Pinegrove Went on Hiatus…Then Went Viral on TikTok

Earlier this week, an enterprising creator on TikTok named @garrettlee39 posted an earnest rendition of himself dancing to the 2014 single “Need 2” by indie band Pinegrove. A palpably moody cut from their album, Everything So Far, the song, and dance, have spread across TikTok like wildfire. Garrett Lee’s original video has already racked up over 5 million views, and there have been thousands of new videos replicating his dance posted to the site since. There are re-edits of a Soulja Boy music video set to the song, as well as clips of DJ Khaled dancing. There’s even a Jersey Club remix. The “Pinegrove Shuffle,” as it’s being called, is the latest example of a song going viral long after its release, opening the doors for an entirely new generation of listeners. 

For Pinegrove, the newly viral moment comes at a time when the band has been relatively quiet. As recently as April, frontman Evan Stephens Hall announced that the band was going on something of a hiatus. He wrote in a post on Instagram that “Pinegrove is not over, but it seems this era is.” The message promised that “at some point soon” they’d be releasing some of the studio work they’ve made over the years but that “for now, pg will be on a more casual basis than you may have come to expect.”

That was before The Pinegrove shuffle took off on TikTok, amassing millions of views. The track was already gaining traction thanks to clips using the song to soundtrack incongruent or mundane footage. The song saw a 96% spike in streams during the end of May, just ahead of Garret’s viral dance video. Today, Pinegrove re-released “Need 2” as an EP on streaming platforms, including a sped-up and slowed version, perhaps in response to the viral furor.

Hall talked to Rolling Stone about going viral a few months after announcing a hiatus and what the Pinegrove shuffle might tell us about Gen Z. 

Tell me about how you first became aware of people using the song as a meme.
So we don’t have a TikTok, but people started kind of just sending it to me. At first, it was starting to gain some traction before the whole dance thing. People were just kind of throwing it on to soundtrack a nature montage or whatever, which I think our music is probably fairly well suited for. But then, when the dance hit, it was a totally different beast. The past few days have lost all sense of chronology, but it must have been just under a week now. And first I saw the first one, which was wonderful. Very strange and mesmerizing for anybody who hasn’t seen it. It’s a guy who’s doing like an angry octopus maneuver in rhythm with this kind of mid-tempo track.

It’s interesting that “Need 2” is from a record you made nearly a decade ago. Did that surprise you at all?
I mean, the whole thing is so strange because I recorded this song 10, 11 years ago. I put it out in 2014, I think originally just self-released on Bandcamp, and then was collected in 2015 for our album, Everything So Far, which we put out just before Cardinal. So it is really, in general, a massive surprise, and I’m not really sure why, but I’m thankful for it. I’m not positive why it’s connecting. I guess there’s sort of a slightly nihilistic bet to this song and that a lot of people are relating to that feeling right now.

The song only features a few lines, the most potent of which seems to be the chorus, “There’s nothing here to care about.” Can you talk about what you remember about writing this song and what the lyrics meant to you at the time? 
At that point, Pinegrove really didn’t have any listenership. We would show our friends the music, and as such, I was really writing for myself. I was really writing, completely unaware of an audience. And so I think I was just sort of bummed out, spaced out, bored, those classic early Green Day tropes. And then, too, this is really a song about songwriting ultimately, and just trying to spur myself on. I had a friend in Canada named Kenny, who wrote me a letter, snail mail, to say, ‘Hey, I really like this EP you guys put out, Ampersand. I would love to put out a cassette of this.’

And we were discussing what the A side and B side would be, and he wanted to just put the same thing on the B side. I was like, well, actually, what if I just write something new for the B side? And so my aim was to write something that was the same length as Ampersand, and that was sort of the only prompt. So I knew I had 12 minutes or 13 minutes or something. And as a result, there are a lot of pretty short songs on there because I guess I was like, okay, I don’t want to overshoot it, so I’ll just do a bunch of tiny songs, which I was interested in anyway at the time.

Basically, it’s the hardest job to compress all of these chaotic stimuli into something small, something bite size. And so I figured the smaller, the better. I was also reading a lot of Lydia Davis at the time, who’s known for flash fiction, I guess you could say, or prose poetry. So I was interested in writing songs that just had a single idea in them. And there are few lyrics in this song. It’s pretty much just like, okay, and here I am, a human on this earth; everything’s a little bit fucked right now, and yet I am compelled to make things. Why is that? Isn’t that strange? ‘Why do I seem to need to?’ So I guess that’s really the crucial line in the song. But all of the preamble is maybe relatable, but hopefully, the conclusion that the speaker comes to and the song is also relatable. Basically, it’s a challenging time, but there’s hope. And I meant that really just, it’s a challenging time for me right now, but there’s hope again, I wasn’t really intending to speak to anybody really with this tune, but I think that that’s maybe why it’s relating for people, because I was trying to be honest towards myself asking this question without any particular answer, but I guess the song itself is the answer.

