Long Fling on Long Fling: Pip Blom and Willem Smit discuss their decade of collaboration
Working on a musical project alongside your romantic partner might sound like a joyous experience, but you only need to speak to the likes of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham to realise that this isn’t always the case.
Luckily for Pip Blom and Personal Trainer’s Willem Smit, the Amsterdam-based couple have managed to overcome any of the potential pitfalls of being lovers and collaborators, and after almost a decade and a half of knowing each other, they’ve finally emerged with their debut offering together as Long Fling. No, this doesn’t mean that either of their respective projects is coming to an abrupt end; it just means that over a ten-year period, all of the ideas they’ve worked on together have been preserved and amalgamated into one nifty little side-project.
Long Fling isn’t a million miles away from either member’s main projects, but its minimalist approach to bringing out their own individual quirks yields fascinating results. Jagged and atonal riffs over repetitive drum machines are combated by cutesy melodies with naive lyrics about the everyday, and it’s perhaps a great distillation of what these two Dutch creatives are like. If you were to ask them, or their respective fathers, who Long Fling sounds most like, they’d tell you that it isn’t their own child who seems like the dominant force, which further exemplifies just how idiosyncratic they’ve both shown themselves to be.
Having made one of the most original debuts of the year, it’s a shame that it might prove to be the only offering from the duo, at least for some time. That being said, while we could go on to talk about it ourselves, we asked Blom and Smit to delve further into the process, share more insider information about what they’ve learned from becoming a collaborative partnership on top of their existing relationship, and how they’ve always been each other’s biggest fans.
Long Fling on… Long Fling
WS: “This is Pip. I met her, I think, probably 15 years ago when she was first making songs by herself. I think we were both in school, and we met each other because we ran into each other a couple of times when we’d go to shows. Pip started her band around the time that we re-met, I guess. She was doing a blog called ‘The Road to Glastonbury’, and the hook of the blog was that you would want to play Glastonbury at some point with your own band. You interviewed me because I was in a band, and we got along really well. I was really hyped about Pip’s project, because she’d just put out one single, and then ever since, we’ve just been playing together and living together. The rest is history”.
PB: “This is Willem, he’s been playing in bands since he was tiny. I think he was eight when he started his first band. I remember when I was in high school that Willem was signed to a Dutch label with his first ‘proper band’, Palio Superspeed Donkey. I was a really big fan, and so me and my mum went to all their gigs. We travelled all across the Netherlands, but I was always really shy. Willem has been in multiple bands of his own, like Canshaker Pi, and now Personal Trainer, and has also played with Steve French, and has played in my band a couple of times as well to help out”.
Long Fling on… being self-taught musicians
WS: “For two years, I had guitar lessons, on and off. I didn’t like playing guitar when it was in education, or if I had to rehearse. I would stop playing pretty much instantly, although from those one and a half years of actually learning something, I did find out later that it was really helpful, after the fact. I learned a lot from a really good teacher, but maybe I was just a great student”.
PB: “Both our dads are in bands, so I guess that kind of started it. I remember when I was in elementary school, I really wanted to join the Junior Song Contest, so the kids’ version of the Eurovision Song Contest. So I played songs with my best friend to enter, but we never got picked, unfortunately. We had guitar lessons as well, but we were mostly just chatting with each other. It was definitely an interest from a young age, but more in making songs than actually being really good at playing something”.
Long Fling on… discovering each other
PB: “I always wanted to be in a band, because I thought that it would be nice to have friends who like similar music. I just remember seeing Willem’s band and always being like, ‘Whoa, this is so cool, they’re playing festivals.’ It was really early on, you were young when you were signed for the first time. Were you about 14?”
WS: “Something like that, yeah. Around that time, maybe a little bit later, I heard your music for the first time, and I remember you had this CD you compiled of songs you wrote on a Loog, which is like this tiny guitar. I think it’s the bottom strings of a regular guitar, right?”
PB: “The bottom three strings, yeah. It’s so you learn to play easily and don’t get discouraged from playing”.
WS: “I remember I heard one song I especially remember really liking. I actually made a cover of it and sent it to Pip”.
PB: “I still have it”.
WS: “I was an instant fan. It really didn’t sound like anything else from the Netherlands at the time, and it still sounds very unique to me, especially that one song. I was just blown away by how it was just very simple, but very different from stuff that people were doing around me for a while. It was right up my alley too”.
Long Fling on… their first collaboration
WS: “That was really, really awkward. Neither of us were used to playing with new people; I mean, I played with the same people for four years. Also, we were 15 or something, so we were just very awkward human beings”.
PB: “I vividly remember that we made a song, but then we needed to finish it, so we scheduled the second date. Then you kept saying on the morning of the session, ‘Oh, I can’t make it anymore’, and I was really annoyed with that. At one point, I sent him a message saying ‘my time is important too’. Eventually, you said, ‘You’re right, I’m sorry.’ We did finish it, and I still really like the song. It sounds strange, but we’re releasing a Dinked Edition of the album, and there’s a seven-inch on it with that song on it as well”.
