Meet Couch Prints: Your New Favorite Synth-Pop Trio

Fresh on the music scene with their new EP, “Tell U,” Couch Prints is a name to remember. Composed of vocalist Jayanna Roberts, Brandon Tong on keys, and Jacob Truax on guitar; this trio brings a strong sense of fluidity to the indie dance/synthpop genre. Finding a home in New York City, with originating influences across the world, Couch Prints emulates an authentic passion for their craft. 

Standing as a journalistic testament to the early life of the group, “Tell U,” released October 30th, brings together the unique perspectives of all three band members seamlessly. 

[UNPUBLISHED]: Tell us about yourselves.

[COUCH PRINTS]: We’re three friends who live in New York and make music together! We love deli sandwiches, sappy movies, friendship, love, etc.

[UNPUBLISHED]: Collectively, Couch Prints has a very unique sound, what musicians have you drawn inspiration from to develop it?

[COUCH PRINTS]: We really do draw from a lot of different artists. There’s so much music and so much accessibility to nearly every single song ever made on the internet, that our tastes are constantly shifting and absorbing new influences. Jake and Brandon grew up listening to a lot of 80’s New Pop like Scritti Politti and Flock of Seagulls as well as to more contemporary synth-wave bands like Shiny Toy Guns and Ladyhawke. Jayanna listened to a lot of singer-songwriter classics like Joni Mitchell or Mazzy Starr, so those childhood influences are also a big part of it. 

[UNPUBLISHED]: “Tell U,” dropping later this month, is Couch Print’s debut EP. What was your creative process like? 

[COUCH PRINTS]: From the inception of the group Jake and Brandon were working remotely together, due to living in different countries, so that’s been our process even when Jayanna joined the group and we all lived in the same city. The process is generally that one of them will start a song and then send it back and forth, each time adding layers and shifting things around. We used to do it over email, and now we have a shared dropbox that we contribute to. Once a song is pretty fleshed out, we will get in our studio together and edit a bit, adding or taking away things together. There isn’t much to the actual process of writing, no rituals or special things we do when we sit down and do it. You just play around on the guitar or synthesizer for a while and if something beautiful comes out you record it. 

[UNPUBLISHED]:  Between your three released songs, “Tell U,” “Of Drawing,” and “Faces,” do you each have a favorite? If so, which?

[BRANDON]: I would have to say Faces, it’s sort of the culmination of all of these influences and ideas we’ve had, and it felt like a real breaking point in that there was no more fear about our ability to make something true to ourselves. We’d done a lot of soul searching the year and a half prior, in deciding the type of sound we wanted, and with “Faces” it felt like we found something.

[JAYANNA]: The song that holds the most special place in my heart is Tell U. It marks the beginning of our journey, the first time we were all in the same room we recorded the track. We spent nearly every day for three weeks in the studio that summer. The memories from that space and time are so near and dear to me so it’s my favorite in that sense.

[JAKE]: Both Brandon and Jayanna’s answers are exactly why “Tell U” and “Faces” are my two favorite songs. If I had to pick one or the other I would pick “Faces” though.

[UNPUBLISHED]: Your music video for “Tell U” gives an equally creative visual to the track. What feelings do you hope to invoke in your listeners with the video?

[COUCH PRINTS]: “Tell U” is largely a song about the feelings in between the lines. The feeling of transience and changes in life that you can’t really describe in words, “How can I tell you about the…” etc, etc. So the music video is a reflection of that, while also having this amazing visual concept and story courtesy of Erin Grant and the director Mayachka. It’s meant to feel odd, uncanny, nostalgic, something you can’t quite place your finger on. The characters and viewer are living separate stories of what the meaning of the opening scene is, and it all intertwines in strange ways as the video progresses.

[UNPUBLISHED]: What’s the story behind your band name?

[COUCH PRINTS]: The name “Couch Prints” originally came from Brandon, who was writing the song “Tell U” at his house in Denver. He was living with 4 other people, who were all musicians, so everyone had little home studios throughout the house. His was essentially in a small living room, where there was this old couch that people would crash on. The song felt like it had this sort of beauty in the everyday quality, and celebration of domestic bliss, so he initially named it “Couch Prints” as a sort of tribute to the beauty in the mundane (the patterns on couches) as well as to the leftover indentations on couches after people have laid on them and how that moment’s only trace is on the couch. Fast forward and we were getting ready to put the song out, but couldn’t decide on a group name. We asked Jake’s former professor and mentor, who’d played in some indie bands in the 90s, and he gave us the idea to change the name of the song and make the group name “Couch Prints.” It seemed pretty weird and goofy at the time but it just made sense somehow so we stuck with it, and now we’re all super happy we went this route with the name.

[UNPUBLISHED]: While creating the “Tell U” EP, how did you balance all three of your visions and ideas?

[COUCH PRINTS]: We initially wrote a lot of the EP two years ago at this now-demolished rehearsal space in Greenpoint. Brandon and Jayanna had just moved to New York and Jake visited for a month in August, so we spent all of that month together hanging out and writing. Like 12 hour days 6 days a week, we’d be in this tiny windowless room or sitting in the adjacent park talking. Since Jake moved to New York 9 months after that time, we’ve all been pretty inseparable, and are all best friends. So through that shared time, we’ve just really synchronized in what we’re interested in and what we want to do with the project. Outside of that we all have a deep mutual respect for each other's ideas and share many of them so it’s not too difficult to balance if they do differ.

