The We Are Scientists drummer talks the emotional weight of touring, and finishing songs alone

Transmission 326: Interview with Keith Carne

Keith Carne is a New York-based drummer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. For the past thirteen years he has held the drum chair in indie-pop band We Are Scientists, while maintaining a parallel career as a session player and recording musician across a range of other artists’ projects.

Title: Magenta Light
Artist: Keith Carne
Release Date: 2026-04-20
Genres: Dream Pop, Indie Rock
Label: self-release
Description: Keith Carne, drummer for We Are Scientists, talks debut solo album Magenta Light — psychedelic visions, touring life, drones, and the moon.

On 20 April 2026 he releases Magenta Light, an eight-track solo debut written, recorded, and produced in his Midtown Manhattan studio, on which he performs most of the instruments himself. The album features contributions from Brian Bond and Justin “Bestamo” Gaynor of Gem County, Drew Citron of Beverly, and mastering by Zeno Pittarelli, with cover artwork by his wife, painter Hayley Youngs. A debut single, “Look for the Moon,” preceded the album in March 2026.

Why did you start making music? What was the catalyst that pushed you toward this art?

I come from a musical family. My father was a musician in bar bands in the 70s and the 80s. I can’t necessarily give you a logical reason; I’ve just always known it to be a truth inside of me. I asked for my first drum set when I was three years old. I just knew somehow—I had what I call a musical epiphany.

Someday it just popped into my head that I knew that I could play the drums. So I just started doing it and then I kept doing it. My parents got me lessons after I had been doing it for years already. Then it just became the biggest part of my identity and the means through which I could lead a truthful life.

“She turned and looked at my face and said that she saw magenta light, sparkling magenta light pouring from my face. I had never expressed to her how much that color meant to me.”

After many years with a band, what was now the right time to go solo? And how did your time in We Are Scientists prepare for this album?

That’s a great question. I’ve learned so much from my time playing in We Are Scientists, and I still will continue to learn because I still play for them. I’ll be on tour for them through all of April. I assume you’re familiar with We Are Scientists? Yes.

Okay. It’s amazing to watch. They know how to make a group of people dance in a room. As the beat maker behind them, I know how to make those people dance too. I’ve always made music on my own, but when I made it before playing with We Are Scientists, everything would be very floaty and almost more ambient.

Now with We Are Scientists, after so many years of playing with them, I understand the value of giving people in a room the need to dance and then fulfilling that desire. Really, they just taught me how to entertain people. They also taught me what is required of a full-scale professional live show. I’ve learned really small things like how to do a good sound check, which I know sounds silly, but it’s a skill you have to learn. I learned big things about how to not overthink things and just give people a reason to want to be free and to want to dance.

What’s the biggest difference between drummer Keith and songwriter Keith?

Confidence. Confidence would be one. I don’t mean to suggest that I’m not confident as a songwriter, but there are many more forks in the road as a songwriter. Whereas a drummer, I can almost act like a doctor. I can say, “this is the result that we want; this is the course of treatment that we will take.” As a songwriter, I have less experience, but I have a little bit more of an open mind, I would say.

Confidence would be the number one thing. And then, of course, just history and the amount of hours that I’ve spent doing it. I practice songwriting all of the time, but I teach drumming and I record for so many different artists. It’s probably ten to one, so I’m more excited about songwriting.

The last thing I would say is the difference is when I’m a drummer, I’m usually doing it for other people’s projects. It feels a little bit more like a committee of people to ask questions to and check in on things. When I’m a songwriter, I love that I don’t have to ask anyone anything and that I can just move forward with my own instincts.

I had to wait for the lyrics to announce themselves to me.

Can you describe the Magenta Vision that started all?

Yes. My wife and I are big proponents of taking psychedelic drugs in responsible situations. She’s a painter—Hayley Youngs—and actually, we were looking at one of her paintings behind me. She had just completed this painting in 2023. We had taken some mushrooms and we saw this flower pulsing and circulating. I had curated an ambient playlist of all these beautiful psychedelic songs that were to guide us through the trip.

She turned and looked at my face and said that she saw magenta light, sparkling magenta light pouring from my face. I had never expressed to her how much that color meant to me. As a child, I was obsessed with it in the crayon box, but always felt a little bit weird about it because boys aren’t supposed to like that color. She described this light to me in utter detail. I was so inspired by the vision. It was almost like synesthesia—meaning how hearing a sound shows you a color. Well, this was the opposite: it was how seeing the color was the sound that I was looking for. It was almost this magic key that allowed me to have a vision of something that I could create.

Why is the moon such a powerful ritual for you when you are traveling?

It’s something that both my wife and I can see. We associate the moon at night, but we often see the moon during the day, and that’s not something that we often think about. Excuse me, I’m just getting over a cold. We find ultimate comfort in knowing that we can be in completely separate parts of the world, but at the same time look up and see a similar moon. Sometimes we can’t always speak on the phone.

