Ready, Set, Go! MAKAR is Ready for 2017

Makar is the folk-rock duo of Andrea DeAngelis and Mark Purnell. Creating an impeccable brand of music, the group, who have been making waves the past several years, are gearing up for their latest release Fancy Hercules which will finally see the light of day in 2017. The musically charged duo pen poetic lyrics and mystical melodies that are thought-provoking and breathtaking all at once. This month we sat down with DeAngelis and Purnell from Makar, to catch up on their 2017 horizon.

What is the inspiration behind your upcoming album "Fancy Hercules"?

Mark: Our third album, Fancy Hercules, is Makar’s usual poet, pop, folk, rock, blues, punk mix of sounds, but definitely veers into weirdest album yet territory with the addition of whacky musical theater musings, songs about insomnia, depression, brain tumors, the meaning of time, family problems, the old ball and chain and a reworking of Devil in a Dream from our second album, Funeral Genius. There are also very strange horror film/Mars attacks type chords and an examination of the myth of Hercules and how he slaughtered his whole family as our title track.

Andrea: This new album feels even more personal than our last two. The older I get the more comfortable I get with vulnerability. Although with the majority of songs that I originate, there’s always this message to myself in the lyrics to keep on keeping on. The most personal song on this upcoming album for me has to be I’m Glad, it’s basically about my joy and relief that my mom recovered from a brain tumor that was diagnosed for a decade.

What made you discover your passion for creating an eclectic sound of indie rock with a dash of folk elements?

Mark: I guess it would have to be hearing Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and Nick Drake. I love folk music. Love its ethos of anyone can play as long as you have something to say. You don’t have to be a virtuoso, you just have to love music and want to share that love of music with other people, maybe share your feelings and thoughts and connect with this beautiful world. There is something so honest about folk music and how it has spoken to the workers like in Old Man River and inspired the protesters and unified the races like in Blowin’ In The Wind. There’s a romance to it, like in On The Road. You can see yourself being Woody Guthrie travelling along them dusty roads with a guitar in hand battling societal ills. As a sociology major that’s about the most perfect music for me to write and you cross that with my love of Rock ‘n Roll, blues and punk music and you get the stirrings of Makar’s indie folk rockin’ soul.

Andrea: Indie rock encompasses a lot of the kind of music we enjoy – punk, garage, folk, pop and blues. It’s a very freeing genre overall. It wasn’t a conscious choice, it’s just what we are or turned out to be. We like a lot of different kinds of music and combine different elements deliberately and subconsciously.But I did grow up with my family’s love of Peter, Paul and Mary and Pete Seeger. I remember us all singing This Land is Your Land around the fire. So folk music was imprinted on my brain early on.

I really enjoy the latest single! What was the inspiration that went into creating it? What places in your mind did you channel to create the song's theme?

Andrea: Thank you. America Where Are You means a lot to us, especially given the dark times we’re living in. I think about my own culpability and complacency. So when I dig into lyrics of this song, I remember the poison of apathy. I recall about how frustrated, disappointed and depressed I was about our leaders until President Obama and VP Biden. How paralyzing my own apathy was. Because if you stopped caring, the pain of what was happening to our world would dull and recede. This overwhelming desire to not listen / read the news with its onslaught of escalating threat levels. An overreaction to the fact that Fox News feels like the TVs in Orwell’s 1984 that you can never turn off except in today’s case, people just don’t want to power down the machine and instead of monitoring us, they issue constant doomsday warnings after warnings eroding your mind and well-being. But if you click off all the news in order to breathe and live in denial, that bubble of apathy just allows wars and injustices to continue.

When I sing this song, I remember the overriding defeatism I felt in the GW years and try to overcome that toxic feeling. I felt powerless in the face of organized religion where everyone else’s God tells them to hurt each other as a moral right which seems to be the very definition of madness to me. And I get angry thinking about the hypocrisy of America, land of immigrants, land which we took from the Native Americans extolling freedom but only for ourselves and not for anyone else.I was afraid of this song when we first wrote it, I was afraid to confront my total dissatisfaction, disconnection, horror and despair in the political / social aftermath of 9/11. I was afraid to put those words down on paper and how they would be interpreted and misused. But even within the dark feelings where this song came from, there were stirrings of hope, that we will live up to the ideals of America, equality, freedom and our awesome diversity, that we will find ourselves and that this will no longer be a song of regret but an anthem of what we have not achieved yet but will. We must all act and no longer remain on the sidelines.

