I'm a Guitarist! Who Are You? An Ode...

Did you know that over 80% of self-identified musicians are guitarists?  Don’t believe me?  Good!  I just made that statistic up.

But, I don’t think we’d be wrong to say that my people, the guitarists, are the vast majority.  In fact, as anyone who’s ever tried to start a band in St. Louis can tell you, the percentage of musicians lugging a loaded six-string around this city is probably much higher than 80.  You’ve heard that joke, I’m sure—the one that goes, “What do you call a working guitarist?  A bassist!”  The music scene is so inundated with my kind, people actually have to play something different if they want to be in a band.  Hell, the first band I started here, LBJ and the Cosmos featured a guitarist, (Bob McMahon) on drums and a guitarist (Billy Croghan) on bass.

The guitar is ubiquitous for a reason; it’s DOPE!  It’s the every-instrument; therefore he who carries it is the everyman (which explains the appeal of your Jack Johnson type).  Its versatility is matched only by keyboard instruments, but the guitar is infinitely more portable and easier to set up.  Its five-octave range is perfect for accompanying a vocalist.  In fact, it’s one of the few instruments that you can play at a gig without any other accompaniment and not look like a jackass (because no one’s ever heard of One-Man One-Tuba sets). 

And yes, I guess you could do that with other stringed instruments.  But who wants to sit around a bar listening to a uke or a mandolin played by it’s lonesome?  Classical stringed instruments are out…your guitar leaves no need for complicated positioning of bows, though, as Jimmy Page proved, you can use one if you really want. 

Woodwind and brass instruments?  You like horns, girl?  I mean, that’s cool if that’s your thing.  I love Kenny G. too.  The guitar has one up on you, though.  Chords.  Yeah, try that with your trumpet.  And, you don’t have to blow into it, freeing you up to…I don’t know, sing a song or something.  And with the right effects, you can make it sound like literally ANYTHING including every horn ever conceived by man! 

Did I mention you can sing while you play it?

Oh, and I guess I left out percussionists.  I love you guys.  I like to dance.  I’ve even seen some good singing drummers.  But I’m afraid I have to give it to the six-string.  My acoustic can double as percussion.  Can your drum set play notes and chords?  Moving on.

Okay.  Have I effectively alienated every non-guitarist yet?  Have we established that all other instruments are William Hung compared to the mighty guitar?  So why doesn’t the guitar get the respect it deserves as the best of all instruments?

Well part of it is probably that the guitar is so popular. Every Joe Blow plays the guitar and they play it publicly, myself included, but only people who are kick-ass at the Sousaphone come outside and play that shit.  Personally, I like the democratic nature of the guitar, so I’m not tripping, but it creates a mindset that diminishes the brand.  The guitar is synonymous with pop-art.  It’s in 4 of every 5 songs on Top 40 radio.  It’s sort of the mass market fiction of the instrument world, whereas other instruments have the air of high art.

So, ubiquity can be a double-edged sword; everyone plays it because it’s awesome, but it’s so popular that it seems, well, pop.   As a result, people sleep on the guitar.

Now this is complete speculation, but I think this principle was displayed aptly when I tried to get a grant from the school district I work for to buy some guitars.  For those of you who don’t know, I moonlight as an eighth grade teacher and, a few months back, I decided to write a grant so that I could start an afterschool guitar club.  I asked for enough money to buy 7 inexpensive guitars so that I could run the club two days a week with 10-12 kids in each group assuming some had their own guitars. 

I didn’t get the grant.  They said it didn’t impact enough kids.  But, that line doesn’t quite add up.  Our librarian got a grant to buy 4 tablets and one of our science teachers got a grant to plant a garden or something.  How many kids are using those?  I’m willing to bet the few guitars that colleagues graciously donated that if I had been asking for violins or oboes or fucking pan flutes, I would have gotten the money to buy them.

But my little guitar club illustrates another point; it shows just how awesome the guitar is.  Because, despite the fact that the kids had to share guitars, that most of the time they were waiting to play instead of actually getting to play, most of the kids that signed up still came.  They still wanted to learn it.  They still thought it was cool. 

And that’s the thing.  The guitar gets to be trite pop and cool trailblazer at the same time.  It’s not like the clavichord, corny and old fashioned in every context.  It’s exactly what you make of it.  The very reason that there’s so many ways that people have come up with to play guitar shows the creativity musicians employ to avoid being labeled as conventional while playing this entirely conventional instrument.

So how can you gain respect and notoriety as a guitarist?  Well, if I knew the answer to that question, I would have done so by now.  But I’ll take a crack at it, and, since you’ve taken the time to read this far, I figure you’ll indulge me.

Moses playing my explorer at Plush.

