John Keith Culbreth started writing songs after finding out he was better at freestyling than anyone he knew. So the the songwriter behind Stop Light Observations got his start as, basically, a battle rapper.
Yeah, I wouldn’t have guessed that in a million years.
It’s not that the band shies away from variety. Listening to “coyote”, one of three songs from Stop Light Observation’s Volume I project, I was immediately struck by the thoughtful, indie rock nuances rising and falling throughout the length of the track. The vocals (sung by frontman Will Blackburn) are mournful, then anthemic; the sonic is hushed, then huge.
This is a song that, if you cut it into twenty-second bits (and don’t, because it’s most impressive as a cohesive whole), could probably fall into at least three or four musical genres on its own.
It’s just that battle rap isn’t one of them.
And yet, spend time talking to John Keith – or Cubby, as he’s alternatively titled – and the freestyle thing slowly becomes less surprising.
It’s obvious: Cubby is good at improvising. And he’s got some interesting takes to share – just read about how the band met, for example. Over the course of a forty-minute conversation, he threw out more well-applied metaphors on the fly than I came up with over 12 years of public school English classes. And we probably covered more intellectual ground.
To be honest, this was one of my favorite conversations so far. Warning: the interview transcript is pretty long – as in, long enough that I thought about cutting it into two parts. But I wanted to let it live together, and I think it’s well worth the read.
In light of that, I’m going to keep this short, but let me plug Stop Light Observations one more time. If you enjoy music that:
- You can jam to
- Makes you think, and
- Is super artfully put together…
You’ll dig these guys. They call themselves “transformational rock.” That’s maybe a little sententious, but it’s also not wrong.
So, click play and give “coyote” a listen. Then, check out the rest of Volume I and II (especially “Vanderlight“, which is pretty relevant to the discussion here). After you’ve done all that, please come back and find out how John Keith Culbreth writes beautiful indie rock that Will Blackburn beautifully sings.
Hint: freestyling may still have something to do with it.
Buy their “Vol. I” EP here
So, I’ve heard a little bit about this – but how did you meet Will? And then how did Stop Light Observations come together?
John Keith: So, Will and I met in middle school. We went to the same school and knew each other throughout high school but never really hung out.
And then, junior year of high school, I had this dream – it sounds kind of cliche. But it started with this video I saw of him singing on Facebook. I could not believe that that was Will Blackburn singing. Because I grew up with Will. He played tennis, golf, hunted – he was like a good old southern boy. I could never have seen him singing so beautifully.
And I thought it was the most beautiful voice I’d ever heard.
The night after I saw that video, I had the dream. And in my dream God came to me.
I wasn’t spiritual, so it was very abrupt and shocking – it was the most vivid dream I’ve had. And God told me that when I woke up, I was going to call Will Blackburn and ask him to be in a band. So, I woke up, and it was such a heavy dream that I did exactly that.
That’s intense. Was it pretty much set in stone from there on out? What happened next?
Will came over and we had like a magical jam, and started the band right then. Then, after playing together for a few years, something pretty cool happened. We played our first show, and our families attended the first show. And when our families attended, they both were so shocked to see each other.
We actually found out that 350 miles away, where I had grown up, Will’s grandfather had been my preacher. And, totally unknowingly, Will and I had been friends since we were little kids, and through all of that time had known each other and had no clue.
Wow. Seems pre-ordained.
Yeah (laughs).
So, when you guys came together, what kind of stuff did you start making? You were listening to Bob Dylan and Biggie Smalls – how did that variety play out in your music?
By that time – I’m sure you can relate – I feel like high school is one of the biggest, if not the biggest musical influence period of a person’s life. Now, I’ll listen to like twenty bands in a year, and I won’t ever remember any of them. But in high school, I felt like I had these lifelong eras of Neil Young, or AC/DC, or Citizen Cope, or Coldplay, or Carlos Santana, or Chet Atkins – but really, it was just like now. I was hearing 20 bands in a year, but I was just discovering music, and so it was really impactful.
