Many casual rock fans get stuck on this poser: name the band who were greatly influenced by both Bob Dylan and The Beatles, and in turn had major influence on Bob Dylan and The Beatles. The answer is The Byrds. Similarly, another ’60s-born Southern California-based outfit led several lives, one that is extremely more commercially popular than the others, but those lesser-known years irrevocably changed the language of pop music.

Appearing: May 21st and 22nd at Chicago Theatre (175 N. State) in Chicago.

They are The Beach Boys.

To this day, an astounding number of Americans are unfamiliar with Pet Sounds, a recording reverently hailed by critics as one of the most important of all time. If you troll its comments section in Apple’s iTunes music store, you’d frequently read those of Beatles fans who write something akin to, “I bought this because I read that Paul McCartney wrote most of Sgt. Pepper’s in admiration of it.”

Consequently, an army of self-styled “serious” listeners ignore The Beach Boys’ early hits — as they do The Beatles’ — believing Pet Sounds and its besieged, ultimately released (in 2004) successor Smile are the band’s true legacy. Because Brian Wilson was central to those albums, those cognoscenti then err by clipping their Beach Boys’ collections when Wilson’s drug use and mental instability drove him into seclusion, and they are comically unaware of albums like Sunflower, when the rest of the band blossomed.

“I would say the reason we’re here is because the early stuff is taken so incredibly seriously,” says Bruce Johnston. “I’d say it’s the reverse. I think people get a little itchy and antsy when [on tour, Mike Love and I] try to go deep. The problem music, I think, is the deeper stuff. The whole world knows the early stuff.

“But let’s not go there,” he pauses. “Here’s how it should sound: Hearing it all is the better choice.”

And so you shall have it. For their 50th anniversary — allegedly the first American rock group to reach the milestone — Johnston, Love, Brian Wilson, and Al Jardine are touring one last time, so people can hear the full spectacle from “Surfin’” to a new album, That’s Why God Made The Radio, due June 5th.

The official launch was at the Grammys this winter, and Wilson says, “Just recently we decided to do the tour. We’re doing most of the Beach Boys’ classics. There are some that aren’t as classic,” he kids, “but they’re good tunes.”

“This configuration,” Johnston starts, “people have a great interest in the depth that [Brian] created, and you get it at his concert. He’s kind of like Burt Bacharach: he’s this all-purpose guy from the music business who did everything. Here’s this amazing talent on stage who wrote, produced, and arranged it, and did all the stuff. And he can get away with some really interesting tracks. When Mike and I go out — other than when we play with symphonies — we keep it a little lighter.”

But surely Love and Johnston don’t need Wilson along to dabble in Pet Sounds, and he admits that the pair cover more than half of the album when hitting the likes of Ravinia each summer.

“He doesn’t tour a lot,” Johnston agrees, “but he’s able to do things that we wouldn’t be able to do — like a longer version of ‘Heroes & Villains.’ And the reaction he gets . . . I’m not saying his audience doesn’t have fun, but Brian gets a more serious audience. ‘Here Today’ is really fun to do, but I have to force Mike. I don’t know why he doesn’t like doing it. ‘I don’t like the instrumental part in the middle!’ ‘That’s my favorite part!’”

In half of a century, The Beach Boys have certainly been entitled to a few squabbles, and those mostly limit themselves to lawsuits over royalties or use of the band name. Musically, fractures appeared in the agonizing sessions for Smile, when Wilson became increasingly withdrawn, Love especially didn’t like its fragmented nature or Van Dyke Parks’ cryptic lyrics, and Capitol Records wanted to know where its money went.

“I always thought Smile should have been Brian’s solo album with us visiting vocally,” Johnston says, “and I don’t think he would have gone through any of the pain making that album. The label wouldn’t be wondering, ‘Where are the hits, Brian? Where are the hits?’ The label was really funky in those days.” Though he’s not a founding member — he joined the touring band after Glen Campbell split in 1965; he wasn’t considered a full-timer until a couple of years later — Johnston occupies what seems like an arbiter’s position in the band. He was one of Pet Sounds‘ biggest champions, yet tours in full-voice behind the early hits. And those topsy-turvy years beginning 1967’s Smiley Smile?

“It’s a great career, great music, and later on band members,” he says. “Have you ever heard Dennis [Wilson]’s song, ‘Forever’? My favorite Beach Boys album in the whole world is Sunflower. It’s one of the least-successful albums in the catalog,” he snickers, “and Dennis wrote this perfect song. The Wilson brothers had great writing talent.”

Reliably, he’s partial to the new album, as well.

“It’s very relaxed to me,” Johnston hints. “What I like about it is the label wasn’t running in the door every five minutes [looking for hits]. They just come over once in awhile and heard all the voices. Brian’s got this cute little pocket suite in it. And nobody’s worried about ‘Strings aren’t cool = it’s 2012.’ Paul Martin did these great string arrangements. It’s relaxed and there’s interesting things going on. Nobody’s trying to put on whatever they were all about from the mid ’60s. Nobody’s trying to win an Olympic gold medal. Al sang a duet with me, and it was a pleasure. It’s not like an album where you’re gonna go, ‘This is gonna be pretty big!’ You’re gonna go, ‘Hey, this is pretty nice. These guys, after all these years, can and want to sing together.’”

Brian Wilson, who guards his words in a separate interview, opens up here. “It’s very mellow-sounding. A lot of harmonies. Most of it’s just harmony. I wrote a song called ‘Shelter,’ which is all about how your house is shelter from the sunlight and shelter from the dark night. It’s a great tune, it really is.”

That’s Why God Made The Radio’s title track has been issued as the first single, and its unabashedly retro feel is charismatic. The band’s rich harmonies cascade over a bass pattern that’s surprisingly high in the mix, with everything swaying in 12/8 time. Despite the arrangement’s density, it never feels cluttered and — like most Beach Boys single edits — ends too soon.

He continues, “Most of the stuff I wrote in 1998 with my collaborator Joe Thomas. [Until now], the guys had never heard it before. They love it. They think it’s great stuff. The guys haven’t changed very much in 50 years, you know? They still sound just as good or even better than 50 years ago!”

If the material was written in 1998, that means it came to life while Wilson was living in St. Charles, not far from the Thomas whose résumé includes work with McCartney and Elton John. The pair were working on Wilson’s solo album, Imagination, and guests at the house included the former Beatle, John Lennon’s son Sean, and Joe Walsh. After an alleged falling-out, Wilson moved back to California. This part, he’s not so willing to talk about.

“Not really. It was hard work, you know?”

Johnston, coincidentally, also has ties to the area, having been born in Peoria and kept a home in Beverly. His father, a big-wig at Walgreens, adopted him shortly before joining forces with Justin Dart, a former son-in-law of the Walgreens empire who revolutionized the drugstore business and became a magnate. The Johnstons moved to Bel-Air, young Bruce cottoned to surfing, and then fell in with some incredibly important artists.

“I’ve been at this since high school,” he says. “I used to back up Ritchie Valens and Eddie Cochran; I was in a band with Phil Spector and on and on and on. But I was at this surf spot called Swami’s in San Diego, and I don’t know, I must have been 18 or 19, and I heard ‘Surfin” On the radio by The Beach Boys, and I didn’t know what it was. We had gone through instrumental stuff by The Ventures and Dick Dale, and all of the sudden vocals are singing about the surfing life. It astounded me that my sport had a voice. One thing led to another, and I’m in this band.”

– Steve Forstneger

For the full story, visit the issue through our partners at ShadeTree, or grab a copy available free throughout Chicagoland.

IE: Are there any that you’re more excited to approach than others?
Brian Wilson: Not really. Well, “California Girls” I look forward to, and “Good Vibrations.” I look forward to those.

IE: Is there anything about those songs that you don’t get to touch on in your newer material?
BW: We try to put all our heart and soul into everything.

IE: You mentioned Joe Thomas was your main collaborator. What about the others?
BW: Well, they’ve all had their input, you know what I mean? If I thought Bruce would be better to sing [one part], he might have said, “You sing it, Al.”

IE: So the collaborative spirit was there.
BW: Right.

IE: Are you making improvements on the old songs?
BW: Yeah, we’re trying to make them sound just as good as they did then.

IE: Has there been any conversation of the legacy of the band and how it fits into today’s climate?
BW: We said we’re not real current; the music isn’t today’s kind of music. But it’s just as good or better than the music of today.

IE: What’s your barometer for that?
BW: Harmonically, I guess. Just the harmonies. It’s got the energy, too — there’s a lot to it.

IE: Can you notice recurrent themes in the music you’ve made through the years? Certain melodic signatures, etc.?
BW: Not just the harmonies, but the melodies are good. The lyrics are very interesting, you know?

IE: Have there been any challenges in putting this together?
BW: We’re challenged to make it sound good.

IE: Are you a perfectionist in that light?
BW: Yes I am. I’m a perfectionist in the sense that I don’t want the guys to sound crappy. And they’ll say, “We sound good.” Sure, we sound good, but we can’t sound crappy.

– Steve Forstneger

Superman had his Fortress Of Solitude; Mayer Hawthorne has his records and the stores scattered around the globe devoted to housing rare and overlooked vinyl.

Appearing: May 17th at Park West with The Stepkids, and later the same night at Beauty Bar in Chicago.

While out on the road, if the L.A.-based, Ann Arbor, Michigan native’s not on stage soaking up the intense, if unlikely, female adulation his bedroom-eyed crooning brings, he’s either satisfying his foodie tendencies at a local eatery of note or adding to his collection of LPs.

You can just picture him hunkering down in a musty shop with creaky hardwood floors – the kind that make it easy for well-fed dust bunnies to hop in between stacks of music. His thick-rimmed hipster frames slide down his nose as he hunches over crates, flipping through unorganized and improperly alphabetized titles. Losing all track of time, he focuses on the hunt, rarely coming up for air until he locates that trip-defining gem.

Hawthorne has a name for this treasured ritual: “digging.” And it’s not a team sport.

“It’s usually more of like a Zen thing for me. That’s kind of like my drug. So, I don’t usually like to talk to nobody when I’m digging for records. It’s more of like a private thing. I just get in my zone and dig,” he reveals on a Saturday afternoon, right before the East Coast portion of his world tour gets underway. “People think that they want to go record shopping with me, but they really don’t – they get bored.”

So, it seems like a spin-off of his “Mayer vs. Food” YouTube series is out of the question then. The 33-year-old will play virtual food critic and break bread with fans online, but shopping excursions are off limits. In lieu of craftily edited vignettes, we’ll have to settle for hard-nosed advice.

“I like digging in record stores that are kind of sloppy and unorganized. Because that way you just like start digging through a pile and find something you weren’t necessarily looking for. That’s usually how I find the best stuff: not having any strategy at all,” Hawthorne admits. A haphazard methodology also makes up for an overwhelming number of choices. “I always have like a list in my head of all these records that I want to get, and then as soon as I walk in the door of the record store it goes completely out the window and I can’t remember anything that I wanted.”

This affection for 12 grooved inches of aural merriment stems from Hawthorne’s two-turntables-and-a-microphone days in Detroit as DJ Haircut. (For those keeping track at home, that’s alias number two for the man born Andrew Mayer Cohen.) Hawthorne came up with his own Motown-influenced melodic riffs to erase the need for sampling copyrighted (and expensive) material. Despite never considering himself a singer, this goofing off caught the attention of Stones Throw Records label head Peanut Butter Wolf, who urged Hawthorne to create an album around the tracks. A Strange Arrangement followed, spurred on by the it’s-not-you-it’s-me single, “Just Ain’t Gonna Work Out.” (In keeping with Hawthorne’s hobby, the single was released on red, heart-shaped vinyl – surely a get for future diggers.)

Hawthorne jumped to the majors for his sophomore effort, How Do You Do (Universal Republic), keeping the soul- revivalist motif going without ever falling into pastiche. Despite the inevitable Curtis Mayfield comparisons, Hawthorne firmly places the album in this decade with a guest appearance by Snoop Dogg and infusing the coos and his A-plus bedside manner with a hip-hop sensibility.

Hawthorne’s voice sounds like it’s draped in gold lamé, even if his outfits suggest otherwise. The budding fashionista might bristle at the word “outfit,” but anyone with a self-proclaimed motto (“flashy but classy”) to go along with their duds, doesn’t just wear clothes. Hawthorne sports a look that’s hipster chic mixed with GQ swagger and very debonair. You’ll rarely find him sans bowtie or without a perfectly pressed and color-coordinated pocket square.

His fashion sense comes from an unlikely source: his grandma Shirley. “I get all my fashion inspiration from my grandma. She’s the most stylish person I know. Like any time she would walk into a room, everybody would always know right off the bat,” Hawthorne remembers. “But, she always kept it really classy. She taught by example.”

– Janine Schaults

For the full story, visit the issue through our partners at ShadeTree, or grab a copy available free throughout Chicagoland.

Even if he was preemptively playing along with what he assumes to be a skeptical urban magazine, Eric Church raises some salient points about country music. His career, after all, could be one of its songs.

