This week, indie rock duo Alec Snead and Noah Fogg joined Kaleidoscope host Juliet Fromholt for a live studio session and interview ahead of the release of their debut album, Telegraphic, on November 10. An album release party for the album will be held this Saturday, November 11, at Saturday Studio in Dayton from 4:00-7:00pm. Alec and Noah played three songs from the new album live on Kaleidoscope, with accompaniment from guest percussionist Evan Miller, who performed on mallet instruments. In the interview, the duo spoke about how they started working together after realizing that they both had dozens of unfinished song ideas recorded on their phones. Over the last half decade, Alec and Noah worked together to complete and record several of those song fragments, which will be available for the first time on Telegraphic. They talked with Juliet about writing and recording the album, and about what they learned from each other about songwriting.
Dayton natives Noah Fogg and Alec Snead say they’ve been working together on the songs for Telegraphic for five years. In fact, some of the songs date back even further. When Alec’s wife introduced the musicians, they quickly bonded over shared taste, including a common admiration for Sufjan Stevens. They also realized they had something else in common: a backlog of unfinished songs piling up on their phones. They told Juliet,
Alec Snead: “We both talked about how we had all these unfinished song ideas sitting on our phones. So when we came together at the beginning of the project, it was very much like, ‘Let’s make something out of that stuff that would probably get lost the next time I got a new phone.’”
Noah Fogg: “I think we met up one time and were just showing each other Voice Memos. Alec had the chorus to that song that we just played, [“Telegraphic”], and we decided to try to write the full track. So we wrote a ton of verses and pieced it together, kind of like a puzzle. And we just kind of kept it rolling.”
While the musicians had a lot of raw ideas to work with, turning those ideas into finished pieces proved challenging. According to Alec, he and Noah had “really different writing styles” when they started working together. Yet the musicians said that the differences were complimentary, rather than conflicting. While Alec tended toward structure and simplicity, Noah was pulled in many different musical directions at the same time. They explained how they shaped each other's writing processes over the course of recording Telegraphic.
Alec Snead: “Stuff that I was writing, especially then, was really structured. I would get stuck if I didn’t come up with exactly the right next thing, or what I thought was the right next thing. Noah’s writing style is super creative, and he comes up with a ton of stuff. It was fun to bring pieces to Noah because he would have like 1000 ideas for it right off the bat. A lot of this record was throwing all those at the wall and seeing what came out on the other side.”
Noah Fogg: “Even the ones that were more written by me or more written by Alec ended up wildly different than they started because of the other person. The next song we’re going to do went so many different directions, and I was really struggling with it. And Alec was like, ‘What if you just play the same chords the whole time, and that’s the chorus and the verse.’ … I have a lot of ideas, but that’s sometimes an issue too. To have someone like Alec who’s way more precise and can make quick, good decisions was really helpful for me.”
Beyond the structural considerations of constructing the songs for Telegraphic, Noah also said that working with Alec has allowed him to locate new emotional registers in his music. “I’m way more inclined to mopey, dark stuff,” he told Juliet. “Alec—not that he’s not inclined to that, but he does it with a smile… I’ve written for other people before, but it’s good to have someone who kind of counters you a little bit, and helps you pull out humor or be more playful or lighthearted and just bring out different colors from your palette.”
Alec Snead and Noah Fogg’s new album Telegraphic will be available on digital streaming platforms on Friday, November 10th. On Saturday, November 11, they will host an album release party at Saturday Studio in Dayton, located at 116 N Jefferson St. Alec and Noah will perform songs from the album live at the release party with percussionist Evan Miller. For more information about the album, and about their upcoming performances, follow Alec and Noah on Instagram.
Text by Peter Day, adapted from a live studio interview by Juliet Fromholt recorded on Wednesday, November 8t 2023.
