We all wrestle with life. From a minor inconvenience to heartbreaking tragedy, we all feel disconnected at times from the rest of humanity. Music soothes the pain as we are brought together with others who have dealt with similar issues and realize we are all one tribe. Broken Robots has released a new CD with 10 songs that explore the trials and tribulations of modern life, aptly titled The Great American Struggle. I had the opportunity to sit down with Kat Baker, Tony Baker, Elix Smith, Ari Augustaitis, and Anthony Friedli to gain insight into this newest adventure.

The first cut is Circles, a smoky, jazzy tune. This is the first tune and first single. It shows the band in a new light of maturity.

GW: Tell me about Circles.
Kat: That was the first song we wrote and so we put it first on the album. Tony wrote a guitar part when we were in Pennsylvania at a haunted B&B. It was super cheap and I thought it was a steal.
Tony: Yeah, there was a sign that said, "Don't go in the basement,” so of course Anthony went right down to check it out. It was a dirt floor.
Kat: It was a sideways town on a mountain, you couldn’t even park on the road. Tony had just learned a new chord and was trying to find a way to use it. I wrote a guitar part for the chorus and they just bounced off each other. It was hard to write those lyrics as it is about me and trying to get over generational issues. I had to step out of myself in order to write the song. I had to say I am problematic in this way and I need to break the cycle.
Elix: When I hear this song I think this is so evolutionary for Kat, so raw and emotional. It shows real maturity. Honest and hard for anyone to admit, but very forward-thinking.

…I’m hoping you don’t mind, I'm not like everybody else… {from Circles}

GW: The words and music are really going together. I hear the guitar lick in What You Wanted and think Tony is really mastering his craft, putting so much emotion into his playing. Is that the way you see it?
Tony: I’ve always struggled with limitations and insecurities that I have and this last year has been a hell ride. Kat has really been pushing me to get to the edge. Like Bowie said, you have got to go to the edge, not too far, but you have to get a little wet.
GW: Your playing feels more improvisational, less bound, more expressive. Do you feel that?
Tony: I’ve been trying more, especially with Elix and Anthony having more experience. I love challenges. It gives me something to aim for. I am very rehearsed; this brings more dexterity, this is jelly movement.

GW: Mad but Nice shows the band's ability to create a total foundation for Kat to explore her lyrics more. Tell us about that.
Kat: That is the greatest thing. I don’t feel pushed in any one direction. It is hard to not feel what feels right for a song. I want to put the feeling there and I need support from everyone, and in the band's current iteration there is an incredible amount of trust.

GW: On Sweet Escape we hear a lot of Tony’s sound engineering. Is this his Alan Parsons moment?
Kat: That is Tony’s song on this album. He loves the song. It is his wheelhouse.
Tony: I accidentally hit a dotted eighth note delay on my board and I looked at Anthony and smiled, I knew I had it. I got to do a little EDM in the song. Remember, guitar is my voice and the melodies and tones are how I speak.

GW: Jazz is a conversation between the players. On Bad Side we get a lot more instrumentation. Is that how it works for you?
Tony: That was a riff I came up with and Elix came over and roundhouse kicked me in the head when he played the bass line with his part and Anthony came in and it just became a thing.
Elix: I heard the line and thought this is begging for a James Jamerson, Victor Wooten, Duck Dunn kind of thing, but I wanted to keep it simple. And I thought, how can I make it intricate yet leave space for the vocals?
Tony: That is what blows me away, how it can all get done and stay out of Kat’s way.
Elix: The subject of that song is not one heard in contemporary music anywhere.
Kat: All of us have worked in production, so we all have been sound engineers, lighting, or DJ. We wrote the song to say, give these people respect.
GW: Anything that clouds the artist's mind takes away from the show. It is all the people behind the scenes that make the show enjoyable.
Tony: There is something slick about the lyrics, like the man at the door.
Elix: Yeah, it’s kind of cool and cryptic. Kat is a mastermind of lyrics.

