Before Talulah’s Tape ever hit streaming, it lived in the far corners of the internet, the kind of late-night rabbit hole where a forgotten upload might turn out to be something brilliant. Like a 1994 grainy VHS relic: no context, just a cryptic title and a thumbnail making you curious enough to click. That’s exactly how people first discovered Good Flying Birds, the solo writing and recording project of Kellen Baker, a 23-year-old musician from Fort Wayne and Indianapolis, Indiana, who wrote the album between ages 21 and 22. For a while, the album circulated through message boards, zines, and random YouTube accounts. A mystery with heart, shared like a secret.
A sound-bite from a 1985 interview with The Jesus and Mary Chain kicks in and you wonder what era you’re in, launching into a glint of tambourine flickers, a creeping brittle guitar line, and a voice too vulnerable to be casual cuts the haze. The production is raw and textured but it doesn’t feel thrown together. There’s intention in the chaos. The songwriting feels careful and knowing, like someone’s been up all night stitching feelings into melody. Then comes the lyric: “I see you in the mirror / every time I cry / I hear your voice / every time I try.” It’s plaintive, tuneful, and real.
The songs chug along with timeless melodies that feel like they’ve always existed. 60s pop hooks, 90s indie grit, glimpses of glam, and underpinning comforting basslines that pull you in. Harmonies drift through like Pastels b-sides, breakbeats slam in at wild angles, and random “bruh” samples or voicemail snippets keep things from getting too self-serious.
The album is cloaked in a warm layer of tape hiss, the audible texture of its analog recording. It’s not there as an aesthetic flourish so much as a natural byproduct, a backdrop secondary to the songwriting itself. It lives there like the sound of old home movies, like the hum of a VCR left running while you built lego sets with your siblings, like cartoons blaring in the background. It’s the kind of nostalgia that isn’t about retro trends or sonic throwbacks, it’s childhood nostalgia, it’s a feeling.
That feeling defines Good Flying Birds, and is what they are chasing and nail so instinctively. Not a revival, but a rebirth. Not a recreation of the past, but the spirit of it: curiosity, connection, and building something out of nothing. With hand-drawn visuals, stop-motion music videos reminiscent of Pee-wee’s Playhouse or Sunday morning cartoons, and songs written alone in bedrooms in single-day bursts of inspiration, Baker is creating not just a sound, but his own little world. He’s re-animating the emotional roots of DIY music altogether.
Before any labels or wider releases, Talulah’s Tape lived in obscurity, a self-released project passed around as handmade cassettes and YouTube uploads. But that changed when Smoking Room and Carpark Records teamed up to reissue it officially on October 17th. And while the songs have technically “been out” before, this moment feels different. “I’m just very ready for it to be out for good,” Baker says. “It’s been weird going through the excitement and humility of releasing your own music and now kind of doing it twice. I’m through that cycle with these songs. I want to move on.”
It’s a sentiment most DIY artists know all too well: the feeling of moving faster than the medium can hold. But in this case, the slowness was part of the charm. Before streaming services, before curated playlists and endless feeds, Good Flying Birds was spreading through word-of-mouth, zines, weekenders through midwest cities, tapes sold on Bandcamp, and an intentionally chaotic website full of GIFs and rambling posts that felt more like a 2003 blogspot than a sleek artist portfolio. It was all very deliberately analog and very personal.
“I’ve never felt like streaming was a healthy way to digest and interact with music,” Baker says. “It commodifies everything and homogenizes it in a way where everyone is being force-fed the same stuff. You don’t have to go to a record store and find something that looks cool and give it a chance. There’s less word-of-mouth, less curiosity. These playlists take the fun out of music discovery.”
This philosophy shaped the band’s early growth, but still the realities of labels and audience reach eventually pulled them into streaming, but on their own terms. “The labels wanted to do it, and being on those platforms was kind of a necessity to make it worthwhile for everyone involved,” he says. “And then of course, all this social and political pressure came right as we signed on.”
In the end, the compromise came with a purpose. Good Flying Birds joined the No Music for Genocide campaign, geo-restricting their music in protest of streaming services’ complicity in ongoing genocides. “If you want to do any damage to a system, you have to infiltrate it,” Baker says. “I’d rather use the platform now so that, when I say all this stuff about how much it sucks, people are actually listening.”
That balance between ethics and exposure mirrors the band’s whole ethos: finding meaning in imperfection, building connections in small corners of the internet and using the system just enough to remind people that music can still belong to its community. It’s not that things are “perfect,” or that this way of sharing music is “right” but it’s that they’re thoughtfully tried, tested, imperfectly human, and built with care.
Growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Baker’s relationship with music was forged in a kind of productive isolation. With no clear scene to plug into, he was left to piece one together, pulling from dusty record bins, old Indiana punk lore passed down from local legends, or whatever fragments of culture the internet would cough up. At age 10 he picked up a guitar because a neighbor looked “pretty cool” playing one. That spark eventually led him into a Beatles cover band and then an original project, the B45s where he wore suits, played 60s garage rock in local bars at age 12, and had to stand behind the merch table or with his parents when not on stage because of age restrictions.
