Surrounding Sounds: Ricky Gourmet

Ricky Gourmet: Of course! Does that penguin on your phone come with the case?

RG: That's dope. I love it. You can start off the whole interview with the penguin phone case.

RG: Yeah.

RG: Oh my God, you really did your research.

RG: 100%. I feel like San Diego was really crucial because it's kind of a tiny town, so there's no actual commercial music scene. It's all DIY. I would play this spot called the Che Café a lot, which was student-run and would get shut down all the time. I saw all of the shows that made me want to do music at that venue, and bands that went to my high school are the whole reason I do it. My favorite band, if I'm going to plug any of them, is a band called Meraki. They were awesome and made me feel like all of this was possible.

RG: When I went to Seattle, it was kind of the same thing, except there are more venues in Seattle, so if you're a touring band, you can play a nicer venue. There are definitely still similar venues there, like The Black Lodge.

I played so many DIY shows that when I came to LA to play in a band called Daisy, our first show ever at a real venue was the first time I ever had a soundcheck. I remember we were using wedges, and if you wanted it louder in your wedge, you had to point your finger up at the sound person. I'd never done that before, and I was like, "This is the big time."

I had played so many DIY shows before I ever got to play a real one that you're just hella grateful for the real ones with the sound guy. But I also miss it. I have a huge love for the DIY scene, and it definitely shaped my music taste probably more than anything.

RG: It's totally different, and I'm so grateful. I worked at a burger place in Seattle, then upgraded to the sandwich shop, then moved here and was a barista at Intelligentsia. Then I became a guitar teacher after I got unemployed during COVID, and then I became a middle school and high school music teacher. I think I started doing music full time when I was 26, and I have to be honest, I had fully given up any dream of doing it as a job at all.

Then I got really lucky. My neighbor was this guy Finneas, and he became my friend. I didn't really know anything about what he was doing, but lo and behold, he was very talented and very successful, and rightfully so. Eventually he found out that I did music. He gave me a lot of opportunities that led to me being able to make this a full-time job.

It was something I never anticipated, especially coming from a DIY scene, where you don't see a lot of people doing that. In Seattle, all my favorite musicians were people with day jobs, working at coffee shops or at the sandwich shop with me. You're used to the thing you really covet about them being their talent and their artistry, and it doesn't matter that they have a day job. I still feel like a lot of the purest music is being made by people with day jobs. But nobody really wants to work a day job as the end goal.

RG: The music industry is so interesting in that way... I didn't understand the path or know it was possible.

RG: Totally. Completely. I feel like I Forrest Gumped my way into it through the kindness of benevolent friends, and I'm always very grateful. Every day I work, I'm really thinking about the possibility of not being able to do it as a job, so I work really hard to make sure I can keep doing it. There's definitely a little bit of stress, like, "I don't want to go back." But I think that anxiety is somewhat good, because it keeps me working.

RG: Yeah, I don't feel too comfortable yet doing it. So I'm like, "We've got to work through the weekend. Let's keep going." I want to make sure stuff works out.

RG: Honestly, I don't know. I think for both of them, it was a really awesome experience where they got to lean into some of the influences they share, but in a way that let them create more freely, and I was stoked to be a part of it.

I don't think there was ever really a plan to do a crazy world tour or anything. It was more like, "Hey, why don't we just do this?" We made the record, it was so fun, and then we wanted to play some shows to celebrate it. I have no idea what the future holds, but I love Ashe, I love Finneas, and I love my boy David. I'm looking forward to the future of it. I don't think there were any great expectations, so I have no idea what's next.

RG: Oh my God, dude, nobody's happier than me. Well, maybe her husband John, and Finneas, whatever. But the whole album she made is so good. When you listen to it, it just sounds like her. She's the only person who could do it, and it feels like she's leaning so hard into the things that make her unique. She's so talented, she works so hard, and she deserves it so much. "Stop the Wedding," "Funeral," these are amazing songs.

RG: Oh my God, she's killing it. And she's also the sweetest as a person. You can be an Ashe fan through and through, as a person and as an artist. She's great.

RG: It's so cool. I thought the whole world had heard it, but it's still growing, which is just crazy. I try not to look at the stats, but I do get occasional texts from Audrey's team, and things are looking good, which makes me so grateful and stoked. The more people that hear it, the happier I am. I've never experienced anything like it. I get why people like it, because I like it for all the same reasons, but it's going about as well as I could have ever dreamed, so I'm very happy.

RG: For sure. It was definitely the first thing I ever did in that world, and the first body of work I ever fully produced that wasn't for myself. I think 100%, in the sense that it was also Audrey's first time, so we really had no idea what we were doing. I had a really scrappy setup in my apartment, and it was so hot because we couldn't run the AC while we were recording. It would be like 100 degrees. I'd fill bowls with ice water, and we'd dip my kitchen towels in them and put them on our heads or necks. The ice would melt in about five minutes, and then we'd dip the towels back in. I was basically not wearing a shirt for months. We were both almost in our underwear, just sweating while working on this. I don't think that if either of us had done it before, we'd have thought that was a normal way to work. It was just the only way to do it.