Get On Stage- Alot

Ladies and gentlemen, Shawn Moses.  Moses is the guitarist in several acts, among them my new band, LBJ Quartet.  In his spare time, he likes to make friends by bogarting people's shows.  If Shawn Moses asks you if he can play with you while attending one of your shows, he means no harm.  He will likely make your set sound better.  He has a great ear, is a skilled technical guitarist, and is very tasteful with when to turn 'em loose and when to reign 'em in.  Perhaps most importantly, Shawn is doing what he should do if he wants to make a name for himself as a guitarist- showcasing his talent as often as possible in as diverse settings as possible.

I admire his pluck.  I played a lot of shows when I first started booking gigs around town, but I never played other people's shows.  The fact that he's so disarming that so many people agree to let him on stage never ceases to amaze me.  And I admire his skill.  Moses is a much better guitarist than I was when I started, and in a lot of ways, a much better guitarist than I am now.  And he's only going to get better, because he has the right approach.  You want to get really good and you want people to know it?  Set a goal to book 10 gigs a month, for a year.  That's what I did.

Get Out of the Box

Listen.  I love you.  I’m a fan.  But, you gotta stop covering “Wagon Wheel.”  It’s a fine song; we all like it.  But, you’re gonna have to let it go.  In fact, go on and google that list of 20 easy acoustic guitar songs, and put them all on your “never play” list.

If you’re gonna do covers, you need to get creative.  You need to play something people won’t expect.  Don’t play something that’s too obscure.  You might as well play originals in that case.  Instead, play something people would know and enjoy, but not necessarily expect in that format.  I like to work up songs written for keys on my acoustic.  I play The Zombies’ “Tell Her No,” or The Frey’s “Cable Car” and people really get into once they recognize it.  It creates a novel experience, which is ultimately the goal.  Hip-Hop songs are good to have in your back pocket.  One of the most memorable acoustic covers I’ve seen recently was Mark Eulalia’s Ying-Yang Twins cover at the last Open Mic @ Plush.

The immortal Robert Johnson.

Get Out of this Century

While your hunting for interesting covers, look into music that comes from the early part of the 20^th century.  The recordings are rough, the instruments are often poorly tuned, the rhythms are sometimes inconsistent and the lyrics indiscernible.  But you can hear it if you listen.  It’s the roots.  Learning these old blues, rag, folk, and gospel progression prepares you to play nearly everything that’s out there today.  Learning this stuff will make you a better songwriter and a better improvisational artist.  But these old tunes have more to teach than just structure.  You can learn a lot about playing with passion and abandon while keeping tight to a prescribed formula.  It’s amazing how those old guys and gals stuck so rigidly to the forms, yet were so free within them.  And the great thing about it is, these old tunes are so part and parcel to American culture that even though most of them are very obscure, they seem familiar.  You can play them and get the same head turning effect you get when you play a song people recognize but weren’t expecting.  Get you some Robert Johnson, I dare you not to dig it. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HleLTn60BxE)

Get Out of the Normal

I’ve been listening to Raul Midon lately.  The title track on the album my mother-in-law bought me for my birthday, “State of Mind”, is probably my favorite.  You should probably take a break from reading this and check it out really quickly. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzaClXAt3aY)  If that didn’t impress you, you might be beyond my powers to redeem.  Where he came up with the idea to that tap/strum/pop amalgamation of savage talent is entirely above my comprehension.  But you don’t have to be Raul for that.  There are people here getting just as weird.  Two local acts come to mind. 

Hard Way Son just sprung upon my consciousness this past Sunday.  Composed of three guys, one playing bongos and two playing acoustic guitar, each guitarist adding percussion, one with a foot on a kick drum, the other the high hat, these guys hit you with everything good about the new folk revivalism represented by bands like Mumford and Sons and The Lumineers.  In a particular song of theirs, the lead guitarist airs out some killer, free-form, Middle-Eastern sounding licks, while the rhythm guitarist, right hand moving at light speed, taps out a progression with his left that’s as much percussive as melodic.  Impressive.  Avant garde.  Most importantly, just good music.

Potions started playing shoes not long ago.  It is the brainchild of mad man Britt Lockhart.  Loud and fast jazz/rock, indecipherable croons and shouts barely audible under the sheer volume of the band, sounds like its coming from way more than just two guys.  But it’s just Britt and his drummer.  And most of the time Britt’s not even strumming.  He’s tapping and dragging, somehow making his guitar sound like it’s bass and lead at the same time.  Just incredible.  And so very weird.

Get Out 

Who am I kidding, man?  The first idea was the best.  Wanna be marketable?  Just play something else. 

All kidding aside though, as much as I love guitar, it’s always a good time to be a multi-instrumentalist.  I think of one of my favorite new guys on the scene right now, Daniel Dwyer, whose EP you must buy-er (guffaw guffaw).  This kid, at 17 mind you, will play keys, mandolin, and trumpet all in the same damn song.  He’s also going to sing somewhere in there, and if need be, go crank out a drum beat and maybe throw down a scratch track on y’all to boot.  He’s going to do all of this and not pick up a guitar.  So for all you non-guitarists out there, though there aren’t many, there is hope—because the next best thing to playing guitar is playing everything else. 

