Alex Casey talks to Liz Stokes from The Beths about breaking through writer’s block and accepting the mess.
It begins with a false start. Just moments into The Beths’ new album Straight Line Was a Lie, bassist Ben Sinclair misses his cue and can be heard saying “sorry, I was thinking about something else” before starting again. Most bands would probably have probably gone for another take, but vocalist and songwriter Liz Stokes says it was the ideal start to an album that is all about working through the wobbles. “It had this real energy to it, it was very organic, and we just knew that was the take – even with a false start, it just felt kind of perfect.”
Stokes is speaking over Zoom (display name DJ Lizard) ahead of the release of the New Zealand indie power pop group’s fourth album, out now. But just like her whimsical display name, do not be fooled by the album cover’s charmingly crafted clock face or its propulsive, upbeat songs – Stokes is here to explore some deeply personal topics in her lyrics that will sneak up on you and leave you bawling on your dog walk. “I issue a blanket apology to all listeners who cry during this album,” she says. “If it’s any consolation, I cried a lot making it.”
This air of melancholy might seem a surprise to anyone who has been following the stratospheric rise of The Beths over the last few years. Their soaring second album Jump Rope Gazers was released during the pandemic in 2020 to rave international reviews, but wasn’t able to be toured until 2022, by which time the band had released another acclaimed album, Expert in a Dying Field. “We ended up touring two albums back-to-back,” says Stokes. “We had a lot of euphoria around it, there was a lot of optimism and this real burst of productivity.”
The Beths accept the Album of the Year award at the 2020 Aotearoa Music Awards. (Photo: Stijl Ltd)
They played Coachella, they got an endorsement from Obama, but then came what Stokes calls “the crash” in her personal life. She was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune condition that causes the body to make too much thyroid hormone which “really messes with your mental health” – to put it lightly. “I’m already predisposed to anxiety and depression, but it really ramped it up,” says Stokes. “There was also this slow post-Covid realisation that maybe the world actually doesn’t feel like a very optimistic or inspiring place any more.”
She started taking SSRIs, or anti-depressants, and soon found she could start rebuilding routine in her life. “It was kind of amazing being in a brain that didn’t have this spinning wheel of anxiety for the first time,” she says. While she was getting to know her “new, quiet brain”, Stokes encountered a surprising new hurdle – writer’s block. “When I’m writing, it’s always very instinctual and very much writing by feel,” she explains. “But it felt like my compass was not pointing strongly in any direction, and that made it really hard to write songs.”
But just because Stokes couldn’t write songs, didn’t mean she couldn’t just… write. She read Stephen King’s advice-laden memoir On Writing and began a daily routine of free-writing 10 pages every morning on a typewriter (not unlike the protagonist in King’s The Shining). “Even though it seems silly. It just felt like the right tool for the job because you can’t erase anything, and so you can’t edit your thoughts,” she says. “The sound is so good too and the tactileness of it – you want the act of writing to feel good, as well as being something that you have to do.”
Liz Stokes, Ben Sinclair, Tristan Deck and Jonathan Pearce of The Beths.
And with the SSRIs quelling her anxiety, Stokes says she was able to “pull stuff out” from her own life and onto the page that she couldn’t have thought about previously. The giant stack of pages continued to grow while she and Johnathan Pearce, her partner and bandmate, decided to go on a writing retreat – not to a forest hut or beachside bach, but to Los Angeles. “I would write all day, and then in the evening we could go out and see comedy, or a gig or watch an old movie. I feel like when you’re writing, you need stuff going in if you’re going to pull stuff out.”
The system worked, and within that stack of pages contained much of the base material that would become Straight Line Was a Lie. “It’s really comforting to me, the idea that you don’t actually have to wait for inspiration,” says Stokes. “You just have to do the work consistently and you’ll find your way out.”
One of the first songs to emerge during the writing process was ‘No Joy’, a classic hooky adrenaline-packed Beths song with deep depression lurking under its dynamism: “Spirit should be crushing / But I don’t feel sad, I feel nothing.” Stokes wanted to capture the feeling of anhedonia – not being able to find joy – without making a totally joyless song. “It feels like a fairly universal feeling, not liking the things that you like any more and not really understanding why, and being like, ‘is this what it’s like from now on? Am I dead?’” she laughs.
‘Mosquitos’ is another song that was formed partly in the morning pages, telling a spare story about Stokes returning to her walking spot at Oakley Creek to find it “totally changed” following the Auckland Anniversary flood. “I was nervous writing it because my experience with the flood wasn’t life-altering as it was for some people,” she says. “I tried to keep it very small – it’s just my little experience of interacting with this really big thing, which sometimes feels like the world is falling apart and changing in ways where it’s never going to be the same again.”
It’s a song with a lot more sonic space than previous Beths songs, sometimes just the vocals standing entirely on their own, which Stokes says forces people to engage differently with the words and creates a sense of intimacy. “It’s something that I don’t normally feel confident about doing. On other albums it has been more about bringing a certain energy to the songs, and creating that driving feeling,” she says. “Songs like ‘Mosquitos’ are about me starting to feel OK with the idea that we can make space for different songs. We’re allowed.”
In the album’s emotional apex, ‘Mother Pray for Me’, Stokes explores her complicated relationship with her mother – “I would like to know you, and I want you to know me. Do we still have time? Can we try?” – against achingly gentle instrumentals. It’s another topic she says she couldn’t have explored even a few years ago. “We love each other a lot, but there’s this cultural and generational gap between us,” says Stokes. “She’s Indonesian and I was born there, but we moved here when I was really young so I’ve always had this disconnect.”
Exploring questions of faith and family expectations, Stokes wasn’t expecting to find any answers in writing the song. “I haven’t solved anything, but I have been talking to my therapist about it.” Her mum heard the song about a month ago. “It felt like a big, meaningful moment where I played the song for her and had the lyrics up on the screen and – this is really quite funny – she was just like ‘wow, it’s really long’,” Stokes laughs. “Not like ‘get on with it’, but just impressed that I had written such a long piece of music.”
It was yet another muddling moment in life that didn’t necessarily deliver a neat conclusion, but Stokes is at peace with it. “In a way, it’s just the continuation of this thing where we still don’t fully see each other, but she knows that I love her and I know that she’s very proud of me – it’s just complicated.” Much of the album is about this very thing: working through the confusions, false starts, and loops we find ourselves in. “It’s a world view that I hope to carry forward: that it’s OK when things go forward and go back and go around again,” says Stokes.
“That’s not a bug – that is what life is.”
The Beths fourth album, Straight Line Was a Lie is out now.