The Beauty of Slowness with Fawn Ridge
On the quiet edge of the modern indie folk scene lies the wistfully reflective Fawn Ridge. Justin Lindsay (guitar), Anna Young (bass), Jordan Kerr (guitar, banjo, keys), and Julian Miltenberger (drums) provide a textured musical backdrop for Sky Van Cott’s (songwriting and vocals) delicate reflections on love and nostalgia.
The quintet, based in Brooklyn, New York, released their debut EP, Every Little Thing, in February. Featuring six songs written by Van Cott, the project glows with vulnerability through twinkling banjo and baroque melodies. This soft introduction lingers, building anticipation for what’s to come.
I sat down on a video call with Sky, Justin, and Jordan to discuss musical influences, songwriting process, and how they embrace slowness.
How did Fawn Ridge come together?
Sky: I started writing music in January of 2024, and I took this one class. It was the School of Song class, which is online; you take all your classes with one teacher and tons of students. The teacher for this one was Adrienne Lenker of Big Thief. I had never written a song before, and I was like, I'm gonna take this as an incentive to start writing songs. Then I wrote my first song and showed it to Justin, my coworker at a music venue at the time. He was like, “Oh, I'm so down to work on this with you as a producer.” We worked on that, and after writing one song, I was like, I'm going to write 4 more songs and then put on a show by July, and made that just a goal for myself. Then it actually ended up happening. I recruited Jordan, and Justin ended up being the guitarist in the band. Then I met the drummer at the time, Julian, who was my neighbor. And our bassist was also one of my friends. Anyway, it was just a goal I set for myself, and then it ended up being something we all stuck with and made into a band.
Justin, what was it that caught your attention about the song, the 1st time you heard it? If you can remember.
Justin: It had a good hook. It was this song called “Apartment,” the first song she ever wrote. And I was like, I wanna record that with you. I'm gonna make you a star! [laughs] No, I wanted to produce for her, and then we had this awkward moment where it was like, oh, that's not what I had in mind. She was like, I want you to be in the band. I was like, okay, we'll do this show and see how it goes. I just ended up falling in love with all these songs that Sky brought to the table, and then we made it our whole personality for the next two years.
Sky: The shows were definitely your moment. After the show, you were like I get it now. And you would watch the video multiple times because it was all live recorded. You watched it more than I did!
The name Fawn Ridge is very fitting for your music. I feel like I listened to the songs, and it just makes sense that that's the name. Where did that name come from, and why does it represent the band's identity?
Sky: It was a sign by where I grew up. I think they're condos; it's a realty sign. It's not an actual street, but it looked like a street sign, and it's what you turn onto to get to my house. I've always just thought it was very whimsical, and I was trying to figure out what to call the project, and thinking in street signs because that seems to be an easy way to come up with something. It's old and tattered and exactly what I like.
It’s so whimsical and cute and fun. I guess this question ties into that a little bit. You say your songs are romantic and nostalgic, yet modern. I'm wondering who some of your inspirations are and how you embody them in your music while still making something new from the ideas you draw from.
Sky: That's a good question. I don't realize how much they are my inspirations until people point out that they are. I think a lot of the writing comes from what I listened to growing up. I think that's where the nostalgia comes in, it’s just like, this sounds like something that your parents were listening to, and you just overheard…Big Thief was huge. I think we're all pretty big Big Thief fans here. The great thing is, I think we all have different music tastes. So when I come to the band with a song idea that's decently written out, once everyone starts adding their parts, it's different styles. Jordan has a very different music taste than I do. And Justin and I have some overlap, but also some music he listens to, which I've never heard.
Justin: There's a lot of overlap, but then we all like to pull from different weird things that have no association whatsoever. We like the Beatles.
Sky: Oh yeah, we love the Beatles, but Big Thief is my number one in terms of inspo.
Jordan: I’m a Big Thief fan, but only after I met [Sky] and played this music.
Sky: Yeah, I got to show him Big Thief, which is crazy.
That's a great factoid. Like I showed someone, Big Thief.
Sky: I know! In this day and age? In Brooklyn? Jordan showed me, Hannah Francis. I've really, in terms of new stuff, tried to lean more into a vibe.
The more that gets brought in, the more it becomes something new type deal.
Sky: Yeah, somebody came to a show, and they were like, “You love Helena Deland,” which I do! And I think they were like, “Your guitarist loves Wilco.” And I was like, yeah!
