Sticky-pinned: 2019 was our 30th anniversary as a band even though, because things have been on hiatus for most of the decade, there wasn’t much to-do about it at this end (like say, a series of shows at a now-gone Maxwell’s, for ex.). You can read more about those medieval beginnings here where typically late to my/our own party, I'll be posting a few things about music’s least-impressive 30-year run over the next week or so (that’s, um, January 2020).
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Fitting into the above stickied theme, because it has been 30 years, it’s hard to talk about almost anything involving band goings-on at anything more than a surface level w/o getting bogged down in backstory & decades of complicated, yet surprisingly uninteresting, band history. Relatedly, it’s been even slightly longer than that 30 years since the candid at the top of the page was snapped…*
I wrote much of the long unwieldy post below in 2013 and been meaning to post it for a while again but tellingly, the amount of editing & time I sometimes spend on these is both silly & indicative of one reason the records take so long (ha). So because today’s my birthday & I just wanna post it & get on w/ my life, I”m giving myself a break and just putting it up as-is, in three convenient travel sizes for your convenience (and interest): a Small, a Medium & an X-Large.
My gain is your loss. Unless you’re into word-counts. Then it’s win-win.
The Super Short of It
Because the involvement of everyone in the band has changed over the last 30 years (as the other band geeks continue on in real trad. careers) and more & more I’ve been doing the albums and stuff (most of the 4 years making the meadowlands & then business stuff the years immediately after), over time I’ve stopped using the pronoun “we” & just relaxed into an easier & more manageably accurate “I” just reflecting what things had evolved to.
But now, with this next record, that’s become again, as it was a long, long ago, no longer accurate - I’d like you to welcome (back) our newest productively recording band member, Kevin! (ha)...
The Sort of Short of It
Over 30 years, each band geek’s relationship to, & involvement in, the band has changed a lot. In the most ridiculously tiniest nutshell, in hindsight, I now realize it started being less of a band thing and more of me working on the records like a fool-on-a-stick, and really just by default, on the ep we did in 1997, to mostly disastrous effect. By the time recording the last record (meadowlands) moved past its initial 3 or 4 months of full-band involvement & tracking (so spring of 1999), more & more I took that over for the next 3 1/2 years of work (released 2003) and then w/ more managerial/business stuff after release. That made sense ‘cause I was more or less full-time, while the others were all steep into real career climbs etc.**
Still, at the same time (post-meadowlands), online & stuff, I twisted sentences like taffy trying to maintain talking “we” instead of “I”, in part ‘cause sometimes, of course, it still applied but also ‘cause that’s how it always had been and up to the meadowlands, was pretty accurate. But over the last 10 years I’ve gradually given that up and just use a more manageably accurate 1st person “I” now, in part again because making this album has been…not pleasant. And lonely.
But, the problem with my relatively late-adoption of the freeing 1st-person pronouns is that, with this record, especially in the first few years of work, it’s once again no longer wholly accurate. Odd as it prob. sounds, Kevin has re-stepped his game up to a Pro Bowl level, and doing his own recording & production now in his own studio, raising the bar again on the quality of & approach to songs and steering the overall direction of the record in a way, by his own admission, he hasn’t in exactly one long-ass time.
And in the early years of work on this one, there was a period of a few years (say, 2012-’14) when he would come over here, we’d compare recordings-in-progress, each try to help the other’s song to be its best, then each go home and try to beat it (ha).
So while this record is easily the least “band” record (i.e. no full-band assembly or playing of songs before recording etc.), from where I sit, with that sort of back-&-forth w/ he & I that we haven’t really enjoyed since the Secaucus years, it’s weirdly felt MORE like a band album than anything since that time. Again, to me. Which is good.
The Super Long of It
Please join me in extending a warm wren-welcome to our newest band member, one Kevin Whelan (ha***). Kevin hails from south Jersey, as we all do, and plays the piano very very well. He’s also a heck of a singer & songwriter, was at one time scouted by major league baseball and looks smart in a suit.
Ok, nonsense aside, it’s really more “welcome BACK" and even that needs qualifying & backstory. It also probably sounds weird since if you’ve ever seen us play live, you know that even if the singing of our collection of Billboard-topping hits splits pretty even, he’s very much the front person (and one of the greats (that’s me saying that (although probably him too - ha))). And of course, this whole endeavor is billed as a band to begin with - isn’t it four now-middle-aged white men sitting around a budget microphone in a basement in New Jersey tooling together iffy anthems of heartbreak & loss?