But for all of us who decide to stay on the road more traveled, at the risk of being ordinary, mediocre, and overlooked, I say we have a unique opportunity.  The fact that all us Joe Blows are banging around on this thing, making similar noises, running the risk of being consumed in one lackluster unison, offers us a chance to rise to the occasion.  Because in this crowded environment, the true artist finds ways to stretch the boundaries, so that his noise is heard above the rest—ways to be different even while playing the most played instrument of all.  I guess, what I’m saying is, if there were only one guitarist in this town, he wouldn’t be very good.  It’s the critical mass that brings about so much creativity.

So in the end, I guess this ode is to all the other guitarists out there, and indeed everyone playing whatever axe.  Thank you for making me look bad, making me work harder, and inspiring me.  Thanks for making me a better musician.

Swan Song

It’s funny. 

Antics from DJ Baqbeet and LBJ

 The open mic feels very much like the biggest contribution I’ve made to this scene to date.  I’ve gotten such good feedback and such positive vibes from so many of you about what we’ve been doing.  Yet somehow, as this thing draws to a close, I can’t help but feel a little… anxious maybe.

Open Mic Nights exist in this weird space between karaoke and a booked performance—a space carved out for folks aspiring to be true performers but still developing the chops, experience, or connections.  The distinction between karaoke and open mics are totally lost on many people, non-musician people like my neighbor Joe who, early on in my St. Louis music career, would sit out late and ask me, “How was karaoke?” when I returned, toting my gig bag, from an open mic.  Open mics are how the new, untested artist spreads his wings, gets his sea-legs, or whatever metaphor you want to use for gaining experience.  Don’t believe that.  Check out LBJ just 2 years ago at his FIRST open mic outing, a week into moving to St. Louis, courtesy of Craig Deeken (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcsV1hRylkM).

Scared?  You bet.  Awkward?  Extremely.  Having the time of my life?  Don’t sleep on me!

If you’ve seen me lately, you know I’ve improved (I hope).  That started with hitting these open mics hard.  Not only that, I would have had a really tough time meeting, oh I don’t know, EVERYONE I KNOW in the music scene, had my devotion to the open mic been less dogged.  Everyone I’ve done a project with, nearly every musician who’s asked me to be on a bill, the co-founders of St. Louis Songwriters Anonymous, even Dan and Jelani, I met at open mics.

Dr. Dan, the pancake man.

Devotion?  Yeah, that.  With the exception of a few outlying venues and some newer events, I’ve been a repeat offender at nearly every open mic in and around this city.  And for the most part, every one of them is a ball and worth attending, each in its own way.  But, other than Plush, I’ve been to very few where the hosts are routinely taking pictures and video (Wesley’s gig at Joanie’s, which you should check out, is the only one I can think of).  I’ve been to even fewer where the hosts conduct onstage interviews.  Only two, The Shed at Gramophone on Mondays and Hwy 61 Roadhouse in Webster Grove on Tuesdays, have a full backline that enables open jam.  And I don’t think I’ve ever seen another one where the hosts offer free studio time and slots on an internet radio show. 

I guess what I’m saying is, open mic might have been a little bit of a misnomer.  We’re more like a once a week community rec center for aspiring artists.  

You guys have been phenomenal.  The energy, the support, the sheer attention paid to each act—you don’t get that everywhere you go.  And that’s not something that Dan, Jelani, and I had a lot of control over.  We just did our song and dance, clowned around and rolled the dice.  You guys made stuff happen.  It was a positive experience every time we took the stage.  And the things that people made happen, the connections made, the projects embarked on and content created, I’ve extolled at great length and need not elaborate here.  You made my day; you made this thing worth doing every week.

So, I guess what has me anxious is, what happens now?  Where will you go?  Where will the next IQ and Daniel Dwyer meet?  Where will a mastermind like Darian Wigfall meet a prodigy like Darris Robins and set out to take over the scene together?  Where will Freevibe get funky every Sunday?

Jamming with our first featured artist, Bongo Jak. Mike on drums.

 Maybe it just seems like it to me because I was in the middle and my typical vantage point has been from the perimeter, but a lot of awesome talent converged on our little corner of the city.  

On Sunday, April 28^th, we sing our last song, but don’t let that be yours.  Do what I did.  Hit the scene.  Schedule to meet up with the friends you’ve made at the Shanti or Foam or Pop’s Blue Moon.  Meet new folks to jam with at The Shed at Gramophone, Hwy 61, or the acoustic jam at Handlebar.  Get your chops and expand your circle.

It’s your scene.

Plush Pulled the Plug

Let me tell you a little story. 