Jordan: It's not things that you guys intentionally were like, okay, we're gonna put this into the music, but it just comes about. It’s like the osmosis of what you're listening to just seeps into what you write.
You guys put out your 1st EP in February, which is very awesome! Congratulations. It's a great EP. What went into the writing and production of that?
Sky: I can speak on the writing just because I bring [songs] to the band, pretty much all lyrically written. I handle the lyrics side of things and the general melody, and then we all work on structure if anything needs to change, and then everyone adds their parts. The production of everything, once we record, I feel like we all kind of end up contributing a lot more in terms of being even on everything, especially us 3. And Peter, who recorded the album, also mixed half of the songs. Justin actually mixed the other half.
Justin: I want to talk about mixing, but also I want to say that I feel like a really important step in all of this was that we wrote the songs and performed them for a while before we recorded them, because honestly, for like 7 or 8 months, we were gigging the songs and making tweaks along the way. That was all part of the writing process, because literally up until the day before recording. I remember we rehearsed the day before, and at the last minute, we were like, actually, the chorus of “Heavy,” we're gonna go into halftime. It wasn't like before. I feel like that is actually a really important part of our process. Now we're doing it again with our next batch of songs.
Sky: We've kind of just made that our process, where I'll write a song and then we rehearse it once, and then we end up playing it, and it doesn't all land the first time because we're workshopping it in real time. Over time, we kind of figure out what works for us. It's also really cool because you're kind of getting live feedback. You kind of see what people are resonating with and what they love.
Jordan: True, that makes it quick once we actually get into the studio. I feel like the recording of the main bulk of the song is pretty quick. We had not that many hours in the studio, honestly, playing through that many songs. I feel like because we played them a bunch, you know, already live, we had that whole production. It's a good way to do it.
You sort of learn what works. You can play with things before you have to figure everything out in the studio right then.
Justin: We allowed for some room for play once the bones of the songs were tracked. Then it was like, okay, now we can figure out what sort of fun little things to add. Some of the writing happened after the songs were tracked…and that informs our performance live now. We're like, oh, I wanna play this 12-string part that we just added now.
Sky: I do voice recording on my phone. So, the 12-string part we added to the end of “Dragon June,” I looked through when we 1st played it, when I brought it to Justin forever ago, and was like, “here's a song,” and he was just kind of fumbling about on his guitar, figuring something out. We were like, “Oh, wait, that could be something.” But then we just forgot about it, and then we came back to it way later when we needed an extra melody at the end, and it ended up being a part. Sometimes we'll lose a part. We'll forget we did that, and then we'll be like, oh, wait, remember that thing you did that one time? Can we bring that back?
I don’t know if I've heard that style of writing before, like where it comes as you go. It's like a process, that's really cool. As for your lyrics, they're aimed at Sky, but they seem very raw and honest. My question for you is, is it difficult to be so open and vulnerable with your audience? Especially because I think you said those were the 1st 6 songs you'd ever written, which is crazy. What is it like to be vulnerable with an audience like that?
Sky: The first time, oh my gosh, terrifying. The first few times, I was shaking. I was like, “This is so bad.” I had a really good support system where I was around so many amazing songwriters, who I also am able to currently call my friends, to whom I showed the songs. So it was kind of a check: are these a little bit too much, or are they a little bit too on the nose? In some songs, I can be very literal, just kind of spewing all of my feelings onto a page, and it's stuff that I couldn't say. So I needed to turn it into song form, and I thought it was way too specific, and I was like, this can't be shown. I think for “Apartment” specifically, when I wrote it, Justin was like, “You have to put this out.” And I was like, this cannot be the first song I release. Sorry, it's too specific, that's crazy behavior. So it needs to stand between other songs. Over time, they just became songs that were not my own. It helped having a band. It felt like, oh, this isn't Sky writing songs. This is Fawn Ridge writing songs, and they're all putting these together. Over time, of just playing them, they became songs that exist that I was just performing rather than my own songs. And then hearing other people resonate with them, being like, oh, “Hopelessly, Hopeful” made me feel like this, or it reminded me of this time in my life, that was the coolest thing ever. Instead of being this scary explosion of emotions, it was more of a conversation. You can tell me how you feel, and it's more of a unifying thing. It's just the most beautiful feeling ever now.
