The Third Eye

Giant Day is the electrifying new musical endeavor of multi-instrumentalist Derek Almstead and vocalist Emily Growden. They blend their pop and psychedelic roots from the vibrant Athens, Georgia, music scene. Their sound is a captivating mix of rich, poppy, danceable, and dark elements, offering a fresh twist on classic influences.

Derek Almstead, known for his contributions to Circulatory System, The Olivia Tremor Control, The Glands, Elf Power, and of Montreal, is a veteran of the venerated Elephant 6 Collective. He has earned acclaim as a songwriter, producer, and recording engineer. 

Emily Growden, with her impressive background in vocal studies from the University of Georgia, has graced various indie music projects like Marshmallow Coast, Faster Circuits, and The New Sound of Numbers with her distinct voice.

Now based in rural Pennsylvania, the duo is dedicated to crafting music, renovating their historic farm, and building a new recording studio. Giant Day’s debut album, Glass Narcissus, will be released by The Elephant 6 Recording Company on August 23rd.

The Third Eye got a chance to catch up with Derek and Emily of Giant Day and ask them a few questions in an email correspondence. Check out the interview below, where the duo tells us about their new LP, what it’s been like renovating a historic farm, and the inspirations behind Glass Narcissus.

Interview with Giant Day

Third Eye: Thanks for doing this interview! Can you give us some background on Giant Day and how the band got together?

Derek Almstead: Emily and I had a band with our friends AJ Griffin, Chris Herron, and Carlton Owens back in Athens called Faster Circuits, but since the move to Pennsylvania, we haven’t had access to many people who are making the music that we would like to make. 

Emily Growden: We’re in such a rural area. There isn’t much of a music scene… cover bands, singer-songwriter acoustic acts, and some metal. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but in order to have a band with like-minded musicians, we realized it was pretty much just going to be the two of us. 

Derek: So we started a brand new project as a duo. This way, we can scratch the creative itch, put music out there, and hopefully go on tour and visit with friends. 

Emily: Yeah, it’s our social outlet.

Third Eye: The origins of the new record, Glass Narcisuss, are fascinating because some of it is based on the music you found on an old forgotten data drive. Can you tell us about that discovery and how it inspired the music on the new record?

Derek: A lot of this was also a result of the big move from Georgia to Pennsylvania. With the song “Overtone,” I was digging through drives, searching for lots of different things, cleaning up my stuff, and organizing and getting the new studio set up. I heard that track again; my friend Josh McKay from Macha and Deerhunter had played vibes on it and got excited about it and just kind of threw some vocals together quite quickly. After a couple of improvisational passes, it all came together. I couldn’t get it together back then for the life of me. It was originally for the 2005 album “Say It In Slang” by a band called M Coast, which was actually the first band Emily and I were in together. 

It was like a one-off version of Andy Gonzales’ band Marshmallow Coast. Andy, Sara Kirkpatrick, and drummer Carlton Owens, who was also the drummer for Faster Circuits and now Cracker, wrote the bulk of the new album during a writing session that I did over the winter of 2018, during which I wrote a bunch of guitar melodies and core changes. 

Emily: You were doing a stint writing a song a day during the first months of the pandemic when we were still in Athens.

Derek: Yeah, when I was writing in the basement studio. During the summer of the pandemic, all we did was yard work, and once it got hot enough, around 11 AM, I would go inside and record until dinner time.

Emily: When it comes to inspiration for the lyrical content on this record, it’s inspired by the pandemic and the loss of our personal society because of the move—the two big traumas. It was a big shakeup, and our lives have really changed.

Third Eye: I’m a bit ashamed to admit I don’t know much about the Elephant 6 Collective, though it seems pretty legendary and has some interesting history. Can you tell us about Elephant 6 and how Giant Day fits into the picture?

Derek: There’s a great new documentary out directed by Chad Stockfleth called “The Elephant 6 Recording Co.” that I recommend for anyone looking to get into the backstory. I’ll try to give you a quick version: A group of friends from Ruston, Louisiana, started some lo-fi psychedelic bands. Some of those bands ended up being Neutral Milk Hotel, The Olivia Tremor Control, The Apples In Stereo, and The Gerbils… 

Some of those people relocated to Athens, GA, and created a community of artists and friends who collaborated with each other. I moved to Athens maybe a year or two after the Louisiana E6ers did, and I just ended up becoming friends with them. I was about 20 years old and had a lot of the same influences as they did, and I was looking to play music, so it all worked out. 