In the summer of last year, I was in talks with several venues, Plush among them, about putting on a benefit concert for Teach For America.  Plush’s offer was by far the most generous, to their credit, so we booked a date in September with them.  However, when we were in the planning stages (booking bands, reaching out to alcohol sponsors, making flyers) I was informed that we had been double booked with a touring band and that my benefit was getting the boot.   Guess giving $5,000 to some teachers isn’t as cool as the $1,000 Plush might have made on the touring band.

“Get me once” right?  Shame on you.

I failed to learn the correct lesson from that experience because I was caught in the throes of what I thought was, and what proved to be, a great idea.  It was at this time that I first conceived of hosting a Sunday, mid-day open mic at Plush.  Now, eight months later, Plush has pulled the plug on me once again.  Shame on me.

Seems we weren’t making enough money to justify continuing the free service we were providing there.  And even though our last event before the hiatus, where Darris Robins graced the stage, had attendance better than some of the shows I’ve attended at Plush, we can’t make a reasonable assumption that three plucky upstarts can make good on this thing with no advertising budget, no media support, and no money to get either of those things.  All hail the bottom line, and the scene be damned, right?

Now, I don’t blame the management at Plush for their shortsightedness nearly as much as I blame myself for this “Gotcha twice” moment I’ve found myself in.  Plush has legitimately decided that they will close at 3pm on Sundays to save money.  Now that we’re running AC again, the bar doesn’t make enough during my open mic to justify keeping the lights on.  That’s the sorry state of business in St. Louis, I’m afraid.  They are a business; they do have to make money, or at least not hemorrhage it.  It’s not their responsibility to see when they’ve got something truly magical on their hands.  Magic doesn’t always make money right away.  That’s why no first year magicians drive Bentleys.

But it was magic.  I was a little nervous about pissing off some of my friends when Dan started calling it “the best open mic in town.”  But fuck it.  It’s the best open mic in town.  Why?  Because people are meeting for the first time at this open mic, and then making shit happen.  Plushies (this is the last time I’ll use this term) are creating tracks together, booking shows together, joining bands together, releasing EPs, and releasing minds from captivity (yeah, yours).  By virtue of the Sunday evening, 4-8p format, we were able to bring together working adults and high school kids, ganja loving jam bands with hip hop hustlers, music lovers with music creators, and people who are always on the scene with people who can’t find any other time to break into it.  And Plush has got the nerve to offer me Tuesday.  You can go to Highway 61 or the Shanti if you want a Tuesday.  That’s not what this is.  This is something different.  You just don’t get it.

I come away from this experience grateful for having had it.  I strengthened my relationship with two guys who I will consider among my best friends for the rest of my life.  I met some of the most talented and driven people this side of the Mississippi and I gave them a platform to play.  At Plush, we enabled the formation of bands, collaborations, concert bills and jam circles.  We saw organic, spontaneous, creation WEEKLY.  And my skill as a guitarist and a performer went into overdrive.  It has been as valuable as anything else I’ve ever done as an artist and I am grateful for having had that opportunity.

Here are the things I’m not grateful for. 

I’m not grateful for having been ignored by the press in this city that claims to be on the side of the local act, the upstart, the do it yourselfer, the guy busting his ass; all of which I’ve been in this city for 2 years now.  I understand not covering all my little concerts, showcases and residencies.  But the open mic was something that deserved, that demanded attention.  NOTHING.  RFT, Eleven, KDHX have all ignored what we’re doing at Plush.  Though some coverage might not have saved us, it sure wouldn’t have hurt.  My friend, John Krane, the first guy in this town ever to offer to record me, a guy I’ve played shows with, wrote an article on open mics in this town and left out Plush.  I don’t think he meant any harm by it but his omission illustrates how thoroughly our little thing has been swept under the rug by the hip opinion makers in this town.

I don’t like that Plush agreed to renew us through June and then pulled the rug out from under us by email after one “slow” week.  Honestly, I thought I had some time to build momentum again.  Our first event back in November wasn’t a show stopper.  There were a lot more people out last Sunday than at the first event, hands down.  Matter of fact, Jelani and I had to play for at least an hour that night, sign up was so slow.  But we had the opportunity to get it rolling free of the fear of the chopping block.  I thought we had the same opportunity, which we need in the light of the kind of media support we get.  We’re an organic operation, fueled by the power of the flyer, the facebook event and good old fashioned word of mouth.  Had I known we were living week to week, I might have started putting up my flyers earlier or maybe asked Dan to reach out to Evan Sult again.

I don’t like that they’re going to have their Tuesday open mic, and maybe get some business, and maybe even pay their host (good luck finding another group of dipshits like the three of us to do it for free).  I’ve avoided the “Get me thrice” option and bowed out of that game.  If Plush will deal with me after this blog, which I don’t think has been too scathing against them, but people are sensitive around here, I’d be glad to do a show there sometime.  But never anything ongoing.  They are too unpredictable, too likely to just up and do something entirely different.  It’s best that we part ways  Because I think the full saying goes, “Get me once, shame on me; Get me twice, shame on me.  Get me three times, fuck er’body!”