Welllll, no. Or at least not anymore. It was at one point****, through the ‘90s for the most part, but naturally & understandably the other three band geeks have, over time, moved on to full careers and we all have families now, have moved from our north Jersey enclave etc. etc. And related to this being tagged as another of the 30th anniversary posts, it’s in part, the flexibility within the band that allows for the evolving participation of band members over time, that has enabled us to keep the whole enterprise afloat for 30 years, even if that means periods of years like the last 10, seemingly adrift at sea (analogy hits rocks, founders).
As an indicator of the changing…work/roles, I guess, within the band, & put in the most bullet-pointed reduction poss., you could summarize the albums thusly:
Low 7” (1993): full-band operating at its best.
Silver (1994): full-band, operating at its worst.
Secaucus (1996): full-band operating at its best again.
Abbott EP (1997): full-band started, maybe not at its best, charles beginning to take over to finish, absolutely for the worse.
Meadowlands (2003): full-band started for a few months, charles works on & changes stuff for an additional 3 1/2 years*****, ultimately for the better.
So with that, the changing…I don’t know..means of production?...in the band, over the last 10 years esp., and esp. online, I’ve found myself gradually going from linguistically bending over backwards to word everything in an inclusive first-person-plural “we”, since that’s the umbrella had all always been under since the start, to just sorta giving in to a much easier & more manageably accurate “I”. In part, that shift to “I” just reflects what’s gone on here over the last 20 years or so, as we went from being the full-on band we started as in 1989 to more of me sitting here doing the records or the business stuff and then us learning the songs after the recording, as we’ve joked, as our own semi-pro wrens cover band.******
But a downside to that, to my relatively late-adoption of 1st-person pronouns in these last 10 years or so, is that what’s initially just a whole lotta charles (obscure Zep b-side), just by virtue of what the band set-up, division-of-labor have become etc., becomes even more so simply ‘cause it’s me on social media, the web site, etc. using my newfound 1st-person-singular pronouns. And those “I”s begin to add up in a way that isn’t, or is no longer with this album now, wholly accurate.
So how’s the division-of-labor w/ this next record different? Well, the bullet-pointed album summ. above would sorta cont. this way:
This next as-yet-untitled record (2020): no full-band at all this time, even for tracking, so me sitting here doing my thing, again for even more years this time (ha)*******. But crucially, and sorta the whole point here, with Kevin now also sitting in his own house this time, doing his own songs (ok, several years ago at this point (1/29/20), but still).
And even that probably sounds surprising since understandably, you probably picture us all together, shirtsleeves rolled up, neckties loosened, pointing to architectural renderings of the problem at hand like the back of a Tubes album, as we tackle the tricky third chorus to some song or other. But among other things, through the meadowlands, the pre-computer-recording equipment set-up (so mixer, multi-track ADATs, outboard gear etc.) made it increasingly difficult for any of the other band geeks to just walk in & fire up the tape to get an idea down********. So when Kevin got set up w/ Logic, an interface etc. a year or two before we started this record (so 2008 or ’09) he took to it fish/water-style & flew through a quick hundred-songs-worth of demos, which admittedly was intimidating. Several of them were also good (ZING!).
Then once we were fully under way with this one, there was a period of a few years - so say, 2012 to 2014 or ’15 - where Kevin would come over about once a week or so, we’d compare progress on our respective songs, each help the other make theirs as good as it possibly could be, then go home and try to beat it (ha). Then reconvene the next week & repeat. Sorta like playing a really avid game of chess against yourself and in that way, a throwback to a more idealized version of what we had had years ago, c. Secaucus.
So ironically enough, given that it’s always been one of the musical templates we’d look to for how to do an album, this record's sort of ended up being MADE in a more White Album-style as far as means-of-production goes (though with less litigation and fewer spouses on stretchers in the control room etc.). I.e. the two different (home) studios, mine & Kevin’s, concurrently working on mostly separate groups of songs etc.
Now, you’re risking sacrilege to compare your own band to the Beatles in any way whatsoever, even if you’re just talking workflow. And of course, unlike the Beatles, all our songs combined don’t quite add up to even one Why Don’t We Do It In The Road demo, but you can’t have everything in an analogy, especially if it involves the Beatles.
But more than that, and as anyone who’s attended one can attest, this is another thing I've blabbed on at length about in these ‘come hear the records’ thingies*********, it isn’t just about a return to productivity or whatever, Kevin's steered the direction of the record in a way that he hasn’t had as much of a hand in, by his own admission, prob. since Secaucus.
Initially, when recording began, I really had no idea what direction I wanted to go in, musically - some next step for the band? That always seems to either play out as an easy embrace of electronics (plugins, sampled drums etc.) or a semi-ironic genre adoption from the past (see the ‘80s, disco etc.).