Much of his early experience came via Sweetwater, a music gear behemoth, headquartered in his home town, where he joined the “build-a-band” program. It was a corporate setting more focused on sales than subculture, getting kids to play music, but not necessarily encouraging a punk ethos. “They’re trying to sell guitars, not have kids sending weird pages of art all over town,” he jokes. “There wasn’t a youth scene happening. Not in any facet, indie, hardcore, anything.”
“Good music comes out of Indianapolis because there’s nothing else to do except get in your basement and try to do something that is interesting to you and your friends,” Baker says. “It gets harder and harder when there’s nothing to do and you keep showing each other your music. I think that drives a creative spark, but it’s just a handful of people making really cool music and no audience for it so there’s not really a scene.”
DIY-by-necessity echoes through the Good Flying Birds project. There was no central sonic blueprint, more like a constellation of influences ping-ponging around in Baker’s head. “It wasn’t like one band or song was the guiding light,” he says. “It’s a mix of stuff from the 60s to now. I guess ‘indie pop’ is the closest term, but even that feels too narrow.”
What holds it all together isn’t genre, but emotion. That’s what Baker consistently returns to. The ability for a song to hold something that a diary or conversation can’t. “Songwriting is the closest I can get to actually understanding what I’m feeling,” he explains. “Sometimes emotions don’t make sense in a straightforward way, and you can’t really write them down clearly. But with songs, especially when things are abstract or fragmented, I can land closer to what’s actually there. It feels more accurate.”
That sense of emotional impressionism carries through the lyrics, too. Some lines hit hard, others feel more like passing thoughts or memories glimpsed through fog. It’s not about explaining everything. It’s about capturing something ephemeral before it slips away.
“Eric’s Eyes” might linger longest, a jangly standout that captures the ache of a memory you can’t let go of. The chorus, “It’s you and me / you and me / Eric’s eyes,” sounds like something you’d sing on a swing set or cry to in a parking lot or maybe both. “Wallace” reads like a postcard from a lost summer: “Founded on the broken vows to write you letters that I never seem to pen / walking through the fallen leaves across the Waldron Circle hill around the bend.” “Goldfall” flirts with blown-out noise-pop, its chorus folding back in on itself like a looped memory. And “Pulling Hair,” one of the final tracks, lands with tender vulnerability. “I know I shouldn’t admit this in song,” Baker sings, “but can I say that I was wrong?”
Live, the band leans into the same ethos. They’re not interested in coolness for its own sake or in curating an impenetrable mystique. “Everyone’s a little too concerned with image, whether they admit to it or not,” Baker says. “But I’m not trying to put on a face. I don’t think any of us are. I really admire bands who pull off that mysterious, careful aesthetic, but it’s not for me. I just want things to feel open and personable.”
That transparency fuels Baker’s maximalist instinct. The desire to cram everything in, to draw and write and build and share shows up across the whole project. Even during our interview he shares a drawing he made minutes before inspired by something one of his students said that day. The website, the visual art, the videos, the dense melodic basslines that run under everything like a second lead vocal. “I’ve always loved bands where the bass takes the melodic counterpoint role,” he says, citing Paul McCartney and James Jamerson as formative influences. “I ended up playing bass in my high school jazz band. I had tried out and got in for guitar and then the bass player quit on the first day. I had to learn all of these Stan Kenton and Hank Levy time charts and kind of intense material and I just had to figure it out. That was a good bootcamp.”
That sense of throwing himself into things before he’s ready and figuring it out in real time defines his writing and recording process. Almost every song on Talulah’s Tape was recorded as a one-day demo. “I procrastinate really badly,” he admits. “So I have to wake up and just decide, ‘I’m doing this song today.’ Otherwise, it won’t happen. I’ll just obsess and never finish anything. Working fast keeps it honest.”
There’s a kind of beauty in that pressure-cooker process. It’s the perfect representation of a feeling captured before it fades. “Even if the vocals come later, I try to get the core of a song done in one day,” Baker says. “I like the urgency of that. The way it locks the song into a specific moment.”
Even the recording process is stripped down for the sake of momentum. “I’ll often just go one mic straight into the four-track,” he says. “If I try to do it digitally, I’ll get stuck in plugins and endless tweaking. I need the simplest path from idea to recording or I’ll get in my own way.”
And maybe that’s what makes Good Flying Birds feel so alive. It’s not nostalgia for a certain sound, it’s nostalgia as a creative process. The emotional truth of a blurry memory. A snapshot of someone chasing connection in real time, building worlds from bedroom floors, and trusting the feeling over the format. A little chaos, a little tape hiss, and a whole lot of heart.
You can listen to Talulah’s Tape out now as well as purchase on vinyl, CD and tape via Carpark and Smoking Room.
Written by Eilee Centeno | Featured photo by Conor Shepherd
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