My first Athens band was Kevin Barnes’ new project at the time, which became of Montreal. We would have potlucks that were organized by the Dixie Blood Mustache which is an incredible performance art and experimental music troop. It was a lot of fun. I started playing in different groups and in different configurations. That was in the mid-late 90s, and I’ve continued playing in tons of bands in that scene and elsewhere.

Emily: He kind of became one of E6’s de facto engineers and tech wiz. There was always a lot of recording going on at our house.

Derek: And Emily…

Emily: I just knew everybody because I sold them weed (laughs).

Derek: But then you were in M Coast and then Marshmallow Coast and Faster Circuits.

Emily: Yeah, I was a session vocalist on a lot of records that were being recorded in the basement. If anyone needed a high lady voice or to fill out a chorus, they’d come upstairs and get me. I’m a little bit on a bunch of records: Circulatory System, Casper and the Cookies, The Instruments, Elf Power, Pipes You See, Pipes You Don’t… and probably more I can’t remember right now.

Third Eye: Giant Day recently relocated to rural Pennsylvania, and you’re renovating a historic farm. Very cool! What is it like renovating the farm, and what are your plans for it?

Emily: The farm has been in my family for many years, and it had fallen on hard times and needed some attention. So we moved up and took over, and we have been plugging mouse holes and fixing crumbling ceilings and broken gutters ever since.

Derek: We’re both very DIY-type people and have been doing all kinds of home improvement projects (maybe unwisely) for a rental place all these years. We had a lot of that energy during the pandemic, so we brought that energy up here. I developed a bunch of new carpentry skills and have been learning, you know, watching 1 million YouTube videos and asking questions of friends and a lot of learning how to do things the hard way (laughs).

Emily: And I finally got to paint the old place some wacky Southern colors. The farm dates back to about 1790 but the main part of the house wasn’t built until the 1850s, and my family made some additions in the 90s. So it’s always been a work in progress and I guess it’s our turn to make our contributions.

Derek: It has a bunch of outbuildings. We turned the old stable into a recording studio, so we have a separate building that’s finally fully functional. It took several years to get it working well and be resistant to the extreme mouse, snake and squirrel population that had taken over. So now we’ve got this great studio space where we can go get out of our heads. It’s got a beautiful little spring-fed trout pond that Emily and her father dammed up and a back deck that overlooks it. It’s this kind of peaceful little getaway just about 100 feet from the main house.

Emily: The whole place is extremely peaceful—some might say, at times, too peaceful (laughs). It’s extremely beautiful, and we’re lucky to have it.

Derek: We spend most of the spring, summer, and fall doing exterior projects, landscaping, gardening, house painting, and maintaining and trying to revive some of the old barns and buildings. But winter can be pretty extreme in the Appalachian hills and valleys, so for several months out of the year, we’re pretty much stuck inside. It’s a good time to be out in the studio working on music and developing the band.

Emily: Fighting off the Space Madness (laughs). 

Derek: The plan is to hopefully continue maintaining and improving the property, making music in the winter, and getting out and touring as much as we can. 

Emily: Continue to do renovations and live here until we’re too old to care for the place.

Derek: And then hopefully retire to someplace warm in a one-room apartment with no lawn (laughs).

Third Eye: What’s one record – new or old – that you can’t stop spinning right now? And why?

Derek: I was aware of this band back in the day and liked them, but it didn’t really click with me until 2014… I became really obsessed with the Cocteau Twins’ “Bluebell Knoll”. I keep going back to that album over and over again because it’s so beautiful but insanely elusive. It’s really difficult to figure out what’s happening, and it keeps me interested. But I don’t like naming just one record, so I also say Sly and the Family Stone’s “Fresh” is one of my favorite records for the last 40 years that I keep coming back to… and of course, the many, many classic records by Led Zeppelin and the Dead and the Beatles and The Beach Boys and Joni Mitchell, etc. of course. I really love Chris Cohen’s “Overgrown Path”. 

I’ve been obsessed with that since I discovered it, which wasn’t very long ago. Cleaners From Venus’s “Midnight Cleaners” got me really excited about pop songwriting again… Solid Space’s “Space Museum” got me excited about ultra minimalism again. This is a hard question…

Emily: I’ve probably listened to at least one song off of the Pino Paladino/Blake Mills “Notes With Attachments” album every day since it came out in 2021. I’m kind of stuck on it. I also listen to Hiroshi Yoshimura’s “Music For Nine Post Cards” a bit almost every day. It’s great for gardening.

