Listen Slowly: Brendon Babenzien Talks the Labor of Love Behind Noah’s Collaboration with The Cure

The “why” is pretty easy. The Cure has always been my favorite band. It’s been 30-some-odd years since I first heard them. Over time, and looking back, they’ve always been there: consistently making great music, consistently being the band that I would go to for whatever emotion I was feeling at the time, and even visually, live, they’ve just been a constant. They came to New York last year and sold out three shows at Madison Square Garden. I went to see them again and they were as good as they’ve ever been, possibly better. I’ve always been a huge fan and this is kind of a dream come true for me to be able to put out some stuff with them, particularly since a lot of their music is older and trying to find merchandise from that era that isn’t either terribly expensive or completely falling apart is really hard. I thought it would be fun to go back and be able to make new stuff that people can access. It wasn’t really about tying it to any particular event they had upcoming. Actually, that would probably discourage me to be honest. Often, you want to shine a light on something when it’s in the dark.

It started out pretty straight forward. Usually with these things, the music stuff is controlled by a few licensing organizations and they’re monsters. When we reached out to the one that runs The Cure, which is Bravado, Mat Vlasic who is the president was super cool. He was like, “Let me put you in touch with Robert’s lawyer and you can talk to him directly.” We started e-mailing Robert’s representation and it was pretty clear early on that the messages were getting to Robert directly and quickly. That’s maybe the closest I’ll ever get to talking to him which was pretty impressive for me. I was really excited, my teenager came out and I was all hyped to be communicating with him. He actually had opinions and specific comments about some of the things we were working on, so it did feel like a bit more of a collaboration.

Well, I preempted this thing by sending a really personal e-mail explaining why this should happen. It was a combination of explaining my fandom and the fact that I want to do the right thing by this, this isn’t a big commercial project. It’s a labor of love, but also Noah as a brand is in a position to educate and inform customers that maybe aren’t familiar with The Cure. It should be everybody’s goal to stay relevant with new generations. This idea of, you do what you do and then you disappear, isn’t that interesting to me. If something’s good, it’s good. I want people to be aware of it. I did that really early on in the process so I didn’t give him a chance to question it. I think I might have even mentioned the siouxsie sioux thing we did when I was at Supreme, they’re friends and I was like, “You can check with her, she’ll tell you it’s on the up and up.” [Laughs]

Right, I mean we’ve been really blessed. For one, we take a really honest approach, and I think at this point anyone who has had any dealings with us as a customer has experienced that. We built some level of trust where if we talk about something people know it’s genuine, we’re really about it, and we’re not trying to overly exploit anything. We’re not in this to blow things out the door, we want to do it in the right way.

For me, the visuals of a t-shirt or a sweatshirt or the things we’re doing, it’s really the gateway drug, and I want people to explore the music in full. Everybody knows The Cure. Everybody knows “Boys Don’t Cry.” The hits are the hits and that’s cool, but there’s stuff in there that maybe you’ve never heard that’s incredible. You really have to spend a fair amount of time exploring their music to get a proper scope. You discover things they’ve done musically in a song that maybe you don’t hear until you listen to it 10 times. You understand a lyric after a few listens that maybe you didn’t at first. Whatever it is, the more time you spend with it, the better it gets.

Right. We want people to remember them first, and then be like, “You know what? I need to check that,” and really, properly check it. We’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of songs. People don’t really buy full records anymore and listen to them start to finish. I grew up in a time when that’s how albums were made. They were full packages, not that much different than a clothing collection. It’s like, you build a collection, a start to finish, with t-shirts, to jackets, and everything in between. You don’t put out a hat and say, “Well, this is us.” You have to tell the whole story.

The only real difference is most of these artists are putting out their own stuff as a commercial vehicle to make money. They’re like, “This shit is cool right now, this is how you make money in music, because the music industry is dead. Let’s find a dude we’re friendly with whose aesthetic we like and we’ll put out all this stuff, right?” This has been a part of the world I’ve been in since the beginning. I guess the difference is my super personal attachment to it, and it’s less about a new financial driver in the industry. This is what we’ve always done.

I would say no, it’s not hard at all. We’re being honest about the things we’re into, and if we’re into it then it belongs. We don’t have this one, directional aesthetic where it’s classic menswear, or punk rock, or athletic. We actually do all those things at the same time. The reason we can, and it works, is because we only touch the stuff that’s real to us. If it’s coming through our lens, somebody in my organization is genuinely a part of that culture and can speak to it in a very real way. Even though with The Cure, his personal style is a bit strange, the big hair, the makeup, and everything is not something I would do for myself, as a fan I’ve always been influenced by Robert Smith. I remember I wore big polka dot shirts when I was a teenager, and that was a direct result of seeing him wear big polka dot shirts. It doesn’t really matter what it looks like. It’s real to us, we’re fans, so it should be part of our aesthetic.