe your live album from 2020, for example.
Dan: Oh yeah! That was kind of like the new electric era. Here I Am is kind of what captures the electric Crane Wives. Obviously our first album is just acoustic folk, eventually it just felt better for the show, and both Kate and Emilee seemed so excited to play electric guitar. With them having such a thick tone, and then also not having to switch different acoustic instruments around, we were loving just the energy that being an electric 4-piece gave us. That’s definitely a big part of this album, y’know, it’s fleshed out. We invited two string players that are our friends from Michigan to play, and there’s lots of other like, sonic depth that we added. But a lot of it is excitement about being a 4-piece electric band.
Ben: You know, we do incorporate some acoustics, and try to stay true to that earlier sound, but it’s considerably different. It’s a super natural progression, though. It’s been nice.
Emilee: We’ve just kind of been doing what feels fun, exciting, and interesting to us, and I feel like as we’ve gotten older, our music interests have changed a little bit. The things that we’re interested in exploring are grittier riffs or more complex sounds, and it’s been really exciting to have an avenue as a 4-piece to explore how big and how thick of a sound we can create with just the four of us, and then adding in extra little ear candy bits just to add a little bit of magic to the music. It’s really exciting.
Ben: It’s really a product of us chasing what is interesting to us. Like, in quite a few of the songs, there’s a specific pedal that was very exciting to us, like, “Oh, that sounds cool on this too!” It just happens to be everywhere, just because we thought it was sweet, and chasing what was interesting. Picking up an electric guitar, it’s a lot more interesting than an acoustic. You can make a lot more different sounds with it. There’s a lot more freedom to run.
Harry: I mean, doing what you think is interesting, that’s music, so it’s good to hear that you guys are continuing to do things that you enjoy, even as The Crane Wives has gotten bigger, at least from the outside.
Dan: One of my favorite parts, as we’re talking about this, is just being a huge fan of each of these three. Obviously we have a lot more sounds, but the way some of those electric guitar parts interweave, it’s just like, “Woah!” It’s also just really fun to note that Ben recorded it in his studio and mixed it.
Emilee: He built that studio with his two hands.
Ben: These two. (Holding up his hands)
Dan: Those two!
Harry: There they are, right there!
Livian: In the flesh!
Dan: Yeah, there they are!
Emilee: But it’s like a dream to be able to work in a studio environment that is not only super comfortable, but was also crafted to fit the songs that we make.
Ben: That’s where we practice, too.
Emilee: Yeah, it’s very convenient.
Dan: In that studio we kind of became like a four-headed producer, where some decisions were made without speaking.
Livian: As you guys said, you have your own lives outside of this band, so I’m curious, what individual projects have you been working on or are excited to work on in the future?
Kate: I think right now, we’re all very excited about The Crane Wives and very invested, but the three of us me, Emilee, and Dan do have solo music we work on as well. But it kinda creeps on over time.
Emilee: Ben and I, over the lock-down, like during pretty much peak Covid, we recorded—
Ben: You about to make news?
Emilee: We recorded a solo record with a bunch of my solo music that’s just kind of been like, I don’t know, we’ve been waiting for an opportunity to let it out into the world, but it just hasn’t felt right.
Ben: We’ve got it done, but we’re like, “Okay! Crane Wives album,” and then that has just been…
Emilee: Yeah.
Ben: It’s awesome.
Emilee: But it’s one of those things where it’s exciting to come back to it and kind of use the influences we’ve gained by performing, and by working on this record together. I feel like it’s kind of like a trading off of inspiration, right? When we work together I think we inspire each other to do more on our own as well. I know Dan also has a solo project as well, and we write music individually. Sometimes that music just doesn’t fit with the band and that usually just ends up in a Google Drive folder somewhere, so it’s nice to give those songs a home as well.
Livian: I feel like every creative has something of a similar experience, just like—
Emilee: Just a dump site?
Livian: Exactly, exactly.
Dan: I actually saw a hat that you can get today, and all it is are just the words, “Untitled, Unmastered.” Something for artists, y’know?
Emilee: Version 5: unfinished.
Dan: Yeah, yeah, I have a solo record that all three of these people were on, and I’m also in a band called Moss Manor, and yeah, like Emilee’s saying, there’s a really cool exchange where you get out certain ideas that don’t belong in different projects. You get them out in different projects, or then you get inspired to do something, and then your playing changes by the time you come back to the band. We’re all just fans of each other’s projects, so it’s just a big old, I don’t even know what you’d call it. Just a generative…
Harry: Soup?
Dan: Yup, it’s a soup!
Harry: This is gonna be a kind of big on the spot question, but what do each of you guys, or as a whole, think your biggest influences creatively or musically are? Like I said, big question.
Emilee: That is a big question.
Harry: If it’s easier, you could just say favorite album or whatever.