What are your favorite venues to perform at? and if you had to choose, do you feel more comfortable in the studio or onstage, and why?

Mark: Some of my favorites are The Pyramid Club, Pianos, Knitting Factory, Freddys Backroom and Luna Lounge. Being in the studio or onstage are both amazing experiences in completely different ways. The experience of playing live is indescribable. The energy, the fear, the excitement of having to nail everything right there in front of an audience, especially because I do and don’t like being in front of an audience. It’s like my ultimate nightmare combined with my ultimate dream. You feel plugged in to the universe and to yourself. You’re buzzing and it channels into your playing and singing. It gives you this incredible energy inside and lifts you into the stratosphere. Recording is a different beast, one that is not easily tamed. You have to get used to doing it the same way you have to get used to playing live but it’s different. You have to generate the energy from within and you don’t have the benefit of the audience or the fear from without. You have to connect to the song sometimes in the dark in an enclosed space, cut off, insular and project everything into that microphone. And it’s got to be perfect. You have got to be as pleased on the thousandth listen as you were on the first. Live you can make mistakes and no one will notice, recording you can’t. People listen to songs over and over again and they will eventually hear a mistake or an untruth, so you have to listen and listen and listen until you are satisfied that you have delivered the best, the most honest, the most riveting performance you can deliver. You practice over and over so that when you play live it’s as good as it’s going to get in that one shot, but recording you play and sing over and over until it’s perfect for all time. Sometimes you nail it in one take, sometimes it takes a long time to get what you want. In the end I like them both evenly, but if I had to choose, I’d take recording over performing. The intimate pure connection to the music. Not performing for anyone but yourself and what the song demands.

Andrea: Me too. Recording is a record of what you have done, a record of a certain point in time in your life even. But if you don’t perform live, you definitely feel off and out of sorts.Sometimes when performing live, I’m terrified or at least I feel that way, it’s hard to tell the difference between excitement and nerves. But I do relish pushing myself to perform for I was a very shy kid growing up. But I attended this school Gill St. Bernard’s which would let anyone graduating speak at their middle school and high school commencements. My English teacher, Ronna Storm, encouraged me to read something when I graduated 8th grade. The idea of speaking in public frightened me but I knew if I didn’t do it then, I may never be able to do it. I’m always pushing and propelling myself forward in live performances and I feel a real sense of immediate accomplishment every time we end a show.

Currently building your music career, how have fans and critics been receiving your music the past year or so in particular?

Mark: Our music has been receiving a lot of love from fans and critics lately. Funeral Genius has been getting great radio play from stations like KBOO, KCSB, WROM, WRUW, KMUD, KVNF and CIUT 89.5 FM and it just landed us on RadioFlag’s Top 55 Song Chart for most spins on independent, college and internet radio in October 2016. We were also interviewed by Paste Magazine, Buzzfeed, Peverett Phile, Ehtnocloud and Vigilantes Radio. And in 2015 we reached the top 10 spot on The Deli Magazine’s Top 300 NYC Indie Bands along with Vampire Weekend, Fun., MGMT and Santigold. So things have been going really really well and we couldn’t be happier about it.

Andrea: The response has been truly incredible and it inspires us that so many thoughtful people in the indie music scene have written such kind words and played our music. We have met such amazing people – other musicians, indie radio hosts and music writers through this strange journey. Some of these extraordinary people I feel we will know for the rest of our lives and be the better for it!

How do you write your songs? What is the process like? Does it take you days, weeks, even longer? How does the perfect Makar piece come together?