For the rest of the band, Jordan and Justin, while you're here, how do you bring meaning to those lyrics through sound?
Justin: Well, I feel like it starts with Sky, because I feel like she's really good at fitting melody to the vibe of what the lyrics bring. It's a really good seed. I'm a really melody and music first person. I historically don't listen to lyrics at all for the first 100 listens of a song. Every once in a while, I'll text Sky and be like, “Yo, that was a great line, by the way.” Like, yearly. But yeah, she sets us up for success when it comes to the song, the melody already matching the vibe of the lyrics. And then, when it comes time to write our parts, I feel like we'll just loop a part or something and mess around. I'll just mess around on the guitar until I hear Skye react to something. Like, oh, you like that?
Jordan: That's a massive production technique. I do the same thing all the time. Just play until she's like, oh!
Justin: We like that, do we?
Jordan: I’m somewhere in the middle with lyrics. I'm definitely listening to them, but I definitely grew up as an instrumentalist, and that was definitely my first instinct. Because Sky's written the bulk of the song, you know, the melody and the basic chords and the lyrics, and just does it so well that with anything that I add, it's just trying not to get in the way of it, basically. Like, what can I add to this that's going to just kind of give it a platform?
Sky: Both of them add such lovely things to the songs…I feel like Justin's very good at understanding what I'm looking for when I'm trying to create a vibe. Sometimes he has a completely different idea, and it ends up being awesome as well, but overall, there'll be a moment where it feels like something. We know when it's not it, when it's not quite there yet, and then there's a moment. And then Jordan always has these amazing ideas, especially in terms of structure and just the overall composition. He makes decisions that I think enhance the song really well, and they’re decisions for everyone to do too! He'll be like, “Oh, wait, if we all do this, or if it grows here,” I don't know. Jordan makes really awesome calls that I feel do speak to the emotion of the song, whether or not he was necessarily aiming for that.
Justin: Whenever Sky and I are stumped on something, we'll be like, “We've got to bring this to Jordan. We'll let Jordan fill in the blanks there.”
Sky: He'll tell us what we're missing. He's also just so informed. He'll be like, “Oh, it's like you're looking for this note.” We're like, ah, it was that!
Like the aha moment! Leaning more into your style, I looked at your social media, music videos, and stuff, and it seems like you guys are pretty big fans of multimedia. I love multimedia, which caught my eye immediately. Does this experimental style of DIY art find its way into your music or even your philosophy as a band?
Sky: A lot of it is very fun. The “Heavy” music video is very multimedia because just getting us in one space was difficult. So it was like, let's just chop us up and put us in this. Especially our bassist Anna, and we have 2 drummers, but the drummer for that video was Julian. Getting us all in one room was hard, so it was like, what can we do for the music video that we don't necessarily need everyone in one space? I am an animator before anything else, so before I started doing music, I went to school for animation. So, the lyric video for “Apartment” is also mixed media, and I just drew that up in 2 weeks. In general, that's the media I know how to create, so it helps with budget when you can do a lot of it yourself. The “Heavy” music video was specifically me and my 2 friends, Julissa and Mel, who are also insane multimedia and visual artists. It was just a collaborative effort with my friends, and it was so fun because we just cut up stuff and glued stuff together and made a really cool piece of art.
I loved going through and watching those. It was so cool, and all the comments are like, ‘oh, this is so horror-esque!’
Sky: Some of the comments are writing diary entries. I'm like, that's awesome. We've been compared to Over the Garden Wall, which is funny, because that show guides a lot of my personal style, and my whole room looks like that. So I think overall, just because I like the combination of sweet and kind of spooky and warm, but unsettling, just kind of comes through in anything that I make. And then these guys are like, sure. So that's awesome.
I love that. It's always nice to have a good team behind you. This question ties into your answer a little bit, but I feel like your music is very serene, whimsical, and airy. I'm wondering: what's the place for that music in an industry that can be very overwhelming and saturated? What's the benefit of having music that's, huh, I can breathe?