Dan: That isn’t any easier.
Livian: Yeah, that might be harder!
Emilee: Hmm, I’ve been listening to a lot of Mitski. It’s been really exciting seeing her kind of pull that like, Kate Bush, avant-garde card a little bit, and see that you don’t have to do the mainstream thing to be recognized, which is really comforting. We also listened to a lot of Boygenius around the time we were in the studio.
Kate: I’m obsessed with Adrianne Lenker, and Big Thief in general, but particularly Adrianne. I wanna say that’s a huge influence, for us all I think, as well as just other art forms. Emilee’s a visual artist, and I like that overlap in visual media and music, which you can see in art that Emilee does for us, and we have Rebecca Green on this new album again, who did the art for our last four albums as well. But then another huge influence has been, especially on this album, space.
Emilee: We love space!
Kate: Yeah!
Emilee: But back to influences, The War on Drugs. Really interested in the guitar sounds there.
Dan: There’s like a Venn diagram, y’know? But it’s so cool cause there’s some stuff in the middle of the Venn diagram of the four circles that we all agree on, but there’s all sorts of stuff in the wings.
Harry: Well, obviously with the new album coming out, is there any chance we’ll be hearing some upcoming songs tonight?
Dan: Oh, yeah! (Reaches for the setlist)
Ben: Hide it, quick!
Harry: I’m not looking, I’m not looking!
Livian: I was right next to it and I didn’t even notice!
Dan: We’re playing “Arcturus Beaming” at every show this tour because we’re very excited to have it released as of this week, and it’s so cool, even the first three shows, I heard people singing along. We’re playing “The Well” tonight, which is our recent single that came out in December, which is just a standalone piece of art, and not actually part of the new album’s music. We have too much music! The way the album flowed and fit together thematically, it felt like it would just be kinda tossed in there. We will play, tonight anyway, one more song that will be on the new record.
Livian: You mentioned the themes of the album as well, and listening to “Arcturus Beaming”, it seemed like it was kind of the title track for the album, singing “Beyond, beyond, beyond.” What felt right about making that part the name of the album?
Emilee: Finding a name for your record has got to be the most torturous experience because no matter what you say it sounds dumb. Every time that you verbalize that it’s like, “That’s dumb. That’s a dumb name.” It’s like that with band names too, like you scrutinize any band that exists. Red Hot Chili Peppers, stupid name. The Beatles, stupid name. Like all of those are dumb. Anything under a magnifying glass sounds so dumb and pretentious. So, we went through a huge process of attempts to label this record. In the past we just kind of spitballed for whatever felt right, like sometimes things just hit.
Ben: There were a few contenders, Dan had a list.
Emilee: Yeah, Dan had a big list.
Ben: There were about 15 in the drive, and they were all pretty good, y’know?
Emilee: But like, “Beyond, beyond, beyond,” that moment in “Arcturus” for me anyways, as somebody who’s just listening to the record and trying to be a casual listener in my mind, that just felt like the pinnacle moment of us saying what we need to say. The theme of the record is that yes, things are hard, but a lot of our music over time has focused about the ugly things that people try to keep pushed down and repressed. This is more like, yes those things exist, but also this other thing exists, which is hope and the future, and this idea that there is a world outside of the hard things and hurting.
Ben: Emilee brought that to practice. She was like, “What about beyond, beyond, beyond?” Without thinking, I was like, “Yup!” I had a feeling, and then we all thought like, let’s all sit on it for a week or whatever. Then in another practice we brought it back up, and it was like, “Yeah that’s it!” Beyond, beyond, beyond felt good, y’know?
Emilee: It just takes you further away from where you start, and I like that this album kinda gives us a view of the veil between, and this idea that there is something on the other side.
Kate: The whole album too just has this sort of trudging energy of making it through the difficulty, and we liked imagining what comes after.
Ben: That doubling down on the unknown, because whatever’s beyond beyond is, beyond. Unknown, unknown, unknown. Picture what’s beyond, and the alliteration at least anyway. It’s just perfect. Nailed it.
Dan: Nailed it! I can’t say what it is, but I have an alt band/alt album name that would be like our early 2000s post-hardcore album name. Has a comma in it, y’know? It’s like way too long.
Emilee: All lowercase letters in it.
Dan: I had so many ones where I would say “That’s our blank-blank album name, if we wanted to be something other than what we are.” So yeah, we got the right one.
Livian: Maybe after the album releases, you make a post with all the other names.
Dan: Then we can make faux press photos, change our look.
Harry: Radical shift for The Crane Wives!
Emilee: I vote for really bad photoshop, with Jojo Siwa makeup on all of us.
Harry: Speaking of Jojo Siwa, that’s not something I thought I’d be saying today, how do you guys feel about the fact that so many queer people really enjoy your music?
Kate: It’s such a gift.
