Meet Memory Card

A Conversation with Henry Tartt

I recently went and saw the country-rock band Oldstar in Brooklyn, NY. They came out with an album in 2023 called On The Run that caught my eye from the star-filled doodle album cover and spoke to me through it’s twangy alternative sound. Through Oldstar I found Henry Tartt, a collaborator of Oldstar, but also known as his solo project Memory Card. He has been releasing music since 2020 and more recently came out with an album titled As The Deer. I connected to his raw indie sound and honest songwriting. Henry makes all his own music and plays guitar, drums, and backup vocals for Oldstar. I approached him at the show and asked if he wanted to interview with me. I was nervous, but he was so kind and excited! We exchanged a few emails and set up a Facetime. Here’s our conversation! Thank you so much, Henry!

What's the origin story of Henry Tartt? How did your interest in music begin?

Ya, I grew up in Demopolis, Alabama. Which I never used to say cause it sounds like a fake place. But all my friends started outing me, they started being like “Ya my friend Henry Tartt from Demoplois Alabama, city of the people.” Which also just doesn’t sound real. It sounds fake. I kinda grew up in three towns of the same general area: Demoplis, Livingston, and Meridian, Mississippi, which is weird cause it's in another state but it’s only 30 minutes away and that's where the PB factory used to be; whenever I mention Meridian to old heads they’re like, “oh yeah that's where they used to make amps.” Demoplois is a swamp town. Our high school literally, I didn’t even realize it cause it seemed normal at the time, but right behind the football field, there's just a giant swamp. It’s a pretty boring place to live. I feel like I lived most of my life like a lot of people our age, on the internet. 

I grew up around gospel music. My parents were both pretty religious. So that was my first musical experience, stuff I couldn't really relate to but was interesting. I still have a lot of reverence for religious choral music whether it be Christian or not. It’s all interesting to me cause most of it is a bunch of people who don’t usually see each other singing in a mass group. It feels like something no one wants to do but most of the time it sounds pretty cool.

Were you singing?

I was ya, reluctantly. I had a really high falsetto as a kid. 

But ya, my first early music experiences were definitely church. But my older sister Kate had an iPod. There was a lot of Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, and The Zombies on there and my dad played guitar. I wouldn't say I wanted to play because he played but when I wanted to learn, he helped me out. He basically showed me power chords and bar chords. You can move all those around and you get rock music. 

technical difficulty disruption*

So, your dad played music and you learned guitar from him?

He showed me a couple of chords and then I learned by myself pretty much. He was just kind of an impatient teacher. It’s funny cause he would do teaching jobs, both my parents were teachers. My mom was a high school drama and English teacher. Actually, she still is. They both would teach every day but when it actually came to teaching me things, they were pretty tired. 

When you did start to pick up guitar who were the artists or what was the music that helped you find your own sound?

It was pretty garbage music. I guess the first one I'm not completely embarrassed about is… I'm trying not to cherry-pick but also not reveal my darkest musical secrets, but Nirvana was pretty big. I think that's safe. Ya, that's still a super-lasting influence for me. Kurt Cobain was the first guitarist where I could watch him mess up in real-time and recover. Obviously, Jimi Hendrix, and I know that’s like everyone, but he was a great lyricist and people don’t talk about that and it makes me mad sometimes. He just has a great use of color and imagery. His songs have interesting stories, outside of guitar stuff. I never really learned that many songs when I started playing guitar. I mostly just wrote riffs. I did that until I started writing songs. I started playing guitar when I was 10 and I wasn’t writing songs till I was 14 or 15. So it was like 4 years of just writing riffs. I was kind of disinterested in learning songs. Like, everyone in my town or anyone who knew that I played guitar would just tell me to play Free Bird or you know, you should learn this song. I was an asshole, I didn’t want to play Free Bird. Looking back, maybe it would have been cool to learn Free Bird. 

Were you singing right away?

It took a little while to sing. The first songs I would record were electronic. I think It's a lot more accessible to make electronic music when you don’t really understand anything and you don’t have a mic. It was like a year of doing that and I would show it to my friends and family, every once and when I didn’t fully hate it, and they would say this is cool but there needs to be words. 