He isn’t one of those momma-got-run-over-by-a-train-when-I-was-drunk things David Allan Coe and Steve Goodman once sent up, neither is he one of the polished pop/rock turds that passes for country on CMT and in Nashville’s boardrooms, nor a Kenny ‘n’ Keith-style interloper. He grew up in North Carolina, on country and rock ‘n’ roll, and did he and his bandmates ever pay their dues.

Appearing: May 15th at Sears Centre in Hoffman Estates with Brantley Gilbert and Blackberry Smoke.

“I just read in Nashville, there’s a label that’s trying to sign a bunch of guys like us who want to do what we do,” he grumbles. “And it makes me laugh! ‘You guys got to be kidding!’ Nobody would be stupid enough to follow our path. You look back at where we came from, nobody would survive it. I can’t believe we did.”

He can laugh now, what with Chief (EMI Nashville) the first country album since the ’60s to top the mainstream Billboard charts without a number-one single. But Church is somewhat annoyed that his spit and blood are being fatally ignored in someone’s marketing proposal.

“I wish people would let more artists develop,” he says. “I think we’ve lost — and this goes for all music — artist development. You throw it out there, it either works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, we got to find something else. Then it becomes, ‘Well, we know this works over here: let’s copy that.’”

Not that Church isn’t above a little petty larceny himself. Country can just be so limiting.

“Country music to me has always been the best songs, the best songwriters,” he believes. “That’s why it appeals to me and most people in America. But the energy you get from rock ‘n’ roll and rock ‘n’ roll shows is unparalleled. It’s unmatched. I don’t think anybody in country, frankly, does it like a lot of the guys in rock do it. I don’t know why. Maybe they’re willing to go there. I think in country sometimes we get caught up in what demographic we’re appealing to, like we might offend somebody or there’s too many old people in the crowd.”

He hoots, “Rock comes in with guns slinging!”

And so, when Church and his band swing through Hoffman Estates, you might notice a shift from the typical C&W dynamic. Goodbye Stetson . . . hello Eddie?

“We went and adopted — well, we stole — an idea from Iron Maiden,” he admits, “where they used backdrops and the motion of backdrops, where they get snatched up or move side-to-side: it’s like a pulley system. And it was just so interesting, like it was video before there was video. But it’s movement and staging, and different backdrops correspond with different songs. And we’re not afraid to blow shit up. It’s like a rock ‘n’ roll show out there, and people are scared of that in country but not us: it’s what we do. It’s very in-your-face, and you never know if something’ll catch on fire.”

And yanging his yin for mayhem, Church has very specific ideas about what does not work for him.

“One of my pet peeves is video screens: I hate ‘em,” he laughs. “I think a lot of artists rely on them; I think a lot of artists hide behind them. I’ve been to so many shows when a person had a first or third row seat, the artist’s right in front of them, and they’re watching that screen almost like they’re watching television. I remember when I was a kid, even if you had a bad seat there’s things to get caught up in, whether it’s the movement on the stage, what the band members are doing, the lights, even the people in your section. There’s much more to a concert than just getting that close-up view all the time.”

He’s aware that with bigger venues come not only less knowledgeable fans, but people who come out less, period. His dedication will remain to those who got him here.

– Steve Forstneger

For the full story, visit the issue through our partners at ShadeTree, or grab a copy available free throughout Chicagoland.

The idea of an artist staging an entire tour around a successful album is a trend that doesn’t seem to be slowing, and in the case of Creed’s upcoming outing, fans actually get a double-decker front-to-back rendering. Though it’s hard to believe, this year marks the 15th anniversary of My Own Prison, which sold over six million copies and brought the foursome from Florida obscurity to superstardom. From there, the band — comprising Scott Stapp (vocals), Mark Tremonti (guitar), Brian Marshall (bass), and Scott Phillips (drums) — avoided the sophomore slump with 1999’s Human Clay, which received a diamond certification for selling more than 11-million copies and led to sold-out stadiums all across the globe.

Appearing: April 13th and 14th at Chicago Theatre (175 N. State) in Chicago.

Both albums will be on display, alongside hits and other album cuts, when the group brings its grunge-infused rock to the Chicago Theatre for two nights (focusing on My Own Prison the first, and Human Clay the next). Of course, the intervening years since the band’s breakthrough have alternated between highlights and less favorable shades of the limelight, but ever since the 2009 reunion, it appears the train is officially back on track.

“I’m telling you right now it’s a real blessing, and that’s the simplest way for me to describe it after going in different directions for so many years and then getting back together and playing music again,” reflects Stapp. “It’s awesome and we’re excited about this year. We feel like we’re just beginning to get back into the groove.”

Chicago will have the first crack at the double-album caper, which continues through late May and is reported to be followed with brand new music. But perhaps the key to Creed making its mark on the next album lies in simply going back to how it all started, which in the case of My Own Prison, includes full-throttled favorites like the title track, “One,” “What’s This Life For,” and “Torn.”

“I think one of our reasons for coming together as a band was we wanted our music to have something to say and feel it again in the way we grew up feeling it,” he recalls. “We were just in a different space [compared to] other artists on the radio at the time, and instead of being so abstract and dark, we wanted to paint pictures, be clear, and make melodies that would unite and connect. That’s something we still try to do today.”

As it turns out, the group’s early tunes connected so quickly that the quartet stayed on tour for two solid years promoting My Own Prison, though all the while, continuously wrote new material for the follow-up. Having never let up on either the road or studio allowed Creed to strike while the iron was incomprehensibly hot, and helped push Human Clay to nearly double the sales of its predecessor and churn out a slew of singles like “Higher,” “What If,” “Are You Ready?,” “My Sacrifice,” and the inescapable “With Arms Wide Open.”

“We really got to hear those [Human Clay] songs in a different way during soundchecks with big sound systems, and we just stayed in tune with the creative process,” explains Stapp. “By the time the Prison tour was over, we went right into the studio and recorded these songs we’d been playing for 18 months [after] really seeing the fans’ reaction.”

However, as Creed’s fame swelled, so did the ranks of detractors, who often assailed the players as purveyors of a blankly derivative and accessible sound. And as listeners began looking closer at the lyrics, additional questions arose about the group’s spiritual subject matter.

“[Spirituality's] played a tremendous role in my life and in who I am as a human being,” the frontman admits. “Essentially I was born in a church nursery, and really was given no other way to think growing up. I think on the first record I was asking a lot of questions, kind of spreading my wings. I lived a life that was very sheltered, and things other people would experience in high school, I didn’t see until I was 20 or 21-years-old. So I kind of went through high school late, so to speak, and definitely on a public scale, but it really began that way because that’s just part of my DNA. I began to find some resolution and confidence in my faith and a renewed trust in my faith, but with more of a global understanding . . . On [Human Clay], I was embracing that spirituality and that faith and giving it a place of gratitude and thanks for the success that happened from My Own Prison.”

As a result, it was only a matter of time before Creed was bombarded with the polarizing question, “Are you a Christian band?” And though the band certainly enjoyed a built-in audience in that marketplace, the answer was always resounding “no,” especially from Tremonti, Marhsall, and Phillips, who weren’t writing the lyrics.

“During those days, I did what I did and I don’t think there was much thought or analyzing by the other guys,” Stapp remembers. “It really happened so fast, we didn’t have time to really have demos and live with it. There’s a lot of times you’re not focused on the details of what the lyrics are actually saying; you’re just vibing, at least for the musicians. When there was a labeling of the band, it kind of didn’t sit right with anybody. [It] was really our first threat of division and would be a major factor in the band not being together years later, initially because everyone’s dreams weren’t matching the reality. I guess. We’re very sensitive guys, and we had all this success and began to get labeled things that we weren’t. Part of the reasons we didn’t want that label was we all knew we weren’t living that life. That was part of our youth and what we were at that time, but we hadn’t really experienced life and everything that’s out there.”

Though the band as a trio (minus Marshall) still had enough steam to crank out 2001’s Weathered (which topped Billboard’s Top 200 chart for eight consecutive weeks, tying The Beatles’ Anthology in the record books), the group officially splintered shortly thereafter. Stapp kicked off a solo career and the rhythm section formed Alter Bridge, though fate would steer the band back together in 2009 for the aptly titled Full Circle, with all of the previous tension presumably ironed out.

In fact, Stapp seems especially rejuvenated after surviving a series of personal demons (to be chronicled in a tell-all autobiography this fall), and he’s a much different man than the one who was sued by four fans over what was reported to be a far-from-stellar show at the Allstate Arena in 2002, just before the break-up. Even so, the singer doesn’t seem to dwell on the past, only offering a fleeting reference to that incident while professing nothing but love for area fans and the city itself.

“When I think of Chicago, there’s not a single bitter taste in my mouth,” he insists. “That city is a city that I love and has been amazing to this band and is a part of what made this band on so many levels. We’ve had some of our most amazing nights as artists, musicians, and performers in Chicago and we’ve been real and human in Chicago.”

Since Creed fans are likely to forgive, chances are Stapp will be welcomed back once again — maybe even with arms wide open.

– Andy Argyrakis

Creed’s Basic Tenets

U2
Rattle & Hum
Some people heard and saw an ego-tripping band of Spinal Tap proportions: others heard and saw a blueprint.

Metallica Metallica
It cannot be understated what a game-changer this album was for commercial hard rock — that it arrived the same year as Nevermind evoked a serendipity not heard since the late ’60s.

Pearl Jam Ten
Eddie Vedder’s brooding baritone launched a thousand bands, but Pearl Jam’s classic-rock base and embrace of workmanly anthems surface in Creed’s work.

Soundgarden Superunknown
Again, a frontman’s self-serious gaze is an obvious touchpoint, but those chunky, drop-D chords gave Mark Tremonti a new lease on guitar.

Collective Soul
Hints, Allegations & Things Left Unsaid
What opened the grunge doors for the Christian-alternative crowd was undoubtedly “Shine,” which may have been a clever lift of Temple Of The Dog’s “Hunger Strike,” but it steered clear of the competition’s pervasive self-loathing.

Live
Throwing Copper
Live were among the first alt-rock bands to successfully parlay positive messages into what sounded — overwhelmingly — like angst.

Acts Of Their Apostles

Nickelback Silver Side Up
Nickelback’s Creed-love finally connected on their third album, and just in time for them to take the mantle from their hobbling heroes.

Daughtry Daughtry
“American Idol”’s credibility got a boost from rock fans for this find; it also replenished Creed critics’ inexhaustible supply of arrows.

Shinedown The Sound Of Madness
Though it’s an imperfect analogy, Shinedown recall the end of the hair-metal era, when suddenly bands were toting a few too many power ballads.

This version of the story has been updated since it was originally posted.

Ladies, if you ever receive a text from a potential mate that reads, “You’re not pretty, but you’ve got it going on,” there’s two possible scenarios to consider. Either the gentleman caller is utterly clueless as to how to woo a fair maiden, or he’s really digging the new Band Of Skulls album. Taking a line from the most aggressive and full-throttle track on the British trio’s sophomore effort as a pickup technique seems circumspect, but at least you can trust his taste in music. That’s gotta count for something, right?

Appearing: April 3rd at House Of Blues (329 N. Dearborn) in Chicago with We Are Augustines.

“The whole concept with that was, what’s the basic minimum compliment? What’s the faintest praise you can give?” guitarist Russell Marsden admits over the phone from London, as tour mates The Black Keys soundcheck in the background. “If it gets used in any kind of social platform, I think we’ll be very proud.”

Marsden should think about the bigger picture. The band’s second release, Sweet Sour (Vagrant), successfully straddles the line between undulating balladry (“Lay My Head Down”) and down-n-dirty garage rock that could have easily emanated from Jack White’s carport (“The Devil Takes Care Of His Own”). The album’s dueling personalities stem from a studio-induced bout of seasonal-affective disorder.

“We went in — it was pretty much last winter. We went straight off tour and we went straight into writing,” he explains. “That was our idea of not wasting any time, which was a bit strange because we basically had a fall out from the tour and we struggled with not being on tour. We forgot [how to] survive. The stranger atmosphere of the record came from that time.

“Then we had some time off, went home, [and] regrouped. We went back into the studio and went up to this place in Wales called Rockfield. That was sort of the nice time. The sun was out, it was the royal wedding, and it was a really happy time. I think that was the two sides of the record that came out — sort of an anxious winter with a real sort of fulfilling summer. I think those two sides of the record are definitely in there, and it was the two periods of working on the record that manifested themselves.”

Yes, the three Southampton natives stopped and savored Prince William’s nuptials like any good royal subject — and no one relished it more than drummer Matt Hayward.

“Matt’s a very patriotic sort of dude and yeah, I think he had his own little party,” Marsden reveals. “It was one of those things that you’ll always remember. We were in the studio and stopped to have a look at the Queen basically. Friends of mine had all-night royal parties. [It's] just an excuse to get drunk really, isn’t it?”

Eye socket-rattling guitar riffs pour out of Marsden’s fingertips effortlessly, and there’s plenty here to make the walls quake, but his vocal tradeoffs with bassist Emma Richardson provide the stoic “Navigate” and the delicate “Close To Nowhere” with emotional heft.