That extends into the music too. I had never really listened to pop music unless it was from before 2004, so I had a huge blind spot in my understanding of the genre. But Audrey is so decisive and knows exactly what she wants. So in some ways, it being my first time was great, because I had no preconceived notion of what it needed to be. She's so awesome and has such good taste that I think it worked because of that. She knew what she wanted, and it was really easy to trust her.

RG: Yeah, for sure. I think we did five versions of "Sex and the city," because she had that song ready to go. The first version I tried was bad, and then I wanted to put drums on it, and she said, "No drums." I was like, "How can it go hard without drums?" Thank goodness she stuck with it. There were so many versions, and I think she and I both love the version on the album so much because it really was everything she wanted it to be from the jump. It just took a couple of tries to get it right. I'm really happy with where it landed, and I can't imagine it any other way.

"Silver Jubilee" was really fun to make. It was the last one we did, so we'd both had practice making songs by then, and it went really smoothly. It was funny that it got such a resurgence a year after coming out, because it was always one of my favorites, so that was very validating. And I've always really loved "Shooting star." That was one of my favorites to make. There was a lot of joy in the process of making those.

RG: It was so cool. I was so stoked when she asked me to do it, because I'm not in her normal touring band. We spent so much time together, and if we weren't working on a song, we'd just be hanging out and talking about what we wanted out of the project. In our dream world, we'd talk about her playing one of these songs on a Tiny Desk someday, and that would kind of inform decisions. So it's crazy that it happened off of the first album. It happened so much sooner than I would have anticipated when we were making the record.

The whole process was awesome, and I was so nervous, because you only get one shot at it. In my mind, it's kind of the lasting artifact of this era, besides the music and the videos, at least as far as what I'm going to contribute. I love the music so much and I love her so much, and I just wanted to deliver. But once we started playing, I was having the time of my life. It reminded me of all those times we were sweating while working on it, or having disagreements about what to do with the drums. Suddenly it was like, "God, we did all this work, and it led us here." I was beaming.

RG: It's really good. Not to keep giving her kudos, but I'll keep giving her kudos. I watched Audrey take something from a dinner where she said, "I'm going to make an EP. This is the title, it's Who's the Clown?, this is the cover, these are some of the songs, and I want it done by this time." Then I watched it grow into, "Hey, I've been telling everyone we're doing an album. Now the album has 12 songs. I need this song done by this date because I want it to come out in May, and this is the video." She had conceived all of these things so much earlier than I ever could have. I had never witnessed someone be so creative and so committed.

Because she and I largely made it by ourselves, I feel like I'm the only person who got a window into how it worked from start to finish. When I saw her show, it inspired me so hard. I was like, "I want to do the same thing she's doing, because now I think it's possible." The biggest thing she taught me was that if you're doing what you want to do, it will work, because you're the only person who can do what you want to do.

All the music I had been making for myself, I was too afraid to share with the world, because I didn't think people would like it. I've been making music since I first put stuff out in 2022, but even with that project, I think I was trying to do something I thought was marketable.

RG: No, it wasn’t the music that comes naturally to me, and not the music I would want to play live. I come from the DIY world, I grew up in San Diego, and I listened to Third Eye Blind, Sublime, and Red Hot Chili Peppers a lot. I like '90s rock. That's what I've liked my whole life, besides classic rock, and even that has found its way in. I just like rock music. But watching Audrey take it from start to finish, and her being so singular, made me think, "Dude, I've watched how it's done. I want to try my best to do it."

So I decided to start writing songs the way Audrey did: write them on guitar and don't worry about producing them. I didn't want to make a producer record. I wanted it to be an artist project, where the songs are the most important thing. So I never fully recorded the demos. I brought them to a band of my friends: Miles on drums, Alex on bass, and my friend Connor engineering. My girlfriend Jill was documenting it. We went into the studio for five days, and every day I'd show them one of my really rough demos that I had purposely not produced. They'd learn how to play it, we'd arrange it together, and we'd record it, basically in a day. Then I took them home, and I've been meticulously producing them out and learning how to really do a full-band recording.

I'm really happy with it. For better or worse, it's the most me thing I could possibly make, so a lot of people might hate it. But if you like it, you'll really like it, because I'm leaning all the way in. As I get older, I really respect artists who fully lean into who they are, even at the cost of alienating a lot of people and maybe not seeming as cool or as commercial as other artists. You can just tell it really floats their boat, and I want to be like that. I have no commercial expectation for this music to change my life, so I might as well make the [music] I want to make.

I'm finishing it by the end of this month, and it's already mostly done. I'm a perfectionist, so I'm just tweaking, tweaking, tweaking. I'm not sure if it'll come out this year or if I'll wait until next year, because people always say not to release stuff at the end of the year, and I want to have the videos done. I have crazy video dreams.