[UNPUBLISHED]: What is your cure to creative block? Is there a specific environment you collectively thrive in the most for developing new music?

[COUCH PRINTS]: For us, the cure to creative block is balancing music with other aspects of our lives. Again, we don’t really have a specific space or circumstance we need to be creative, it’s more about going out and seeing the world, having experiences with other people, being inspired by others’ work, that fuels our drive to make something of our own. There’s no shortage of inspirational people and work, both in our immediate environment of New York, as well as the world of the internet, so finding things that are beautiful and letting those recharge you is the way.

[UNPUBLISHED]: What unique gifts or perspectives do each of you contribute to the group?

[COUCH PRINTS]: We all have a lot of interests outside of music, and they really help and inform our music project as Couch Prints. Jake is an incredibly talented designer and visual artist so he’s often the creative director for music videos and album artwork, Jayanna makes really unique paintings, sculptures, and art in general that we’ve been incorporating into our merchandise as well as drawing from in our visual language, while Brandon has a fascination with words and literature that allow him to write lyrics, copy, and press for us in a really beautiful way.

[UNPUBLISHED]: If you could collaborate with any music artist or group, who would it be and why?

[COUCH PRINTS]: Hmm there’s just so many! Probably Oneohtrix Point Never if we had to choose one. He has a truly incredible sense of sound design, song structure, and creating soundscapes that we think could be really interesting with Jayanna’s voice.

[UNPUBLISHED]: What would you recall as being the highlight of Couch Print’s music career so far?

[COUCH PRINTS]: Though a ton of amazing things have happened since, a lot of which dwarf this in terms of our ability to continue making music, but for us, a huge moment was seeing “Tell U” on David Dean Burkhart’s Youtube channel. When we first started the project almost three years ago we would listen to his channel a lot and have been so inspired by the artists on there. A large part of why we wanted to start a project was because we were so inspired by the indie/DIY landscape we saw on there. To imagine that we would ever be in the same realm as those artists really didn’t seem like a possibility at the time so that was a pretty beautiful moment.

[UNPUBLISHED]: When did you each know you wanted to be musicians? Was there a sparking moment for any/each of you?

[BRANDON]: For me, I’d always had a fascination with the music industry and musicians, and definitely had the sort of pipe dream of becoming a musician one day. Though truthfully for a lot of my life I subscribed to the false idea that great musicians are born with some inherent gift and they float to the top automatically, and for me, I just wasn’t in that category. When I got to college I was living with 3 guys who were all producing dance music, like really impressive tracks, and I saw that they were just normal guys who spent a lot of time working on creating songs. So it was at that point that I shed that sort of mentality and started just learning music and trying to make songs no matter how shit they were at first. It really influenced how I look at everything, and demystified all of the really great pieces of work in the world as the culmination of years and years of experience and passion, and not some miracle by a genius figure.

[JAKE]: It’s pretty silly but the earliest memory I have of knowing I wanted to be a musician was when I saw The Goofy Movie for the first time. I was obsessed with Powerline. At the time I was listening to Michael Jackson’s Thriller constantly, and I was too young to be watching MTV, YouTube wasn’t a thing yet, so Powerline was basically the first visual of a rockstar I ever had. I was so into the idea of writing this catchy song that people could be singing along with. Plus I thought his green jumpsuit was so cool.

[JAYANNA]: I see myself more as a performer than a musician. Growing up in a Filipino community my first introduction to performing was through karaoke. Eventually, I wanted to learn an instrument so I could sing alone. The first instrument I tried to learn was the piano but after a couple of lessons, I hated it. Now I’m trying to learn how to play the keyboard so that's been a new fun challenge. I learned to play the guitar in high school and performed at open mics nearly every week. I used to busk in subway stations when I moved to the city as well. Performing was always a passion that brought me a lot of joy, just sharing a live musical experience with strangers. When we began Couch Prints that’s actually when I realized I wanted to focus on music more seriously.

[UNPUBLISHED]: What sets you apart as a group? What do you bring to the music industry that is unique?

[COUCH PRINTS]: Our biggest strength is our fluidity as a group. From the beginning, we’ve never wanted to define ourselves in terms of other artists or our past work, so we’ve cultivated a sort of “anything goes” mentality when we write songs. While Jayanna has this incredible vocal tone, Jake and Brandon produce, play guitar, play piano, and sing, so we have the ability to use “real” instruments while blending them with electronic productions seamlessly.  We draw from any and all influences and experiences in our lives and are constantly learning new ways to create music because we never want to be a group that makes the same song over and over.

[UNPUBLISHED]: What’s something about your group that your audience would be surprised to know?

[COUCH PRINTS]: We put out an EP called the Tony Lambo EP 2 years ago based loosely around this character who was a fugitive from the law hiding in the American Southwest and his experience being isolated and unwanted in this desert town. We took it off Soundcloud after a week :) 

[UNPUBLISHED]: What does the future of Couch Prints look like? What’s next?

[COUCH PRINTS]: Hard to say what our future looks like from the COVID chaos of this year, but we’re really excited about the new material we’ve been working on for an album after the EP. Other than that, we’re just staying energized and inspired and seeing where the world takes us.

Stay up to date with Couch Prints by following them here and listening to their Spotify