“It wasn’t too thought out, to be honest… The whole premise was we were just helping each other,” says Aaron Graham, one half of Ray Bull, before the other half of the New York-based duo, Tucker Elkins, admits, “We didn’t have a plan.” I’m chatting with Aaron and Tucker via Zoom, just prior to the May 8th release of Please Stop Laughing, the latest album from Ray Bull, who actually never set out to be a band, but just an art project who ultimately decided that music would be the most effective medium for their work.
Aaron admits that Ray Bull has gotten a lot of positive responses since they started releasing music — whose sounds can run a playful spectrum between folk and pop — and performing live half a decade ago, even if they’re not exactly sure how to characterize their biggest fans: “The most meaningful reactions I’ve seen are the interactions I’ve had with the people who have let the music into their lives… mentally ill people, freaks [laughs]… A pretty wide range, and we don’t yet know the throughline.”
While Ray Bull have dropped a number of singles and EPs, and the 14-track Baby Mode, since 2021, Tucker tells me that the process of making Please Stop Laughing did feel a little different: “It was more of a complete idea, I think. For the first part, we were sort of stumbling through it. This is the first time we kind of set out to make a complete work… although some of the songs are old and some of the songs are new, some were written close together and some weren’t.”
On May 12th Ray Bull kicked off a month of headlining dates behind Please Stop Laughing which will have them at The Foundry this Friday, June 12th, on the penultimate night of the jaunt, prior to a sold-out show at the Bowery Ballroom in New York. And Aaron says that this run will also see him and Tucker approaching their live shows in a slightly new way: “This is our first time touring an album, instead of just an EP or something. We have this project we love, and these are the songs we’re excited about… But then it’s like, what ‘hits’ do we need to leave in?”
Providing support for the tour is our buddies Babehoven, who last played The Foundry on Halloween of 2023 when they opened for Slow Pulp. I tell Aaron and Tucker about Babehoven’s ability to shift between super quiet performances (like when they opened World Café Live for a solo/acoustic Naima Bock) to trying to get as close as they can to a “rock band” for the Slow Pulp tour, and they tell me they’re curious what they’ll do for this run, admitting to being fans but having minimal experience with them prior, with Tucker explaining, “I did a phone call with Ryan years ago to ask what mastering is, but we’ve never seen them.”
Although Aaron and Tucker may be best known for their music at this point, they certainly still explore other art forms, which has recently included making a longform, 23-minute video for Please Stop Laughing’s title track, which stars Tucker as a man wandering the city in a hospital gown with an IV in his arm. “We both have a visual art background, but our main focus has been music for the past several years… but I have an art itch… and Tucker makes actual films,” says Aaron.
Tucker tells me that the video for “All That You Are” is a scene from a recent film of his and goes on to explain that their processes for working between different mediums isn’t always clear: “It’s blurred between when we’re making music and when we’re making something else.” I can’t help but ask if they have any favorite works of cinema, and Aaron tells me, “I like slow stuff where almost nothing happens… Like, Chantal Akerman’s probably my favorite filmmaker,” before he and I go on an extended tangent discussing the profound significance of Akerman’s News from Home…
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