WS: “It has some standard GarageBand loops on it or something. It sounds really strange because everything is clipping all the time, but it’s quite charming, I think”.
Long Fling on… re-meeting each other
PB: “It was still a bit difficult, for sure”.
WS: “We didn’t really know each other, we would just run into each other. I think when we re-met, I’d just got these free tickets to a big festival in the Netherlands. I was going with a friend, but we needed someone to drive us there because I didn’t have a driver’s licence. We went to see Parquet Courts the day before the festival, where I ran into Pip, and I knew that she had a driver’s licence, so I asked if she would join so we could go there. That’s how we kind of re-met, but we had probably seen each other ten times in those five years between, but only waving to each other”.
PB: “It was really fun, though, because I remember being quite scared about going to a festival with people that I barely even knew. My dad kept saying if I don’t like it, I can always go back home. Luckily, we hit it off really well and then tried making music together again”.
Long Fling on… choosing to make an album
WS: “I think it was always something in the back of my mind. Personally, I thought at some point we could make a record out of this and play together. We’ve been wanting to. Ever since we’ve known each other, we’ve been in touring bands, and we always liked the idea of maybe doing it together at some point. We also like hanging out together at home, so it would be good to combine the two, I guess. A year and a half ago, we both had a gap in the schedule, so we thought it might work this time and crammed it in”.
PS: “It’s more of a logistics thing. You don’t want to interfere with someone else’s album cycle and all that stuff. We sat down a couple of times, going through all the songs, because we needed to figure out if we had enough that we liked or needed. It kind of went from there. Was it two weeks? “
Long Fling on… working without collaborators
PB: “I think we’ve had conversations mostly about the drums, because we are using computer drums and loops that have been programmed. That was the main thing that we were wondering, like, do we want to record that live, and if so, how does that impact the rest? We ended up not doing that, because we figured if we’re going to do that, then maybe we’d need to do it all again, or it would change too much”.
WS: “This is the one project where I think we both felt like we didn’t need to conform to any rules that we have wired in our heads at the moment. I would never think about keeping standard drum sounds from a DAW on a record”.
PB: “My records are filled with those”.
WS: “Yeah, and it makes no sense to not want to do that. It’s complete bullshit, but there’s always this thing in my head, so this time I was like, why not? I really don’t see a problem there. Being very bold about decision-making felt very good”.
Long Fling on… maintaining their identities
PB: “Not to downgrade the project, but there’s a lot less on the line. It’s not even that bold, but if we make choices that are unconventional for our own projects, it can sometimes feel a bit more stressful because people depend on those bands and they are protecting their need to get bigger, or at least maintain the way that project sounds. With this project, it has an end date, so it felt like a really good stepping stone for trying out stuff that we can maybe also do with our own projects”.
WS: “The same thing goes for mixing, as well. I would be so scared if I were to mix the next Personal Trainer record. I probably wouldn’t finish it, but with this, it felt like a possibility”.
Long Fling on… learning from each other
WS: I’ve always had the idea that I’m quite open about everything in my approach to making music, and I always think that there’s no rules, but I found out really quickly when working with Pip that she really has, like, a very open attitude. There’s no ruleset, and if there are some rules set in her head when making music, they’re completely different from the ones that I would ever think of.
PB: “Willem is really good at doing the whole rhythm section of a song. A bit of an admission: I can’t really hear the drum and the bass usually, so when I saw him doing that, it inspired me to not always use loops and see if I can learn how to do that. Last week I ended up being very confused and asking Willem to help me, but it’s a work in progress. It’s nice to be able to do it all, or at least have ideas about drums. I usually pick things because I think the sound is good, but I don’t really know what’s happening. Willem always knows what’s happening in every part at the same time”.
Long Fling on… the best song that the other has written
WS: “I think I have to go for ‘Hours’. I think you’ve levelled up a million times since that, but it means so much to me, especially that first version. You know, the first time you hear a band you’re really into, and there’s one song that sticks out that’s always gonna stick with you. Nothing’s ever gonna beat that song”.
PB: “I’m really bad with names. Is it called ‘Still Willing’? I really like melancholic music, and this song gets me every time. Every single time I see it live, I cry. I like it when a song does that, even though that can be quite overwhelming”.
Long Fling on… differences in taste
PB: “I think it’s funny because we started out having very similar bands and tastes, but I’ve stayed a bit more in that lane. I’m listening more to dancey, electronic stuff as well, but it’s still quite indie. You’ve branched out, though. I would say Willem is very into sad boy indie music”.
WS: “Yeah, I like that stuff. I like sad boys with guitars. That’s probably the biggest difference.”
PB: “I find them a bit pathetic”.
Long Fling on… making a second record
PB: “Maybe if we’ve got time?”
WS: “Yeah, that’s the main thing. It’s probably not gonna happen that we’re gonna put out another record within a time span of three years. Maybe if we get like some kind of patron who is very rich and very into what we do and can set us up for life, we’re down”.
PB: “There’s always a chance, but I would recommend if people want to see us, come to the couple of club shows we have, because who knows how long it’s going to take before we do it again”.
