Bestfriend Embraces Feelings of Uncertainty in “Anxious People”
Photo by Maxine Tamoto
Canadian alt-pop duo Bestfriend, composed of Stacy Kim and Kaelan Geoffrey, announce their dreamy sophomore EP places i’ve left that follows places i’ve lived. The staple song “Anxious People” is a panic-driven pop confessional that tries to deconstruct what we do with panic, and the feeling of staying in place and sitting with your feelings. “Anxious People” is a dream-pop hit, backed by lo-fi, fuzzy instrumentation alongside Kim’s despondent, yet expressive vocals. Bestfriend composes a narrative through the uncertainty of living life in a constant monotonous loop that feels like being in a simulation. Through the feelings of uncertainty and anxiety, there emerges bittersweet observations of quarter-life disillusions.
“Anxious People” takes its inspiration from the book Anxious People by Fredrik Backman that touches on the people you encounter walking past you, who are on the same public transportation and working alongside you. The story centers around how strangers have lived an entire life completely outside your own and understanding you have no idea what someone else’s life is like and what they have gone through to be passing you by. The “Anxious People” music video features Bestfriend being trapped in an endless loop that ties into outlandish and uncomfortable feelings we experience while completing mundane day-to-day tasks.
“I am sure that you can relate to the notion of everything just feeling cyclical and recycled in the same way everyday. It just sort of feels like a script that I've read a million times,” Geoffrey says. “I think we're kind of struggling at a point where it was just like how can we break this cycle. It felt like we were in a weird video game or loop almost.”
Bestfriend’s debut EP places i’ve lived, is a direct reflection into the past and required the duo to process past experiences and creative choices, while places i’ve left follows a different storyline of breaking out of a cycle and checking in where they are now and exploring new directions.
“places i’ve lived, we framed the first two EPs to be intrinsically tied, so places i’ve lived was the first one and that was a lot about learning to do our things and learning to produce and learning to write and learning to be vulnerable and learning to emote,” Geoffrey says. “For places i’ve left, it’s checking in with us right now. It’s checking in with where we’re at right now and we have no idea where to go from here in our lives, and I think that’s obviously a very common feeling.”
[UNPUBLISHED]: Thank you for sitting down talking to Unpublished Magazine. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. First of all, can you introduce yourself and who Bestfriend is and what type of music you make?
[STACY]: We are Bestfriend and we make indie-pop and alt-pop music and we’re part of the indie scene.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What inspires your artistic persona and style?
[STACY]: I think a lot of writing inspiration came from listening to a lot of very emotionally charged music when I was a teenager, which everyone does. I think that a lot of the music that we write generally pertains to that kind of thematic, looking back in the past and what we liked and what we continue to like now.
[KAELAN]: I don't even know if we have a style? I don't know if we've ever intentionally tried to make it style as much as we've just made music. We've tried to stay pretty true to ourselves from the beginning.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Your latest single “Anxious People” just released and it's an invitation to step into your dream-pop world. Can you talk to me about the inspiration behind the single and how the creative process looked like for you guys?
[STACY]: Dream-pop is also a good one. This started off funnily enough as a slower song that I had written with the guitar and sent it over to Kaelan, and then we had a meeting with a few people and they were like, you should try making faster pop songs. Then I went from 100 BPM to 150 and just made it faster and Kaelan did his thing and padded it out. We continued working on it from there. It’s named after a book and I would say thematically, it has the same elements.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What book was it?
[STACY]: Anxious People by Fredrik Backman, who is my favorite author right now. The general theme of it though, is that every person that you meet and every person that you either interact with or just passed by on the street kind of have their own thing going on, that you're either never going to know about, or you may not know about just because you haven't asked and kind of took that feeling and said, a lot of people that I know and a lot of people that I pass by on the street probably deal with kind of the same anxieties and general unrest that most of us do. I took that and ran with it.
[UNPUBLISHED]: The “Anxious People” music video follows storylines of two different people who are undergoing the same things in a loop and there's glitching elements and things around you are disappearing. I would love to know the inspiration behind the music video and your experience filming it.
[KAELAN]: I am sure that you can relate to the notion of everything just feeling cyclical and recycled in the same way everyday, in terms of the things that we're supposed to be doing to be like building these lives for ourselves, and carrying ourselves on the day to day. It just sort of feels like a script that I've read a million times. Originally when we started writing the song, I think we're kind of struggling at a point where it was just like how can we break this cycle. It felt like we were in a weird video game or loop almost. That’s where the idea of a simulation started. What if we were living in an idiot college kid’s project right now? We went down the rabbit hole and had a little bit of fun with that.
[STACY]: The filming process was really funny too. It came together so fast because we realized that we wanted to make this and we had a deadline for it for like the first time in a long time because we're now signed to a label who says we need this by this date, which was cool. We had two weeks to film it and Kaelan flew here for literally a day and we shot the whole video in six hours.
[KAELAN]: It was incredibly anxiety-inducing. It wasn’t intentional. We weren’t trying to build on a theme and we weren’t trying to be stressed out while we were making it. It just happened to come together in a way that was what we needed. We finished that night and were like, yeah this was wretchedly stressful.
[UNPUBLISHED]: You guys independently produce everything yourselves?