Emilee: It feels like we’ve really found our people. We spent so long playing like, I don’t wanna badmouth venues or other people obviously, but like to people that I felt were not our people.
Ben: We played a lot of breweries. People there for the beer, and then the music. Maybe a little too much of the beer.
Emilee: Exactly! And now we have these amazing, deep-feeling fans who wanna know what the meanings of the songs and visuals are, and like they’re artists! They’re creators! Which is also such a huge thing to be able to write music for people who make things. It’s such an honor. It feels so great to be in a room full of people who you can trust to hold a drink.
Ben: Not to generalize too much, but like every town we go to, the people that run the merch table are the most polite humans I’ve ever met. Every night it’s like the nicest people.
Kate: Our openers on our tours have said the same thing, they’re just an attentive audience of kind people. It’s almost scary being on stage, cause everyone’s listening so intently, no words are exchanged. It’s such a polite crowd, and our fans make friends at the shows. I know people do in the wild, but like there’ll be people who have never been to a concert, they’re scared to go to a show where they don’t know what they’re gonna get out of it, and they’re like, “Ugh, how do I do this!” There’s a Discord server that we have where fans will like sync up before the show, and plan to meet each other. It’s just this little safety net of people who are open, kind, and loving, so it feels amazing to play to audiences like that.
Dan: Mhm. Yeah, we get lots of stories about people finding belonging, and we always say that we didn’t do this or propagate it, but they found our songs, and we’re just so happy that our songs can mean so much to people’s lives.
Emilee: I always think as an adult, that grew up queer and didn’t have safe spaces or a safe community necessarily, it feels like a big responsibility, but also important work, to be able to provide that for our fans as well. It’s really good to know that the way that they’ve cultivated themselves has been to such an extent where we feel comfortable saying that this is an all ages show, and we feel comfortable bringing you here. It’s been really meaningful and important to me to be able to do that. Particularly for the kids, cause I remember being 16, going to my first concert, not necessarily old enough to be there, a lot of Warped Tours.
Kate: I will say too about the emotional content of our songs, when we were younger and writing these songs which are very cathartic, and like they’re not about love, they’re not love songs, they’re identity songs, but there was a lot of influence from the music industry, and from like brewery fans y’know, to kind of change our sound—
Emilee: “Play Rihanna!”
Kate: Yeah! To play, what other people wanted. It’s really poetic that we aren’t able to veer from our course, we just wrote the songs we had to write emotionally. But in doing so our fanbase needed those songs, they found those songs, and it’s just really poetic to have this alt fan base that is not mainstream, and to just be able to have this beautiful community together, instead of changing who we are to be what the mainstream demands.
Emilee: Fuck the patriarchy.
Ben: You could make that the title of the article if you want.
Livian: We’ll remember that one.
Emilee: It’s nice to be able to speak our minds as well. It’s just nice to know that our fans are not going to send mean emails to us anymore about like, being pro-feminism. The bare minimum.
Harry: Well, if those are the people who are sending you mean emails, they suck.
Emilee: Y’know, that’s alright, we don’t play for them anymore, which is wonderful. It’s been really nice to have that shift.
Harry: Are you looking forward to Omaha?
Kate: I think the last time we played in Omaha we played to, two people?
Harry: Two?!
Dan: I think it’s our first time in Omaha, but it was in Lincoln. It was the bar staff and two people. It was a Monday, it was bad.
Kate: This’ll be a little different.
Harry: Fixing the first impression, I suppose.
Emilee: But also it’s nice to go to these spaces where I feel like we don’t know what these communities are like, and figure out what the vibe of every town is. Every place is a little different, and it’s exciting to hit a new spot and kind of see what they’re about.
Harry: I can tell you one thing, there is a huge hardcore music fest going on right now, Pokey’s Fest.
Emilee: So we’ll fit right in.
Livian: I saw that most shows on your tour right now are actually sold out. That’s gotta feel pretty amazing.
Dan: It does, it’s crazy.
Emilee: It doesn’t really feel real, until we show up and there are people. Cause I think in some part of my brain I keep thinking, “The bar staff and those two people are gonna have a great time tonight!” I hope people come!
Dan: It’s wild too. You go out, you see all those people, and you’re like, “Alright, time to do something that deserves that.” What we end up doing is the same thing we’ve been doing the past 13 years, but they love it!
Emilee: Thank goodness they like it, cause that’s all we know how to do!
Dan: They either like it or they’re too polite to boo.
Ben: There’s a feeling I had last night. I can’t identify this feeling, cause we walked out and it was our biggest show ever last night. 1,600 people, and it was like me doing this with my instruments, is that what you wanna hear?
Harry: Is there anything you wanna add, or wanna mention at all?
Emilee: We’ve got a couple singles coming out, we’ll release one in July and one in August, before the record comes out.
Dan: Record releases September 6th.