But I do like you!  So come check out the LAST open mic @ Plush that we're putting on.  4-8p on April 28th.  After that, Dan, Jelani and I have cool things in the works.  Stay tuned kids.  We got something for you!

21ish Questions with Bryan Ranney of Following the Water

If you go to the Venice Café on Tuesday nights, you have a 50% chance of walking in on an evening with Bryan Ranney.  In fact, Bryan is a busy working musician in St. Louis between teaching lessons, raising a toddler, gigging solo and playing multiple bands.  One of those bands, Following the Water, the joint brain child of Bryan (guitar, mandolin, vocals) and Sean Bennight (guitar, vocals) will be releasing their debut album in roughly 12 hours from this very post.  This past Wednesday, May 30^th, Bryan and I met at Hartford Coffee to talk a little bit about his music and influences, the album and its creation, the St. Louis music scene and his personal creative philosophy.

A St. Louis Sound

LB- We’ll get started with the most inane question an artist can possibly answer.  Who would you say that Following the Water sounds like?  If you had to compare yourself to something what would it be?

Bryan Ranney- Well that’s a pretty awful question.  Way to get the interview flowing with that one. 

I like to start things off by completely derailing things.

Bryan- (Laughs) I don’t know what we sound like.  I know what I like to listen to and I know what I like to play.  I don’t know that that makes us sound like anybody in particular.  I think an interesting thing about being a musician in St. Louis is that you have an opportunity to be around so much fantastic blues and jazz and alt-country and hip hop and the genre list goes on and on—the great folk music here.  And everyone listens to each other if you’re out and about playing and you can’t help but to have that sort of creep into your sound.  I think more so than I expected I sound like some of my compatriots about town.  They brought me in… they lured me.  Something about that blues thing creeps on in.

I don’t know if you guys do this in your set, but I’ve seen you do ‘The Thrill is Gone’ a couple of times.  So it’s like you were talking about—the blues creeping in.

Bryan- That one is because Sean totally digs that tune.  I don’t even know if he’s mimicking someone’s version of that in particular because I don’t think we do it like BB King particularly…

It’s pretty unique.  In fact, I do a cover of that now and yours influenced mine.

Bryan- Oh did it?  Awesome.  Yeah, I just like jamming to A-minor blues tunes.  That’s all there is to that.

A Brief History

So I know you play a lot of music.  You have your thing you do on Tuesday at the Venice and you have Elemental Shakedown.  I just wanted to hear a little bit about your musical back story before Following the Water.

Bryan- My dad is a singer songwriter who plays around town.  My mom is a singer songwriter.  My aunt is a singer songwriter.  My uncle plays the mandolin with a bunch of impressive bluegrass people out west.  My other uncle plays the piano around town. And they all had friends who would come over to my parents’ house and sit around in big circles and play guitar, sing songs and harmonize.  So there’d be 13 guitars in the living room. That’s pretty much the image I get when I think of my childhood.  And that’s sort of like the event based big deal thing of it but even on a daily basis my immediate family—my parents, my brothers and I—communicated with music in a big way.  It’s our point of reference for one another’s lives.  It’s the medium for our conversation.  For me it’s not about having made a choice to play music.  It’s something that was always present and then it was just an artistic choice to present my career in that way.

How did Following the Water come about?  How long have you been together?  How did it start up?

Bryan- Funny you should ask me.  We’ve been together 4 years today.  Our first gig ago was 4 years ago, 2008, May 30^th.  We opened for Brewer and Shipley at the Focal Point, which is why we came up with the name.  We knew we needed a name cause we had that gig.  So Sean had written this song called Drifting.  We went over it to spruce up the chorus a little, fiddled around in the verses.  We just changed the chorus very slightly.  I remember it having a really powerful hook and wanting to work on it right away.  We wanted this concrete image to come in and I wanted it to be related to water because the song was about drifting.  I was picturing floating down the stream or floating through the ocean waves.  Came up with following the lake, following the stream, following the water.  I was like we need something like following the water, so somebody said, ”How about following the water.”  Then we needed a band name the next week.  That was kind of the first line we wrote together—our first co-creation—so that became the name of the band.  Seemed appropriate.  And whenever we say the name of the band to people they go “Oh.”  I don’t know what they’re thinking when they say that but that’s what they do.

It’s very profound.

Bryan- Oh, is it?  I guess.  I like it.  Other people seem to like thinking about it.  So that’s good enough for me.

That’s the most important thing—that other people like it!

Bryan- That’s the number one thing.  If I’ve learned anything about being an artist it’s that you should make sure that everybody always likes what you’re doing.

So you guys, in the last four years have played a lot around town.  Just rattle off some of the places you’ve played.

