Verboten, the band and musical outlet of songwriter Foster Powell, are releasing their debut album, Life Expectancy, on November 10th via NYC-based imprint Rascal Records. Life Expectancy comprises a set of songs written during a period of creative breakthrough for Powell, which preceded a major life change in the form of relocating across the country from Vermont to Bellingham, Washington. To find out more, I dropped Powell a line…

I’m curious about the name of your project. Do you feel like your songs touch on forbidden topics, or is it a broader way of describing be an artist in today’s world?

Yeah, I was definitely thinking about what it’s like to be a musician nowadays, in that you’re quite often looked down upon if you’re not making any money, and thus in a sense I think it’s easy to fall into the trap of not feeling like you’re “allowed” to be a musician anymore. I was in Germany briefly a few times visiting my partner’s family and of course the word “verboten” is everywhere on no trespassing signs and the like, but it kind of has a different meaning there—it’s not quite “forbidden” in the way we use it in English and closer to “prohibited,” and also it’s the word you’d use to scold children, i.e. “Don’t do that! Verboten!” So it has a bit of darkness to it but I also saw it as a little bit playful within that.

Your website describes Verboten as “the band and musical outlet of songwriterFoster Powell.” Do the other members of the band contribute ideas, or do they mainly follow your musical lead?

I do tend to direct the band, but more often in the way of general suggestions rather than trying to choreograph a specific arrangement, although that does happen occasionally if I have a really specific idea of it. I think I’ve learned over the years that people are happiest and most musically engaged when they have ownership over their parts and have free range to improvise a little and come up with their own ways of playing things. So I try to leave as much space as possible for that. My bandmates are also really good musicians and frequently come up with ideas that are cooler than whatever I had in mind.

That said, when it comes to recording, I have done a lot of it myself mostly because it’s been easier thus far in my life to pull off: it’s way more expensive and financially risky to bring the band into a studio than to home record it track by track (although the latter approach does take longer). But I’m getting a little better at recording now and I’d very much like to make the next record with the live band.

Along similar lines, what attracts you to being a member of a band as opposed to a songwriter with a band, if that distinction makes sense?

Verboten is in a sense a “solo project” in that it’s based around my songs, but I’ve always thought about it as a band. I’ve never liked playing solo, and have always been uncomfortable with being a songwriter in the usual sense—I feel like for me, it’s a little too revealing or egotistical to attach my name to my music. I also didn’t start writing songs seriously at all until I was in college and realized the potential of the kinds of things you can do musically with a band that you can’t on your own. I did play under my name for a year or two before we came up with a band name but that was confusing for people since there was this ambiguity as to whether it was a band or a solo project.

How has the band evolved since its inception? Who’s come and gone, and how have personnel changes influenced the music?

Technically the band started back in college with a kind of crazy five piece lineup of guitar (me), synth (Aubrey Lavender-Cook), upright bass (Dylan O’Hara), fiddle (Amy Anders), and drums (Charlie Smith). The idea was to sound like a mini orchestra, and we kind of did! We were all really fresh on our instruments so I’m sure we were technically awful but it had great energy. Then when some members graduated/moved we pared down to a trio with Daniel O’Connor on drums and Amy switching to bass. And that was the band for several years while Amy and I were living in Vermont—occasionally we had a friend sit in on guitar or keys but mostly it was just the three of us. We started very experimental with these crazy arrangements that were really hard to play, but as I gradually started to get more into more classic “songwriter” music I think our sound changed to something a little less edgy and more quietly confident. Amy and I ended up moving out to Bellingham last year and parted ways with Daniel, who moved to Durham (NC). In our last year in Vermont I also met Harry Zucker, who’s filled in on drums a few times and played on/co-produced Life Expectancy. He runs Rascal Records in NYC and helped to release the record!

Your new album, Life Expectancy, was written during what you describe as a period of creative breakthrough precipitated by moving across the country from Vermont to Bellingham, Washington. What was behind the move, and how did it lead to a breakthrough?

I had been living in North Bennington where I went to college for a few years during and after the pandemic, and was feeling kind of stuck in life and really isolated. So one way to change that was to move 3,000 miles I guess! At some point in that period I realized that writing about this feeling of stuckness and indecision could be interesting, like taking a more meta view of your choices in life and whether or not you have any control over your path. So that became what most of the songs on the album are about.

Did the band move with you, or did you form the band after the move?

A few months after moving to Bellingham, Amy and I ran into Henry Locke, who we actually went to school with in Vermont, but hadn’t played music together before. He’s an amazing guitar player. Then we played a show with Sunflecks, this magical band in Bellingham, and the drummer, Amanda Glover, offered to play with us. Turns out Amanda also went to Bennington, but didn’t overlap with any of us. She’s also an incredible musician. So weirdly we all went to the same tiny 800-person liberal arts school in Vermont but didn’t even know each other there. I do think it helps that we all had a very similar musical education, we kind of speak the same language in a lot of ways.

How does the music scene in Washington compare to the scene you were used to in Vermont?

It’s different in that it actually feels like there are other songwriters and bands in the PNW, whereas in southern Vermont at least there was hardly anyone else doing what we were doing and we kind of had to start it. I think musically there’s also a big east coast/west coast difference that I’m constantly fascinated by; the east coast rock bands I know are really tight and precisely arranged. On the west coast there’s more looseness, but I don’t say that as a negative. Both have their ups and downs! I think right now I’m really into the looseness.

Before Life Expectancy, you released an album called Shadows in the Park. How are they different?

Shadows is kind of a demos album of the songs I made during the song-a-week club. I should maybe have put “demos” in the title but I didn’t want to be unnecessarily apologetic and at the time I wasn’t sure if I would be re-recording any of these songs. I got to the end of recording them very rapidly and slapdash and I just wanted to release them right away since I normally never do that. So that was fun to do! Some of these songs will probably be on the next Verboten record, but I want to actually record them with the band instead of multitracking it myself.

Life Expectancy by contrast is much more fussy and I had a sort of unspoken rule where if any part didn’t absolutely need to be there, I would delete it. The songs are also a bit more considered, I took longer to write them and they have denser chord changes and the kind of Beatles-y weird harmony that I was really into while I was making it.

For that project, you started a “song a week” club with twenty friends. How did that experience shape you as a songwriter?

Mainly it was just so much fun for me to get to write a bunch of brand new stuff really fast. I had always written songs really slowly and thought that the slowness was essential to the process, but now I’m not so sure. I feel like if anything my lyrics and melodies got sharper when I was rushing and pushing myself to finish things and just spit out what I was trying to say even if it seemed stupid on paper. It was also one of the great joys of my life honestly to get to hear new songs from friends who I hadn’t seen in years. The day after the first deadline I went for a walk and listened to everyone’s songs and was just so completely knocked out by how good they were, and how vital. Usually you don’t get to hear songs until a few years after they’ve been written, since albums take forever to make. But there I had a window into all this music that was actively responding to like, the way the world is NOW. Which was so cool and so meaningful to me.

What’s next for Verboten? 

We have a tour starting to come together for the spring. I also have an album of older songs that’s completely finished that I recorded with Amy and Daniel in Vermont and just haven’t got around to releasing yet (it’s a lot of work to release a record). So that should be coming out pretty soon. I wanted to have it out this year too but realistically it wasn’t possible to do on top of LE. And then like I said I want to make a new record with the current lineup, which will get recorded this winter as our work schedules allow. So lots of exciting stuff. I’ve had this massive backlog of old songs to record that I feel like I’m finally now getting to the end of, which feels great.