“I think it’s a lot more exposed when you’re doing something more heartfelt. You do a song that’s a little deeper and you’re emoting your feelings — it’s more of a terrifying prospect really,” Marsden admits. “And sometimes those messages need a little more space around them to come across. Sometimes we feel angry and want to rock out. We want adrenaline and then we’re human beings, too, and sometimes we feel bad or upset and playing some uptempo number’s not going to tick all the boxes for us. We don’t want to be typecast into one thing, so basically it’s our way of saying, rightfully, we have the permission to have more than one emotion in our music.”

Most of all, Marsden wants to keep proving the band’s not just a one-trick pony. He hates the impression Sweet Sour only churns out slightly altered versions of its snappy first single “I Know What I Am.”

“I hate, ‘Oh yeah, Band Of Skulls, that’s that band [that does] that thing.’ I hope we can keep opening doors to what we do next. Some days we feel quite frivolous. Other days, downright grumpy,” he says.

Making a followup to an acclaimed debut can wreak havoc on a band’s creativity if one trusts rock’s checkered history. The phrase “sophomore slump” gets thrown around a lot. Marsden’s not buying it.

“It’s really difficult to make a breakthrough, to get the ball rolling for any band or any artist. That really is the make-or-break moment,” he proposes. “Like the second album, in many ways, you get so much more help and resources to call upon. You might feel the pressure, but it’s not as hard as like struggling as every band does before they get their first [chance].”

The career trajectory for Band Of Skulls centers around two simple goals: “Being a good rock band and making good records,” Marsden lists. The rest goes into the bonus column.

“You don’t want to overestimate. To underestimate is always probably the right side of things to do. I don’t know, maybe it’s because we’re British or something, I don’t know what it is, but we’re always totally surprised — we really stress out and think no one’s going to show up,” Marsden says.

Not that it’s a completely irrational fear. “As a band that’s played with no one showing up in our formative years, we know that feeling of pain when no one comes. So, it’s just basically an anxiety attack about that feeling.”

All you can do is take a deep breath, count to 10, and wait for the curtain to open. It probably doesn’t hurt to have a quiver full of borderline-offensive one-liners, just in case.

– Janine Schaults

While we’d never met and probably have no friends other than perhaps Facebook’s in common, having “come of age” in lockstep with Thomas Dolby and his music/performances across the ’80s brought a first-ever phone call with him the sense that one was calling a long-lost friend. And, indeed, it was a sense only heightened by Dolby’s own self-imposed near two-decades’ silence from mainstream music. Which is not to say he wasn’t keeping himself busy during that time: embracing technology in Silicon Valley and — not surprisingly given his signature synthesizer/production oeuvre — patenting/profiting from his groundbreaking work in polyphonic ringtones. The immediate question that does arise, however, is what prompted the return to recording — and, ultimately into mainstream music — now?

Appearing: April 5th at Park West (322 W. Armitage) in Chicago.

“I’d been away too long, you know,” Dolby responds frankly, “I never really intended to take 18 years off. One thing led to another — I’d always been involved in technology and going to Silicon Valley was exciting, sort of like going to the source, really, of all technology.

“And it was really happening in the early ’90s, whereas the music business was already, you know, severely in retreat. So I just felt that I could make more of a difference there. And it got very frenetic during the dot-com boom-and-bust years. But the company that I formed ended up being successful in the mobile space. And so I’ve sort of have had an extra two phases, really, to my career: in Silicon Valley and then in mobile and . . .” Dolby pauses, collects his thought and then continues matter of factly, “I’d had enough. I wanted to get back to music, which is my first love and it seemed like a good time to do it.”

But as his chosen route of return — the recently released A Map Of The Floating City – wonderfully displays, his “first love” of music embraces the art and craft of songwriting itself, which also seems sorely missing in an environment where sampling is the most consistently successful creativity. And is something, Dolby somewhat concurs, also served as a prompt to his reignition.

“Well I think it’s not as highly valued as it once was, other than perhaps in the sort of Starbucks café society with sort of singer/songwriters,” he says with a slight chuckle. “But the mainstream music tends to be more groove oriented and there’s so many people out there doing that, that you can’t possibly feel like a pioneer in that space, I don’t think. The value that’s put on the groove and on the production, I just, uh . . . life’s too short, really, to be competing with 10,000 other guys to come up with the coolest groove.

“But what I’ve got that those 10,000 other guys don’t have is that ability to write a song with a story, with a melody, with a vocal, with a structure to it. So I’ve sort of chosen to elevate those values in what I’m doing versus the more superficial production values.”

As a songwriter, Dolby has often cited his admiration for other greats of the craft, in particular citing the chord sequences of Bowie’s earlier classics, among others. Two of the songs on his new album — “Jealous Thing Called Love” and, in particular, “Road To Reno” — sound as if Dolby had taken both vocal and chording cues from the Thin White Duke songbook of that era. Homage or coincidence?

“He was a strong influence on me, as was Prince,” Dolby quickly answers, “again, during the era when each of them used to write songs that needed a guitar tablature to follow them. And they were both very successful and very influential with songs that were, you know, classic songbook songs. Space Oddity to Purple Rain. Or, you know, ‘Ashes To Ashes’ to Sign O’ The Times. And in each case, after the peak of their commercial success they moved to a period — along with the rest of the music industry, I’d have to say — they moved more into the sort of groove space, where, you know, it’s a jam with the vocal on top.” Dolby pauses, then adds somewhat wistfully, “Ahhh, I was just sad about that really. Because they were my heroes at the time when they were writing their best songs.”

While Dolby has divided Map into three sections — “Urbanoia,” “Amerikana,” “Oceanea” — it’s clearly America (with a four-song section) and New York (the subject of two of four “Urbanoia” songs) that predominate as subject matter; and perhaps reflective of Dolby’s 20-year residency on this side of the Atlantic (as opposed to his more recent return to the North Sea side), is the three-song muse for “Oceanea.” Unsurprisingly, Dolby freely admits he’s “strongly influenced by my environment” in his songwriting — but it’s not without unforeseen consequences.

“Well I get into trouble, actually, because when I write these songs, I don’t look my references up. I just sort of have subliminally taken in that the D train goes to Brooklyn,” Dolby breaks into laughter, then continues. “You know I wrote that line without going on Wikipedia to check it out. And it occasionally gets me into trouble, like when I mentioned a ‘64 Camaro on ‘Road To Reno.’ Not only did I pronounce it wrong, but also that that particular car didn’t come in ’til ‘67. And so people were very quick to point that out to me.”

Pointing out that he did pronounce it like an Englishman causes him to break into laughter again, before offering another misstep from his 1992’s Astronauts & Heretics.

“But I got into the most trouble when I wrote ‘I Love You Goodbye,’ and on live radio in Louisiana it was pointed out to me that, ‘We don’t have ‘county’ sheriffs, we have parishes’; and ‘The Everglades are actually in Florida and not Louisiana.’” Dolby again breaks into laughter, then concludes, “So I obviously need to do my research a bit better.”

Truth be told, Dolby didn’t totally desert music in 1992. Since 2001, he’s served as musical director (and house band leader) of the highly influential TED (Technology, Entertainment, & Design) Conference — an annual gathering of some of the world’s foremost (and most eclectic) thinkers, inventors, speakers, and artists. Says Dolby, “It is great fun. I mean, I really enjoy attending and it’s nice to contribute as well. I get to bring in some pretty interesting musicians — both in my house band, as well as the entertainers we have doing some of the slots and the show. And it’s a great thing, because it really helps people sort of process the barrage of stimulating ideas that you get.”

In fact, as we speak, Dolby is getting ready for this year’s event, after which he’ll embark on a multi-city U.S. tour with a full-fledged band that he’s really looking forward to, and not just for musical reasons. “It’s called the ‘Time Capsule Tour,’” he explains, “because we’re bringing with us a trailer that looks like it was designed by HG Wells and Nikola Tesla. We tie it behind the tour bus, and it houses a personal video-messaging system, which allows you to send a message to the future. The idea is that anyone who comes down to the shows [and other stops] can have some private time in the time capsule and record a private message to the future. You can talk about whatever you want — you can talk to your grandchildren if you like. But you could also talk to space aliens that visit the planet years after our species has been wiped out. So what would you say to them, you know? ‘What went wrong?’

“And these clips will be uploaded to YouTube and rated by viewers. So the most successful clips will go into the time capsule — which is a hard drive that I’m trying to get sent into space.”

So Dolby must be looking to the Russians or Chinese to launch his dream, since the U.S. seems to have ceded the space to them for the time being?

“Well, actually in the private sector, there’s quite few people sending rockets up,” Dolby points out, “and a lot of them are at TED, so hopefully I will find an interested party next week.”

– David C. Eldredge

She’s not sure exactly when it happened. But there was a time when flutter-throated Celtic thrush Dolores O’Riordan really lost her way, spiritually. And it had everything to do with the skyrocketing popularity of her band, The Cranberries, and its early international hits like “Dreams,” “Linger,” and “Zombie” — she was chugging at such a breakneck speed on the fast track, she barely noticed herself derailing. Or putting her group on hold for a solo career back in 2003. And how she got back on track again — and rediscovered her soul, both literally and figuratively — has everything to do with Roses (Cooking Vinyl/Downtown), the surprise new Stephen Street-helmed comeback from her recently reformed Cranberries.

Appearing: May 16th at Riviera Theatre.

On his HBO show “Real Time,” host Bill Maher just pointed how twisted and commercial the American Dream had become. As a kid, he said, his father would drive the family through wealthy neighborhoods, just to look at the posh, pricey houses. But never once did he point to them as the ultimate achievement in life, as something to be coveted by the average hard worker — the American Dream back then simply revolved around being comfortable, able to put a roof over your family’s head, and feed and protect them. Now, it’s warped into absurdly entitled imaginings of wealth and notoriety; teachers quiz students on what they want to be when they grow up, and they often reply “Famous.”

Any parent who would drive past mansions and pass them off as entertainment, as aesthetic architectural works to be enjoyed at a distance? “Now that’s a good dad, a great spirit, a great father,” says O’Riordan, a mother of three, stepmother of one with her husband Don Burton. “Because I’m the same way to my children. I happen to be doing very well in my life, but I come from a very poor background. My mother had to take the neighbors’ kids and babysit them because she didn’t want to leave us, so there were always about 30 kids at the house. And once we got to a certain age, then she went out to work in factories, and she always worked so hard. So me, becoming successful with the band and making a bit of cash and going from one extreme to another, I had a bit of an identity crisis. Like, ‘What the hell am I supposed to do with all this money?’”

Ironic, since O’Riordan wasn’t even part of brothers Mike (bass) and Noel (guitar) Hogan’s original band/concept with drummer Fergal Lawler: The Cranberry Saw Us in their hometown of Limerick — Niall Quinn was their late-’80s frontman. When Quinn quit, the trio advertised for a female vocalist instead, and lucked out with O’Riordan, who immediately proved her worth by adding a rough-mix melody line to what would soon define the group, their breakthrough smash “Linger.” Once MTV got behind The Cranberries’ ‘93 debut, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?, the rest (four more albums and a 2002 greatest-hits package) was chart-topping, multi-platinum history. And therein hangs the tortured tale.

As a photogenic female, O’Riordan recalls, “Suddenly I found myself surrounded by all these designer-label type people, and they’d go ‘Who’s your bag by? Is it Prada? Guccci? Versace?’ And I’d be like, ‘Uhh, actually it’s from a cheap little shop in Ireland!’ And I remember I got to the point where I was feeling like I’d better get a designer bag, because I wasn’t feeling very good about myself. Because you’ve got pressure: chicks would come up and go, ‘Who made your shoes? What do you weigh? What size are you?’ And I just completely lost myself. I found that success was great, but it brought an awful lot of crap and pressure with it, and I got a bit messed up.” Finally, she sighs, “I got to the point where I knew that I was happier before the success. I was happier when I was poor — I had crappy boots, but I ate properly, I slept well, and I liked myself.”

O’Riordan arrived at a solution, and it was drastic. “I went off to the forest,” she says. “I disappeared into the forest in Canada and I had a baby. And I do remember hitting a brick wall and being very suicidal before I had a baby — I remember telling my mom that I just didn’t want to live. I hated it. I hated people following me, I hated cameras, and I wanted to go back, I wanted to be nobody again. And you don’t really expect that. You kind of think that if your band does well, you’ll love it. But it’s really weird, not being able to just fit in, not being able to walk outside your house without people noticing.” She sighs. “But that’s the added irony: be careful what you wish for, ’cause you might just get it.”

The singer fell so deeply in love with her log cabin in the Ontario wilderness (where she began sculpting her two solo sets, 2007’s Are You Listening? and No Baggage in 2009) that she and her clan have permanently relocated there from their old home in Dublin. “Because I’d ended up in such a shallow place when the band got big, I realized that I had to go back, I had to go back at all costs,” she says of her return to a simpler existence. “Even if it meant giving up the band and going off to find out who I was before I became this trainwreck. So then I had kids, and that really brought it all back to me — the instincts suddenly are there with your baby, and you’re breast-feeding and that’s it. Nothing else matters. It was so nice to get back to that animal instinct, and who cares what you’re wearing then? Who’s actually gonna look down at your clothes and say ‘What label?’ Having kids was brilliant, just to bring me back to what life is all about.”