It's funny, I guess the initial thing of writing music came from not wanting to cave under the pressure of learning songs but then once I was actually recording songs I was pretty susceptible to people just being like, “You need to do this.”

I did electronic music and then eventually I was like I’m good at guitar and I need to start recording guitar music. I did that just off of a school computer, you know the Whatever, Dad thing of just using the internal mic. Up until my first album, the self-titled, I was completely stealing from my school's resources. We had one Mac that had Garage Band, but our school was mostly think pads. I was really lucky that my mom wrote a grant to get a Mac. And I would just record stuff on there. I had been doing sound for the high school since I was like 12 just because my mom was like you know how to use knobs. So I had a little office in my mom's room, no middle schooler should have that music of a power trip. But ya, so I had my little office and I would work on music in there or sometimes bring the computer home if I really wanted to work on something for a long time.

The self-titled has a couple of songs recorded like that. I learned how to do stuff on my phone. I used the internal mic on the iPhone, which is actually really good. The first two albums for Memory Card were made on a different medium. Living Document was ridiculous. The intro is just me playing around on GarageBand. The same way I would have done when I started. I’m actually proud of Living Document. Even though I’m kind of done with slowcore adjacent stuff. I bought this 4 track, but it was like a digital 4 track and it was really bad. It had an amp sim on it that you couldn't turn off. So everything was run through a really gross digital distortion. It recorded to MP2, which you know is the precursor to MP3, which I didn’t even know existed. I didn’t know it went chronologically. Shoutout MP2. It was a really weird machine. It's so broken but I wish I could use it more. The natural audio compression and bit crushing it did was super interesting. 

Self-titled took a little longer but when I released that I was already working on Living Document. I really hate self-titled, I don't like it as an album. I wanted to come out with something that could represent what I actually wanted to do with music. And so Living Document was really rushed in that sense. It’s really upsetting that self-titled got the most attention, at least it makes me some money. I thought that maybe that would be the gateway album when it wasn’t as huge, but I think it's actually divided into factions of people who like different albums. It's just all playlists. Everyone is just so playlist-centric now. You shouldn’t be allowed to see other people's playlists on Spotify for artists. It’s an affront to god. 

What is Memory Card to you?

I got the band name because I had just bought a drum machine and it was really dysfunctional, it didn't work super well. So every time it opened up it would just flash “memory card error memory card error” and it would delete all of my presets. I think I saw it enough times I was like that would be good. Before it was called “Currently Untitled Recording Project”— no ring to it, the abbreviation is gross. I wasn’t taking it seriously, putting the name on it actually made it a thing. I don't think it really means a lot. I’ve been doing it for 4ish years and I think the more it goes on the less I feel attached to it. The first two albums were something I wanted to make Mount Eerie, which is what everyone kinda does in the bedroom pop circle. It was an experiment. 

Living Document was a little more conceptual, or I just knew what I wanted to write about. I wanted to talk about the impermanence of digital life, which sounds really pretentious, I’m imagining reading that right now and I'm like oh my god. The fact that growing up I thought the internet was the future and evolving all the time and it's never gonna die. The internet is something that will exist forever. But quickly I learned that a lot of the internet now is people being lost in media and a lot of internet culture surrounds the fact that it's fleeting and intangible. There's this line in the first album— “playing back memories till the tape disintegrates.” I think that was on “hook”. It kind of played with this idea of constant media consumption and putting so much stock into something that is not physical in real life. More or less a giant escapist thing that you really have no control over. Everything I've sort of achieved as a musician, cause this is technically my career, even though it's pretty small, has been through the internet. Every time I do a show it's wildly different from how the recordings sound. In real life I never have an actual band, every show is like asking people to play with me. Even my friends in Alabama that I play music with, were introduced to me through Instagram. It's funny, the only Memory Card tour was doing all our songs like a power pop band cause we were a 3 piece and it just seemed like that would be more fun.

Let's talk about As The Deer, walk me through your writing process on this more recent album.

