Originally formed in Portland, OK, Soft Cheese was a band that has transplanted as a solo project to the Twin Cities. The sound is both familiar and new. It was great to learn more about from Soft Cheese’s Hugh Jepson.
Please tell me about your music project Soft Cheese.
Soft Cheese started in Portland, OR in 2019 as a power trio with my friends Annie (bass) and Dustin (drums). We had played in other groups together for years, but I wanted to do something a little more simple and fun. I tried to lean into poppier song writing, with lots of hooks, big choruses, and guitar solos, and I was aiming for a pretty high production value, with lots of shoegazy effects in our live shows and on our recordings. We released a couple self-recorded EPs (Blue Sausage Fruit and Tarp) and a self-titled album recorded by our friend Cam in 2020, trying to stay as active as we could during Covid, even though it really destroyed our momentum. Once live shows were happening again, our friend Conner joined the band on second guitar to fill out the sound even more. We self-recorded our second album, Dream Body, on the Oregon coast and at a friend’s studio, going for a darker, heavier sound, which was released in July 2023. Since then, my partner Isabel and I moved out to Minneapolis – she’s attending grad school at the UM – and I’ve been trying to figure out ways to keep the band/project going. I kept writing new songs and eventually built up the motivation to record them myself in my apartment, something I’ve always relied on others to manage – Dustin was the recording/mixing mastermind behind our EPs, and Dream Body. I think for now, Soft Cheese will remain my solo recording project, but eventually I’m hoping to get the band back together! We’ve never done a tour so that is still on the band bucket list for sure.
The new album, SFTCHZ, is stylistically different from your 2020 album. What inspired the newer stripped down ethos? It feels very raw and vulnerable.
I think partly I wanted it to convey the atmosphere of my recording process – just me in my apartment recording one thing at a time. Also, our previous releases had been so packed with sounds and effects, that I really wanted to try and get the most out of the instruments without adding additional stuff to them or hiding behind a wall of sound, and try to leave more room for empty space. And thirdly, I think I was just listening to more stripped down music and getting inspired by that – early releases by Mogwai, Sparklehorse, The Breeders, and The Microphones come to mind, and anything engineered by Steve Albini. Not that my recordings live up to his, but I just love his whole ethos behind what he did and it was so sad when he passed away.
I like to think that Cruisin USA is about a drive from Portland to Minneapolis. Is it? (As I recall, the drive is about that long.) Also, you have come from Portal Oregon, and I happen to have a daughter in town visiting from Portland. She often talks about the artistic connections between the two cities. Do you see them too? What do you think you bring from Portland? And what’s been different for you in Minneapolis?
Cruisin USA isn’t specifically about that drive (i haven’t actually done it because I flew out here with our cat, and my partner did the hard part and drove out here with the U-Haul), but it was definitely inspired by the idea of driving or traveling somewhere all through the night in a real bleary-eyed kind of way. The title and idea for the song was actually inspired by the 90’s Midway arcade game Cruis’n USA, but I wanted to add a more nightmarish, never-ending atmosphere to it.
I definitely see the artistic connections between the two places, specifically in the DIY scenes with music and visual art. In Portland, my partner and I really felt part of an artistic community in which artists support each other as friends – everyone playing in each others bands, recording each other, playing at each other’s houses and small local venues and helping out bands from out of town, and using art as a means to raise funds for all kinds of causes. Although I’m not fully immersed in the scene or community here yet, I think the same things apply – for example, I’ve seen and heard great things about the local punk/hardcore scenes here, as well as the puppetry scene, and it seems like artists here are trying to engage and support each other in the same ways. Also, I think there’s a real struggle in both places between small local venues trying to survive and larger conglomerates monopolizing venue space, and in keeping things affordable and available to local artists and audiences.
Proceeds from the album sales will be going to MIRAC. They are fantastic; they do great work. Can you tell us more about them and why you decided to make such a generous donation to them?
I learned about MIRAC through my partner Isabel, because her grad cohort has been involved in some events that MIRAC has organized – protests against the genocide in Palestine and against any local corporate & university investment ties to it, and protests against ICE as well as teaching sessions about how to respond to ICE raids. They are a legit organization that brings people together and gives people a voice to fight against all the horrible things taking place, and I believe art can play a significant role in raising awareness and providing financial support to organizations like them. I was disappointed to hear that the recent No Kings protests had questionable ties/affiliations with the police, as well as an all around lack of cohesive messaging and objective, and so I wanted to help support an organization without that baggage and with a very clear purpose.
Where can folks find you? Are you playing in town? Are you looking to play in town?
RIght now the best places to find out about Soft Cheese are our bandcamp and instagram pages – https://softcheese.bandcamp.com/ and https://www.instagram.com/sftchz/?hl=en. Now that I’m finished with the new album, I’m working on how to perform it live so that I can hopefully set up a show. Sadly my bandmates are in Portland, and so I’ll need to figure out if it’ll just be solo, or if I can get some sort of band together here. I think I might just get my partner to play with me – she actually sings on the album, and she’s a musician too with her own project called Babytooth.
Mostly Minnesota 