It’s interesting that you mentioned challenging yourself to make a really short song because I feel like that’s also something that really resonates with younger audiences right now.
Yeah, that’s right. When I first started hearing about TikTok, I was like, okay, that’s sort of in line with some of my creative fixations also. I mean, again, I haven’t spent any time on TikTok. I just see TikTok reels three weeks later on Instagram like the rest of us millennials, but I am increasingly seeing the creative potential in it. I have a friend, Olivia Barton, who recently went viral on TikTok with her partner for the song “If I were a fish,” which I love so much. And that was the first time that I was like, okay, maybe there’s something actually really positive possible with this technology.

Talk about the decision to release “Need 2” as an EP, with the different versions of the song.
That, too, is something we did before TikTok, another kind of coincidental merging of artistic interests.  Pinegrove has always been really interested in revision and trying out different iterations of a song. Recording music is something that happens in time, and every time you play a song or every time you listen to a song, it has a different message and it’s a changed meaning. It’s a different person playing it or listening to it. And we have a history of re-releasing songs in live formats or just a demo version, a studio version, or a live version. If we have something new to say with the song, we’ll try it. And so, in line with that philosophy, I’ve always been interested in songs at different speeds. For instance, I was just listening to Hail to the Thief on vinyl, and my turntable has a tempo range controller, and just hearing songs in a slightly different tempo, it’s a different key. So for some unknown mystical reason, different keys hit the soul in different ways and at different speeds. If you’re conditioned to expect a beat to fall at a certain place, you have this internal clock. If you’ve listened to a song enough, that tells you to expect a moment at a certain time. And to disrupt that habit with a different speed is a very interesting way to listen to music, and undeniably when it’s fast, all of the moments are just happening in a shorter amount of time. So it’s a more potent listening experience if you can get past the chipmunk sounds. 

The viral dance is bringing a bunch of new fans to your music. What’s it like to see that kind of burst in attention?
I mean I like the internet and have gotten a lot of joy and entertainment and even, God forbid, some knowledge from the internet, but I also view it with skeptical eyes. And so when we started trending, it was like, okay, this is cool. Easy come, easy go. I’m going to try not to be obsessed with this. I mean, really, it’s just distracting me from reading Middlemarch, which I’m loving, but it’s just really long and kind of hard. And George Eliott expected her readers when she first published in 1871 to have a totally different sense of tempo and patience, really. And so it’s sort of strange. I’m trying my best to immerse myself in the world of this novel. And then something quite the opposite of patient narrative, something that’s extremely 21st century, is happening in my phone beside me and it’s tough to know what to do because I need my phone to look up words every now and then, so I can’t have it totally away from me. But then I just keep getting texts and getting distracted. My manager, my friends are like, yo, I saw this crazy shit.

So it’s safe to say you haven’t tried the dance yourself?
Oh, I’ve tried. It’s hard. It’s really hard. And the hands, that’s the hardest part.

Yeah. There’s a rhythm to it that it. I think that’s what makes it so transfixing.
It is very hypnotic. I’ve innovated my own private version of it, but this is, I think, a solo celebration. I’m not sure that I’m going to be posting it. This is just for friends and family.

You announced in April that things were going to slow down with the band. Does this change that? Have you guys had any conversations about maybe seizing this moment?
I mean, we’re all in our thirties. We’ve got other things that we want to be doing, and I’m going to be studying English in a grad program in the fall. So there are a lot of things that I’m doing my best to finish up before I go, but I’m really excited to do this. I’m sort of viewing it as a sabbatical, but it’s going to help me tell stories better.

Along with the re-release, are there any other plans for the near future?
Oh, well, I don’t know. We’re working on new stuff. We’re working on collating some old stuff. We’re not as active really as we have been. So it’s a really funny time for this to be happening, although of course, I welcome it. But yeah, there are going to be some audio releases soon. We are working on putting together a B-side album, just like from across our history, across our different recording sessions, stuff that didn’t make it onto albums for one reason or another. And then I’m working on some new songs too. I guess it’s maybe an ep, but this is something that’s still in progress. I don’t really know what form it’s going to take. But yeah, there’s going to be new music coming out.

And what would you have to say to the probably millions of kids who are going to get exposed to Pine Grove, maybe for the first time?
Writing songs is pretty easy. And the more people that do it and are supporting each other doing it, the better songs will come out of it. So give it a shot, start a band, put on shows in your living room or basement, and find people at your school interested in making music and get together, talk about it, and listen to albums together. All you need is a few chords. There are only a couple of chords in this song, really. It’s all about melody and what you’re trying to say. I hope there are some people who hear this and are like, damn, this guy recorded this by himself in his bedroom. I could do that.