[KAELAN]: We both like to have our hands on the production stuff. I've been doing it for a long time. Stacy's picked it up a little bit more recently, and I think that's partially why we've never really been too worried about throwing a style out there because we've sort of been trying to find it ourselves together, kind of learning the process as we go. We do it all ourselves.
[UNPUBLISHED]: If you could describe “Anxious People” in three words, which would you choose and why?
[BEST FRIEND]: Frenetic, energetic and introspective.
[UNPUBLISHED]: A lot of your music touches on the themes of nostalgia and adulthood and finding the balance between both. What is the message you hope to convey to your listeners through your music?
[STACY]: The goal has always been for me at least, I am the most comforted when I'm listening to songs, watching movies or watching TV shows where I can put myself into the person's shoes and it's very comforting. For me with anything that I write, we come together from a place of we feel this way but not exclusively, so we want to be able to share how we feel with everyone because I think everyone generally feels a little bit alone and we want to bridge that communication gap.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Your EP places i've left is set to release later this year. This is a follow up to your 2021 EP places i’ve lived. Has the creative process been different for places i've left and have you taken any approaches? Are you experimenting more lyrically or instrumentally since the debut release?
[KAELAN]: There's been a big difference, because with the first EP, that was very much us not only getting to know ourselves as musicians, but also as people because we were really close friends before coming together to write music. A lot of it was exploratory and taking steps and deciding what different steps to take next time. It feels like this time we have a full toolbox that we can reach into and we’ve been doing a lot more traveling back and forth to see each other to track vocals or to give it a little bit more of a live sound and you can catch that energy. There's just something that you can't replace about doing something in the same room, so we've been trying to pull elements of writing things digitally from far away whilst also getting those live elements in person.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What is the inspiration behind places i've left?
[STACY]: I think that it's inspired a lot by real life.
[KAELAN]: places i’ve lived, we framed the first two EPs to be intrinsically tied, so places i’ve lived was the first one and that was a lot about learning to do our things and learning to produce and learning to write and learning to be vulnerable and learning to emote. That involves a lot of us looking back and processing and revisiting these things that have happened to us that we’ve never got to dive into a creative fashion or aspect. For places i’ve left, it’s checking in with us right now. It’s checking in with where we’re at right now and we have no idea where to go from here in our lives, and I think that’s obviously a very common feeling. That’s sort of what we’re exploring and trying to decide for ourselves and hopefully help some other people decide for themselves too.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What is your favorite song off of the EP and why do you love the song? Is there a specific lyric or message that stands out to you the most?
[STACY]: My favorite is the first one, “PLACES.” Lyrically, it’s my favorite and I’m pretty excited for it.
[KAELAN]: “Love Always Came So Easy For You” and it’s the last track on the EP and Stacy hit something special with it. I just fell in love with it, and I think it carries really well and I think it’s gonna hit close to home for a lot of people and I’m excited.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What was the hardest song for you guys to write, either lyrically or emotionally?
[STACY]: There's a song called “Tuesday Waltz” that is on the EP. I would say it’s one of the shorter songs and it's like one of the more stripped back songs. It was really difficult to write in that. It was the first song that I'd written pretty much right after a mental health related hospitalization and I came home and I wanted to write a song mostly because I just want to write something. The initial thought was I'm gonna write something really sad because I'm feeling really sad right now, but that kind of felt wrong at the moment. I wanted to feel hopeful and so I tried writing a more hopeful song and it was really tough but I think it ended up happening for the right reasons. It’s one of my favorite songs.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What excites you most about the EP release? How has the reactions from friends and family been like?
[STACY]: Honestly, none of this feels real to me. We haven't played a live show yet, and we want to and we’ve had so many friends backing us from the beginning literally since day one and they’ve been so supportive.
[KAELAN]: We wouldn’t be doing this stuff if we didn’t have such wonderful people around us. It's truly been one of the most exciting journeys getting to share this with like two full different sets of people and then the rest of the world. We’ve lived completely different lives before this, and it’s fun seeing everyone’s little circles come together to be the same, supporting us and being a part of this project.
[UNPUBLISHED]: How are you feeling in this current era of your career? What does the rest of the year look like for you that you would love to share with Unpublished?
[STACY]: We've been building out a lot of sets. We're really excited to play live. We're really excited. We have been itching to play live for a while, so that would be probably number one.
[KAELAN]: We started in 2020 and didn’t want to play any live shows until things have become somewhat normal and feel okay in our hearts and the world has calmed down a bit. It’s been a waiting game of waiting until the world is ready, and I think we’re there. I think that’s the biggest thing we’re most excited for this year. We have our EP coming out in April and we’re excited to share it with the world.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What is your wildest dream as an artist? If you can have one thing happen, like a milestone or dream collaboration you hope to achieve in your career, what would that look like for you guys?
[KAELAN]: It might be the same answer. If I'm thinking of collaborations, I probably want to work with Justin Vernon, that's gotta be without a doubt the biggest goal.
[STACY]: Yeah, that would be it. Justin Vernon for sure. For bigger dreams, and this is gonna sound cheesy, but I feel like I’ve already gotten to the point where I never thought I would get signed to a label. We have people listening to us and they’re not just my mom and my friends. I'm still wrapping my head around that first really.
[KAELAN]: It's kind of rare at this point now where we can just play.
