MAN LEE: Interview

“We are allergic to everything manliness stands for”, explained MAN LEE’s Sam Reichman and Tim Lee. The Brooklyn-based band broke out into the New York rock scene this year preceding their debut album, although these tracks have been a long time coming. 

The pair brings a playful edge to the NYC scene. Their work is produced on a foundation of collaboration and community and full of experimentation and intrigue, in line with their perfectly ironic title. They have been crafting their sound since 2016, combining classic instrumentation with electronic augmentation and bending the bounds of what rock is and continues to be. 

Their album Hefty Wimpy is set to release in 2025, though you can catch them playing the Brooklyn venue circuit for the foreseeable future, that is, if you’re lucky. 

[Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity]

S: I’m Sam Reichman, vocals and keys one half of MAN LEE, and we are both songwriters.

T: I’m Tim Lee and I play guitar. 

S: Absolutely, it was one of those things; I woke up at 3 in the morning after years of coming up with names and trying to make something that made sense, and I woke up and like, oh my God, I have it.

T:  Yeah we had a running doc of pen names and stuff, many of which were pretty terrible. But this worked well because it was our own. But there is the double joke of manliness and all of its implications, and the way we as members don’t fit that loaded definition.

S: We’re allergic to everything that manliness stands for.

T: We’ve learned a lot, we’ve found a lot of great collaborators too. It’s been a long time coming. Some of these songs we’ve been working on for years. 

S:We are also married, and living together helps. We started writing together when we started dating in 2016, so it’s been a really long time coming. The pandemic happened, we all had to wake up in some way or another.  A couple of years later I lost my job and finally had the brain space to actually set everything in motion. We had done all of this work and essentially mapped out the record, but one of the main things was actually connecting with our producer, Lora-Faye. It really wasn’t until I had a break in my career that I had the opportunity to take a step back, and really kick things into gear by finding collaborators.Then it took two years to write, record, mix and master, and then actually start playing shows.

S: When we need opinions we will bring works in progress to them for sure, but for the bulk of the songwriting we will record a demo and bring it to the band.

T:  I’d say personally two influences are Ellen Kempner of Palehound, and Delicate Steve. Beyond that we are both influenced by Deerhoof and Cibo Matto. 

S: Oh my gosh, truly everything. We grew up with what our parents listened to, Three Dog Night, Harry Nilsson, Supertramp. These kinds of 60s, 70s, 80s bands that are on their way to being theatrical in their recordings and definitely in their performance. Those were my original influences, but also anything that has continued in the tradition of original vocal performances, experimentation that you can feel as a listener come through the recordings. The band I think of and listen to everyday is Cibo Matto, they are able to just transport you in a way that Deerhoof also is. And they are also still under the umbrella of rock, somehow. It makes you realize rock is a mindset, just a way of being.

T: The Hungarian influence comes from my side, my mom is a Hungarian-American. Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents on that side, and was around a lot of Hungarian language growing up. It is sonically very different from English, and when I started in the school system in Virginia, I started to lose it. It was this process of being alienated from myself by wanting to be a kid and fit in. There is this familiarity but distance from the language that was an inspiring theme for the song. 

S: So you know what the translation is, the initial sample in my voice has a very awkward English translation for “come to our party” in Hungarian. Then the sample in the middle; you know when an older man in a bar comes up to you and tries to teach you something that you didn’t ask to be taught? Yeah, we ripped that off the internet. This guy was teaching a woman who didn’t ask how to pronounce “cheers” in hungarian. It’s very silly but so relatable!

S: The really helpful piece about being one half of a songwriting partnership is the consistent soundboard. By default, we have another person we can just throw something at, at any point in the day for anything that crosses my mind. It’s a really iterative back and forth process, that is different every time. 

T: It picks up little things from each of our lives. It never ceases to amaze me the varied sources from Sam’s process. Whether it’s a book, a poem, or a sound that we hear on the subway that you sample and figure out how to make a bass synth sound like this. These inspirations end up rebounding through the both of us and becoming the concept of a song

S: Right, it’s how much can you accumulate in a studio apartment without having to break down the wall.

T: It’s just gear on every surface.

S: The vocal processor that we got recently has been really inspired by a lot of the work our producer did on the record with my vocals, and reverse engineering what that looks like for a live show. 

T: Yeah the vocal processor is a Zoom v3, so it can do the sort of monster vocals that are an octave down. I think my favorite guitar pedal, that is used sparingly, is the Zvex Fuzzolo. It’s a small pedal but it has a gate so it sort of snaps, crackles, and pops in unpredictable ways and that’s probably my favorite. 

S: It’s got a little buffalo on it. It’s very cute.

S: I mostly use my Microkorg. I also have a mini Juno, which is the baby synth version of I think the Juno from the 80s, but not nearly as many synths as I would like.

T: We are interested in ways we can expand songs for the live setting, and provide a little treat for the folks who come to our live shows. Something hopefully they can vibe with. Some of our songs on the record aren’t recorded with a full band, and so we kind of view them as their own things. It’s been fun to take those songs to the band and see what they come up with. I enjoy the idea of them living separately in those spaces.

S: We are playing our first duo set this weekend, and we are going to keep figuring out the way spaces and audiences inform the way that we play. Having the flexibility to play a different set in a way that is more in line with the recordings will be really interesting. It definitely feels like we are playing with a track, more minimalist, doing more vocal effects. 

T: We are still early in our journey of our entry into the community and the scene. I’m personally excited to delve deeper by playing shows, and meeting other people making music and making art. Continuing to find people who resonate with what we are doing, and seeing how that impacts the form of what our next effort takes.

S: I will just say we want to play more here. There is an influx of new small venues which is really exciting, and it means more opportunities. We are also working on the next record, some of the songs that we played are from the second record. And we are nowhere near recording or producing, but it is taking shape and an evolution following the themes from the first record. It’s all taking shape in a way I couldn’t have really imagined two years ago.

S: So many of the artists in our circles have taken it upon themselves to also become organizers. Friends are just throwing shows in their backyards and on their roofs, things that have always happened here, but there is so much more of it and that’s really exciting. And I would love to be in the position later to curate as well, and that’s a much later goal, space in New York is so expensive. What’s that line in Jurassic Park? Life finds a way —- one hundred percent.

T: Related to that and event organizing, we are seeing our friends doing their thing, for example trying to be techno Djs, and we are seeing people organizing events that are crossing over scenes that don’t always overlap. It excites me to have the opportunity to curate something different that is compatible but that isn’t always thought of as such. 

S: I definitely feel that way about our current producer.

T: We already won.

S: Beyond that, we aren’t punk enough to open for Editrix –

T: We admire Wendy Eisenberg.

S: Wendy Eisenberg can do no wrong. I want to start a punk band just so we can open for Editrix. Putting that out into the world.

T: In a lot of ways I think we already achieved what felt like a long shot working with our producer.

S: Lora-Faye is someone I’ve always kind of admired from afar, and we had mutuals, but I finally had the guts to reach out a couple years ago, and now we’re friends.

S: Yeah we will build towards that, we will do an album release show, and are hoping to do a small tour or support someone else on their tour.

T: We are definitely going to try and do a release show, and in some form or capacity it will be kind of that concept of curation that we described earlier. We have some music live, some sort of DJing, maybe other forms of art.

S: Captain Beefheart. I’m giving myself a reeducation, some old Frank Zappa.

T: Scorts, a Brooklyn Rock band. 

S: And we just saw The Narcotix! They just released their first record this year.