And O’Riordan — now a wise, lived-to-tell 40 — unleashes many of her hard-won philosophies throughout Roses, from the carpe diem insistence of the chiming lead single “Tomorrow” (“Tomorrow could be too late/If only you had faith” she chirrups in her brassy brogue) to humble pleas for sanity (“Losing My Mind”), grace (“Fire & Soul”), and daily guidance (“Show Me The Way”). And she bounds inquisitively into the metaphysical, as well, on the neo-psychedelic dream study “Astral Projections.” The ebullient anthems ring like a cathedral bell (as producer Street oversaw much of The Cranberries’ early material). But O’Riordan’s thoughtful, carefully considered lyrics also inspire discussion, further analysis, maybe even the occasional argument. But this celebratory reunion would not have been possible with her reflective time away, a growing experience that helped the quartet grow, too.

For a long time, there was no real contact between the Hogans and their estranged frontwoman — they’d simply folded up shop and moved on with their lives, personally and professionally. Noel made solo records. Mike opened his own restaurant in Limerick. Fergal hired on with several other Irish acts. But in 2008, when O’Riordan was awarded an Honorary Patronage from Dublin’s Trinity College Philosophical Society, she rang up the Hogans, spur of the moment, to back her for some songs at the ceremony. A year later, as No Baggage was hitting shelves, her son had his confirmation, and she again invited the Hogans and Lawler to join in the festivities. The band members arrived with their wives and 11 kids in tow. A whole generation had sprouted since The Cranberries were last together, O’Riordan noted to herself. “I was thinking ‘My God! Time is moving on! And we are not getting any younger!’ So we all talked about it, had a few jars, and finally said ‘Let’s do it! Let’s do a reunion!’”

– Tom Lanham

For the full feature, check the IE digital edition or grab a copy of the March issue free throughout Chicagoland.

One of the feel-good stories of the ’90s alternative-rock boom and its subsequent bust, Nada Surf recently caught wind of a new danger on the horizon.

Appearing: April 2nd at Metro with An Horse.

Back in ‘96, MTV pumped the cable wires full of the band’s novelty hit, “Popular,” a grungey dig at the hollowness of clean-cut cool kids, and the sort of anthem that would also consign contemporaries like Seven Mary Three and The Toadies to the post-Nirvana cut-out bin. Despite issuing an ignored sophomore album two years later, the Brooklyn-based band recalibrated and were reborn on 2002’s Let Go (Heavenly/Barsuk), a taut collection of melancholic power-pop that blindsided critics the way Radiohead’s The Bends had sandblasted the indelible image of “Creep.”

Suddenly, Nada Surf were in league with Spoon and The Flaming Lips as Lollapalooza-era survivors, the boy got the girl, and . . . scene! If the screenplay is being test-marketed, its chronology ends around 2004.

Except Nada Surf are still a band, and have just released their third album since the Let Go pick-me-up, The Stars Are Indifferent To Astronomy (Barsuk).

“When we did these record-release shows for [2010's covers record] if i had a hi-fi,” says frontman Matthew Caws, “we played all of Let Go one night, then Weight Is A Gift, and Lucky. In relearning a lot of those songs, I had to listen to the records a lot for a couple weeks — I think I had the same worry that a lot of songwriters have, that I’m writing the same two or three things over and over. So, with this record, there was a conscious effort to wrestle with the lens I’d been pointing at myself and getting it to point somewhere else. I don’t want to hit 70 or 80 and look back to see that all I’d really done was stare in the mirror. There’s a much bigger world. And it’s not only songwriting. You’re one of, what, 7 billion [people] now? There’s so much going on. I think that has helped. The outside world figures into this record more.”

And while that imagined row with the mirror did manifest itself in one of the new songs (“Every birthday candle that ever got blown out/is one more year of someone trying to figure it all out”), the trio — still rounded out by co-founders Daniel Lorca and Ira Elliot — successfully present enough diversity to keep their music interesting.

“It’s only a matter of degrees of change,” Caws agrees. “It’s rare for us to have some sort of concept and, deep down, these were the last 10 songs that we wrote that we were really psyched about. There’s not a lot of over-arching conceptual thinking going on. The fact that we kind of had a plan on this one is a change.”

Like the subtexts of sleep and dreams?

“Yeah! That’s there,” he says. “The environment is there — my worry about getting out of touch with nature, and also the warming of the planet figures heavily. Maybe I don’t talk about it overtly, but it’s there. One of the reasons the title resonated with me was because it makes me think about our presumptions as a species. And yeah: there’s sleep, there’s dreams. When I was young, that key phrase in there — ‘I didn’t know if I was better off asleep or up’ — I still find it really shocking every morning that you can be anywhere in the imagined world, having dreams or nightmares of any stripe, and the alarm rings and you’re probably in the same place you were yesterday, and no matter where you are you have the same exact issues you had the day before — possibly the same issues you’ve had for 20, 30, or 40 years. It’s shockingly repetitive. And sometimes, it’s a difficult moment. I have a lot of friends who think waking is the hardest part of the day. ‘Oh, yeah: I’m in this life. Right. Oh, yeah: I’m this person and I have that issue I still haven’t dealt with.’”

After more than a decade, Nada Surf have already swept aside the issue of their former pariah status. But Caws dismisses the idea that the storybook portion of the band’s career has robbed them of motivation.

“I don’t miss [the drama],” he muses. “I think it keeps us slightly on an underdog level a little bit. I do like that. I miss people having misjudged us completely. I was used to having someone think we’re some novelty band with a funny video, and they’re surprised there’s some decent songs coming down the pike. I’ve been reading reviews, and I’m finding more mixed reactions to this record, but I think that’s because we’re getting written up more, period. So I’ve been enjoying that. It’s been like, ‘They never change: it’s boring.’ Or, ‘They never change! It’s incredible!’ And then there’s, ‘It’s totally different! Great!’ ‘It’s totally different: awful!’ It’s always nice to get a mix. It keeps it lively. But I don’t miss the drama.”

– Steve Forstneger

For the full feature, check the IE digital edition or grab a copy of the March issue free throughout Chicagoland.

For the past 13 years, Miles Nielsen made a name for himself throughout the Midwest and beyond thanks to several different band incarnations, but none seemed to hit the spot as much as his latest collaboration The Rusted Hearts. With equal parts roots rock and power pop and plenty of pub-infused power, the Rockford-based band just dropped Miles Nielsen Presents The Rusted Hearts (Rotown). The collection serves as a culmination of the leader’s vast influence pool, plucked from previous projects like Harmony Riley, HMS, Cory Chisel & The Wandering Sons, and even a hint from his famous father (more on that later).

Appearing: March 23rd at FitzGerald’s in Berwyn with Chuck Prophet.

“I spent my time working for other people and letting other people sort of dictate the way things are gonna go, and now it’s my turn to sort of be a little selfish in that respect,” suggests Nielsen. “I write the songs almost primarily, but I feel like on the current record everybody really had a lot to do with the shaping of the way the tunes turned out. I consider it to be a full band project.”

Aside from the leader, The Rusted Hearts include Daniel James McMahon (guitar/vocals), Micky Rosenquist (drums /percussion), Adam Plamann (horns/percussion/keys/vocals), and Andrew Scarpaci (bass/vocals). Many of the above were involved with Cory Chisel & The Wandering Sons, while others also split their time developing a side-project with Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos. (That’s another lineage hint by the way).

“When the Miles record came out in 2009, we were playing out a bunch, but the lineup solidified in 2010 and has remained the five of us for the past two years,” says Nielsen. “I was tired of people asking me when I played, ‘Is this a full band or more like Miles and friends?’ It’s not just my random friends showing up, but we needed to give it a name, so that was the conception of The Rusted Hearts.”

The full-band feel is certainly evident across the dozen-track disc, which finds Nielsen turning in a blend of gritty and smoky vocals over a finely chiseled rhythm section that leaves plenty of room for unexpected combinations. “I would describe it as coming from someone who’s a fan of things like Elvis Costello and The Cars, mixed with something along the lines of The Kinks and Wilco. I really hate to say ‘it sounds like these 17 bands,’ but probably everything I’ve ever listened to seeps in.”

Of course, growing up in the Nielsen household gave Miles a vast musical palette since literally as long as he can remember, and we’re not just talking about albums on the stereo, but actual rock stars stopping by for dinner. Considering he’s the offspring of legendary Cheap Trick guitarist/songwriter Rick Nielsen meant an interesting childhood to say the least, but one the troubadour truly considered normal because he didn’t have any other point of reference.

“I’ve met a lot of people and it didn’t seem weird or odd to me to have Aerosmith and Todd Rundgren come over or Roy Thomas Baker living with us for a month because I didn’t know any different,” he reasons. “Maybe that all indirectly played into me wanting to be a musician – seeing all these really quirky, cool, and weird artist folks. I remember Steven Tyler was really friendly every time he came over and hung out, and the Guns N’ Roses guys were young and wanted to party.”

While he certainly has the utmost respect for Cheap Trick and has often bunked up on the bus (both as a spectator and supporting guitar player), Miles Nielsen Presents The Rusted Hearts is far from a carbon copy. However, the idea of music running inside the family’s bones is a theory Nielsen subscribes to and his melodic aptitude is nothing short of extraordinary.

“I really don’t know if their sound influenced me as much as the feeling that comes with what they do: those really four-on-the-floor rock tunes,” he observes. “Robin [Zander]’s voice has been an influence on me as one of the best singers I’ve ever heard, and my dad’s choice in melody has influenced me. I find myself being melodic and I truly think it’s in my bones. I never struggle to find a chord progression and I always come up with something.”

The apple also doesn’t far fall from the tree when it comes to crafting lyrics that are just as contagious as they are sophisticated. “Dear Kentucky (You’re Killing Me)” is all about the wear and tear of the road, “Baby Blue” talks about society’s proclivity for white lies, while “Overrated” is a cheeky account of canceling his Rolling Stone subscription after being outraged Adam Lambert made the cover.

On a more serious note, “Cold War” traces his grandmother’s childhood in Germany, and “Disease” is an especially touching tune about an older friend battling Alzheimer’s disease. “Lyrically this is a more truthful record than the last one,” verifies Nielsen. “This one is coming from more of an autobiographical point of view than the past, and all the stuff hits a bit closer to home for me.”

As for his pop’s opinion, at press time he’s yet to hear the material. It turns out the elder Nielsen hasn’t requested – and his son hasn’t offered – a copy, but he insists their relationship is rock solid.

“We get together, but we don’t talk music so much,” he explains. “He still works a ton and I don’t really know if I’ve given him a copy to be honest with you, which probably seems weird. I just did a bunch of dates with [Cheap Trick] for the Dream Police shows, and was more focused on that than sharing the new record with them. It’s not that he’s not proud, but he’s focused on his own thing. Yet he’s still my dad and sometimes says I’m working too hard and that I’m gonna burn myself out. But I feel like I’m gonna burn out when I don’t have work. That’s when I start getting into trouble and having too much fun!”

Nielsen won’t have to worry about an excessive amount of free time considering he and The Rusted Hearts are spending spring on a national tour supporting the CD. But it’s clear his heart is geared to frequent writing and recording sessions, especially now that the group has its very own studio called Midwest Sound – which also makes its home in Rockford.

“I don’t want to be on road all the time, but for a good amount of time, like three or four weeks at a time,” he clarifies. “I don’t want to go out for a two-year stint to the point where no one recognizes you when you get home and you’re a different person. Relationships fall apart because of those things and I like taking time off to record music. I like to take a couple weeks off to write some new songs and be inspired by not being on the road, take it all in and take some time to write about it. I just want to be able to play music for a living and be able to say on any given day, ‘I’m going to write songs.’ If I’m sitting around not doing anything, my mind gets the best of me. I drive myself to stay motivated and work makes for a better day.”

It doesn’t hurt that it’s his name on the door now.

– Andy Argyrakis

Uptown is one of Chicago’s oldest communities, one that brims with a rich heritage from the Gilded Age to Prohibition. Fast-forward to its current incarnation as an urban melting pot that hosts music of all genres, Catherine and Matt Denny began Uptown Recording in 2001 in the shadow of Broadway & Lawrence, a short walk to the area designated by Mayor Emanuel as a new entertainment district giving added muscle to those who want to rebuild the music scene around the venues that have made Uptown U-P-T-O-W-N, like the Aragon Ballroom, Riviera Theatre, and The Green Mill.