Bryan- We play the Venice Café, the Shanti, Beatniks out in New Town, St. Charles, Off Broadway, El Lenador.  That’s the bulk of it I’d say.  There’ve been some other spots too.  We’ve played in Belleville here and there.  We’ve played at the New Ground Floor. Gone out of town a little bit.  We play at the TOCO Festival every year, which is a big event for us.  We played at the Festival in the Clouds out in Alma, Colorado last summer.  We’ve done a few dates with the Bottoms Up Blues Gang.  I can definitely tell you we’ve spent at least 90% of our time in 63118.  Just can’t get out of that zip code.

Is there any venue that you’re partial to—that you really love to play?

Bryan- I’ve got to say the Venice Café.  It’s just a beautiful place to make music—just a wonderful, inspirational place just to hang out.  The people are just so open—your audience is so naturally receptive there.  The room itself does something to the people there.  And that’s not even any sonic quality in particular, not that there’s a bad sound to the room, but it’s really more about the visual experience.  It’s like playing in a sculpture.  But, there are a lot of great spots around town.  We’ve enjoyed our time at the Shanti very much.  I’m doing so many solo gigs at the Venice right now, that really is what comes to mind right away.

 When I first met you, you were gearing up to go to Colorado.  Where else have you guys been expanding your footprint beyond St. Louis?

Bryan- We went down to that Walnut Valley Bluegrass Festival in Winfield, Kansas one year and passed through Kansas City.  We’ve played a little bit here and there.  We haven’t toured extensively because we haven’t had a record.  So now that we have that and can be more focused on having that additional revenue stream it’s a little more feasible to be out and about and have something to hand to people.

So before it was more just playing wherever I go.  I play whenever I go somewhere, and whenever I go somewhere, I play there.  And whenever Sean and I have traveled together, we’ve played together.

I went to Milwaukee and auditioned for American Idol maybe two summers ago.  I was about to be too old and my wife was like “You gotta do it.”  It was the most fun I ever had standing in line.  But I was up there so I played a show.  I just like to do that.  Whenever I know I’m gonna go somewhere I like to go be among the people and sing a little bit.  And Sean has a very similar attitude.

Creating a Sound

Following the Water is officially just you and Sean.  So, unofficially who else are you working with to fill out the live sound?  Who appears on the album?

Bryan- We made the record with Billy Engle who has got a great studio, and more importantly is just a very skilled engineer with a lot of experience and a great personality.  It’s just easy to be very comfortable with him.  I’ve spent a little bit of time with him when he did my family's records.  And just the quality that he gets is pretty astounding.  He plays pedal steel on the record.  He’s a really prolific player at large; he blows me away.  He plays some bass for us too on there.  Alyssa Avery from Elemental Shakedown plays violin on a couple of tracks.  Adam Andrews who plays around town with Bryan Currann and the Bottoms Up Blues Gang played some harmonica.  Matt Reyland who plays with Stank Nasty and Ellen the Felon.  Miles Long from the Venice Café open mic.  And my brother Stephen plays the bass on a couple tracks.  It was sort of an organic process.  We did a few sessions with Matt and Stephen and then we worked on it a bunch without anybody and then we did one session with Miles, rounded out the rhythm tracks, and then added in some nice lead players at the end there with Alyssa and Adam.

Who are you using live?

Bryan- At the CD release party on Sunday all of those people will be playing.  Live it could be anybody.  We change the line up based on the nature of the gig.  We base it off of the duo and then we play with it from there.

What do you draw inspiration from?  This could be musical influences or it could be what inspires you to write music and lyrics as you write them.

Bryan- I don’t know, ultimately.  I have a fairly spiritual outlook on it.  I have a process that I do on a daily basis to make art in general.  I write in a journal and I try to do creative thing on a daily basis, sometimes that’s writing a song, sometimes that painting a picture, sometimes that’s playing with my son.  He’s just one big ball of creative energy of course.  I don’t know where the songs start really.  Sometimes it’s a melody, sometimes it’s a rhythm, sometimes it’s an idea.  You start with one or the other and the other elements just show up as I start to work.

That’s sort of like the epic question.  Everyone’s trying to figure out where they get inspiration from and how to make it kick in when they want it to…But I really think that inspiration is mostly something that you should not worry about so much as try to just encourage generally.  I think if we have everything flowing it’ll work itself out.  It’s just like getting your groceries when it comes down to it…certainly there’s a miraculous element but you really have to engage in the mundane to make it work too.

The Album

I want to shift to talking more specifically about the album.  You’ve already talked a lot about the instrumentation and who has appeared on the album.  What should people expect from the album?  Is it like what you do live?  More grand?  More minimalist?

Bryan- It’s pretty similar to what we do live.  It sounds like us.  Tonally it’s very similar to what we’ve been doing live lately.  If someone’s reading this a year or two from now, that might be out the window.  But we’ve been working with these particular tones and sounds and used them to make the record too.