So, the band had been listening to a ton of music, and we had a rock-and-roll side to us. At that time, I was listening to like, Rage Against the Machine, but Will was really more into singer-songwriter people – like Donavon Frankenreiter, Jack Johnson, Jason Mraz before he was too cheesy – and so, when we joined together, he added (at least for me) this idea of wanting to write more poppy, catchy music. And his voice gave me an outlet to do that.
When we first started writing stuff together, it was very experimental. Like, we were trying to hash out how to make all of these different sounds bleed into one sound.
And since then, that’s still been the story.
Do you guys co-write?
We have on a few songs – and Will’s written a couple of his own songs – but we’re just starting to co-write together.
What’s it like to write songs for Will, knowing that he’ll be the one singing them?
I think a positive of it is that it leaves me with no restrictions melodically. Because I know that he’ll be able to make it happen.
I think the hard part is being so personal on songs. There’s a worry that it won’t resonate with him. Or even just a vibe will be very personal and won’t fit. Our song Aquarius Apocalyptic – it’s just like a very personal vibe that I was feeling. So the hard part is kind of talking somebody into becoming that persona. Because I feel like a lead singer is a performer – especially when they don’t write the lyrics. But that’s still honest. It’s kind of their art and skill to make the song come to life.
Everyone always asks, “Oh, did you write the song?” And if he didn’t write that particular song, it’s kind of a blow to the ego a little bit – like, “Oh, I thought you were a true frontman.” Because in the past 40 or 50 years, the lead singer is usually the writer.
Right. But not always.
Right. Like if you go to the 20s or even to the 60s, and today again with pop, you don’t look at Frank Sinatra and go, “What a bitch, he didn’t even write Luck Be a Lady.”
You don’t look at Elvis and go, “What a loser, he didn’t even write Hound Dog.”
You don’t look at Aretha Franklin and go, “She didn’t write Respect. She’s nothing.”
I think the people who sing the songs are just as important. And back in the day, you saw a kind of connection, where people with extraordinary vocal ranges and voices maybe aren’t as inclined to writing as somebody with a smaller palette.
Having a smaller palette kind of leaves room for imagination – like how so many people have covered Bob Dylan songs, because he sucks at singing, or how Lou Reed sucks at singing – or even Anthony Kiedis isn’t really a great singer, Kurt Cobain, not really a great singer – all these new era, incredible writers…
And I think what kind of works for us is that we get to go back to that old school style of writing. Will really focuses on making the song its fullest, and my job is to make the best song I can make.
When you write something, do you sit down and have a debrief session with him and explain the place it came from, what you were thinking? And, do you feel like when Will performs it, he gives it meaning that’s his own that wasn’t original written into it?
Yeah, for sure. I do debriefing on a lot of the stuff, but sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I’m just singing a song, and he’ll just be like, “Oh, what was that?” And I’ll tell him, and then he’ll like it right away, so he’s kind of more attuned to it.
But yeah, I think that’s why Frank Sinatra, Elvis, Aretha Franklin, Rhianna are the best – because they take songs that are not theirs, but because they’re good songs, they’re universally relatable, and they put a life into them that makes them resonate in a way that’s so much grander.
Yeah, there’s something powerful there.
It’s really like the power of the microphone to begin with, in an analogy sense. Like, a street-side poet has all of these words and these ideas and these philosophies, and nobody listens. But if that street-side poet could find somebody they knew that had the power of an amplifier and a microphone, and the trade off would be that the person with the microphone got to say it but the poet got to write it – it’s worth it, right?
What all the most fabulous singers do is bring a song to life. The bands lay down these recipes and you mix the song into a casserole, but the singer’s like the oven that actually bakes it and brings all the stuff to life.