Matt Denny began it all out of his basement studio. Like any young entrepreneur, he knew he needed to expand to fill the demand of musicians looking for a good recording. “Uptown Recording was started out of a need to provide local and national artists a place to record comfortably and without worrying about going broke.” Denny had been recording bands in the basement of his apartment in Uptown, bands like The Gelheads, The Great Apes, The Wrightwallys, and alt-counrty artist Thomas Pace (with 10 albums tracked at the studio). More and more local artists were trying to get in, and it made him realize he had to go ligit. This led to finding a C-zoned building in Uptown. He gutted everything but the four exterior walls of their current Clifton Street location. The build-out was completed in late 2001 with his home above the studio still part of the plan, but a much larger and professional “environment,” says chief engineer Rob Ruccia.

Uptown’s original focus had been to always nurture young acts in the Chicago area and provide affordable recording choices. Being musicians who learned the ropes in the local clubs, its aim was to provide locally focused options as an inspiration and a good business practice. Engineer Dan Stock stresses he not only records bands, he recruits them. “We’ve stayed involved with the local music community by attending shows, and contacting bands that we’d like to record. If I hear about a fantastic band or see a killer show featuring a group I’ve never heard of, I have no problem approaching them and saying, ‘You guys are a great band, I have a great studio, let’s work together.’ After working with them, I become their biggest fan. I want them to go on to bigger and better things just as much as they do, after all, my name is on the record as well. If I haven’t seen the band live yet, then that becomes a must-do. If they don’t have a bill booked before our planned tracking session, then I’ll show up at their rehearsal space. Listening to and watching a band live is the core to capturing their attitude and swagger. Whether it’s the Metro, Sylvie’s, or a 10-by-10 rehearsal spot, I’ll be there.”

As technology has changed, Ruccia emphasizes the staff at the studio has changed with it, keeping up with software that’s been powering most recording studios during the past decade.

“We stay state-of-the-art with our hardware and software, while remaining true to the origin of recording. We have a hybrid of equipment that takes the best of the analog world and brings it into the 21st century. I’m the in-house active test candidate for Avid as well as a Pro Tools/ Macintosh guru that allows Uptown to stay functional and keep ahead of the curve when it comes to updates and upgrades.” Both Ruccia and Stock stress that bands with their own pre-recorded tracks are welcome at Uptown, which enables them to refine their recordings and pick-up on new techniques to make them better. “‘Laptop artists,’ as we call them, have been a common sight at Uptown. In fact, we openly welcome them. We were born out of a basement, so we aren’t saying ‘don’t be a recording enthusiast,’ just let us help. Having an expert engineer track your album in a professional environment, can be the difference between a great album and a dull basement demo. We recognize you can track most of your own music at home. As technology gets better, the ability for anyone to call them selves a studio gets higher. However, you cannot substitute high-end microphones, proper acoustic treatment, [or] high-quality reference monitors with a set of ears listening that are so discerning they can hear your stomach gurgle on the vocal track, and a Pro Tools HD system that puts laptop rigs to shame.

“It is generally a good idea to use a professional environment for the major stuff — drums, vocals, and mixing/mastering. Having a musician/engineer at Uptown be a co-producer to the artist can be very important. It’s the third ear that everyone wishes they had. We hear things that you may hear in your head, except we know how to get them onto tape. The first five years our motto was, ‘Are you hearing things? We can help’. From making edits that allow songs that may be too lengthy for commercial environments to adding a horn or piano part, Uptown Recording has enough musical production experience to bring the project to new heights.”

Having a 10-year track record in the recording business means not only being a good businessman, but also means being a good citizen in the community, and the Dennys are entrenched in their surroundings, working closely with their locally elected officials to make their neighborhood better.

“Matt Denny is very active in the Uptown community and is working with Alderman James Cappleman and the Uptown Chamber Of Commerce to develop the entertainment district along the Broadway corridor that includes the Riviera Theater, Uptown Recording, the Aragon, The Green Mill, and a soon-to-be-rebuilt Wilson Red Line [CTA] station,” Cappleman agrees. “Since its founding, Uptown Recording has been instrumental in bringing development into the 46th Ward. Their commitment to the neighborhood and their quality clients are helping to shape the future of the entertainment district. As we continue to develop the entertainment district in Uptown, Uptown Recording Studio and its owner Matt Denny are fundamental to the district’s success.”

One of the keys to business success is keeping your staff in place to offer continuity to the customers. Denny has held onto his original engineers (Ruccia, Stock), while giving local and national artists a comfortable and affordable place to record, including Cage The Elephant, Three Days Grace, and From Zero, plus breakout local bands like Madina Lake, Funkadesi, and Bruiser.

Naturally, the Dennys are proud of their decade-long accomplishments. Catherine Denny says they plan be around for the long-term. “We’ve been in the hood for 18 years, and are dedicated to making Uptown and Uptown Recording our home for a long time to come!”

– David Gedge

The British take a lot of pride in their rock ‘n’ roll, boasting that they studied its roots better than its host country; rescued the form after the crooners rushed in to fill Elvis’ void; and, if you canvas the ’60s titans, only the Queen’s subjects showed any real longevity.

On that last part, the numbers sure are hard to ignore. Beyond those Rolling Stones – whose reputation now is more Barnum & Bailey than actual Rock ‘N’ Roll Circus – The Who, The Kinks, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin far outlasted the careers of The Band, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Velvet Underground, or Simon & Garfunkel. The lone holdout are The Grateful Dead, while you’d want to put duct tape over the more embarrassing permutations of The Beach Boys and Jefferson Airplane/Starship.

Death, of course, intervened indiscriminately, which has led more than a couple people to wonder what would have become of The Doors. The conversation was controversially steered into view when keyboardist (and native Chicagoan) Ray Manzarek and guitarist Robby Krieger ignored the cries of drummer John Densmore and critics by asking The Cult’s Ian Astbury (and recently Hawkwind’s Dave Brock) to fill Jim Morrison’s role on their Doors Of Perception tours, beginning 2002.

The tone is far less circumspect this year, however, as Rhino and Eagle Rock – on behalf of the original label, Elektra – revisit The Doors’ swan song, L.A. Woman. Despite the broken – physical and mental – status of their frontman, L.A. Woman and its Morrison Hotel predecessor declared a band who’d reorganized and been revitalized. That Morrison was to move to France matters not – it was an indefinite hiatus before there were indefinate hiatuses. The trio of Manzarek, Krieger, and Densmore would “complete” and release music they’d been working on at the time of Morrison’s death – music Morrison intended to complete.

Still, his ragged vocals on L.A. Woman and the collective decision to shelve touring before Morrison’s relocation to Paris suggest the set might have been an end forthcoming. In the new, authorized documentary Mr. Mojo Risin’: The Story Of L.A. Woman, Manzarek himself reckons, “We had one last album to go, and we’re gonna make this album. In this zen moment in time, we didn’t discuss the future: the future’s uncertain. The end is always near.”

Call it a crafty editing job.

“That would be a good story, what people want,” he jeers to IE, “that when Jim left for Paris we knew it was the end. That would be a good story. Like we’re fucking psychic. We knew he was at his end. That his destiny had been completed.”

You knew with the court case that he’d been under a lot of pressure, and that his voice was pretty shot.

“Have you listened to L.A. Woman?”

Yes.

“And you think his voice is shot?”

On certain tracks, it sounds a little ragged.

“Hey, you know? It’d been five years of singing his ass off, sure. You’re getting a little bit of that whiskey voice. Oh! What a shame! That means he’s going to die? He’s getting a little older. [Referring to the DVD:] Is that exactly what I said? Or did I say, ‘It was our last recording contract with Elektra Records. Our last record on the contract of the seven.’ That’s what the last is. It’s not The Doors’ last record.”

This, of course, is discussion of the end of The Doors. Let’s start with Ray at his musical beginnings.

Ray Manzarek: Everett grammar school. St. Rita High School. And DePaul University.
IE: Local history then was all about the folk revival at the Gate Of Horn, etc. Were you involved in that at all?
RM: No, the blues scene and the jazz scene.
IE: So the South Side and West Side clubs?
RM: South Side, yeah. I went to see Muddy Waters at 47th and Racine at whatever the heck the club was. So I saw Waters live. That was a most amazing evening.
IE: You were known for inserting nods to your heros in those keyboard lines.
RM: Oh, absolutely. A tip of the hat. With The Doors, we always credited John Coltrane; “My Favorite Things” and “Ole Coltrane” were the inspiration to play the solo in “Light My Fire.” Those two were in 3/4, but I’m basically playing it in 4/4. Gosh, Miles Davis – what an influence he was. We used to open our sets at the Whisky A Go-Go [in Los Angeles] at 9 o’clock – nobody’s in the club; no need for Jim to start singing – so John, Robby, and I would play “Milestones” and then “Kind Of Blue,” and then improvise like a jazz quartet. It was always a tip of the hat. I cut my eyeteeth on the piano players of rock ‘n’ roll. My deepest influence was the blues, South Side of Chicago. Al Benson I’d come home from school and he’d play blues [on WGES-AM]. Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Richard, Magic Sam . . . holy Christ! Howlin’ Wolf, all of it. You hear those sounds as a young keyboard player, it’s mesmerizing. The depth of the emotion of those men singing their songs: absolutely profound.
IE: You’re in your late teens, early 20s . . .
RM: I was gone by 21.
IE: So before that, when you saw Muddy on Racine – was it easy to do that? Just any kid at school?
RM: Oh, yeah, but [my classmates] just weren’t hip to it. It was pre-Butterfield. And pre-Stones. So the Stones showed white kids what the blues was, and Paul Butterfield opened up Chicago and probably college students to listening to the blues. But there we were, the South Side of Chicago. The blues permeated the South Side. So it was no big deal. But I could never find anybody who was into the blues. Rock ‘n’ roll? Definitely. They were definitely into rock ‘n’ roll.
IE: Well, you grew up on Western. And the city was/is segregated.
RM: Oof! Wasn’t it ever! That was a totally white neighborhood. There were no black guys at St. Rita, not until much later. It’s pretty well mixed now, but at the time it was a totally white school. “We do not play the blues in St. Rita High School.” But they sure do now.
IE: But you could cross into the clubs on Michigan Avenue and Roosevelt Road without a problem?
RM: Absolutely. Things were pretty cool. I was there at Peppers Lounge, and Muddy Waters was playing, and we’re three white guys: me and two buddies from DePaul. Muddy thought it was so charming, that he introduced us. [Laughs.] “I’ve got my white fanclub here.” And we’re going, “Nooo!” “Stand up boys, and take a bow.” So we stood up, and people are applauding, and we sat back down. Talk about embarrassment. We tried to melt into the floor and be totally inconspicuous. But it was fine, like, “There’s some white guys. Hey, it’s cool! Come on, you kids!”
IE: Was everyone else listening to rock at that time?
RM: Yep. A couple guys I knew, one was a musician and the other was our buddy. We said, “You gotta go see this show.” “We’re gonna go where?” “47th and Racine, Peppers Lounge. Come on, man!” “O.K. That could be quite the adventure.” “It’s Muddy! Playing live!” They were reticent, but had the time of our lives. We came out of the club like, “Holy fuck, man.” It was a ritual, out of the transposed soul of Africa to America.
IE: When you moved to Los Angeles, what sort of musicians did you grip onto?
RM: The jazz musicians. It was also in Chicago. I went down to the Blue Note – I think it was called the Blue Note. What was great about it was, well because you had to be 21 to get into it, this was for under-21 and in the back they had a railing separating the kids area. They actually had a kids area. They weren’t 12-year-olds, but 18, 19, and 20-year-olds. And they would only serve Cokes. And man, I saw Duke Ellington, Count Basie’s Big Band with Joe Williams singing the blues.
IE: That was when West Coast jazz was just hitting its stride.
RM: Just getting started. Very rarely did you hear Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Shorty Rogers, Shelly Mann, and those people.
IE: Whom do you hear in Robby? Obviously there’s blues overtones, but when you hear his jazz you don’t hear Wes Montgomery or George Benson.
RM: No.
IE: He sounds more like a sax player.
RM: Yeah. Well he’s fast now. Holy Christ, can he play fast. He was a rock ‘n’ roller when we first started. He played blues, with a bottle neck like country blues. That’s what he played, and he played flamenco. With The Doors, he didn’t play with a pick. So it was flamenco-style guitar in a rock ‘n’ roll band with blues influence. And that was Robby Krieger.
IE: Was that like most bands in L.A., like Love? Amalgams of different players? Today, rock bands are all weaned on rock.
RM: Psychedelic rock was too young. It had its Little Richard era. But the ’60s were a cross-cultural time in which white people and black people all embraced each other. Anybody who was psychedelic was a member of the tribe. The battle for supremacy was between the squares and the hip people. The heads and the straights – and the straights win.
IE: There was a book a couple years ago, called How The Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘N’ Roll, and the point was that snobbery didn’t exist among listeners until a certain point. You could listen to The Association and The Beach Boys as well as the Dead and Incredible String Band. There was no differentiation between what music was cool. Do you agree?
RM: Oh, yeah. I don’t know that The Beatles did that. And if you think of rock ‘n’ roll as ’50s music as Little Richard and Elvis Presley – that expanded from the original genre it was into almost world music. Hell, there was folk rock in Los Angeles that was very big, like The Byrds. Then into the mid-’70s like Jackson Browne, the Eagles, and Linda Ronstadt. Almost country rock. Jingle-jangle morning. Everything was going on.
IE: You didn’t happen to know [The Byrds'] Roger McGuinn back in Chicago, did you?
RM: No, I didn’t know anybody. That’s why I got out of there. I wasn’t going to stay around. I never played with any bands in Chicago – I played with my own band. There were no bands. There were little lounge gigs. I guess if there were bands, they were little folk-rock bands. And the only guys playing R&B and rock ‘n’ roll were black guys. With electric basses. Holy shit, the first time I ever heard that live!
IE: When you think about The Doors’ history – we can look at it now like the first one came out, the next one, L.A. Woman came out in ‘71. Does it seem like a blur, or can you see each as stages?
RM: The stages were pretty short, man. We were recording as fast as we could. The first album came out in January of ‘67, the second came out in October. We were moving. We were hauling ass. We were recording, playing, and the whole thing. It was just a rollercoaster ride.
IE: Today, four years is two albums. If that.
RM: It’s an album, two years of touring, and a year of recording the next album. People take their time. Jim’s got a great line: “In that year, we had a great visitation of energy” – that’s The Doors. That was a five-year year. It lasted January ‘67 to July 3rd, 1971, Jim’s death. But now, my God, it seems like 40 years.
IE: When you and Robby tour and do interviews, do you have conflicting memories?
RM: Oh, sure. It’s the reality plus 40 years of memory. But then we have memories that are identical. We are different people, different human beings. We were four people, now we’re three, and we all have our own version of it. I make my own stories. Robby and I can be sitting next to each other and talking about something and tell two different stories.
IE: Are there any specific instances where you can’t believe he doesn’t have the same memory as you?
RM: All the time, but there are no specifics that I can give you that would make an amusing point in your article. You’d have to be interviewing Robby and I at the exact same time.