…I don’t really want to be the bad guy, I just don’t want you on anyone's bad side… {Bad Side}

GW: The fans all really want to see their favorite bands get credit, but especially when they put out an album like this. I hate to make a Dad Joke, but this band seems to be Going Places like the song. (I get them to laugh).
Kat: I was in an emotionally dark place when I wrote that and I wanted to write a manifestation song, like we are all going places and we are going to get through this. We went in a funky direction with this one.
Tony: Sweet Escape is a little more cryptic where Going Places is more fresh. I feel we were trying to uplift with this song.
Kat: Yes, Going Places is very meta. In live performance we do a very long jam, which is fun.
Elix: Live we go directly from this song into an older song, Rat Fight. It is like advanced jam band stuff.
GW: Anthony is so sharp on all the tracks but Going Places is masterful, you are always there to catch every nuance.
Anthony: Well thanks. I feel that my part is really dynamic. There is a way to add into the song with ghost notes, and builds are my forte, but you have to keep it simple. The way I see it, the drums are the skeleton, the bass is the cartilage that connects those bones, and everything else is the meat and skin. They can’t work without each other.
Elix: I think of it like a car; the drums are the engine, the bass is the wheels, the guitar is the transmission, and the vocals are like the windows. The keys are holding down connecting it all.
Kat: Since Ari has joined, we have removed a lot of the backing tracks. He holds the songs together.

GW: The Needle, the Thread and the Hospital Bed is one of my favorite tunes from this release.
Ari: That is my contribution to the album and my first song I worked with the band on. That was back in the fall before I formally joined. I already knew the song, it was in my head all the time. It is very catchy. It's just exciting to play these songs live now.
Tony: The song has so much solidification of how we are like a family now.
Elix: It is the most intense for me. I had that guitar riff for years and thought this could be a Broken Robots song. I was playing it here on an acoustic and Kat and Tony were like, yeah, so we played around with it and when we needed a keyboard part on this I thought of Ari. He is my bandmate from Earth Radio and I asked him, and he is just great. I think that is what brought him into the band.
Tony: Anthony’s drumming on that song is so excellent. I remember mixing it and every ghost note and thirty-second note is so precise. Everything he was doing was so important I actually spent hours just on the drum part. It propels the song, it is my favorite piece for drums.
Kat: The song has a fever dream feeling to it. Tony woke up one day and started retelling the dream to me and I said, wait, and started writing it down because it was so intense. He remembered he found the dog and the fences were melting. The lyrics were recorded in real time. I had to check into a facility because I was having a mental issue. Three days later I was checking out, they said I was OK, and Tony called to say he was having stomach pain so severe he didn’t know if he could come pick me up. I had him come to the hospital and we checked me out, then checked him in. That is when we found out he had cancer. They told him if he had come later, he may not have made it.
Tony: The second verse couldn’t be recorded for a month. I came home and I had lost a bunch of weight. Kat said, let's get back to work, and we picked up and recorded Kat's side of the story.
Elix: For me, as a third party to witness my friends going through this was horrible. Anthony and I talked about what we were going to do now that this happened.
Anthony: All of us were here during the crazy time with all they were going through. It was just insane, and now listening to that song it takes me back, it is very emotional.
Elix: Also this is the only song Ari is on; it just gives the song a weird vibe.

GW: On Again and Again Kat’s voice is so haunting, it feels different than what I expected.
Tony: I’m not going to speak for Kat, but there is a giant Goodbye in that song.
Kat: My lyrics are just the cherry on that song and I just let the music take shape then jumped into the lyrics. It was very emotional. It was before Elix joined the band, and the other bass player didn’t show up for practice. He just said I don’t want to do this anymore and he quit. It was like a sudden thing and we all just thought, what are we going to do now? That is when Anthony said, let's keep going.
Tony: I love that attitude. I was turning into George Costanza, like running around saying the world is ending, and Anthony said first we are going to chill out. We are going to breathe and we are going to write something. Anthony pulled out the keyboard and just wrote the structure right there.
Kat: Most of the sound effect, the electronics, are all his. That is really his song.
Tony: I asked if there was anything I could do and he wanted a guitar solo.
Anthony: Yeah, and it took Tony six months to get me that solo. But it is thirty-two bars.
Tony: Kat had me listen to a bunch of Smashing Pumpkins and kept telling me, try this and try that. It just fell together.
Anthony: You know I’m a drummer, not a songwriter, so I don’t know the sections, so I didn’t know where to put things. The song just moves up and down, there is no chorus, but I just put one in there. We did it live last month and just extended the outro.
Elix: The song makes me feel like I’m smoking a cigarette on a dark street corner at night. It is very contemplative. It is very dynamic and shows how important that is.
Kat: When Tony and I first started to write, we would never come close to the complexity.

