It’s a Wednesday evening in Waverly, and Yemeni takeout is on the table. Every week, Crying Laughing have a “Rice Meat” dinner at 6PM before practice. All five band members take turns bringing food, and the meal must contain rice and meat.
Practices take place at the home of multi-instrumentalist Christian Best, who has graciously offered to host our interview. So, alongside bassist Marc Miller, keyboardist Steve Strohmeier, saxophonist Rose Hammer Burt, and drummer Jen Kirby, I pull up a chair for my first Rice Meat. While we dish out piles of leafy salad, chicken ghallaba over hummus, and a glistening platter of lamb that falls off the rib, I ask the group if there are any questions they wish someone would pose.
“Are we, or are we not for the liberation of the Palestinian people? And I’m gonna say yes,” asserts Kirby. All nod and tear at the bread, passing trays, tucking in.
Like many aspects of Crying Laughing—from their convivial stage presence to a musical approach that embraces complex, cascading assemblage—agreement and harmony appear as less of a lifestyle choice than a natural outcome of working with seasoned musicians who also happen to be your old buddies. Kirby recounts the origin of the band’s name: “It was when we were the two of us. We had just started and we were kind of dinking around. It just occurred to me and I texted Christian and he was like, yep, that’ll do it.” This ease, acceptance, and willingness becomes a major throughline, as if nobody in the band can actually believe their process is as pleasant as it is.
“None of us is trying to make things difficult or weird. Everything about this band is such a gentle, lovely time. Which is a part of what makes it fun and why we keep doing it,” says Burt. The chemistry is evident in recent performances at Peabody Heights Brewery, Current Space Garden Bar, and the intimate sanctuary inside 2640 Space. Crying Laughing presents a slate of songs that bounce at a rollicking pace, highlighting Best’s fluid ability to move between the punctuations of idiophonic percussion tools and a saxophone playing style that draws him across the stage to Burt.
“Rose and I are often playing off each other… sometimes Rose literally counts me in too… So I need to see her,” says Best. Burt acknowledges the teamwork. “It’s collaborative, right? It’s nice to be physically there together. It also makes it easier to hear each other because we’re in the PA, we always hear the PA, and the saxophones are pretty directional. So if we’re pointed at each other there’s a better chance I can hear, which I find to be very helpful. I feel like one of the things that is often hard for me in live performance versus in rehearsal, is can I hear everyone? Can I see everyone? Sometimes the shape of the stage is weird or sometimes the monitoring is weird or whatever. And the saxophone, because they are an acoustic instrument, we have this little ace in the hole of, like, we can actually just play at each other’s faces. We can hear each other.”
Jen KirbyThe band is its own thing that none of us individually made, that we all serve. Joyfully. You’re motivated to keep feeding it, keep feeding it and eating.
Crying Laughing’s debut CD/ CS Talking (Hausu Mountain, 2026) diverges slightly from the blast and shake of their live performance with an autumnally crisp production style. Strohmeier’s lush, baroque keyboards seize a place of prominence, providing an atmospheric elegance and softness. It is hard not to compare this sophisticated restraint with Strohmeier himself, a hypertalented polymath of the Baltimore music scene. Every member of Crying Laughing has an impressive resume when it comes to touring and/or live performance, while Strohmeier has steadfastly dodged the spotlight, preferring to quietly lend his talents to the likes of Beach House, Dan Deacon, and Midnight Sun—his current project with drummer Mike Kuhl and vocalist Hanna Olivegren.
Regarding the difference between the audibility of the keyboards live versus recorded, Strohmeier notes, “Some of the sounds that are installed in the sampling device that we use have different levels and really different EQs to them too. I’m still getting the hang of not making the piano too quiet or the marimba too loud. It’s sort of a weird grab bag of sounds—kitchen sink approach—in the sampling. I just sort of came into the band, and that musical station was already established, so it was about me figuring out what to do with the tools and the parameters that have been really fun.”
Crying Laughing emerged from the ashes of Best and Kirby’s previous project Smoke Bellow. The implosion found Best bursting with new ideas while continuing his collaboration with fellow band member Kirby. Strohmeier expands on this: “Part of the collective thing is that a lot of the ideas come in a pretty open and small germ form. Sometimes Christian will bring in things where they’re actually almost physically impossible to play or you need a Peabody musician to play them or something because they’re in three different time signatures. The resulting thing is sometimes more interesting because it’s everyone’s take on how exactly to do that. A lot of our songs come from a quick sketch that Christian has, or maybe someone else in the band has, and then the collective kind of takes over.”