(Here is where the chat turned to the misunderstanding on the DVD at the beginning of the article.)

IE: You may have been joking or being sarcastic.
RM: Hey, [people] love that shit. “We thought the end was coming, and we were making our last album together.” Even greater, if all three of us, if after Jim died, we’d committed suicide. That’s four brothers, a great rock ‘n’ roll story! But the fact is, we were making our music and playing away, and Jim was going to Paris to take a break. Jim never said anything about Paris until the album was virtually completed. All the recording was done, all the vocals were done, we were mixing, we had three/four more to go, and Jim said, “I’m leaving for Paris next week.” It was like, “What?” “I’m going to Paris.” “Good idea, man.” The contract was up. We’ve completed our contractual obligation. We are now free to break up and never play together again; sign with a new record company; or take a break and sign with another record company in six months or a year. “Go! Jesus Christ! You’ve been drinking too much, man. You’ve got too many groupies and too many bad friends. Perfect. Go to Paris, become Jim Morrison poet again in Paris.” An American In Paris. Hemingway. Fitzgerald. Who wrote Tropic Of Cancer/Tropic Of Capricorn? Henry Miller.

So, anyway, that was Jim Morrison. The next American in Paris. “Get your shit together: write.” Of course, he only lasted four months. And who knows what his thoughts were? “He was breaking up the band. He had quit.” People know that? If he had, in his mind, quit, and went to Paris without telling me? Then he broke the magic circle. If he’d said to me, “Ray! That’s it, buddy. We had a great run. We put this band together out of nothing, graduated out of UCLA, didn’t see each other for two months, didn’t see each other until July 1965, right on the beach and we started the band, we dreamed the dream but I’ve had it. That’s it. The dream is now over.” I would have said, “My friend, go to Paris. Send me a poem or two every once in a while, and I’ll see you.” That would have been fine.

IE: The music you were working on when he left, Full Circle . . .
RM: Full Circle would have been great had Jim been there.

IE: Was it normal for you guys to just jam, the three of you?
RM: Jim would be on a midnight creep for a week and a half, and then he’d come back. We’d have rehearsals every Tues-day/Thursday, Monday/Wednesday/Fri-day depending how ambitious we felt, how close we were, how exicted we were in the recording studio. And we’d work on songs. Jim would be there, not be there, Robby would have songs, when Jim left John and I started writing songs. We had plenty of material to work on, and we were just rehearsing as we usually did, and waiting for Jim to come back.

He said to John, he called John, and asked how L.A. Woman was doing, and [John] said fine. “It’s the Doors’ comeback.” And Jim said, “That’s great. Sure was fun making that record.” And John said, “We were talking about going on the road with Jerry Scheff [Elvis Presley's bassist, who played on the album] and Mark Benno on rhythm guitar, so instead of four there’d be six of us on stage and we’d do the album just like we recorded it.” And Morrison said, “What a great idea! Sounds fabulous! Let’s do that as soon as I get back.” John said, “Cool. When are you coming back?” “I don’t know.”
IE: When you guys were working on what would have become the album after L.A. Woman, would Morrison have been writing melodies as well as lyrics?
RM: Never.
IE: Never?
RM: Jim was the word-man. If he initiated the song, he would sing the melody. Well, he could add words to Robby’s stuff. That was Jim’s words to Robby’s melody. His songs, he sings the melody, that’s his melody. And he had a good sense of bars and phrases, and when to lay out and when to come back in. He was a very musical guy.

And the British very certainly couldn’t call this one their own.

– Steve Forstneger

Just because Martha Berner’s finally closed a six-year gap between full-length studio outings, it doesn’t mean the singer/songwriter was inactive. In fact, she’s used the half decade and change to practically start from scratch, reinventing her already alluring folk flavorings under the umbrella of insurgent country, good ol’ fashioned rock ‘n’ roll, and Stax soul. Much of the evolution comes from slogging it out on the local circuit and beyond, but another key element was the cementing of her supporting band, The Significant Others, with whom Berner shares co-billing throughout the new Fool’s Fantasy (Poprock).

Appearing: Friday, February 4th at Lincoln Hall with Andrew Fraker and Raised On Zenith.

“I never expected it to be six years since I put out my last full-length, and I actually had plans to make the next one shortly after [debut album] . . . this side of yesterday!” exclaims the troubadour by phone from her Windy City home. “In the end, what probably took an additional three years [more than I wanted] was just a shift in who I was working with and really wanting to differ this record from the others. [It's] not that one way was right and the other was wrong, but [I preferred] just to have a very cohesive and intimate band feel with musicians who knew the songs for awhile and experienced them live for a long time before going into the studio. Basically the timing isn’t always what we think it’s going to be as artists, and even though I’m kicking myself a little bit, I feel really great having it come out now and I’m excited for where the band is at.”

Berner’s idea for The Significant Others began with a call to longtime friend and collaborator Scott Fritz, who produced Fool’s Fantasy, played a slew of instruments (from guitar on down), and helped recruit the other musicians. Keyboardist Will Sprawls and drummer Tyson Ellert round out the group, contributing to the comparatively thicker, full-band feel and extra aggression.

“The new music has a little bit more grit and edge that my other albums didn’t have, and it’s a little more rock ‘n’ roll,” confirms Berner. “I wrote all the songs, but the guys wrote their own parts and we all sort of co-produced it together. It’s still billed as Martha Berner & The Significant Others, but it definitely is a band effort. I see them as the special sauce, and I couldn’t achieve this sound without them.”

As for those specific sounds on Fool’s Fantasy, they range from the 10,000 Maniacs-styled title track to the smoky soul of “Some Stay A While” and the alternative country grit of “Cry.” On the other hand, “Where Does The Day Go” could easily fit alongside the easygoing indie pop of Feist, while “Irene” and “Burning Candles” recall recent collaborations of Robert Plant with Alison Krauss. (Because this collection features four-time Grammy-winning mastering engineer Gavin Lurssen, perhaps that last comparison is no coincidence.)

“I met Gavin through a good friend and fellow artist Erika Rose, and I flew out to L.A. [to work with him],” she explains. “It was super fun sitting there seeing his Grammys, and it was a real honor to watch whatever it is that he does. He seemed to really hang on to the textures, warmth, and depth, and not lose it in the compression process.”

Another area of depth comes on the songwriting side of the coin, which Berner culls from a composite of everyone from Leonard Cohen to Sinead O’Connor, The Sundays, Wilco, Bon Iver, and Rogue Wave. Lyrically, many of her tunes take a storytelling approach, and even though they’re coming from the perspective of a burgeoning artist hoping to make a mark on the world at large, Berner makes a point to relate to listeners from any walk of life.

“‘Fool’s Fantasy’ as a song and the record as a whole are my examination of life, not just for me, but people in general on a journey to achieve what they want in life,” she says. “It’s the song that kind of questions how do you know when to draw the line in your pursuit, whether that be a music career or relationships. How do you know when you should work harder or just walk away? [In my case], whether I’m foolish or not, I’ll carry on this [musical] path.”

Even if Berner’s yet to become a household name, she’s been making a push through multiple appearances at Austin’s gem-uncovering South By Southwest conference and Milwaukee Summerfest, plus an aggressive campaign to be heard on television programs, most notably MTV’s “The Real World.” Add in some WXRT radio airplay, mounds of positive press, plus a continual presence on the road, and the tunesmith is certainly popping up in all the right places.

“I think there’s a natural desire to push [my career] forward, even with the state of the music industry right now,” she considers. “There’s some great stuff going on and some tougher stuff, too, but I just want to strike a balance between being very driven and also really wanting to preserve my love for it. I always have something I’m working on, and at the end of the day, I want to love performing and writing and being in a band. It all ebbs and flows as it would for anyone, especially in today’s economy, but I’m going to keep on doing it.”

Despite having to weather the music industry’s uncertainty, Berner’s thankful for Chicago’s support over the past eight years she’s lived here, which follows a provincial Wisconsin upbringing, through spending time in cosmopolitan San Francisco, and more exotic locales like the Virgin Islands and Thailand. She attributes the frequent moves to wanderlust, though one has to question the tendency away from paradise and toward the wintry Great Lakes.

“Chicago is a very inviting and warm city and I love the Midwest strategy of picking yourself up by your bootstraps and cracking a good joke while you’re doing it,” she explains. “I love the drive and humor and, music-wise, I just continue to have great relationships with musicians in the city. Chicago has the big city opportunity, sophistication, and talent, but still the small-town hospitality. We back each other up, we’re all in this together and we have a good time above all.”

It’s all part of her fantasy.

– Andy Argyrakis

Chicago hip-hop artists who make and perform music full-time are too few and far between – that is, artists who actually still reside in the area. But while it becomes even tougher for local rappers to ditch their day jobs, 20-year-old Chicagoan Rockie Fresh is among a select few who are already on their way to stardom before ever having to step inside a cubicle.

“It’s definitely become my life,” says Fresh of his music. “I’ve been able to make an earning off of it and take care of things that I need to take care of – get the things that I need and I want. I wanna do this forever, so it keeps me on track and focused.”

If Fresh were a label-manufactured act, his ascension wouldn’t be so surprising. To his credit, though, this MC with the slow flow has been able to garner a decent amount of downloads and book a whole lot of shows independently. Yes, some of this was done with the aid of a management and public-relations team, but before he had any publicist, he was still able to fill Reggies Rock Club in 2009 for the release party of his debut mixtape, Rockie’s Modern Life. This was also his first live show ever.

“I was kind spoiled because that was the crowd that was all of my fans and they knew the words and were super happy to see me,” he reflects about his debut.

And so 2010 was the true test of Fresh’s abilities when he hit the road rocking shows along with fests like South By Southwest and CMJ in front of largely unfamiliar audiences. He accepted the challenge and embraced the positive response from new fans. In fact, he says it was certain Chicagoans at that time who began to have a problem with his growing popularity – something he addresses openly throughout his second mixtape, 2010’s The Otherside.

On the synthy, smoked-out “They Don’t Understand Why” he raps, “Anytime you gettin’ money then you bound to get respect/but you gonna find a problem when you find success/the ones that used to hate you feel like they know you the best.”

Without calling out anyone specifically, Fresh explains that “people on the Internet and people outside of Chicago, they were definitely showing a lot of love for the music, but I kind of expected more from people at home. And in turn, I realized that the way Chicago people treated me as an artist really made me a lot tougher and it gave me a lot of strength that a lot of artists don’t get in other cities. So it was cool in the long run.”

It makes sense why Fresh has been compared to Drake – a pair of meditative MCs who can show their self-consciousness about their haters but ultimately aren’t afraid fire back or boast about their achievements – whether they be within hip-hop or with women.

One can pluck just about any line from his tracks for proof, but especially as he raps on “Otherside,” “All my life I’ve been picked on, slept on, stared at/however, I refuse to be stepped on.”

He’s less than three years into his career, but Fresh, the Prairie State College dropout, is already easing into his own style. What sets him apart from Drake or other acts to whom he’s been compared is his alt-rock edge. Yes, he can do straight-up braggadocio rap as heard on “Sofa King Cole” or his collaboration with West Coast act Casey Veggies (“Duckin N Dodgin”), but his rock tendencies are just as prevalent. They’re the creations of his production team The Cartoonz and others, who are often adding guitar riffs into his beats or to a greater extent by doing collaborations with his rock influences like Good Charlotte.

