a conversation with memory card
about having a song blow up on spotify, touring with a full band for the first time, and the state of rock music in the south.
hey!!! before you start reading, you might wanna know that this interview is a little different from the other ones i’ve done… memory card was kind enough to record a live session for broadcast on the radio, and they’ve agreed to let me share it here!! make sure you don’t miss it — you can find it at the very bottom of this page.
memory card is the recording project of Henry Tartt. In the last two years alone, he’s put out four albums, released via North Carolina-based tape label Trash Tape Records. Tartt’s songwriting produces perfect little gems of songs — often understated, sometimes soft, sometimes fuzzy, but always touching and intimate. It feels almost like you’re being told a secret.
Previously a solo effort, the current live iteration of memory card has grown to include Nathan McMurray and Evren Centeno of Trash Tape labelmates Welcome to Berlin. The trio just completed their first tour together, traveling all over the South to promote a new memory card album called “As the Deer,” which is out on streaming platforms now.
If you want to keep up with memory card, you should give them a follow on Instagram.
part i: the interview
John Dietz: I wanted to start off by asking: what is memory card and, you know, not to steal Nardwuar's bit, but why should people care about memory card?
Henry Tartt: memory card started as a recording project, so it was just whatever I could do and whatever sound I could try to replicate from what I was listening to. I don't know why people should care about it. Maybe because it’s done with heart.
I care about it. I don't know — I don't like listening to things where you can tell that someone's doing it for cynical reasons, or maybe aesthetic reasons. Like they just want to make something that is bare-minimum considered music with a cool album cover or something. I hate being duped by cool album covers with horrible music.
J.D.: I know it's barely started — you just played the first show this weekend — but how is tour going so far? Are there any cities you haven't played before that you're really excited about?
H.T.: It's going well! There are tons and tons of cities I haven't played before — this is the first time I'm really getting out of Alabama. It's exciting. I've just been staying with Nathan and his wonderful family and been acclimating to the weather and all that. We're an incredibly insane power pop band live, which is super weird for everyone who comes to see us.
J.D. I was gonna ask about that… I watched a little bit of the live recording that uh... I think Todd from Kevin and the Bikes uploaded on his YouTube channel, and it seems like the songs are a lot heavier live than they are on the recordings, which is awesome. Do you think that there's something about your music that's particularly well suited to to being played a little more heavy?
H.T.: I don't know. I think what I realized the first time I played, like, after my first attempt at playing a show as memory card, I was like, these songs have to be more intense. So they have to drive more and I have to pick the songs from my discography that that can do that.
So yeah, I think, for instance, if a song like ‘student film’ is in drop D, and it's kind of mid tempo, there's room to build that into something that can be more kind of freeform and loud and kind of like a Yo La Tengo song, because in drop D you have so much leeway to noodle and make noise and it just sounds right somehow. I think not necessarily all the songs lend themselves to heavier instrumentation, but it's more or less about finding the ones that do.
J.D.: Your tour announcement post says that you're going to be playing music with more sass than ever before… can you elaborate on that?
H.T.: It's funny, this is probably the largest band I've had, and Nathan and Evren play with so much sass in Welcome to Berlin. So I figured we're probably going to be a pretty bratty, punky version of what we're doing. And I did not realize how hard I was going to go with them behind me. At the first show that we've done, I broke two strings in the same set. And I ripped my hand to shreds.
J.D.: Going off that, I want to ask a question for both of you — Henry, what's it like performing these songs that you mostly wrote yourself having Nathan and Evren to bounce off of?
And Nathan, since you make music with Evren so much, what's it like adding a new person to the mix?
H.T.: I think it's been really delightful. It's been awesome. Because, I mean, Nathan is a really good bass player. And I don't think a lot of people know that. But he's really good. And he's very intuitive. And so is Evren.
They're both just so good at their their respective instruments that I really don't have to teach them much. And they like the music. So that's nice.