I hope that people can view it as a story with a beginning, middle, and end.  We tried to really construct it in a conceptual way—to make a little emotional story.  It starts off with ‘Already and Ever After.’  The first line is “Déjà vu, I think I’ve been here before,” which is really fun after you get to the end of the record if you’re listening to it on a CD player that starts over from the beginning.

There are a lot of songs about fighting, drunken fighting especially.  There’s a little motif called ‘Stick in the Mud’.  Then ‘This Town’ is about fighting.  And then after that comes ‘Drifting’ which is also about fighting.  There’s a lot of that conflict element in it.  And a lot of it is coming of age tunes we’ve been writing since we were teenagers.  

The record is called ‘Confluence Blue’,  Confluence is the flowing together of water, the coming together of ideas and people.  And then Blue is a color… a very moody color.  When you combine these ideas and people in this place you get this feeling.

How many tracks are on the album?

Bryan- Eleven.  Comes in at about 42 minutes 20 seconds.

Talk to me about the album release party.

Bryan- It’s at Off Broadway, this Sunday, June the 3^rd, at 2:00pm.  The show will be opened by Pierce Crask of The Falling Martins.  He’ll just be performing solo, doing a bunch of his original tunes.  He’ll play for about an hour.  Then after that, we’ll have a rendition of what the record sounds like with all the players who played on it including Billy Engle, Alyssa Avery, Adam Andrews, Stephen Ranney, Miles Long, Matt Reyland, Sean Bennight and myself.  We are collecting canned food at the door.  You can get half off your ticket price if you bring three cans of food.  Or if you just want to donate too, that’s great.  That’ll be going to St. Louis Area food bank.  We’ll have a bunch of merchandise for sale—fun, new Following the Water stuff no one has ever seen before.  We’ve got a print maker on board named Stepjen Kuppinger.  I’m just a huge fan of his work.  We’ve been friends for a long time and he’s making the CD cases himself.  He’s printing them each individually so they’ll be a unique piece of art and numbering them by edition.

Did he design each cover?

Bryan- Yeah!

The mentioned emblem.  Following the Water's first sticker design.

Did he also do your emblem?

Bryan- No that was Julie Burge back when we were doing that El Lenador show last year.  She came up with a poster design for us and we based that theme off of that poster.

You guys have been together four years.  Why release the album now?  Why not earlier or later for that matter?

Bryan- If I had an answer for that, it’d be a different world.  It just took us a while to figure out how to do it.  We’ve been recording over the course of the last four years.  We did a demoing process.  We continued to develop the songs live.  At a certain point it became the highest priority so we got in the studio and made the record.  We’ve spent about the last year on it in the studio recording.  I guess that gives us three years of pre-production.  Yeah, it was just time.  Time to get the ideas down so we can move on.  And part of it was just to allow ourselves to finish it.  You know, it’s so easy to become a perfectionist.  Ultimately, perfectionism is just an excuse not to do any work.

What’s your favorite track on the album?

Bryan- It keeps changing as I listen to it more and more.  I can tell you the moment that I’m enjoying the most on the album right now is the end of “There was a Time”.  There’s a certain dramatic swell of violin, chaos, and drums, vocals.  I’m pretty happy with that right now.  It makes me feel good when I listen to it because it’s so dark and depressing.  I like it.

The St. Louis Scene

As I understand it, you’re a life-long St. Louisan, correct? 

Bryan- Yeah, I was born at Forest Park Hospital there when it was Deaconess right off of Highway 40 and I live a mile from there now, less than a mile probably.  Which is also 5 blocks from where my great grandfather lived.  So, we haven’t made it very far generationally on my little line of the family tree.  Yeah, but, I lived in Chicago for a few years and I spent some time in Columbia, MO, but, yeah, St. Louis!

As a person who’s lived here most of your life, and who’s been involved in music here a lot of your life—I’m hearing a lot now about this being a special time, that something’s happening in the music scene—do you feel like that’s accurate?  If so, what’s happening and why?

Bryan- Having never existed in any other time, it’s difficult for me to make that judgment, but yes I hear that buzz as well.  I wonder if everybody in every scene—that isn’t already Austin or New Orleans or New York, Chicago, LA—doesn’t feel something similar to that.  I’m almost hesitant to discuss that.  I feel like this might be an underground conversation not ready for the public forum yet.  I’d hate to show our cards too early. 

But there are a lot of people in town who do really good work.  I mean you can wander into a corner pub and have your face melted off by some of the most amazing players I’ve ever seen in St. Louis.  If you don’t know to look for it, you won’t see it.  But if you keep your ear to the ground…I mean there are some incognito people who are super stars… literally rock stars who live right here.  And the people who are working the pubs and playing the bar scene and playing the club scene and the people who tour from here are of the highest caliber that I have run into any other place.

Do you feel like the scene has changed much at all since you first started playing around town?