While he now lives in the city, as a teen attending Homewood-Flossmoor High School, it wasn’t beats and rhymes all day.

“Growing up in the suburbs and being introduced to alternative rock and different types of music outside of rap, like punk, it made me really get into that type of stuff,” he explains. “Fall Out Boy was a band that I really appreciated and same with Good Charlotte. John Mayer is one of my favorite artists of all time. So for me, there were certain things that I wanted to do to make myself different from everybody else. I never really saw anybody add that dark element of rap to music and be consistent with it and so that was something that I wanted to be my thing and I just ran with it.”

That dark element is something Fresh is no doubt still building upon within his reflective raps. The first single off his new mixtape, Driving 88, is called “No Fear” and rife with moody backup vocals, downtempo drums, and lyrical meditations. It’s not exactly happy-go-lucky material when he kicks off by rhyming, “Reporting live from Chicago/where they tell me I’m the future/but I’m not promised tomorrow.”

Fresh is a live-in-the-moment type of person, whether gloomy or grandiose at the moment. When he performed a homecoming show of sorts at the Metro last November with Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump, it was hard to tell how the crowd full of the headliner’s fans would react to the young rapper, even if Fresh had already toured coast-to-coast with Stump. But he didn’t appear worried when he hit the stage. Ripping through “Sofa King Cole,” calling himself “so fucking cold,” the crowd was visually lifted.

“This is the most love I’ve gotten, I swear to God,” he told the Metro between songs.

As Fresh continues to develop his sonics, his fanbase expands as well. During our interview he talks with equal enthusiasm about his work with NYC rhymer Action Bronson and SoCal rockers Good Charlotte.

“I do realize that my fans range from all different types,” he says. “Some of ‘em appreciate rap music, some of ‘em like urban rap, some of ‘em like when I sing so it’s just really trying to get people all of those things and all of the different types of music that I appreciate.”

It’s all a balancing act that this full-time rhymer thus far has proven possible – hard times or not.

Rockie Fresh released the Driving 88 mixtape at the end of January. Download for free at rockiefresh.com.

– Max Herman

As a number of enthusiasts have pointed out, there are currently more pop-music genres than there are artists to occupy them. Whether such a sneering jab is true, the slotting of acts into ready-made categories has always been a vice of critics and fans.

The practice of labeling often gets dismissed as laziness, but the feverish production of new phyla seems to stem more from over-active minds than the other way around. Cross that industriousness with the inexhaustible supply of fresh sounds online, and it’s no wonder the cup is overflowing.

The result, however, has been the opposite of intent: there are so many alleged styles that nobody can agree on what each signifies, and they often come about with little regard for whether an existing tag suffices. (Or if – as in the case of mumblecore and crabcore – we’re even discussing music.) The “-core” suffix gets applied so liberally, you’d think the hacks who attach “-gate” to news scandals are behind it. The English-bred field of “drum and bass,” which sprang out of ’90s rave culture, has nearly two-dozen permutations (darkstep, breakcore, techstep, darkcore . . .) most of which appear designed to only appease the organizational demands of beats-per-minute Talmuds.

With local artists as a prism, we’re going to try and help you determine which sounds correspond to which circles on your Scantron sheet. In a cosmopolitan metropolis like Chicago, you never know if the next blues or house will spring from dubstep. Or drumstep. Or moombahton. Or moombahcore.

United States Black Metal (USBM)

While black metal itself is unfamiliar to most, the USBM delineation is hardly perfunctory. The mother genre arose out of Scandinavia with deceptively conservative architecture and an equally dogmatic culture (which is ironic, because it’s rooted in opposition to organized religion). Black metal is frequently written and recorded by individuals in solitude, by melding violent blast beats (percussive cannonades akin to machine-gun fire), low-fidelity recording techniques, a raspy, nihilistic Cobra Commander-esque vocal, and punishing, tremolo-picked guitar arrangements. A generation of Americans, however, have abused the genre for their own nefarious means. While many practice traditional black metal (and spend their days crafting perfectly indecipherable logos), others surgically dissect it, taking only what they need.

Chicago is perhaps the best place to start, with Nachtmystium (championed by “Caught In A Mosh” columnist Trevor Fisher) and some bands you’d only think of as tangentially heavy metal – though tangential seems to be the nature of USBM. Because for as important it is to note USBM’s similarities to and differences with regular black metal, it’s also a neutral identity. Nachtmystium sound no more like Liturgy than Jimi Hendrix sounds like Crosby, Stills & Nash. The former, fronted by Blake Judd, began as a trad outfit and who began splashing their core influences with classic metal signatures and even modern rock. (Key track: “Addicts.”) Locrian involve so much of the no-wave noise rock pioneered by Glenn Branca that, with a couple tweaks, they could almost be Sonic Youth. Utilizing chants, earthy percussion, and things that go bump in the night, they’ve become the sonic equivalent of a terrifying horror film that never shows you the gore. (Key track: “At Night’s End.”)

Dubstep

Typically an electronic-music movement makes its way through England and Europe before winding up in stateside pop songs and hip-hop samples. Dubstep emerged about a dozen years ago in London, from the mingling pools of drum and bass, grime (a mercurial strain of hip-hop), 2step, and dub reggae. Its American manifestation has shown up at the neo-raves of DJs like Skrillex, who’ve been slammed by purists for creating “brostep”: a frat-boy friendly bastardization. Mostly instrumental (save when samples have vocals), dubstep typically relies on a half-step rhythm and menacing bassline filled in by some or all of synth figures, syncopation, and samples. The modern/commercial tracks all lead to what’s known as the drop. “Filthy” drops are akin to bass solos conducted by malfunctioning automobile factories. Customized dance moves resemble breakdancing seizures, and remixes typically add teeth to the most innocent of tracks (Adele, Ellie Goulding). While Chicago has no one on the level of Skrillex or Bassnectar, DJs Chris Widman and Phaded (1/29 at Reggies) hold down regularly at Smart Bar, while Nameloc was among those at the Lava Lounge beginnings and who regularly throws down at Subterranean. (Key track: Nameloc “Ever After.”)

Juke

Juke juke juke juke juke. You won’t have trouble finding local examples of juke hip-hop, because juke is a Chicago idiom. Like go-go to D.C. or hyphy to Oakland, juke represents a regional culture that hasn’t really traveled outside the area. An offshoot of ghetto house, minimalist – and we mean minimalist – beats move at a breakneck pace to push dancers to the limit. The dancing (“footwork”) is more essential to juke than breakdancing was to early hip-hop, and it rivals dubstep moves in mind-bending ingenuity. You’re more likely to find representative CDs sold from of a car trunk than a Best Buy, with the more mainstream artists being Chrissy Murderbot, Zebo, Flosstradamus, and Kid Sister (Key track: “Luuk Out Girl“). But if you find yourself in a South Side fix and need to flash some cred to save your neck, you can always ask anybody if they have any DJ Rashad, Gant-Man, Traxman, DJ Client, Dude’n Nem, Ghetto Division, or Starfoxxx. (Key track: DJ Rashad ft. Gant-Man “Juke Dat.”)

Moombahton

The term “moombahton” sounds far more international than the Hispanic high-school where it was born. Invented when a DJ (Nadastrom’s Dave Nada) turned up for a dance with only techno, and deliberately modulated it to sound like reggaeton (the first song he tried was called “Moombah“), the style’s vocabulary has exploded in ways that variably amp or downplay the ethnic aspects. Chicago already has top men working on it – Top. Men. – with fierce parties hosted by Willy Joy (1/13 with Nadastrom at Metro) or Rampage & Nader, while Stratus – who also deals in dubstep – released the addictive cut, “Jasper’s Theme.”

Witch House

Nothing announces an arrival like a good backlash, and maybe all you need to know about witch house is that there’s an arbitrary band-name generator online: it spits out ideas with each capital A replaced by a triangle. The second thing is the deceptive use of the word “house,” which doesn’t necessarily signify the dance-music form. The best way we can describe it is ineffably slow and languid late-’80s goth-pop for the American Apparel generation. Vocals are purposefully drowned out and not particularly melodic, which lead to an impression of hauntedness. Pitchfork alleges that early, ambient dubstep and Swedish electro band The Knife were key influences, though witch house’s burgeoning star, Charli XCX, shatters the buried-voice rule and sounds like a synthed-out Siouxsie & The Banshees. With a scene that’s almost purely Internet-based, locating practicing local outfits is difficult. Local booking agents recommended Magicks, the nom de plume of a Reggies employee whose latest upload, “Catalyst,” tells you everything and nothing about witch house, because it might be considered . . . (Magicks: 1/19 at Reggies with Rituals)

Chillwave

Chillwave also goes by glo-fi, though the only people still calling it that are also calling witch house “drag.” The difference between the two depends on how you grade the amount of light you feel. The – semi-dismissive – shorthand on chillwave is “electronic vacation music,” if you believe vacationing to be sitting on a warm beach and letting the wind sift through your hair. (Male-pattern baldness need not apply.) Chillwave also prefers strong vocal lines, though in the eyes of Chicago’s Glitter Bones, they don’t have to be high in the mix. Houses (Key track: “Soak It Up“) amiably fit the holiday description, while Young Man (Key track: “Up So Fast“) – releasing another album on French Kiss this winter – drifts into and out of Animal Collective/Beach Boys space.

Noise pop

Not new by any stretch, noise pop has shown a spectacular ability to regenerate and mutate, recently adding middling success to its repertoire. As distinguished from full-assault, Boredoms-esque noise rock, noise pop’s game is to hide the melody. The bigger national bands like Animal Collective and No Age get prominent slots at major festivals, washing their tunefulness in waves of distortion and electronics that are less ferocious than textural. Provocation remains integral, but even local outfits like Yawn have managed to sculpt bracing psychedelia into something user-friendly. Bigcolour kicked off with sizzling, chillwave compositions but have since morphed into a garage-rock hybrid that trembles while trying to focus. But if it’s discomfort you seek, Gypsyblood’s Cold In The Guestway (Sargent House) doesn’t sound at all out of place on a label with serial Japanese noise terrorists Boris – as if when they were kids they put saw blades in their bicycle spokes.

Lazer Bass

Such is the yen for artists to feel insulated from traditional scenes, MC Zulu told the Chicago Reader he’d rather not live where there are large Afro-Caribbean communities. While Toronto and Queens teem with competitors, Zulu – born in Panama to a military family – has few peers in Chicago’s field of lazer-bass saplings. (Other descriptors include “future blap” and “turbo crunk.”) The sci-fi-like genre couldn’t be more of a melting pot if it tried, combining dancehall MCs, clunky hip-hop, hyperdrive techno, bossa nova, and whatever else you got. French-Canadian DJ Ghislain Poirier initially announced the “movement” to be stillborn, that it was only a small circle of people who were fiddling with the same sounds. Central to it – as for dubstep, moombahton, etc. – are deep, industrial-grade basslines that are frequently doubled in octaves above and below, plus the odd conflicting bass pattern. Zulu, quasi-Caribbean by birth, seems primed to overtake it. (Key track: “Call Red Alert.”)

Genre Unto Themselves

We could really run with this forever. Besides frequent citations of “post-chillwave” and well-populated but sufficiently underground categories like glitch-hop or crust punk, we’ve come across purple sound, acid crunk . . . it’s overwhelming. But one of the biggest square pegs we’ve found among Chicago-based musicians have already been put on the shoulders of an unlikely source: Victory Records. The punk label’s roster, which seems to aggressively recycle the same hard-edged tones, dug up Victorian Halls and no one knows what to do with them other than blast them for being Blood Brothers clones with high-tech dance beats. It’s a fair argument, though clearly the sound didn’t get the BBs anywhere – something else must be afoot. Dance punk, so myopically rooted in Gang Of Four since forever, needs an exit strategy. Even if that means Auto-Tune. Victorian Halls might not find the door, but with some occasionally embarrassing and thrilling solutions, they’re doing quite a bit more than fumbling through their keys. (1/27 at Double Door)

And if you only seek a pure, guitar-pop rush, there’s always Clip Art. They’ll be on display at Schubas every Monday (beginning the 9th) in January, and spiritually following Shoes and The Redwalls – or, if you like to get grandiose, Badfinger and Big Star. Their immediate antecedents, The Smith Westerns, headline Metro on February 3rd.?

Winter is always the hardest season for music lovers in Chicago because so few bands hit the road. And who can blame them? After all, the below-freezing temperatures, blustery snow, and icy roads are enough to make even the proudest native wish they were somewhere south, while tourist traffic is slim, especially since cash is short after the holidays.

Thankfully though, there is one relatively recent development in the indie-rock scene that’s giving faithful a much needed new-year fix. Enter Tomorrow Never Knows, a festival spanning January 11th to 15th, that’s spread across Schubas, Lincoln Hall, Metro, Smart Bar, and Hideout, bringing a mix of national and local bands, plus a handful of DJs and standup comics.