When I give Will a song it’s like all the ingredients, and it’s good, and if you took a bite of it it might even taste good – but it’s nothing like the apple pie that comes out of the oven warm and ready. It’s a totally different experience.
Knowing that it will be spoken by Will, how do you balance writing on themes that are really personal to you and making those personal themes relatable at the same time? Like, the best songs that Rihanna sings are the ones that everyone relates to, but you need to write from a personal place, right?
I think I don’t do that. I usually just write from my spirit or my heart, and those are the ones that relate with people the most.
What context are you writing in? Is it something that comes to you any time of day, or do you sit down and say “Okay, I’m going to write a song now”?
All kinds of ways. But if I’m in “the muse” or the vibe or whatever you call it, I’ll just pick up a guitar or head to the piano and write a song.
My background of freestyling lets me kind of say what I want to say at an exact moment, and if it sticks it’s good enough. So when I’ve been freestyling for like three minutes, I go back and I’m like “Oh, what was that one line I said in the beginning? It was so perfect.”
Then I always go by the Lynyrd Skynyrd quote: if it’s not good enough to remember, it’s not good enough.
The majority of what I do is pick up a guitar or piano and just write the entire song right there.
How long does it take?
Five minutes sometimes, two years sometimes.
Like, tomorrow, we’re releasing a song called Vanderlight. I wrote the entire song in the time that the song is.
It’s like stream of consciousness?
Oh yeah, and I just remembered it all. Like, I’m so connected to the stream of consciousness that I know exactly what I’m saying, so I could say it again. But the thing is, then I refined it and edited it and worked on it, and it ended up taking three years to get it into existence.
And then we’ve also gone into the studio before and kind of just hit play and written a song right then and there.
So is it more about editing, or improvising?
I think both. But to the songwriters out there who don’t have that skill or that ability improvise: many times when I’m not “in the muse” and I can’t pick up a guitar or write a song, I’ll wait until something inspiring comes to my head – a word, or I hear somebody say something. Then I have a Google doc where I just write the word down.
At one point, I wrote the word Vanderlight, which is the name of our song coming out tomorrow. At one point, I wrote the word coyote down.
And once you have the word – then what?
Then, when you’re sitting down and it comes to you, or you’re driving around and a melody comes to you but you don’t have a chord progression, it kind of helps to be able to say, “Okay, what is this song going to be called?”
For me, if it has a name it helps to set the direction. So I’ll just sit down and add up all of these miscellaneous pieces. Like, I might have a melody in my head, but not a chord progression, so I’ll use the old chord progression to a song that never really went anywhere, and then I’ll look on my phone and I’ll grab the name of an idea I put down maybe six months ago, and then maybe I’ll add a guitar lick to it, something that I did to another song two weeks ago. And it’s kind of just building it together like that.
Do you have a bank of chord progressions and licks the same way you do for words? How do you stockpile those things?
Well, I have Ableton, and I have a home studio now, so I’ve definitely gotten more advanced in the past year and a half. As far as it generally goes, I just kind of remember my little licks always, and they’re just kind of in my brain somewhere.
Does that just come for sitting down and messing around for a couple hours? In the same way that you freestyle and wait for something to stick – do you just poke around until something sticks on guitar?
Yeah. I don’t think my skill is in freestyling words, I think my skill is in improvising in general – words, even dancing, noodling guitar or piano licks, or coming up with a story – whatever it is, it’s just improvising in general.
Do you usually write on guitar or piano?
I definitely switch back and forth. I’ve been recently writing in Ableton, which means I’m writing from a beat, versus writing from a melodic progression.
Do you feel like that changes, stylistically, what comes out?
Absolutely. 100%.
So what kind of time do you put into choosing those beats?
The same amount of time I put into choosing my words the first time around – so, zero time.
Recently, I’m getting to the point where, when I’m done writing my song, I like it to be basically ready to release. “coyote” for example, sounded probably 90% like that without the words. There was very little added musically. I did that arrangement and all of that stuff in the van – not including the vocals and the timbres that came from the studio. But I’m getting to the point where I want to have the song almost completely finished before I stop.
