On Oct. 4, indie rock band The Rare Occasions performed at the Crystal Ballroom in Davis Square. Their extensive discography consists of songs with catchy melodies, skilled production and introspective lyrics, but they are best known for their hit single “Notion” (2016), which rose to fame on TikTok and other social media platforms in the fall of 2021.
The band, composed of vocalist/guitarist Brian McLaughlin (E’14), bassist Jeremy Cohen and drummer Luke Imbusch, is currently based in Los Angeles, but the members are originally from New England. McLaughlin and Imbusch hail from Barrington, R.I., while Cohen is from Beverly, Mass.
The Rare Occasions formed while the members were attending college in Boston. Imbusch met Cohen at Berklee College of Music, while McLaughin was a student at Tufts. In between an acoustic performance on WMFO radio show “M&T’s Audio Adventure” and the Crystal Ballroom concert that evening, the Daily had the opportunity to interview the band.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tufts Daily (TD): What’s it like being back in the Boston area and at Tufts?
Brian McLaughlin (BM): It’s pretty cool. We never did [a WMFO show] before, so that was a first for us, but it’s good to be back. All of our family is from the New England area, so we’re gonna see friends and family tonight. And it’s just amazing how close the show is to where I used to go to college.
TD: The Rare Occasions as we know it formed while you were in college. How did you balance being college students with being musicians?
BM: I was on the cross country and track and field teams, so I was exhausted all the time to be honest, it was not sustainable. I studied electrical engineering, so I was constantly studying for exams in Halligan Hall with my EE classmates. We’d have a gig on the weekend, but then the next day I’d have a track meet. I don’t know why I felt the need to do all those things. Probably pressure from my parents.
Luke Imbusch (LI): Yeah, it was always like “Keep doing music, but don’t give up on your schoolwork, and don’t give up on your running!”
BM: Not to throw my mom under the bus. She supported us; we jammed in her garage as teenagers. But there’s definitely pressure. When you pay for a four-year degree, you want to walk away with something that you can get work with right away. I knew as a singer/songwriter that the path toward didn’t necessarily involve getting a degree in music. So I was like “Okay, I’m gonna get a degree that can pay my bills once I get out of here and still treat music as if it’s my profession as much as I could.”
LI: And to be fair, none of us ever thought that this would be the thing that makes us money.
TD: That was going to be my next question, actually. When did you know that you wanted to do this professionally and that you could pursue this as a career?
Jeremy Cohen (JC): Fall of 2021.
TD: When “Notion” went viral?
BM: Yeah. This was a passion project up until that point. But I still cared about it deeply, I wanted to be professional. I think we all did.
LI: We just didn’t think it would ever pan out.
TD: How do you think your sound has evolved since you were at Tufts?
JC: We’re kind of full circle, I feel, because we did a lot of weird crap.
BM: Yeah, we did a lot of proggy stuff when we were first starting out, really experimental, and then we went through a more poppy phase and a more power pop phase. And now we’re trying to keep the melodic sensibility of that pop style music, but our new music is pretty out there. There’s some weird experimental stuff. While we were working on this album, it reminded me a lot of the demo recordings era back when we first started the band.
TD: So your lyrics have a lot of deeper themes and a lot of sophisticated words that aren’t usually in songs. Where do you get the inspiration for them? What does your writing process look like?
BM: It depends song to song. For some songs, I’ll just have an idea and I’ll bring it to the band and it’s already almost fully formed. And then other songs, I get really stuck. During the pandemic, we had Zoom meetings, and I was like “Guys, I’m stuck on this line, do you have any ideas?” And they would throw in some ideas, and oftentimes it would get me unstuck. I took a poetry class here when I was a junior and that was kind of when I started taking lyrics more seriously.
TD: Okay, so you guys started in Boston and you moved to L.A. Do you think the relocation encouraged your creativity or hindered it?
LI: It definitely challenged it. It’s a bit of a bubble in certain parts of the country. Boston definitely has its own bubble. L.A.’s bubble is just so big that it’s too saturated with all different genres, and so it’s harder to stand out there. … We tried to be like a local L.A. band, but everyone in L.A. is trying to be like a national act. There’s more competition there, which just inspired us to be as different and unique as we could be. I think if we had stayed in one part of the country or another, we would just probably be like “hometown heroes” and not try harder.
BM: Yeah, a lot of songs talk about making [a] home away from home. We have a song called “The Fold,” which is about when you come back home, things have changed and it’s not necessarily the home that you left behind. And then we have a song on the new album called “Shine 4 U,” which sort of references home a little bit in the first line.
TD: For your newest album, do you think the writing and recording process was different than earlier albums? What did making “Through Moonshot Eyes” look like?
BM: This is the first album where we recorded it in a real studio and I didn’t mix it. We had a professional mix it. So that was a big step up for us. And as far as the writing and recording, I feel like our perspectives have changed over the years now that we’re doing it professionally. We’re going at it at a different angle, and I’m happy with the results, but it takes a lot to get there.
JC: Yeah, we started writing it over two years ago, which for me personally, was a different part of my life. This album has kind of been a streamline through all of it. As much as it’s nice to say this was an ‘era,’ we changed as people throughout the whole process as well.
LI: And you can kind of see that from beginning to end of the album; It starts in a lighter place and ends in a darker place because we’ve changed throughout the process of writing.
TD: Finally, do you honestly still enjoy performing “Notion?”
LI: I enjoy performing it. When I hear the recording, I’m sick of it. When I hear it in a TikTok or something, I’m just like “ugh.”
BM: When we’re in the van, whoever is working on socials, if they accidentally leave their volume up, [“Notion” will start playing] and we’re like, “Turn it off! Turn it off!” But performing it, especially to a really energetic crowd, is awesome.
JC: That song has been the bane of my instrument’s existence. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve dropped my bass so many times playing “Notion.” And that’s a good thing, because when you’re a grown man and you’re playing music to a live audience, sometimes you lose control of yourself and your bass finds a way to fall on the floor and that’s okay. Nothing wrong with that. Sometimes, during the live shows, the instruments just have a life of their own and we’re just along for the ride.
“Through Moonshot Eyes” by The Rare Occasions is out now on all streaming platforms.