Best explains, “We had a kind of distinct idea about what we wanted to do with it. And then, Jen and I asked our lovely friends to help us achieve that. It took on its own life. I had been thinking about this project for ages, conceptually, and these guys were kind enough to come along, and I handed them the kernel, but it’s become something so much better.” Burt nods. “I do feel like we figured out, like, what we are and what we’re doing really quickly.” “Crazily quickly,” Best replies. Hausu Mountain was shocked to learn that Crying Laughing existed for barely over a year when they were in conversation about the release of Talking, but that’s what happens when a pile of heavy hitters from the Baltimore outsider/ indie ecosystem congeal for a good time.
Burt, a conservatory-trained experimental saxophone player, was part of the athletic Baltimore Afrobeat Society and did a lengthy stint in the all volunteer Red Room Collective making yearly High Zero festivals happen. Marc Miller is renowned for his work in disobedient scrawling rock trio OXES (along with Talking’s recording engineer Chris Freeland), and Microkingdom, a project with Will Redman and John Dierker currently celebrating its 20-year anniversary. A virtuosic guitarist, Miller occupies a somewhat surprising niche in Crying Laughing. “I haven’t played bass in a band, for real, [since] high school. I’m in a position that’s unusual for me, which is that I’m in a portion of the sonic puzzle that there’s no competition. [Kirby’s] floor tom is tiny. There’s not a lot of big bottom stuff, so I can fill up that space.”
Kirby’s drum kit, an ensemble unto itself, parallels the group’s approach to songwriting: expand upon a desire, winnow it down to the most important parts. Miller describes the process of creating a higher register drum array with a bit of tongue-in-cheek: “Start with a cocktail kit, and then you swap out some of the stuff for even smaller stuff, and then you get rid of some of the stuff entirely and replace it with stuff from a junkyard.” But, again, the efficiency of need remains a core guiding principle behind this instrumentation. Kirby’s practical approach emerged from logistical limitations. “[Smoke Bellow] toured in a compact sedan. For that band, I got this really sick nesting drum kit. Really nice drums, a 5 piece set. I only use 2 of those now, the kick drum and the floor tom. I mounted the three-set of rototoms where the rack-toms would normally go. And then I have a tiny weird snare drum that is very small and has tambourine jingles on the outside of it. And then a lot of cowbells and blocks and stuff.” Mention of the jingle snare prompts delight from the entire table, especially Burt who proclaims with a laugh “It’s tiny!” Everyone loves the jingle snare.
I marvel at how the individual components are rather spare and isolated, but, together, the effect is something ornate. “Everyone wants to hear everyone else. You don’t want to step on anyone. You’re trying to do what needs to be done, but stay out of the way,” says Kirby. Burt adds, “Everybody is always playing rhythm, and everybody is always playing pitch. All of [Kirby’s] drums are pitched. All of the horn parts are rhythmically interesting, so the whole thing is that you’re shifting between foreground and background. None of the things is trying to really dominate. That’s just part of the sound, right? It’s this structural thing, which I find really fun and interesting.”
“I was the last one added to this band,” says Miller. ”It was sold to me as: postpunk rhythm section meets Ethiopian saxophone. That is how I was thinking about it. But that was only one song!” Burt clarifies that Crying Laughing “only had 2 songs at that point.” Miller continues, “Sometimes parameters create a weird kind of freedom, you know? There’s a constriction in no parameters, which everybody deals with in the Internet age. You can find a lot of freedom within parameters, and that can be a fun focus of a project. And when the conversation comes about, if you need new parameters or something, that can happen when it needs to. It’s fun to constantly find new ways to approach each new song. I know I do it specifically, speaking for myself, with my instrument. I’m always looking for different ways of playing. I use a pick half the time. It’s funny because we keep approaching stuff differently again. In the end, it always sounds like us. This combination of people definitely has a sound. It really does.”
Having only recently celebrated the release of Talking after what felt like years of waiting, Crying Laughing looks eagerly to the future. Kirby: “We just put [Talking] out and now we have to prove that actually we’re a way better band than that record! The next record’s going to prove that. So there is an urgency, not in an ego way, but you want people to hear it because you like listening to it. I like listening to it, you know? I get Steve’s things stuck in my head. I get Mark’s bassline stuck in my head. I get Rose’s little tootin’ stuck in my head. You want other people to have that too. The band is its own thing that none of us individually made, that we all serve. Joyfully. You’re motivated to keep feeding it, keep feeding it and eating.” The entire table agrees, enthusiastically.
Best, a registered nurse, is nearly incandescent with gratitude and stewed chicken. “I feel really blessed because I think that to be in a band in your forties can often be like a sick burden. You’ve got this urge to make music and you can’t stop. You’ve got no time, you’re tired, and you’ve got all these other responsibilities, and I really feel like I dodged a bullet here because it’s a part of my life in this way that’s so fulfilling. It’s like being in love with your spouse after 40 years or something. You’re just like, how did this happen? It’s really nice.”
Crying Laughing plays with Horse Lords and Duncan Moore on Saturday, October 10th at the Ottobar. Tickets are available here.