Because you know, once you get interrupted from that flow, it’s sometimes impossible to return to. If you’re in a flow on a guitar or singing lyrics, in your head you’re hearing the notes, maybe hearing some other stuff – oh, this could go like this, the guitar player could come in at this moment, there could be cymbals right here – you’re just thinking of ideas beyond the actual song, you’re in producer or arrangement mode.
The beauty of Ableton is that, when you have those thoughts – “oh, what if French horns just crescendos right here, and then when it reaches the climax a little distorted bell just kind of echoed” – then you just do it.
It’s so beautiful, and mind blowing, and interesting, and honestly life changing. I’m so appreciative of the technology that’s been provided, and it’s changed my songwriting a lot.
Yeah, it’s interesting how that ability to record anything anywhere has impacted songwriting.
But at the same time, in the end a song is a song, and it’s gotta be good on a guitar with one dude singing, or on a piano with one person singing.
And you get all of these pop tunes that just sound huge. And then all of a sudden you get a piano or guitar and you play it and you realize how excellent of a song it is without all of that glitter on top of it.
What do you think makes a song excellent?
What makes an excellent song is that you feel it. Because there are a lot of songs that sound like a hit – like you hear a band, a Joe Schmoe on the street, or someone you don’t really know play a song, and when you’re done you’re like, “Wow, that sounds like a lot of songs I hear on the radio. Why isn’t it on the radio?”
Well, one reason it’s not is because they don’t have a million dollars in a record label turning them into a product – I think there’s a million, billion songs out there that could’ve been number one hits that just didn’t have the resources to make it happen. But what makes it great is you gotta feel it.
And I do think that there are obviously some psychological elements to an arrangement that just hold themselves true, too. Like, a 1,4,5 always sounds good, even to a baby. You know? Like, dissonant notes are dissonant notes.
Then the next part that makes a great song is that the story is true in some sense or another. Even if it’s completely fiction, it’s honest. It doesn’t have to be a true story. Like the Beatles’ “Rocky Raccoon” – not a true story, but just such an honest song.
And then the last part that I think makes a really, really great song, is that it was written with a higher intuition.
What do you mean by that?
I guess that there has to be some kind of moment in it that was purely from the soul or subconscious. Even somebody like Leonard Cohen, who took four years to write Hallelujah – and he wrote so many verses, and put so much thought into each and every word – there was still an intuitive flow to that preciseness.
Malcolm Gladwell gives the example of Picasso and Cézanne. Cézanne would take years and years on sketches, and then would take literally a decade on one of his paintings. They’re considered masterpieces, and he’s considered one of the best painters of all time.
On the other hand, Picasso painted his paintings in ten minutes, and had so many paintings.
And the thing is that they’re both geniuses. They’re both masters. But, where for Picasso it would have really ruined him to sit, and think, and have a teacher break down the preciseness of his strokes, it would have ruined Cézanne to have somebody say, “Well, just quit thinking about it so much and do it.”
So, Cézanne’s intuition was to be precise, and Picasso’s intuition was to be free. And I think we all have our influences, and we all have songs that we like and things that we aspire to sound like, but in the end you gotta really know who you are. You’ve got to know your style, and be intuitive to your style, and just be yourself.
What’s your goal with music? What do you want?
My fullest goal is to find healing and to create liberty – to silence my anxieties through the expression of art. I think that means taking an experience and being able to share it with the world around me, and really create a community and a culture of freedom.
Like, these aren’t just songs to get famous or see how many plays I can get online, or so I can walk into a bar and have people go, “Oh my god, you’re Cubby from SLO.” Or whatever.
It’s really about the spiritual element. Like when I discovered Bob Dylan, how I would lay in my bed and just cry sometimes listening to some of his songs – and how free that felt. Or like when I’d turn on Biggie Smalls and just feel like such a badass, and when I played basketball how that just totally changed the game. To do that.