Third Eye: What’s the best book you’ve read recently? And why did you like it so much?

Emily: I’m a big fan of dry, dusty nonfiction history. I really liked the new Eleanor Janega book, “The Once and Future Sex,” which looks at European women’s lives and roles in medieval times and the misconceptions we have about what their lives were like. It’s not at all dry, actually; it’s written with a lot of humor.

Derek: Like Emily is stuck on that Blake Mills/Paladino record, I’m stuck on John Irving’s “Until I Find You.” Like most of his books, it’s a semi-autobiographical story. The first half of the book is from the perspective of his youth—all the traumatic events and memories that formed who he thinks he is. In the second half, he revisits the locations and people from his childhood. 

He discovers that his memories were not the way other people remembered them or that they were completely different. There’s something really interesting about a major midlife rediscovery of your life. That all the obsessions you have with yourself and all the stories you tell yourself that make up your self-mythology… realizing that the things that make you angry or happy or sad might not even be real stories.That they’re just ones you made up, and not at all the way other people saw things. I think that’s an interesting and helpful way of looking at the world. It resonates so deeply with me that I can’t seem to break free and finish it.

 I’m also separately reading a completely different kind of book called “Unrestricted Warfare” by these two Chinese colonels, which is about the concept of asymmetrical war between the major powers. The idea of how to attack, I think, in their case, specifically America, and it’s an interesting way of opening up your eyes to the kind of propaganda that exists all around us today. It’s a pretty amazing book. 

Emily: I’m enjoying “The Golem of Brooklyn” by Adam Manbach, but I haven’t finished it yet, so let me get back to you on it. Larry David is involved.

Third Eye: I like to ask this question in all my interviews. How would you define psychedelic music? What makes a song psychedelic?

Derek: I think a lot of people would define it as a kind of production technique (delays, reverbs, distortion, and extreme compression) specifically associated with psychedelic sounds and records from the period of, like, 1966 to 1969. But I think it’s mostly about visual concepts and things that put you in a trance state that’s associative… where you can get things playing around in your own head. So, I think like, honestly, a lot of rhythm-based music that is highly repetitive has that same kind of effect. Most dance music really has that effect. 

I think that if you think about a lot of indigenous music, old blues, funk, rave music, and house music, all of the derivatives of that stuff are really psychedelic, especially if you’re a part of that live experience. Will Hart and I used to joke when we were working on the second Circulatory System album in the early 2000s… what’s even interesting anymore about having a bunch of beeps and boops and screechy sounds flying around in your mix if you can turn on the radio and they’re like zoom, whoosh, bam “IT’S THE MORNING GRIND WITH CRAZY DAVE THE SHOCK MASTER ON 99.99 THE BLAST” (laughs). Everyone was so used to hearing that all the time; even back then, it was expected. 

So, making psych music is not about using specific sounds or clichés, though they are fun to use. It’s about getting something going that lets your brain play along. 

Third Eye: Last question – what are some short and long-term plans for Giant Day?

Emily: Well, we have a small tour coming up in August/September promoting our new record, “Glass Narcissus,” which is out on Elephant 6 Recording Company on August 23. We have a link to vinyl pre-orders on our Instagram.

Derek: Well done! (laughs)

Emily: We’re pretty excited, and I hope we do some more touring in the fall and winter. As we said, this is our social outlet. We want to do the Midwest and go down the Mississippi Valley down to Louisiana, where I have family. Maybe the West Coast next year?

Derek: The only goal I ever had for this band is that we get invited and paid to go play some sort of Scandinavian festival. Once we have achieved that we can just quit. (Laughs)

Emily: We want to make more records and improve our live show. It’d be great someday to be able to support adding additional musicians to the live shows—maybe having live drums and bass.

Derek: I’m writing a bunch more songs for the next record. I also want to record some more covers. I think that’ll be fun.

Emily: We have an Amanda Lear cover that we love to play, as well as ones by the Eurythmics, The Moles, and Pete Townsend… we’ve got a lot of other ideas we’re kicking around. 

Derek: Gary Newman. Gary covers can be good, you know.

Pre-order Glass Narcisuss by Giant Day on Bandcamp here.

Giant Day: Bandcamp | Instagram | Facebook

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