Quick-fire Questions: 10 minutes with Keith Carne
As the bashful puppies of indie music, We Are Scientists have always retained a lovable charm that partners with their riffs like warm sunny rays and a fruity IPA.
So, when Keith Carne, who has drummed with the band for the last 13 years, decided it was time to roll out a debut solo album, Magenta Light, the multi-instrumentalist was at risk of breaking up the magic combination that has made them so beloved. Thankfully, as a frequent collaborator away from his WAS mainstay, he knew how to perform with an array of different energies in the mix.
For Carne, the result is a delightfully varied offering with a personality all of its own. Far from a wishy-washy ‘side-project’, that ‘personality’ is borne from a very singular vision in a literal sense. “I named the album for a psychedelic vision my wife had,” Carne recalls. “She saw sparkling, magenta light pouring from my face. I began recording the ideas in my head the very next day with this vision in mind.”
This wasn’t quite the idle quirk amid the everyday that it might have been had ‘magenta’ not held a special place in Carne’s heart. “I would always choose that colour from the Crayola box first,” he explains, “a little self-conscious of what people might think that a ‘boy’ identified so heavily with pink – it was the 90’s after all. Thank gosh it’s 2026 and we don’t have to think about that stuff anymore.”
That combination of wry winks, deep personal reflection, and a bid to capture a certain singularity gives Magenta Light‘s lush textures a paradoxically potent vitality. It is rare that something so feathery arrests your attention so swiftly, like the pleasant moment you take note of warm spring sun after a long winter.
So, to shed some light on the myriad emotions behind the album and the quirks of life that have led Carne to this point, we threw some quick-fire questions at the We Are Scientists drummer and got his take on everything from ghosts to The Beatles and even Phish.
Quick-fire Questions with Keith Carne:
1. What song would you want played at your funeral?
“Probably some sad-bag, blue boi, ambient piece. Something from the Kalia Vandever album We Fell In Turn, maybe. It’s an ambient solo trombone record she made with a loop pedal, and it’s just the most crushingly gorgeous music that’s simultaneously noble and humble. There’s something really dignified about horns at a ceremony.”
“But then I’d want to follow that up with ‘September’ by Earth, Wind and Fire. Something bopping and melodic with a groove to keep the mood up after the somberness. Funerals should be a celebration of life, not just an acknowledgement of death. Plus, that song has trombones in it, too!”
2. What’s your most unpopular culture opinion?
“I think it’s arguably better to read a book AFTER you’ve seen the movie adaptation. A movie adaptation from a book is almost always disappointing if you read it first because the film can often be so reductive. This avoids that trap. Other than plot spoilers, the only real downside to this approach is that you might not be able to shake the face of the actor playing one of the characters.”
“But often books and movie adaptations are so different that it doesn’t even get in the way. It can also give you a deeper appreciation for the movie. I recently read Hamnet after seeing the movie, and even though I didn’t really love the movie, reading it made me appreciate what the film invented. I also don’t really dig TV series. I’ll watch one every once in a while, but I vastly prefer cinema – something that doesn’t keep stringing you along in an effort for self-preservation.”
3. What has been your favourite album of 2026 so far?
“This is tricky because I feel like I only recently caught up with the great albums of 2025. I really love what I’ve heard so far from the Gregory Uhlmann record.”
4. How does it feel to make music without the WAS guys?
“TERRIBLE! I asked them to play on this record, but their session fee was way too high for a lowly ole DIY guy like me to afford. I kid, I kid. It was definitely a lot less funny than if they had been hanging around. Those two have the most hilarious good-cop/bad-cop comedy dynamic. It was also probably more sober. They love to use margaritas as recording fuel, whereas I probably recorded most of this stuff without drinking much.”
5. Will We Are Scientists ever make an appearance at a Keith Carne show or in a song/video?
“They’d better! I’m playing an album release show at Union Pool here in Brooklyn on Saturday, May 2nd (my 40th birthday!), and they’d better be there! In terms of performance, I think I’ll let them have the night off from entertaining a room full of people. Who knows though, maybe they’ll invite me to open some shows at some point…”
6. If you could make music with any other collaborator, who would it be?
“Sam Wilkes. He’s probably my favourite musician right now. He’s figured out this amazing way to turn bass into this expressive, melodic point of focus in his music.”
7. What’s the weirdest gig you’ve ever played?
“Take your pick…
1. On a boat that cruised around a shipping port in Hamburg with We Are Scientists IMMEDIATELY after a club date with the band.
2. Also in Hamburg with WAS on that same tour (I believe in the same week), we played in an arena where half the audience was school kids from all over Germany who sang as a massive choir accompanying us. The other half of the audience was their parents and family.
3. With my old band Communipaw (now called Gem County) opening and closing a night of open-mic stand-up comedy at a venue that’s also a laundromat in Wilmington, NC. The comedians were REALLY bad. This was like 17 years ago, and we still joke about how bad one of them was.
4. As a hired gun in a jazz piano quartet with my buddy Bestamo at a really bad Italian restaurant and nightclub in the financial district in Manhattan. The dude who hired us – whom we only knew as ‘D – had us all switch instruments on a bunch of different songs. No one at the venue had a key that could open the lock on the piano that ‘D’ was supposed to play. One person showed up to the gig… which is arguably worse than nobody. And after the gig, Bestamo and I realised that he had billed the band that night as The Meters. Yes, that funk band The Meters.”
8. What’s your greatest phobia?
“Tarantulas. Even typing the word gives me the howling fantods. That said, I’ve been working on exposure therapy because I love hiking and the outdoors, and I don’t want to completely lose my cool if I ever encounter one.”
9. What album have you probably listened to more than any other in your life?
“Stone Temple Pilots’ Purple, Sam Wilkes’s Wilkes, Sunny Day Real Estate’s LP2 or How It Feels to Be Something On It. It also very well might be something really embarrassing, like Reel Big Fish’s album Turn the Radio Off, which was something I just burned constantly in middle school. Or, less embarrassingly but equally unrepresentative of my current tastes, Dave Matthews Band’s Crash.”
10. What’s the perfect hangover cure?
“A single beer, some kind of weed product (joint, bowl, edible), and a chicken sandwich from the Commodore in Brooklyn.”
11. Who’s your favourite new band?
“Hotline TNT or Constant Smiles.”
12. What was the first song you wrote for this record?
“‘Look for the Moon’, which is also the first single. I completed that song in early 2023.”
13. Which song from this record took the longest to get right?
“’37 Hours’. I’d had the guitar part since 2018. I wrote a complete set of lyrics in 2019, scrapped ’em, rewrote them in 2024, scrapped ’em. Finished it in January 2025.”
14. Do you believe in ghosts?
“Yeah, I think I do. Is that the same thing as spirits? If so, I guess I do. My cat Mona has made me a believer. She sees stuff around our apartment all the time.”
15. Are The Beatles overrated?
“WHAT?! No way! I don’t even know that they’re appropriately rated.”