And then, on a more mechanical level, I’d love to be a professional producer and songwriter at some point. For multiple people.
Interesting. This isn’t really musically-related, but I’m kind of curious – spiritually, where do you fall?
I think that’s a big part of our story. Spiritually, I’d consider myself to be where I think a lot of people in the Millennial generation and Generation X are. That is, I recognize that there is something greater than myself, and I don’t know exactly what it is. And I am looking. I’m on a continuous journey to search and find out not only what it is, but also find other people who I can share and practice my individual ideas with.
Because religion is not individual ideas, and any idea that’s not individual is not accepted in practice. At the same time, there’s a lot of wisdom and discipline and guidance in religion that would be incredibly helpful if I had some kind of fellowship to be able to join. I mean, I’d love to join a church, or a monastery or a buddhist temple or a mosque, but they’re not going to accept my individual ideas, and they’re not going to accept the fact that I don’t believe that their prophet is the only way to eternal life. And because of that I just can’t do it.
It’s like, you can’t date a girl who’s racist. No matter how hot she is, or how wonderful she is, or how sexy she is, or how fucking perfect she might be – if she’s racist, you just can’t marry her. And so I can’t marry any religion, because they’re so wonderful, but they just have a couple of things in them that are unacceptable for me, as far as being tied to them.
But, I’m still looking for a woman to marry.
Man. I’d love to dive into that more, but since we’re limited in time: can you give me a little bit of the backstory on “coyote”?
Yeah, for sure. I wrote it in the summer, and I was sitting on the same couch that I’m looking at right now.
I just grabbed my nylon guitar and was totally sleepy, ready to end my day. And then I kind of just started playing this chord progression, and while I was playing it I was imagining in my head what it would be like to go back to when we wrote our album, and what it would feel like if one of our friends – my friend Lewis, for example – if he had died.
What it would be like, if you had this place where all of your friends meet up on the regular, to go back to that for the first time after this person’s death? And how empty a void would that be?
And then I started thinking about how my wife’s best friend committed suicide her junior year of high school, and it was just such an incredibly heavy thing. And I started thinking about how even in your pack of coyotes, you’re still so lonely.
Lonely?
You’re hanging out with all of your buddies, and you’re hanging out with your family and friends, and you’re all together. And we’re all connected on social media, and it seems like you have this gigantic pack. But we still recognize this loneliness even in spite of the pack.
So the song is kind of a call to action, to be like, “Let’s howl into the night,” and do what we can to feel free and safe and at peace. To know that we all are holding onto these pains and these struggles, but that’s it’s okay to cry about them, and it’s okay to talk about them, and it’s okay to liberate yourself from them.
I think in a lot of cultures, especially older cultures, there’s joy in getting together and celebrating the good times, but there’s also something in celebrating the hard times and being honest and open in them. Those things can live in the same places.
There’s a lot of shit we face every single day. There are a lot of vibes and feelings that we never share with one another. You can’t go anywhere spiritually because you feel like you don’t connect, and the word Jesus Christ makes you feel all weird. You can’t go to a psychiatrist, because it’s two hundred dollars an hour and health care doesn’t exist.
I feel like music is a giant outlet, and it’s a call to action to howl into the night with your pack of coyotes.
I’m kind of surprised you wrote it on guitar, because it seems piano-driven to me.
Yeah, it really is. I wrote it on guitar and it’s a one-hundred-percent different song on that instrument. The song “Vanderlight” is one of those songs too – I wrote them both on this sixty dollar nylon guitar. Actually, the guitar was free – I found it – but I don’t think it cost a lot. It’s real jangly and loose, and has this super percussiveness to it – anyway, I wrote “Vanderlight” on that, too.