Nathan McMurray: Yeah, it's easy for us because Evren and I have spent literally hundreds and hundreds of hours playing together. We started playing together when we were 14 or 15 probably, so we're a little bit symbiotic when we play at this point, and adding another person is easy. It works really well, I think, with us playing bass and drums, because we play symbiotically, we just sort of lock in and create a decently solid rhythm foundation. And then we give Henry something that's usable to work with.
J.D. So, going back to the tour announcement post, you mentioned that these tour dates are promoting an upcoming album called “As the Deer.” Is there anything you can reveal about it and how it might compare with your previous work?
N.M.: It's really good.
H.T.: Yeah, everything else I did was really bad. This is my first good album.
I do feel it's a jump in production quality. A lot of the master files that we uploaded are kind of compressed now, because when we left Alabama, I forgot to get all of the uncompressed .WAVs, so I only have some. One of the songs is uploaded from a SoundCloud download, so maybe we'll have to remaster it immediately.
If anybody heard File Sharing, it's like that with more of a focus — and it's a finished album.
J.D.: I also wanted to ask about the the title, “As the Deer.” You say in the Instagram post that the album has “little to do with deer — no deer on the cover, and no deer in the songs.” So why that title?
H.T.: My family is still religious — I'm not really — but I went to this church service because it was the hundredth anniversary of my mom's church. And I was just flipping through the hymn book, because I remember as a kid I would read the lyrics and the titles without the music. And I saw this one that was called “As the Deer,” and I was like, that's tight, I'm gonna use that.
But yeah, the album originally was going to be this long, intense alt-country album, and so I think that title fit it more. There were lyrics where I had the title in the songs. I'm really bummed that I didn't get to use this one really great verse where I actually said the title. I always love when you hear the title on an album; it's just such a fun thing. But yeah, the title is essentially divorced from the meaning of it. There's mild themes of growing up in the South and being kind of repressed emotionally, but it's not really a direct album about deer or God.
J.D.: Kind of going off of titles… I also really like it when the name of the band appears in the lyrics. Has “memory card” ever been in one of your lyrics?
H.T.: It got close. I think the second song on self-titled has a line that's like “playing back memories till the tape disintegrates,” but I don't think I've ever said “memory card” in a song. It'd be hard to write about a memory card.
J.D.: Why choose that as your as your band name?
H.T.: For a long time when I was starting to gain traction on SoundCloud, my SoundCloud was called “currently untitled recording project,” which has a very gross acronym, because it’s CURP.
So I was like… that's gross, and I was using this drum machine — a Boss DR670, and every single time I opened it, it would go “memory card error. memory card error.” It would just flash at me… and then it would delete all of my presets. So I just settled on that one. I think in the early music, especially “living document,” I use a lot of metaphors and analogies for losing media, or the decay of media and the internet, and, you know, how art isn't permanent.
J.D.: That's really interesting. And it kind of makes me think about how, growing up, I just remember always hearing the internet is forever, the internet is forever, blah, blah, blah. And I went back, I was trying to look for the old WCWM website. And I was at the Internet Archive — the Wayback Machine. And so my friend and I found the old website and every single thing on it was a Flash animation and so it's just lost forever.
I also wanted to talk about the song “cute” off of your self-titled album. It’s done really well on Spotify — I think it has like 150,000 streams or something (Editor’s note: currently 154,446! I was close), I've seen people using it on TikTok, etc. Is that something that you pay attention to or care about? What has that been like, and how did it happen?
H.T.: I wish I didn't care about it, but it got under my skin, because when that song came out it peaked at like 600 listens on SoundCloud. Which at the time was not good for what I'd normally been doing, which sounds like such a lame thing to complain about, like, “oh, it only got 600 listens.”
But I hit this point where I kept on getting a thousand listens on everything I put out, or close to that, and so if something went below… it's just how numbers work in your mind when you're starting and you have no self-esteem. So now it's affecting me in the exact opposite way, where I'm like, this song sucks, why do people like it?