Sky: For me personally, it's a good release. People tend to be like, “I'm warm and comforted by this music,” which is awesome because I'm generally a very wound-up, anxious person, but the music I listen to tends to have this very warm, forgiving energy. That's what I just lean towards in general. I think that slowness and nostalgia help me and help a lot of people feel reflective and force themselves to reflect. When I'm writing, it also just ends up being that way. I don't think I'm ever really aiming for something specifically when I start writing a melody or lyrics, but they kind of just end up being that way to self-soothe, I guess. When I started writing, the songwriting class I took was talking about specific moments and blowing up those moments and finding the importance in very tiny things, and that resonated with me a lot. Instead of trying to write a song where I'm addressing a 1000 things, and it's bigger than me. It's really hard for me to connect with that. Instead, writing something that comes from one specific small thing and then blowing that up to reflect what is around me is a lot easier for me to resonate with in general.
Jordan: I think it's refreshing because I play a lot of different music, and a lot of it is very intense. I grew up loving and playing very intense music, and intense in different ways…Being in the music business and around musicians who have very heady stuff, I love that these songs are definitely refreshing in the way that they are; Interesting and have both those sides, as you say, the kind of sweet and spooky side or whatever, so there's definitely interest. It's not just a basic pop song; it's very refreshing. As you said, kind of airy. I've never really thought of that word before, but it's true. I feel like the songs have a lot of space to breathe.
I thought of spring when I listened to it. Spring air.
Sky: Yeah, my favorite thing ever has just been anyone who's come up to me and talked to me about how the songs have resonated with them. I think that's really important because it was very much just me getting my feelings out, and the fact that anyone has taken that and been like, Oh, I feel this way about it, and maybe it's a different takeaway than what I initially gave out, but it's just so cool. It's the coolest thing ever.
I feel like that's the beautiful thing about music, it's just so versatile in every way, which is cool. Then, this is just a silly question that I had. In your guys' opinion, what is the banjo's place in your music?
Jordan: Sky asked me to play banjo! I'm usually a guitarist and bass player, but she already had a guitarist and bass player and knew that I had a banjo, so she just asked me to play banjo. You can fit anything into anything if you think about it the right way. I love the challenge of trying to fit something musical in any instrument, especially an instrument that I don't play too often. Fawn Ridge was a really cool challenge to do, and an opportunity to venture more and to get better at banjo. But really it's the same as I would think about any other instrument, how I would fit it into the music.
Sky: One thing that I think is so incredible about what Jordan does with the banjo is that it's never on the nose. The banjo ends up serving a different purpose in pretty much every song. Sometimes he's playing it more like a mandolin would be played. Sometimes he's playing it almost like a guitar part. We've had him play bass at some shows, and then he's kind of doing some of the banjo part on the bass. You're just really good at knowing what a song needs, and I really love the sound of the banjo. It's just this really cool medium that's not what you would expect the banjo to be doing, but then it ends up being so awesome and filling its own space in our songs. We might do a few songs with less banjo because sometimes we're putting him on guitar because he’s a guitarist first. I think the first song that we thought needed a banjo was “Heavy” because it felt so sparse, and it was so low. I was like, I need something twinkly, and I did know that he played the banjo, so I reached out to him, and he was originally just gonna play on one to two songs for the show, and then he ended up playing on all of them. Put him in banjo jail, we call it.
It really is an awesome addition. I think. So your work is paying off. And then, my final question is what’s next for Fawn Ridge? What should we be looking out for?
Sky: Right now, we're in a writing phase and just playing shows and doing that process we told you about, where we write the song and then just play it immediately and see how it goes. I think we have 6-ish new ones and maybe start recording late summer, try to have something out by the end of the year or the beginning of next year. Right now I'm just trying to play shows, maybe do a little tour. I just want to write, I feel like I'm getting better at writing all the time because, as we said, the EP was my first 6 songs, and now I'm feeling like I'm maturing and maybe we're kind of going down a still warm and heartfelt, but slightly less, very sweet energy. A little bit more maturity, at least in my eyes. Not that it was an immature EP, but that was us playing and figuring out what our sound is. And I think we figured out a decent system. I think Justin was saying we kind of have a formula that we're following.
Justin: Our secret formula.
Sky: Don't tell them!
Justin: We're just going through the same process again, but we're going at it this time with a little bit more intention. I mean, this conversation of being a little bit less cutesy and whimsical this next time around, I think we want to have a little bit more of a mature sound in the next go-around.
Sky: I'm also just changing as a writer. When I wrote a lot of those songs, thematically, I mean, some of them stray from it, but overall, they were very yearning and lovey-dovey, and now I have more things that I feel comfortable writing about. I'm just excited to tackle new topics and play with arranging more.