I think it’s fun to take a song you wrote on guitar and transfer it to piano. To me, a guitar is very unmanageable, like out of the box, this wild and free-spirited instrument. A piano is very precise, and kind of more mechanical. If you write on piano, you know that it feels more pop. And you look at piano-based songwriters – the Beach Boys, Elton John, Lady Gaga – people that are heavy piano, and you can tell it’s piano written.
Then you got your guitar writers, like Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and it’s fun to take those songs and then put them on piano. Or take piano songs and put them into the guitar world. It just kind of creates a really beautiful contrast. And that’s what I did with “coyote”.
When you had the finished song, did you know it would be on piano? Or did you just try it out?
No. I made an Ableton song that was just the song pretty much.
To the listener, a song is a production. The average listener doesn’t understand songwriting, they only understand production. So I produced this beat, and then I was just kind of like, “Oh, wonder what it would sound like if I put “coyote” on top of it?”
And when I did, I got what the song is now. And I thought it was really cool. It sounded a lot more anthemic. It has kind of this crescendo to it.
Yeah, that’s what caught my ear – the build.
Yeah, exactly. But on guitar it’s this real, slightly stupid type of melancholy man vibe. It’s a totally different vibe. We’ve talked about releasing an acoustic version for sure. Not an acoustic version of the production you hear now, but an acoustic take on the original version.
How did Will take this song and give it life? Did his meaning shape it at all?
I don’t ever ask him, “What’s your interpretation of this song?”. And he doesn’t ask me. I think he just hears what I’m doing, and instead of breaking it down, he gives it a lot more energy and mystery by just taking his interpretation and singing it. It always becomes what it’s truly about.
If you hear some of our songs without Will singing them, you can tell he does more than just sing. He finesses the melody a lot, and he likes to change the timing – like make it slower or faster. That’ll change the energy of the song. If you heard “Aquarius Apocalyptic” before Will did it, it’s a hundred percent different feel, even though it’s the same song. On “coyote”, he just got it and sang it and crushed it immediately.
Did you track the vocals yourself when you were putting it together in Ableton?
No, I didn’t. I don’t like to. Sometimes I do, if I’m really certain about something, but I usually don’t like to have a recorded vocal for Will to hear. Because he’ll start trying to mimic what I was doing. That’s why I’m excited to co-write with him – because I think he sings the best when he hasn’t heard me sing it. I wish he could read music, because I’d just put the notes there and have him sing it. When he hears what I do, what happens is he’ll mimic me singing when he does it.
But it’s not as true for him if he’s doing it that way?
Exactly. Not nearly as true. It’s just an impression.
So a lot of times what we’ll do is he’ll sing it like me, and we’ll just keep singing it and singing it. Eventually, he’s done it so many times that he forgets what I sound like singing it. And then it’s honest again.
What’s your favorite line or part from the song?
My favorite line is probably:
Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me
Unless you leave me or desert me
Not like dessert that is sweet, but a desert that is lonely
Except for a cactus and a pack of coyotes
And specifically, the play on desert and dessert. Because, from a songwriter standpoint, I like playing around with the English language. When you look at it, it has a much different impact than hearing it.
Was that line stream of consciousness or from editing?
I was just lucky. Sometimes you get lucky.
When I am in that vibe, I’m not like “Oh God, I’m so good.” Because most of the time I can’t do that, so when I am like that I’m like, “That is not me.”
It’s like those cartoons – you know when a mouse smells the cheese? Like if you walked past a bed of roses and you could visually see this scent vibration coming from them. That’s what if feels like.
I don’t know if there are just these vibrations floating around us that we kind of inhale sometimes, or what, but it’s definitely not me doing it. It’s not my everyday – writing lyrics.
Last question: what’s up next for you guys?
“Vanderlight” comes out tomorrow. And we just finished our last show, and then we’ll be touring this spring. And then we’re playing RockBoat, which is a cool cruise, with NEEDTOBREATHE and a bunch of other good bands.