RG: Yeah. I was recently talking with Audrey, and I told her, "I smoked weed and thought about the album name, the sequencing, the videos, and how I want to roll it out." She said, "That's the most fun part." So I want to have it all ready to go, so that when I start releasing it, it can be seamless. The reason I was a little late today, actually, is that I was working on a song for the next project. I'm trying to start writing it now, because suddenly I'm having fun doing it. The second I started making music I liked, I became very motivated to keep doing it. And playing music in a band is what I grew up doing, so it made sense that when it's my own thing, I want it to feel like a band. Maybe there'll be a show before the end of the year. That's also maybe in the talks.

RG: That's really sweet. Going Gourmet is so interesting, because I think the reason my EP isn't done is that I thought I could keep doing Going Gourmet at the same time. It turns out that editing a 20-minute YouTube video and trying to get it out every two weeks means you're basically working on it every day for two weeks. I was unable to finish my EP, even though it had been recorded in May. So after the eighth episode, with my boys Anuvis and Johnny, I decided to put it on hold, finish my EP, and then resume Going Gourmet.

I have big dreams, and Going Gourmet is a huge part of them. In my dream world, I'm on tour, and it becomes more of a travel show. Anthony Bourdain is the biggest inspiration for me. I hate that new movie, Tony.

RG: I didn't like it. I'll go on record saying that movie sucks. It would be a totally fine movie, but it has nothing to do with Anthony Bourdain. I feel like he would have hated having a movie made about him at all, especially one that isn't even factually about him. He's a huge hero of mine, so I hate that movie.

But the idea is that I'd go on tour, film it, and cut it docu-style, mixed in with live videos, so it all converges. I don't know why I like making videos. I thought it was something I had only recently started, and then I realized I was making the vlogs for Finneas, and before that, I was making videos for my old bands all the time. It's just something I like to do. I don't think I'm exceptionally good at it or qualified, but I've been enjoying it, and it's really fun getting to edit. I feel like I get to be way funnier when I get to edit the hangout. Being the one on the aux of the hangout, retroactively, is really great.

So there will be more Going Gourmet. Season two will start. The new thing I'm going to try is adding voice-over, Anthony Bourdain style, introducing where we're going, and making the production value a little higher. The goal is that as I'm releasing music, I'll start doing musical interludes, where I premiere my videos on Going Gourmet or something like that. So stay tuned.

RG: Oh my God, let's just go down the list. We've talked about her already, but I've been listening crazy style to Quiet Light, Devon Again, Truman Sinclair, and my boy Marinelli, who has the best record ever rolling out right now. I’ve been loving Emma Ogier too.

Obviously and guiltlessly, I’ve been listening crazy style to the Audrey record [Who’s the Clown]. At the end of the day, I’m a fan of hers just like everyone else.

If I'm going to shout out some other people, I've got to shout out my favorite high school band again, Meraki. San Diego legends. You can find them on Bandcamp. Emo rock, just so good. I've been listening a lot to "California" by Phantom Planet, stuff like that. But mostly I'm shouting out the homies, because all my friends are so good. I've been listening to Finneas, obviously, and Ashe, obviously. Got to throw those guys out there. A couple of small artists you might have heard of: Finneas, Ashe, Billie.

But yeah, that's been my playlist. I listen to a lot of my friends. I'm lucky.

RG: Great question. What's in? I think hot dogs are hella in for fall. I'm trying to petition for a two-pack of hot dogs and a two-pack of buns, because I'd like to eat exactly two hot dogs without having to buy a pack of eight buns and eight hot dogs and then worry that the buns are going to go bad if I don't eat them all. So I'm trying to normalize hot dogs. Quinoa is also in.

I would say making music as a live band is in. I think bands are in, period. I think everyone's happy to listen to bands again. I love Geese, Cameron Winter and all the indie darlings.

On their way out, if I'm being so bold... I think being too cool is out. Being cool at all is out. Caring about how you look is out. Also, going shirtless to the climbing gym is out.

RG: Hatred is out. Racism is out. Bigotry is out. Sexism is out. But those have always been out. The new things that are out: being too cool and caring how you look.

RG: Tony [Bourdain]. It has to be Tony. I have so many questions. He's like a father figure to me, but I could see myself really annoying him with questions, and the people he likes seem to be kind of gruff and scruffy. But no, I think we'd love to chill. I'd eat wherever he wanted. If he was drinking, I would really drink. I'd try to keep up. I'd probably die, but it would be Tony.

I miss him. I think about him every day. When he died, I was so sad, because I was a huge fan. As things get progressively more messed up, I would have really loved to hear what he had to say about all of it. It would have made me feel better. I don't know why he's a comfort like that for me. He's like a weighted blanket.

RG: It would be him for sure. And if I had to pick one other person, maybe Tony Hawk.

RG: That would be sick. And then Tony Soprano, James Gandolfini. I'd want the three of them. That's my dream Tony lineup. Antonio Banderas, too. The Tony trio.

RG: Yeah. My message is: Buy that interface. Buy that crappy guitar. Find some friends. Play in a band. Record it. Put it on the internet. Give it a cool album cover. There's never been a better time.