Animal Instinct
John Boegehold defied the gloom of the last two years by escaping into the new worlds he created on the new Pattern-Seeking Animals album. The songwriter and band founder talks to Prog about cranking up the energy, escaping the side-project label, and steering away from the darkness on Only Passing Through.
Words: David West
Pattern-Seeking Animals: on the way to bigger things.
Images: Mark Berry
“I’ve never been a fan of playing live myself and even if I was,
I’m not good enough to play with those guys.”
“My cocky assertion after the first album was, ‘We’re going to put out one album per year,’” says John Boegehold, the creative engine behind Pattern-Seeking Animals, the band he formed with Ted Leonard, Dave Meros and Jimmy Keegan in 2018. While a combination of the pandemic and vinyl delays put a crimp in the one-album-a-year plan, Pattern-Seeking Animals still delivered their third record, Only Passing Through, less than two years after Prehensile Tales.
With album three, Boegehold was determined not to get stuck writing about the pandemic. “Everyone’s going to be so sick of this by the time it’s over,” he says. “‘Here’s what I wrote about the pandemic while quarantined in my house.’ No one wants to hear that right now. [In the 1920s], when the Spanish flu was done, we got the ‘Roaring 20s’. Everyone just wanted to party, go out and dance and hear happy music. I could have sat down and gotten very morbid about everything, but I just didn’t want to do it.”