Improvement Movement certainly didn’t intend to make an album about uncertainty. The issue was that balancing life changes with the demands of touring and keeping up with a band made uncertainty impossible to ignore. And thus came their latest album, Your Perfect Real Life, out now.
“When we started making the record, I don’t think the message was on the whiteboard,” says member Clark Hamilton. “It became something that, as we progressed through writing and recording, we noticed was happening.”
When the band started making the album, their lives were changing quickly. They had spent the previous couple years touring extensively, while also trying to figure out what came next for the band. They wrote and recorded the album independently, before eventually signing with ATO Records. In retrospect, the uncertainty surrounding the record’s creation began to mirror the larger uncertainty they were watching unfold around them.
“It was really hard for us to [make this album] for many reasons, personally,” Hamilton says. “The world is also so crazy now. Doing all this was really hard, and we’re really lucky to be able to have the chance to be in a band and tour.”
While this perfect storm of uneasiness led to a natural theme of uncertainty and anxiety throughout Your Perfect Real Life, it takes shape in smaller, more universally recognizable moments. For example, “Common Place,” a stand out track, considers the disappearance of the places where people once gathered together, particularly within Atlanta’s DIY community, where the band calls home. It’s a song about losing something that used to give shape to your everyday life, and the strange hope that comes from realizing you’re still around after it’s gone.
But member Marshall Ruffin puts it more simply. “We’re sad that something we loved was destroyed, but we’re still here. So we hope that we can pick up the pieces and make a new scene, invest in new spaces.”
That idea feels especially relevant to Improvement Movement, whose identity has been shaped by Atlanta’s DIY community even as touring pulled them further and further away from the city. For Tony Aparo, part of what makes Atlanta’s scene so distinctive is that there hasn’t historically been much formal infrastructure for the kind of music they make. Instead, it’s been built by the musicians themselves, and that has shaped the way they think about what’s possible for the band.
“There’s not really labels to speak of,” Aparo says. “There’s not much of a tradition except for just the people doing it. But it’s got an incredible scene of musicians, and so that just generates a certain kind of music and a certain kind of person.”
That environment has also given the band a particular understanding of what it means to make something even without knowing exactly where it will lead. When Improvement Movement began working on Your Perfect Real Life, they didn’t have a label waiting on the other side. They were still hoping their management team would eventually find someone willing to take a chance on the record. “We really had the desire that making this music would lead to thees exact conversations and hopefully many more like it.”
Those conversations can be found throughout the thematics of the record. Some tracks examine the gradual loss of community and common community spaces, while others explore the emotional aftermath of a breakup. While the circumstances may be different, Ruffin sees the commonality. Whether it’s the closing of a favorite shop or the parting of two romantic partners, these experiences involve hoping something will go one way, watching those expectations fall apart, and being left with the task of figuring out what comes next.
“For us as musicians and artists, we have to write about what happens to us,” Ruffin says. “And my belief is that the more personal and granular we can get, if we can try describing the smallest piece of the picture that we can focus on, it seems counterintuitive, but that material seems to resonate with the most amount of people because somehow they can see themselves in it.”
But, the band didn’t let the intimacy of the album stop at just the subject matter. One of the defining (and strongest) qualities of Your Perfect Real Life is how much it sounds like four people actually making music together, something that sounds obvious in theory, but seems to become increasingly less common. The members of Improvement Movement switch between instruments and vocals, leaving room in the arrangements for each person’s particular instincts to change the direction of a song.
“The four of us came together as great friends with a lot of respect and admiration for each other’s personal talents and interests,” Hamilton says. “When you’re in a truly collaborative space, it becomes an extension of your creative ability to be like, ‘Wow, I think that this song’s message can be made stronger by this person’s contribution and their talent here than just what I could imagine myself.”
That approach became even more pronounced during the making of this record. Rather than beginning with one person writing a song on a single instrument and bringing it to the rest of the band, they increasingly built songs together, allowing everyone’s contributions to enter the process from the beginning.
“It was like we all were on our instruments writing the songs together,” Hamilton says. “That allowed for everyone from the jump, everyone’s contributions and skills and inclinations and talents to kind of be wielded and tried out quickly.”
There’s a certain humility required to work that way. It means being willing to let someone else’s idea take a song somewhere you hadn’t imagined, or recognizing that another member’s voice or instrument might bring something to the music that you couldn’t have gotten there on your own. Improvement Movement seems comfortable with that kind of give and take.
But, in reflecting back on the particular magic that comes with live performance, it would make sense that this approach to songwriting would come naturally after so much time on the road. Playing night after night, with the intent of never making the same show twice, gave the band a different understanding and perspective of how fluid making music can be, which influenced the recording process on this record. Their end goal was to create an album that captured the same energy they had learned to create together on stage.
Hamilton hopes that the live version of Your Perfect Real Life can leave as much of an impression as the record itself, especially for those who hear some of these songs live before they ever listen to the album. “I would really love for us to sort of be able to capture the spirit of those songs consistently enough that then they buy the record and take it home, and they’re like, ‘Whoa, the show was this. It was exactly this, and I felt it as deeply as I’m feeling it now that I can listen in detail.’”
For Aparo, though, the live experience extends beyond the songs themselves. “You can go get in a room with a bunch of human beings and have a two-way street of a conversation with the thing that you’re consuming, not just a passive screen version,” he says. “It can depend on you as the audience, and the player, and everybody in between.”
That exchange is part of what Aparo sees as the real value of a live show. “There can be a variety of emotions: sadness, happiness, fear, optimism, all things. So in that way, it can just be an analog for life, just condensed down into one really concentrated moment,” he says. For Improvement Movement, the goal is less about recreating the record exactly and more about creating a space where something can happen between the band and the people watching them.
“I want [our audience] to know that if they come and they see us play once, they will not see the same show if they come and see us again,” Ruffin says. “If everything works well, we will have written and recorded new music by then. We’ll be different people.”
In listening to the album, it becomes clear that the band’s openness to change is what really makes Your Perfect Real Life work. The album was born out of a period when very little felt settled for the band, but instead of trying to resolve that uncertainty, Improvement Movement allowed it to become part of the music. The result is a record that seems content with the idea of change, even when it’s not guaranteed.
And for a band that has spent so much time learning how to exist in motion, maybe there’s something fitting about leaving the future open. Improvement Movement doesn’t seem particularly interested in knowing exactly what the next version of the band will look like. For now, they’re content to keep making the music, getting in a room with other people, and seeing where it takes them.
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