I mean, yeah, it sucks that we don't get paid enough with streaming stuff. But the worst part is seeing people's playlists… it's vile! You don't need to know that! The titles of these playlists with “cute” on them… I'm just revolted.
J.D.: Do you have any least favorites?
H.T.: I don't know if I can even say it. There's just one with a really awful title and it has glaive on the cover of it. Like my arch-nemesis.
J.D.: If you say it, I'll bleep out the title.
H.T.: It was “serenade my penis.” That's not even the worst one, but there are other ones that just made me kind of sad, because it was like “for my crush.” Some of them were heartwarming — it would be like a couple's playlist, but then there were other ones that were like “she don't want me no more” with my entire discography.
J.D.: Do you know how it blew up? Did it just happen organically or…?
H.T.: No clue.
J.D.: That's so interesting…
I've been thinking about this for a while, and I couldn't really figure out how to make it into a question, but I'll just say it, and I'm curious to hear both of your thoughts on this.
I was talking about this with with my friend and I feel like, when I think about rock music in the 90s and 00s, I think about New York and Seattle. And that's not to say that there aren’t good bands coming out of those cities now, but a lot of the new and exciting rock music that I'm listening to now is coming from the South, whether it's Wednesday or Home is Where or bands on Trash Tape like Welcome to Berlin and Hippie Love Party and memory card. I just want to know what you make of that and the state of rock music in in the Southeast.
H.T.: I think it's really cool. I'm excited about it. I share the same sentiment, not just because I live there and I make music there, but I feel like the New York bands that are getting signed and are at the forefront of music right now… maybe this is — I don't know, I don't have a big platform, so Complex isn't about to be like “memory card disses…” —
But yeah, it's bad. Like, I don't think The Dare is gonna kill me if I say that I hate his music with a burning passion. He's a model, he doesn't care. But honestly, I heard a Dare song the other day, and I was like… it has a good bassline.
N.M.: And then he starts singing and I want to walk out into the road.
H.T.: It's like Mindless Self Indulgence, but at least with Mindless Self Indulgence, when i was in middle school, I was like oh this is super gay, and I could identify with that. But with The Dare it's just like this straight guy being abhorrently straight, and in a gay voice kind of. Not even in a gay voice! It's super macho! He's so macho.
J.D.: I didn't want to be as upfront about it, but that discussion about music in the South did kind of spawn from being like “man, is The Dare the best New York has to offer right now?”
H.T.: No… there are really good bands in Brooklyn! Salt’s really good, People I Love, Lola Star, Kitchen...
J.D.: I think Geese is really good too! So, like, not to totally shit on New York, but…
H.T.: Yeah, I think the Brooklyn scene is the best part of it.
N.M.: I'm happy that the South is back. I'm sick of New York. I really hate New York. I have friends that live there — I like my friends that live there, but I don't like New York.
H.T.: Oh yeah, and really quick tag on to the South thing — shoutout barklate in Alabama, shoutout Rope Bridge.
N.M. I think the South breeds something in people that makes them better than those losers. It instills something in you that makes you a better songwriter, better musician.
It can do that, or if you grow up in the South and you really like it then it'll make you write like ass.
H.T. Yeah, you have to kind of hate living here. You have to critique it.
N.M.: You don't have to fully hate it, but yeah, you gotta struggle with it. I think it'll produce cool things. But I don't know. I just moved to Chicago a few years back, and after coming here for the tour, I want to come back. It's way better.
J.D.: In a few minutes, we're going to broadcast a pre-recorded live session of memory card — I was wondering if you had a tracklist or anything to keep an ear out for. I know there's a cover or two on there.
H.T.: Yeah, we're opening with “cute,” even though it's the bane of my existence. Then we're covering “Strange Victory, Strange Defeat” by Silver Jews. Then, we have this new song that’s a weird interpolation of Sparklehorse’s “Come On In,” but it's also like a rave song. It's like a nightmare Casio rave song. We wrote it last night for the radio. My voice is all pitched up and weird on it. And then we end with a version of a song I did called “Campfire” from when I was like 15.