Before every album that I’ve made, I’ve made an album that I deleted before that. I tend to write a lot. Before the first Memory Card album there was an entirely different project that sounded similar but I just didn’t feel was good enough so I scraped that. Living Document was basically a mixtape that I called an album but now when I listen to it there is definitely a theme. But it's also funny cause that album is half serious and half funny. I was laughing when making Angel and Want2. Angel is so stupid, it's literally mumblecore. I liked doing stupid synth stuff so it fell in line with that. With the song Want2 I was like what's the most melodramatic stupid thing I can write and I mean I can’t even say the chorus out loud. But it ended up being in the top 4 which is kind of abysmal. I was still coming out of being an ironic detached high schooler. I was just someone who could still not really try to do something seriously. Which is fine. I think I definitely took this less seriously than As The Deer and that made it a little more fun.

What was the recording process like for As The Deer? 

Before As the Deer I made an album called File Sharing that kind of exists. There’s is an EP version on streaming but the full LP is on Bandcamp. I was really trying to do something ambitious with file sharing but I ended up kind of dropping it. Nathan and Evron who run Trash Tape were like these songs are good so I trusted them and sort of put it out. Those songs show a progression of something more organic sounding. Then once I started working on As The Deer I wanted it to be my NPR country record. I didn't want this album to relate to the same slowcore sad TikTok audience. I just wanted to make my most ambitious 16-song album that would have been more acoustic. I ended up writing like 50 songs for As The Deer. I kept writing and rewriting and rewriting. I would write a ton of stuff in my voice memos but then what I actually recorded was more spontaneous. Generally, I write by spending a bunch of time writing air-tight songs but when I start recording I start with something like a guitar loop and just write on the spot after writing music for months. 

So, you’re almost influencing yourself?

Ya, I guess, and once I realized that I couldn’t finish it in the capacity I wanted to it became more of an indie pop album. I was influenced by Bill Callaghan and the way he records his voice, it's like you can hear his spit. He has an album called A River Ain't Too Much To Love By Smog. It's so minimalistic but all the things he's singing about and his arrangements become deceptively busy. It’s an album that I may think was boring if I wasn't focusing on the lyrics. Now I just want to write drowny long stuff like that but I didn't get there with As The Deer. I just wanted to record my voice in a disgusting way. 

How is this album different from your other music? 

The big influence for me when I was making this music was 22° Halo, I kind of defended them as not being a slowcore band; I defended them as being more indie rock. That was some of the most fulfilling and inspiring music I've heard in my life maybe. The only trace of that might be on the song “Dinner.” I was listening to the first 22° Halo EP, the one on SoundCloud. I hadn't heard it in a while and I was like, “I want to make something like this I don't think it really sounds like that at all.” I was actually learning drums around the same time for Oldstar and I wanted to make a song that actually sounded like a band. “Dinner” was the first track that I played drums on and actually felt good about it. While working on As The Deer I was working on a comic. That's where the album cover comes from. I never finished the comic but that's where I drew a lot of inspiration for the album. It was a non-narrative comic about the same relationship that the album is about. 

Why didn’t you finish it?

It honestly felt a little too on the nose. I had a draft of it but it made me profoundly sadder than the album. It just bummed me out.

Well, maybe one day you could release the comic as liner notes when you print vinyl…

That would be a good idea. There might be some tapes or CDs coming out soon. Fingers crossed. 

Walk me through one of the songs on the album. My favorite is “Sore Subject”

Ok ya, that song was actually originally gonna be called sordid subject, I recorded a lot of weird voice memo shit, and if my amp did a weird thing that I didn’t understand I would just record it. I was listening to the first Broken Social Scene album a lot and I was influenced by the bass lines and how melodic they were. I was also influenced by Warren Peace, which was huge. It’s such lyrically beautiful music, and I was just so happy to hear something that came out within my scene that was unique, whimsical, fun, and smart. There were lines that I could laugh at but were just really interesting. In the same way that Silver Jew songs make me laugh. I mean As The Deer was maybe the most personal thing I had ever written. 

The interesting thing about “Sore Subject” was that I first came up with the instrumental and really I just needed two or three more songs before I could put out the album. I was about to go on tour and I wanted this album to be out so that it wasn’t lingering in the background of my life. It was literally like this has been burdening me and ruining my life so I just needed it to be out. I sent “Sore Subject” to my friend Evron, I mentioned them before, and they were like this is good but you need to develop it. So I sent it to them piece by piece till it was finished. This song would not have existed without them. Everything in that song was sort of punched in and edited. If you listen very closely there's a bunch of pops and clips that I didn’t edit out cause I was lazy. Around April, I was driving back home from Florida after visiting Zane (lead of Oldstar) on their birthday and I put on the album. I had just played a show where I had burned a bunch of CDs of it and sold it so I had one in my car and I listened to it. And I was like ok this sounds coherent and I was finally at peace with it. 

