Sitting at a table on the top floor of a coffee shop in East Nashville, Reality Something frontwoman Elena Franklin pulls out tattered copies of M Train and Woolgathering, two memoirs by rock ’n’ roll hero, artist and poet Patti Smith, from a tote bag full of books. “She is my favorite person in the world,” says Franklin, her eyes growing wide.
Smith’s influence is in full force on Reality Something’s debut album Life Noise, out May 4 via local label Infinity Cat. The album’s title comes from a line in the pocket-size Woolgathering: “I pressed my palms together and bowed, leaving my post in pursuit of life noise,” writes Smith in a passage that touches on determining how to fulfill your purpose as an artist.
It’s been a long journey for Franklin and Reality Something to find their purpose. When it began in 2012, Franklin, now 29, had never played guitar. The New York native was living in Los Angeles and went with a friend to see Deer Tick at the El Rey Theatre. Deer Tick’s fellow Nashvillians Turbo Fruits opened, offering a rock spectacle the likes of which Franklin had never seen. After the show, she struck up a conversation with guitarist Kingsley Brock. The next day, she followed the band to Las Vegas, and within two weeks, she’d moved in with Brock, sharing the basement of a house outside Nashville with The Weeks. With her roommates constantly on tour, Franklin picked up one of the guitars lying around the house and taught herself to play. She listened to Smith’s acclaimed 1975 debut Horses over and over.
“I had no idea that you could do that in music,” Franklin says. “So once I realized that you can do literally whatever you want, it completely changed my outlook of how to write songs and express yourself.”
Over the next three years, Franklin built up a collection of songs. Brock added his lead guitar to the mix, and following a self-titled EP in 2015, Franklin and Brock’s pals Bill Grasley and Ethan Place joined the group on a permanent basis (on bass and drums, respectively). Turbo Fruits disbanded in 2016, making Reality Something Brock’s primary band. The comparisons of Reality Something’s gritty, hook-filled, guitar-driven sound to that of ’90s rock legends piled up. They’re not totally unfounded, and Franklin cites Kurt Cobain and Sheryl Crow as major influences. But she says she didn’t start listening to The Breeders, Veruca Salt and Juliana Hatfield — all of whom the band is often compared to, and who Franklin also grew to enjoy — until after she started writing songs.
“In general, the term ‘nostalgia’ is getting annoying already,” Franklin says. “We get the ’90s thing all the time. Really, we play pop songs. We tend to get comparisons from people of whatever it is they listen to.”
The group recorded Life Noise in the home studio that Brock built. In this intimate setting, they meticulously layered heavy, distorted guitars that wrap around catchy pop melodies, carrying the emotional weight of Franklin’s lyrics without drowning them out. The songs are like pages of a diary, in which Franklin explores her struggles with difficult relationships as well as with self-doubt and the frustration that comes with it. Her stream-of-consciousness outpourings crystallize into gems of truth about maintaining your self-worth and finding space for yourself: “And I can sweep you off your knees / But I can’t save you / And I refuse to seize mediocrity,” she sings in the standout track “Stay.”
The album is also punctuated by samples of ambient sound — snippets of “life noise” — that Franklin recorded during a trip home to New York City last summer. Thanks to mix engineer Mark Petaccia, the opening track “Life Noise” emerges from the sound of traffic and a bustling crowd, and closing track “Fail You” dissolves back into it.
“The album sort of feels like the first thing I’m doing that’s a culmination of my life up to this point,” Franklin says. “After this, I’m gonna be able to move forward and in a different direction.”
The convergence of the visual art community with the local music scene is something that Franklin finds inspiring about Nashville. Spaces like Elephant Gallery in North Nashville and Fort Houston in Wedgewood-Houston (where Franklin exhibited some of her own artwork in the fall, consisting of film photography with paint and typed poetry overlaid) have provided a new crossover realm for artists, so she has something of a support system no matter what direction she decides to take her work.
“I think there’s definitely a good, healthy competition,” says Franklin. “The creative community here is incredible. In New York, people have less time to care. In L.A., nobody cares about what anybody else is doing except for themselves. Here people really energize each other. There’s really an opportunity to do something here and feel really good about what you’re doing. It’s incredible the way everyone supports each other.”
