Music Mid-Week: an interview with a dream pop tour de force

“Can you guys see this?” Wyatt Clem asked as the camera swung away from him, emphasizing his blurred background. “We’re at a Lowe’s right now,” he said with a smile. He was leaning slightly forward, his blonde hair draping his shoulders. Shawn Abhari, who was closer to the camera and sitting next to Clem, had moved the phone camera back to its original vertical position on the Zoom call. 

Clem and Abhari are The Ivy, an indie synth-pop duo from Tulsa, Okla. This Lowe’s provided a moment of rest before departing on a 9 to 10 hour drive from Oklahoma to Albuquerque, in preparation for the start of their tour the following day. Naturally, they had ample time for an interview. 

The two met in 2016 while attending The Academy of Contemporary Music at the University of Central Oklahoma. Having the same class schedule and sharing a similar taste in music, the duo discovered each other early on. Homework and playlists were not all they shared, however.

“At college, it felt like everyone was racing to form a band,” Clem, who sings and plays guitar, said. “It felt really cool to find your teammate early on, within the first week or so.”

Abhari, who plays bass and synths, already had a band and it had a name, one that came to him after he said he got poison ivy five times in a row.

“We wrote our first song in the first two months of meeting each other and put it on The Ivy Spotify just for kicks,” Abhari said. 

At the time, they were writing in their dorm rooms and recording wherever they could, be it in  a classroom or a stairwell. By 2017, their releases were gaining momentum. 

“We woke up to a song that had made it to a viral chart on Spotify, and I was like ‘Oh maybe this is something that could work out,’” Clem said. 

In February of last year, they released their first album: “A Door Still Open.” This was always the goal, Clem said, but the issue was how to get there. He said new management guided them in the direction of an album after previous team members had pushed them away from it. 

Working on “A Door Still Open” was something of a soft reset for the band, a “sonic shift,” Clem said. 

“Our focus became less ‘how can we make the catchiest single’ and more ‘how can we make something more cohesive,’” he continued.

To achieve this, the band needed a change of scenery. Clem, who had recently renewed his passport after it was stolen four years prior, originally envisioned holding up in a northern, snow-covered cabin and doing little else besides composing for a week. Instead, they traveled south. 

“We went to Mexico and brought a little studio and went back to basics,” Abhari said. “The same way we did in our dorm room.”

Abhari has family friends in Mexico, Clem explained. “He’s been going there since he was a kid, and I was like, ‘Man, I want to have that experience too.’”

The two flew down to Mexico with a guitar, synth, midi-keyboard, finger kalimba and pre-amp in tow. They started writing song after song after song, one in the morning, one at night, Abhari said. They would meet up with different ideas, put those feelers out, and write the song to completion. 

The first day they were there was Clem’s birthday. “I immediately dropped my phone in the ocean,” he said with a chuckle. 

The duo lived out of a trio of shipping containers, arranged in a U-shape, that was about ten minutes away from the sea, Clem said. It was one part studio, one part kitchen, and one part living quarters. The friends were living in a “real local area,” he added.

“People were just selling tacos out of their garages,” Clem said, and street dogs were everywhere. “Who do these dogs belong to? The answer is everyone.” 

After finishing up demos for their album, the band returned to the States. Soon after, they collaborated with Jackie Hynes, who is perhaps better known by the name of her musical project: Lyncs. The Ivy and Lyncs released “Don’t Fall Asleep” last month. 

“I didn’t really know what to expect with the session.” Hynes said. “Sometimes with sessions you can spend three, four, five hours chatting, getting to know each other, some people wanna play video games, do absolutely nothing or just make content. We got past all that really quickly and they came to it with an amazing idea and sounds that I was really into.”

The Ivy and Lyncs, who said they all “vibe well together,” are touring with each other and will be playing at The Camel in Richmond on April 16. 

“I’ll tell you a good one that Chat GPT taught me,” Abhari said, when giving tour advice. “You should have a stage bag that you just bring inside the venue, then you have a suitcase that you bring inside the hotel. So you can just flip-flop throughout the day.”

Hynes said to bring your own pillowcase. Clem said to drink water, not the twelve beers in the green room. 

Meet cool musicians, make music and put it out there, Abhari said. “Release shitty songs,” Clem added. “Don’t wait for the right time.”

Contact opinions and columns editor Jonathan Sackett at jonathan.sackett@richmond.edu