motel void

Nobody Ever Does is a studio project that has just released their new archival double album Nobody Ever Did.

MOTEL VOID: Your name comes from an old folk song, which one? Do you find inspiration in old folk music?

NOBODY EVER DOES: Our Spotify bio does claim that our name comes from an old folk song, but in reality our Spotify bio was written by a very basic AI chatbot. And the prompt we gave it was completely silly; everything it says is total nonsense. We’re actually very interested in AI, but not so much the cool new advanced models. We’re more into the hallucination aspect of AI, the way it can just spit out the silliest stuff – more absurd than anything even we could come up with. We really like the idea of “model collapse,” the idea that as more and more AI content is generated, learning models will just absorb the content made by other learning models and create a feedback loop that makes them all completely lose touch with reality eventually. So that was a really long way of saying that there is no folk song; our band name actually comes from the movie “The Life Aquatic,” specifically Owen Wilson’s character named Ned. Nobody Ever Does is a reverse initialism of Ned.

MOTEL VOID: You seem to me like a band of good friends (from the pictures that I’ve seen!), did you know each other before you started the group?

NOBODY EVER DOES: Yes. We’ve all known each other for years – most of us since high school in fact, some even longer. NED formed as a sort of “supergroup” that encompassed pretty much everyone in our friend group, so on “Nobody Never Did” you can hear contributions from lots of people that we’ve known from way back. We’re still big on collaboration; we like to say that everyone is NED! We love to get all our friends into the studio to lay down tracks.

MOTEL VOID: You’ve just released an archival double album of rare and unreleased recordings. Recorded in dorms and basements from 2008 to 2018. Are you recording a new material as well?

NOBODY EVER DOES: Very much so. We’re just finishing up our sixth studio album now, and it’s our biggest yet, over 90 minutes long! It should be out in a couple months. We also have a full length country album in the pipeline. We honestly make a massive amount of music. Often have to pick and choose tracks to make it onto the albums. Every band member is also a songwriter and so our well of songs grows deeper all the time. Each writer with their own style, we have distilled an eclectic sound as we mesh our sonic sensibilities together.

MOTEL VOID: Do you still play these old songs live? Will you support the album with a (little) tour?

NOBODY EVER DOES: We’ve never actually played a proper NED show, although some of our music has been performed live by our friends, and various combinations of our members have all played in other bands that regularly played/currently play shows in the NYC area – Systemlord, Transporter Room, Kenny Logout, and Wavetable just to name a few. But NED has always been strictly a studio project because there’s never been a time when all of us lived in the same city at once. There’s always been at least one member that lived 500 miles away, so we do most of our work by lugging huge amounts of equipment with us whenever we all meet up to go on vacation. The situation is looking like it might change soon, though, so there could be a first-ever NED tour on the horizon if things work out.

MOTEL VOID: Who is your biggest music inspiration right now?

NOBODY EVER DOES: That’s a tough one because we all have pretty varied musical tastes. But we have been listening to a lot of old country music lately – George Jones, Tammy Wynette, that kind of stuff – and we’ve been really into Fred Again. Also that new album from Mk.gee is fantastic, as is the new ML Buch stuff. We’re also really big fans of Neggy Gemmy, George Clanton, and the whole 100% Electronica crew.