Should it be a continuation of the last record (so more trad. rock instruments painstakingly written/overdubbed to create the illusion of a band playing songs that weren’t written yet in a room that never existed)..? Add to that that because I was immersed in making the transition to computer-based recording (from the meadowlands world of ADATs) the limitless options of plug-ins, virtual synths, track count, save-as versioning etc., meant that it all seemed to me, confusingly equally possible.
So at those initial weekly get-togethers, when we’d compare songs-in-progress, I was often either caught wearing some conservative pants in these situations as I went the second “follow the meadowlands” route:
Me: “hey, I added a new part to this chorus - it’s not just a guitar, it has reverb!”.
Kevin: “I tracked a series of rented glockenspiels in an oil drum I set up in the dining room, transposing the 2nd verse melody into interlocking 12-tone rows that I taught our two-year-old to play”.
And it sounded fucking awesome (me talking, not him. Actually probably him too).
Or actually more often, it was me trying to go the “stylistic next step” way with some unnecessarily foncy ponts parallel plug-in processing (in a phase-locked loop spread across the stereo spectrum via Haas delays..bla bla), and Kevin'd come in with a piano, beautifully played, nicely tracked and it'd just kill mine. Each time.
So in that way, in a very real way, he steered the direction of the record: real instruments, recorded in a real room etc. That didn't necessarily end up binding for the whole record and there was plenty of deviation in the end, but it didn’t have to & didn’t matter. The imposition of limitations being sometimes freeing, him doing great work, and in a relatively “real” way, did mark off the way forward, and crucially (esp. for me), right in the beginning.
So while this new one is less of a band record than even the last one (i.e. it’s the first one that didn’t even start with any songs put together or rehearsed as a band before recording), in a way, because Kevin & I were getting together pretty much weekly for a couple of years, it actually felt MORE “band”, again for me, than things had in a long time.
So welcome back to the band, Mr. Whelan. With each other at each other’s sides, I feel there's nothing we can not do. Except of course, finish the record [clang of cheap cymbal].
[tellingly, I wrote that zinger along with much of this in 2013, when I thought work was winding up [peals of laughter] even though I hadn’t even finished all my lyrics yet then - that alone took the whole of 2013 - let alone sung them.]
Let’s show the under-50 bands how it’s…[nods fwd. into blissful slumber..]
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NOTES:
*as an aside, in the heady 1980’s of my hometown of Ocean City, NJ, there was an ongoing party at the home of our friend and eterna-host Carl. And it was there, where we both served duty tours in the rotating membership of the house band, that I first met Kevin.
Pictured here, as much to shout them out are (R to L): me, with the hair of a god (the God of Self-Grown Cossack Hats). Kevin, as but a child. Tom Breene, then as now, probably the finest bass player I’ve known. And bottom left corner, the Ocean City (and south jersey) legend, Steve May, a true master of the Strat and a huge influence on me (I literally learned to play rhythm, to keep my strumming arm moving steadily up&down and propel & accent from there, by watching him. That came as a revelation years into my already playing the guitar. I’m also not what one would call a “natural”.
**although that division-of-labor thing, prob. common to a lot of bands, has admittedly caused a fair amount of problems, stress & issues over the subsequent years and is def. one of the factors that’s delayed the album, happily, we’ve been sorting out much of this the last year or so, all of which bodes well for this album and shows & music after that.
***relatedly to our 30th anniversary, and another way really of saying why this has all taken 30 years, I wrote most of this back in 2013.
****and will be again in part ‘cause I won’t do another one this way again (arranging, recording parts & songs AFTER they’re recorded rather than recording at least functionally completed songs to begin with), which yes, I said after the meadowlands but this time I really mean it. But also, more importantly maybe, that I do honestly think that’s what the other three want, that they wanna be more involved and do this in that way that becomes both easier & more clear as one gets older.
*****even that’s a generalization since there was a period after initial tracking when Kevin & I were working on some of his, so for ex., changing what started as a song called Miss Me and turning it into Boys, You Won’t etc. Still, as a generalization on the bulk of the final poop of the record - arrangements, guitars & basses, backing vocals, that sorta thing - it more or less covers it.
****** at least through the meadowlands & subsequent years but even that isn’t entirely the case either, since that record includes what I usually point to as our finest functioning-as-a-band everyone-contributing song, Happy. Still, as generalizations go, sorta covers it.
*******one of many reasons this one has taken 10 years to do.
******** the exception/example here, on the meadowlands at least, prob. Kevin’s finest - and truly solo - moment on the record, that last song, Not What You Had Planned. Those clunks you hear are him actually dragging the mic to the piano like a creatively inspired caveman caught up in the need to get some pigment onto the walls at Lascaux. It’s sort of a drunken miracle that was ever recorded.
********* which speaking of, footnotedly, there will be one last round of these beginning March, 2020.