GW: The band has come so far with this release. You can tell the band has really matured and you are all working so well together.
Kat: Yes, it is like we were saying, it takes so many small things to make a song come together. We have a very collaborative nature in this band and we all bring our own thing, no one tries to dominate.
Elix: We all bring different aspects to this album. This album is all over the place stylistically, but it is very cohesive.
Tony: It’s one of my proudest moments as a producer. It’s a hodge-podge of stuff and from a producer's perspective everything is important, even the order of the music. The album is supposed to take you on a journey. It could have come across as pretentious, but instead the journey worked out. I think it is just a great piece of art.

GW: The song Over and Over I had to listen to several times. It is so light and funk, yet a total departure from the whole release.
Tony: I wrote that riff when I was nineteen, so long ago. And the aesthetics are of bringing back a song from so long ago. I was saying goodbye to my old stuff. You know, there were a lot of songs I have written that were never going to be heard, and I wanted one of my old songs to be heard.
Kat: When Tony wrote that song by himself he wrote it with an acoustic and an omni-chord. We wanted the old sound from the eighties. We recreated the sounds of the omni-chord.
Tony: It is the closest to an endearment song with a lightness and feeling of appreciation to it.
Kat: I wanted to make this an ode to us. We have a unique backstory. When I met Tony, he was a panhandler and I would stop and talk to him. We became friends and one day he had a sign that said, does anybody even read these? I’m glad we got that as a lyric in the song.

…Everybody is staging their way to the perfect story…You were holding a sign that said; does anybody read these things? {Over and Over}

GW: The release ends with Potential. I think we all need to know that it is ok. We are told we are not living up to someone else's expectations, but you are doing the best you can.
Kat: A lot of people can relate to that song. I took ownership. I wanted it to sound kind of broken so I told Anthony when you hit the drums make it loud, I wanted a feeling of imperfection. I came up with the guitar part and Tony helped me make it a song.
Tony: I remember I was at work and she sent the riff to me. I had to plug my ears to listen to it and I got excited because I knew it was a great song. When we recorded the drums, Kat was so adamant about the relationship between the drums and vocals that she conducted it.
Kat: I come from a very traditional Ukrainian background and women are supposed to have a lot of kids and stay home and cook. My grandmother was disappointed in me. I was so excited when I got a job as a sound engineer and she was disappointed and said that I wasn't going to be happy because that was not a job for a woman. I wasn’t living up to her expectations, but I thought I’m living up to my expectations, so where do your expectations come in? You know, why can’t you just love me for who I am? So there is a tinge of feminism to it because in my day-to-day life I feel I have to fight against preconceived notions of who and what I’m supposed to be.
Elix: We were playing an outdoor event, I had a messed up leg and we had to move some big furniture. I asked Kat to help move the stuff and two or three big dudes came up to Kat and asked if she needed help, and I thought, no, I’m the injured one here, she can do it herself.
Kat: I’ve been to gigs carrying my tube amp. I carry gear for a living, and men will just appear and offer to carry my gear.
GW: You have to be strong to be a musician, physically and mentally.

These young musicians have poured themselves into a work that is pure art and a labor of love. This album The Great American Struggle hits the streets on September 12 and promises something for everyone. Find the release on streaming services, or better yet, seek out the band and buy a copy for yourself. It will be a constant companion in your daily struggle.