Have you performed songs from this album live? Will you?

Not really, I released it and did a small southeast tour. It was a completely different band. I just wanted to be a rock band. I ended up writing a few songs where I hoped I could make people move. I wanted to be able to have a set that was almost danceable and engaging. I wrote like three or four power pop songs, songs with bridges and outros. I wanna play the As The Deer songs in a respectful normal way at some point. I actually played three songs of mine at the end of a show during the Oldstar tour. I played Sleet and Zane and I drunkenly fumbled through this song called “Big Idea.” People liked it, I guess. They were like “Play more, play more” and I blanked out and played “cute” and that was pretty bad. I played the song normally but I looked like I wanted to die the entire time. It wasn’t a bad vibe, it was one of the better places to do it. I told myself I never wanted to do this twee bullshit again. I’ve put a lot of time into playing in Oldstar because it's been the most viable full band that I can be a part of. 

Ya, let's talk about Oldstar. You just wrapped up a tour with the group; How was it? I could tell when I saw you play in Brooklyn that you were all having so much fun on stage. I remember Zane saying something on stage like, “fuck slowcore, we’re a country band” I wanna know what that means to the band and the music. Being from Alabama and Florida where country music is a big part of your lives there, what is your relationship with a style of music that people our age tend to ignore? You guys are doing it in such a way that I feel I can engage in.

I don’t know it's funny, it's kind of having a moment. Outside of my mom and my dad, country music was kind of an ambient thing. You’d hear it on the radio but I kind of ignored it. It wasn’t until I found the album Guilded Palaces Of Sin by The Flying Burrito Brothers that I took county music more seriously. It's one of the best and most influential country albums. Once we started playing music together we listened to Silver Jews and that Drag City alt-country stuff. That's the kind of music where I first started paying attention to lyrics that had more humor and variety in terms of what they were going for. It's fun but it's not ridiculously stupid. 

Zane was working on these country songs influenced by Neil Young and Crosby, Stills, and Nash Brothers, the more folk-like country stuff. I started getting into Neil Young more cause my dad never really played him. He thought he was a hack, but he did play a lot of The Byrds, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and Tonight's The Night. Country songs feel supernatural to write; my dad did play that stuff a lot. Post 9/11 radio country was not really my thing. I was never bumping the Dixie Chicks. The structure of country music was definitely something that was in my head. I’ve been doing Oldstar as a side thing to to Memory Card but it's been pretty much all I've been doing for the past six months. We’ve been working on a new album. I Think I’d Know is more of the newer band. In the future, we will definitely be recording more full band. 

The song “Engine” started as an accident, and we did one take of it where I played drums. We were really into The Royal Trucks, which is a weird Drag City band that can be harder to get into. So we wanted to make something like that. 

The great thing about those songs is we didn't do that much to them. We did the first guitar and drums take and just added the most essential things, like a couple of guitar overdubs. Most of the time whenever we record, we record two parts at once with the same mic. It's a real red-neck setup. We’re working on tapes so we don’t have as many tracks. We just record in Zanes' practice room/studio. I Think I’d Know is half six track rack unit that records to a cassette and half reel to reel. “California” was on reel to reel and the other ones are six-tracked and overdubbed on my computer. I cheated. This process has been really fun. Memory Card songs just don’t work like that. Its always a weird sound experiment that's a lot more vague and takes longer. Zane and I will usually write a song over Facetime and then I'll come down to Florida when I have the time. Zane and I met because they had a demo on YouTube and their Instagram was linked. I followed them on Instagram and we started talking about Dean Blunt or something. Then we went on a small little tour for On The Run. 

Ok well, that's pretty much all I have and we’ve reached an hour and a half already!

Damn, thank you so much for wanting to do this. 

Thank YOU for wanting to do this!!

**Go stream Memory Card and Oldstar ASAP :)