Bryan- It’s hard for me to say.  I just sort of immerged somewhat.  I only just now kind of know my way around.  I don’t know that I have enough perspective to make that call.  It’s nice to see Pokey [LaFarge] doing well.  And it’s nice to have run into so many people who are working so hard and playing so hard and who really get it.  It’s something that as a teenager you feel isolated and you don’t ever expect to run into anybody who thinks just how you do and wants to do just what you do, but I’ve had that experience over and over again here.  And I learn so much for the people who are working here, who’ve been doing it longer than I have, who have different ideas than I have.  Everybody does it just a little differently.

It’s a confluence.

Bryan- It is a confluence.  You’re on to me.

Bryan’s Playlist

I don’t like to stay too deep for too long, so let’s get back to something just a little bit silly.  Who are you listening to right now?

Bryan- My students have me listening to ‘You Don’t Know You’re Beautiful’ by One Direction.  So that’s probably the most horrible answer I can give.  It’s a much better song than that other one…let’s not talk about that.  I’m still really digging on that Wood Brothers record that came out a year or two now.  I listen to a lot of Jack White.  I think he’s just on top of his game.  Pretty much anything he’s touched I’m now going back and trying to listen to all of it—exploring him in reverse just because he blows me away every time.  I’m finding out songs that I love are written by him and I’m like “Oh, of course.”

I wanted to ask you about local musicians?

Bryan- I’m a big fan of the Bottoms Up Blues Gang record “Handle It”.   I love that record.  Tony Esterly engineered it and Jeremy Carry and Adam and the whole gang—so many great people on that record, Benny Smith, the late, great.  Fred Friction’s record that came out last year, “Jesus Drank Wine”, I absolutely love.  Aaron Kamm and the One Drops keep putting out good records. 

It’s so cool to know people and to really like their record.  I’m not listening to it just because I know you, but because I like your record.

 

More Info

Last question—this is the promotional question—where can people find out more about Following the Water?

Bryan- We have followingthewater.com. It is brimming with information of course.  And if you come out to one of our shows, we can tell you a lot more too.

The Barons of Tang are Here

Word association is a powerful thing.  Before last night whenever I heard the word ‘tang’ the first think that came to mind was the orange, just-add-water refreshment created for astronauts and kept in business by working mothers for whom the powdered drink was a more practical solution than actual fruit juice.  But my mental landscape was changed for good, the meaning of ‘tang’ forever re-established, when I stepped into El Lenador last night. The Barons of Tang had taken stage.

Imagine the scene.  The stage at El Lenador is essentially just a platform for the drum kit around which all the other musicians set up.  So, around this small stage, you have six musicians in addition to the drummer, and they are energetic, theatrical, and masterful at their own particular brand of off kilter presentation.  Between pulling off beautiful duets and solos, the horn section, Anna—alto sax and trombone— and Aviva—clarinet and bass sax—danced and jumped about.  Anna jabbed at the air with her instrument as if fighting of some invisible monster. Julian, the bassist and lead singer, slaps his upright and growls the lyrics in his thick Australian accent.  Annie bounced from bongos and congas to corbel and an array of cymbals, adding perfectly timed flurries of percussive virtuosity to Sean’s steady thunder on the kit.  Occasionally the entire band shouts lyrics slightly off cadence from one another creating the exact kind of riotous cacophony they seem bent on inciting. Carlos’ accordion and Jules’ electric guitar made for a melodic glue for otherwise disparate sounds. In a word, magnificent.   It was magnificent to behold.

This is the type of band that breaks up the regular boxes we put music into and makes you ask what exactly you’re experiencing.  At one point, I hit the bar and turned to Johnny Vegas, the man behind the mayhem at El Lenador , and asked him “What is this?”  A guy next to me overheard.  “It’s hipster punk,” he said. 

I see where he got punk.  The energy of the band certainly reminds you of a punk act doing it well.  And there was an element of ‘hipster chic’ to the band’s look and presentation.  Still, I didn’t quite agree with his characterization of the sound.  There was much more to it than that.  There were elements of the big band jazz of the early 20^th century, a strong folk influence, bits and pieces of prog rockers like Frank Zappa and Jethro Tull.   In short, the music defies simple explanation and conventional labels.  The Barons are exciting precisely because they bend and resist the normal constraints of genre and in doing so create something entirely new.  On their website (http://www.thebaronsoftang.com/) they call their style Gypsy Deathcore.  Something gets lost even in that description though as this music, in my opinion, is accessible to a far broader swath of people than deathcore typically is (perhaps it’s the gypsy part).

The best way to understand what I’ve been rambling about above is to get out and see the band.  If you’re reading this within a reasonable time of when I’m posting it, you’re in luck.  The Barons of Tang are in town for one more night and they are playing at 9pm at the Black Bear Bakery (http://blackbearbakery.org/), 2639 Cherokee St., St. Louis 63118.  Be sure to get out and see them or you’ve missed the show of your life