Sometimes you want to have a connection that’s more than just a text or an email or a message on social media. If I’m having a crazy day on tour or if she’s having a busy day in her painting studio, we can step outside, take a few lungfuls of fresh air, and look up at the moon. It’s also a thing because I miss her so much when I fly. At night when you fly and you can see the moon extending on the wing, I think we’ve all had that experience where we are so amazed at the beauty of how the sky looks when we’re in the sky. I was swept away by this feeling of the power of how looking for the moon makes me miss my wife less. Or it makes me feel connected to her at least. Sometimes it makes me miss her more.

Why is liminality such a recurring theme in your writing?

You’re calling from Spain, right? Spain is amazing at this. I love going to Spain because you don’t take a coffee to go; you take a coffee to stay and you sip it for a moment at the counter. Spain, Italy, and France are really good with these things. It’s a thing that I try to hold on to because New Yorkers and Americans are just so busy. We have so many things happening. I think that the way that we experience the world is we very rarely stop and give focus and let it wash over us.

We go through cinema and books when we have the time to read, and we go through music, but we forget about these things—they’re just on our journey. It wasn’t this way 15 years ago when we had to have the CD and you would go and sit with it. Or if you listen to vinyl. My favorite part about listening to vinyl is that I’m not distracted at my computer; I sit on my couch, take a coffee, and read the notes. It’s a space to be present. I notice taking the subway how people move through spaces and experiences as opposed to giving themselves completely to them. As someone who’s practiced music and been disciplined, I long for those experiences to be immersed in something as opposed to moving through them. It’s just a thing that I tend to think about a lot. It was a conscious thing eventually when I wrote the song Totally Liminal, but I had also noticed that it had been a theme of a lot of the other lyrics that I had written.

Which track on the album was the most difficult to finish?

I think it was the track 37 Hours. That guitar part for that song I have had since 2018. I play it all the time and I could never find the right vocal or melodic lines. Then once I wrote the melody, I had so many different lyric versions of it. I actually locked myself into my studio one day. My wife was on a painting residency in France, so it was the only time that I had to shut away all other influences. My wife is a very positive influence, but I had the opportunity to just be in my own head.

I wrote all the melodies, but the words were completely different. I sat and thought about it for two months and I just said, “these words, they’re not right.” I had to wait for the lyrics to announce themselves to me. Of course, when I say that, I was actively looking for them for a long time, but I didn’t find them for months. That was without a doubt the most difficult one.

How did your guest collaborators change the record’s energy?

Some of the songs, the ones featuring Justin “Bestamo” Gaynor on guitar, were improvisations that he and I recorded, which I edited in the computer to give it more of a structure. In that instance, that guest collaborator was completely responsible for the world that we created. I could almost give him a co-producer credit.

In some instances, Brian Bond, who also mixed the album, just gave the tracks a point of focus. He recorded the guitar lead on the song Totally Liminal. I think that song provides an interesting dance and choreography with the vocal pattern; it dances in the spaces of the vocal patterns, so he shaped that. And Drew Citron has just such a beautiful voice. I played drums in a band with her for years, and I had always heard a female voice for Look for the Moon. She sings the choruses on it—that’s the female voice in that song—and she completed it for me. I felt the emotional pull of it, but her voice was the emotional arrival of that song.

When you’re trying to translate a visual or sensory experience into music, do you start from an abstract emotion or do you look for a sound?

That’s a great question. I’m a big believer—Brian Eno talks about this a lot—about always beginning a piece of recorded music with something else. I alluded to the fact that two of the songs began as improvisations with a friend of mine. Sometimes they’ll start like that, and it will just be a drone in the background. I love drone-based music, so often it is a texture. I almost see the emotion and the texture as being one and the same because I very much wear my heart on my sleeve. I feel intense emotions and allow myself to feel them.

Often those textures that begin the songs bring forth the emotion that I write about. For example, the drone that starts the second-to-last song on the album, Mist Trail, is from one of these improvisations. The droney vocal melody that begins Totally Liminal—those were all the musical elements that I had recorded for something else that began those songs, but they also provided the path for the emotion for me as well. It usually begins with the sound, but I find that the sound is so tied in with the emotions. It’s very rare that I pick up the guitar and say, “oh, this is a great chord.” It’s not about that for me. It’s a very atypical songwriting process.

Do you plan to perform these songs live as a frontman?

I do. How much performance I can do, I’m not really sure about, but I turned 40 on May 2nd, and so May 1st, I’m going to be performing a show at a venue here in Brooklyn called Cassette. I’ll work with some collaborators from other projects in that band, and it will be just a really fun celebration of these songs from Magenta Light.

I wrestled very hard with this idea about whether or not I should, because I have a very busy spring with two bands, with We Are Scientists and with this performer, Sean McVerry, that I work with, and I have almost no time. It’s also a lot to prepare for only one performance. But because so much is online now, and this release will be mostly online, I wanted to have something physical and real and concrete to do, so I’ll perform. I might press vinyl, I might make tapes, we’ll see.

Are you already working on your material?

Yes, I am. I mean, I’m always working on material because I’m constantly recording. I’ve played on 15 or 16 tracks this year for other artists already, but I always am practicing songwriting.

Photos courtesy of Keith Carne

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others