Mark: At this point, Andrea and I usually come up with songs while rehearsing. We used to start a song individually then work on it collectively. Now it’s the opposite. Usually we cannibalize our own chords coming up with new songs by just noodling around during practice. We just wrote a funny song called Zombies Have Rights Too because we’re huge fans of the Walking Dead. The song came from noodling around with the I, IV, V chords of a song off our debut album, 99 Cent Dreams. As soon as we heard the chords together we knew we had the beginning structure of a song, but had no idea what the lyrics would be. Then Andrea started singing them and it was one of those moments when you look at each other and get goosebumps. That’s the magic of music and why I keep coming back again and again. You don’t even know what you’re going to create until it gets created and at that moment you are as much a fan of the work as the creator.

Andrea: Inspiration can come from anywhere. I find I’m a very visual person so sometimes when I’m walking around the city, I see or misread a street or store sign and that becomes the impetus for a new song. That’s what happened with the title tracks on 99 Cent Dreams and on Fancy Hercules. Both were names of actual stores! My songwriting process can be all over the place. Mark reins me in, focusing my stream of consciousness. I think the hardest way to write a song is to come with some inflexible notion of what you want the song to be. A song always has its own ideas and you have respect that.Timeline wise – it’s all over the place. Some songs you can dash off in a rehearsal and it remains basically unchanged when recorded, other songs take a long time to get right. We’re working on this one song now called I Want to Be Loved where the melody came to me in a dream but I couldn’t figure out the chords for them. Months later, Mark came up with a catchy chord progression and I sung the melody over it. But we’re still working on this one since it’s not quite right. Time Flies, another song on our upcoming album Fancy Hercules, was the first song MAKAR ever wrote but the final tweaking in the writing didn’t happen until this album, over a decade in the making.

How did you create a sound throughout time that is so uniquely your own? What defines the Makar sound to you?

Mark: Ooooh, a sound throughout time? I love that. You are definitely a romantic yourself and I would say it is from being a romantic that Makar’s sound is defined. At least for me as I tend to be the balladeer of the group, in no small part because I play the piano, but also because I have the soul of a poet and the head of a dreamer and a heart attached to my sleeve, at least as much as a karate man can. We usually cry on the inside. Going for your dreams in the real world, you have to be a romantic, a believer in dreams and making them come true. The world is a rough place and dreams get squashed all the time, so first and foremost you have to believe in your own dreams with all of your heart or else they will be squashed as well. But every note you play, every lyric you write, every act of creation you put your love into is a form of belief in that dream, and yet it is so easy for Andrea and me because we love what we do and there is really no other option for us. We feel a compulsion to be musicians and writers. It’s just who we are.

Andrea:  I guess I’ve always had punk rock heart even before I listened to punk rock. Also, every time I say I want to write a so-and-so type of song, it comes out very differently than I imagined or modeled it on.

This year is already shaping up to be a huge year for you. What do you hope to accomplish in the New Year?

Mark: Thank you. Our biggest goal is to finish and release Fancy Hercules. We’re so excited to hear the finished songs with drum and bass added as we’ve only been hearing them acoustically. As recording academy members we’re going to submit it for Grammy consideration if we finish by the fall 2017. We’re also excited to do some live online shows so Makar fans spread out all over the place can finally see us play live. Look out for live shows on City Bird and Stageit in the next month or so. We plan on playing weekly shows called Makar Mondays to lift people’s spirits at the beginning of the long work week. We’re going to play though our entire catalog including the new songs. Also, our friend Cindy, who hosts the amazing Cindy’s Chat corner is starting an Art is Alive film festival in New York on June 22nd, and asked us to perform in it at Webster Hall, so we’re super stoked and nervous about doing that. That would be our biggest gig to date so lots of beta blockers for that one. She told us about it while we were eating brunch at Fada in Williamsburg during a snow blizzard and a man dressed as the abominable snowman walked past the restaurant. We snapped pictures of it and put them on Instagram if you want to check it out. It was one of those only in New York moments.

Andrea: Recently, we submitted a live version of America Where Are You to NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest (https://youtu.be/pTweYFp5lzQ) along with a ton of other acts so that’s a pipe dream. But as long as we inch closer to our dream of being able to perform and write music full time I’m good.