“It started in 2005, essentially out of Jeremiah Wallace from Paper Airplane Pilots, who worked here [at Schubas], looking to find support for a record-release show,” recalls Matt Rucins, talent buyer and promoter for both Lincoln Hall and Schubas. “We figured it would be best to make it two nights of local bands and – by naming it – it would be easier to promote. It went well, so the next year we stuck to local bands, but added a third night and the idea stuck. Then we started introducing regional bands and wound up with five days at Schubas. We continue expanding a little bit each year and wound up adding Lincoln Hall. We’ve always been close with Metro and last year we brought them on board for a couple of nights. This year we wanted to add another venue, but went to the smaller end with the Hideout, where comedy will be a nice addition to the room.”

Though acts continue to be added, confirmed artists at press time included headliners The Walkmen (performing a 10th-anniversary concert), along with Grouplove, Glass Candy, Chromatics, Theophilus London, Two Gallants, Tycho, Active Child, and Chairlift (above). Of course, there’s also a slew of even less familiar faces, but Rucins recommends showing up early because chances are one of the future’s most beloved bands could emerge from the event.

“Some of the stuff you might not be aware of unless you do some research, but if you know and like the headliner, you’re probably going to be fairly happy with who goes on before them,” he confirms. “Bon Iver did his first show in Chicago as part of Tomorrow Never Knows and now you have to pay $30 to see him play at Chicago Theatre or UIC Pavilion. We’ve also had Tapes ‘N Tapes, Dr. Dog, Handsome Furs, The Helio Sequence, Atlas Sound, Freelance Whales, Maps & Atlases, White Rabbits, and The Redwalls, to name a few.”

Given the event’s Chicago roots, it’s understandable for prospective attendees to draw a mental parallel to Lollapalooza or Pitchfork Music Festival, but Rucins likens it loosely to South By Southwest in Austin or CMJ Music Marathon in New York. “I think this is for pretty serious music fans,” he continues. “Pavement’s not headlining and you’ve got to come out in the depths of winter in Chicago to see it. It also takes more effort from you and it’s not all one-stop shopping. We provide a trolley to all venues, but there are also buses, trains, and cabs. That makes it more along the lines of CMJ and South By Southwest, but it’s much, much smaller and it’s not a music conference. We don’t have panels and I don’t envision us going that route, but we do hope to keep up a diverse lineup and continuing partnering with other venues.”

Perhaps the smartest planning angle of the entire event is the immense amount of attention it and the participating bands receive, if only for the lack of competition. Even though TNK is a shoe-in to saturate the blogosphere and print papers, all of the attention is certainly warranted since so many new musical discoveries are ripe for the picking.

“When we started this, we didn’t sit down and say, ‘Let’s start a music fest in January’; it’s more organic than that,” promises Rucins. “There’s not a whole lot going in live music or much else really, so we quickly found out the coverage of it between press, blogs, and word-of-mouth was pretty all encompassing. Having it a part of the Martin Luther King Jr. weekend buys us a little extra energy, and it gives Chicago music fans something to look forward to in the middle of winter.”

Bands to watch

The Walkmen
Formed from the ashes of late-’90s buzz band Jonathan Fire Eater, The Walkmen not only survived the garage-rock boom of a decade ago, but are surging. Though their biggest commercial achievement remains the arena-friendly “The Rat,” a romantic flair and widescreen arrangements keep them fresh.

Active Child
Frontman Pat Grossi could probably give you the mathematical and theoretical breakdown for why his vocal arrangements drop peoples’ jaws open. He doesn’t hide his skill or training, and filled You Are All I See (Vagrant) with influences that range from Jeff Buckley and Owen Pallett to Antony & The Johnsons and Baby Dee. He offsets his classical composure with the pent-up, minimal R&B that built James Blake a house, but streaks that quad wearing a Petruccio mask.

Chairlift
One of those Apple television-ad bands, Chairlift’s 2008 debut didn’t always work but came from so many directions that the possibilities on the folluwup are manifold. They’ve released two singles from their forthcoming Columbia debut, Something, and both “Met Before” and “Sidewalk Safari” reveal a more assured, focused band – now a duo – without losing an ounce of enthusiasm.

Class Actress
Elizabeth Harper started as an earnest singer/songwriter, and now seems to prefer mugging for photo shoots. Class Actress’ effortlessly sexy, glittery synth-pop meets somewhere between The Knife and Goldfrapp, and can be both teasingly girly and relentlessly powerful. Rapproacher (Carpark) never goes anywhere without its makeup on, even if it’s tellingly smeared.

Dom
Coming seemingly out of nowhere, Dom’s decidedly lo-fi, fuzzy, surfy-psychy, synthy, reverb-heavy-just-out-of-the-garage rock has been building buzz since it first started circulating on cassette. The band deliver solid hooks, with riffs recalling “La Bamba,” “Get Off My Cloud,” and “China Girl” – or, in short, touching all of pop/rock’s historic high points.

Plants & Animals
Plants & Animals sound like the work of a theater company. Seeking more power from their trio, the band stack songs with brass, clarinet, flute, and choir. A big choir. Evoking Polyphonic Spree, Beta Band, and Head Of Femur, they alternate between a pensive romanticism, desperate and sultry R&B, shy folk, and glam Bowie without seeming out of their element.

Grouplove
If ever a song were sole justification for Lollapalooza to invite a band, “Colours” is it. A flailing, acoustic thumper with stuttered verses and adlibbed harmonies, the track frantically ticks all the boxes on the summer-anthem checklist (“Things are not thaaaaaaaaaaat bad”).

Herman Dune
This band’s approach to songwriting might cause some to stick them with the dreaded “quirky” tag, an effect most likely from David-Ivar Herman Dune’s conversational lyrics. But slowly, you join the Tell Me Something I Don’t Know EP’s discourse and find yourself one with the geeks.

Willis Earl Beal
This reclusive West Side artist will probably spark a number of uncomfortable conversations this year. Acousmatic Sorcery, due in late March via XL, might strike you as gut-wrenching gospel/blues of the Fire In My Bones order, Wesley Willis-level exploitation, or pure minstrelsy. Moments of unbridled, soulful majesty are broken by passages of utter inscrutability, making for an exhausting yet rewarding listen.

Cloudbirds and Carter Tanton
Familiarity (and clouds) strikes twice on the 12th at Schubas. Cloudbirds are 3/4 of Kinks-bred local boys The M’s, who’ve transformed into a gentle, hymnlike acoustic-harmonies trio. Their self-titled debut can be had for free here. Tanton used to travel the globe as Tulsa, but ushered a shimmering version of his echoing Americana into Freeclouds, which was released last fall on Western Vinyl.

Nadastrom and Willy Joy
The term “moombahton” sounds far more international than the Hispanic high-school where it was born. Invented when a DJ (Nadastrom’s Dave Nada) turned up for a dance with only techno, and deliberately modulated it to sound like reggaeton. (The first song he tried was called “Moombah.“) The style’s vocabulary has exploded in ways that variably amp or downplay the ethnic aspects. Chicago already has top men working on it – Top. Men. – with fierce parties hosted by Willy Joy.

Tycho
Scott Hansen knows that his graphic-design job and music gig are deeply intertwined, but he’s given them separate names (ISO50 and Tycho) anyway. He embraces the chillwave aesthetic – waking up on the beach – in both, though his latest outing, Dive (Ghostly International), will get you more in the mood than staring at sun-bleached visuals (on a cold January day in Chicago) ever would.

Poliça
It’s always a good thing when the psychedelic, Animal Collective paradigm gets stretched into something less recognizable. There are far too many artists who orbit too closely. Poliça, an offshoot of Gayngs, manage the swirling effect but come at it with the mindset of underground R&B producers. Channy Leaneagh’s fluttering, faux-Auto-Tuned vocals on next month’s Give You The Ghost recall James Blake with a heartbeat, and her pulse gets a boost from Ryan Olson’s beats — and he’s not afraid to rock out if he has to.

Caveman
On its debut (head-scratchingly named after an ’80s-era middling bad guy WWE wrestler?), current Brooklyn-based five-piece band o’ month Caveman serve up high-fretted, whooshly keyboarded ethereal indie pop with an electro/ambient edge, which serves as perfect backdrop tight harmonic vocals that all members appear to contribute. Think jangly pop without the jangle from Autechre backing Enya singing in English and you get the idea. On cuts like “Old Friend” and “Thankful” it can get irresistibly compelling that one keeps returning to.

Hospitality
That giant swoosh you just heard was a premature donning of corduroys by Belle & Sebastian nation upon hearing the opening tones of Hospitality’s forthcoming Merge debut. A (merciful) red-herring if there ever was, the New York-based trio can surely deal in wistful twee as well as any Glaswegian waif in a cardigan, but it’s Amber Papini’s unexpected sass on tracks like “Friends Of Friends” and “The Right Profession” that move the record along.

Canon Blue
If you’re the type of person who enjoys Mutemath, you’ll probably not be caught lurking around TNK this week. Everyone else will need to make this set a priority, because the next time multi-instrumentalist Daniel James and co. come through, it’ll be opening for the keyboard-smashing cabal. Canon’s Rumspringa opts for brightly popping classical-related fills, samples, and loops, giving the album a distinctly British feel.

– Interview by Andy Argyrakis; preview by Steve Forstneger and David C. Eldredge

Grab your torches, we found the person responsible for Kanye West. Actually, while most of local hip-hop history goes relatively unsung, people far and wide shout No I.D.’s praises – probably without knowing it.

The South Sider, born Dion Wilson (his moniker is the reverse spelling of his first name), has made several unremovable marks on rap music in two distinctly different eras, and is one of the few artists in any genre to successfully choreograph a second act. The first came at the side of rapper/actor Common in supplying the beat for “I Used To Love H.E.R.,” raising the Midwest’s game above the East Coast/West Coast fray in ‘94. (It was during this stage that a green-eared West would sit in the studio and watch a master at work.) The second act, we’re living with him: he’s an A-list producer/songwriter behind Jay-Z, West, Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Drake, among others, who was recently tapped to become an Executive Vice President at Def Jam Records – the New York-based label that is hip-hop.

“Well actually,” he laughs, “I’m in control at this moment.”

Looking at that history, the eyes are drawn to a gap in the chronology almost perfectly sandwiched by Common’s voyage east to become a Soulquarian and West’s rocket-like ascendancy of the pop-music zeitgeist. Peoples’ taste for the jazzy elements that were his signature turned to the live-band approach favored by The Roots. Then, sample freaks in general flocked as commercial hip-hop went the way of hook-heavy Puff Daddy productions and the jerky punch of Timbaland. No I.D. actually released a couple solo albums in this interim, but otherwise laid low.

“I took a break,” he says matter of factly. “It’s not like [artists] go to school, and get a handbook, and it’s laid out. We make our mistakes, have our ups and downs. A lot of people don’t get past the downs. So, I took some time, refocused, rethought. I educated myself a little bit and decided on a path. So pretty much everything happening was a choice, an educated choice. Experience taught me a lot. The [Def Jam job] wasn’t an accident: it’s a job, a specific project with goals that I set. From that aspect, I wasn’t surprised [to get it] other than the fact that I’m good enough to achieve these things. I may be the one producer from my era that is still working at this level. I feel kind of over-qualified for what I’m doing.”

It’s hard not to notice his confidence, or hear the similarities in the way Common talks about his own career: there are no extraordinary gambles, miscalculations, or accidents. Everything happens for a reason, or for each door that closes another opens. Asked if he feels his current status feels like a vindication or a longtime coming, he steadily repeats himself.

“I think it’s not more of a longtime coming, but being qualified to do a job,” he assures. “Not a vindication.”

No I.D. cut his teeth spinning records at house-music clubs and parties when he was a teenager. DJ technology was still pretty primitive in the late-’80s, so cutting tracks and matching speeds took not only an inherent feel for rhythm, but the ability to read an audience whose mood balanced on the mercurial mix of chemicals in their bloodstreams. House music, as it related on the South Side to step music and eventually juke, wasn’t simply pressing buttons.

“I started out with Farley Keith, Steve Hurley, Andre Hatchet, Ron Hardy,” he remembers, “you name ‘em: all the classy house DJs. It was a Chicago culture. I was a young kid and I got the experience of playing music for 2,000 people and having the responsibility of making them react to things they’d never heard. I was just all into it. The music business and house music were not . . . it’s not a business you can make money off of. It was more for the love of the music and the culture of going to the clubs, the instant gratification. You’d dance all night, and Chicago’s one of those places where a person from Chicago will just start dancing by themselves. It’s weird. You don’t see that too many places, outside of New Jersey, maybe. It was just something fun. The excitement was musical, challenging, and in a city where there was no music industry where I was growing up, it was my introduction to everything.”

He soaked up ideas from anyone who’d give him the time, and transferred his house skills into the studio where he and Common would form a lethal combo. His spellbinding mix under “I Used To Love H.E.R.” gave a psychedelic, mysterious feel to a parabolic tale of hip-hop as a tragic female. They also started a minor war with Ice Cube via “The Bitch In Yoo,” and meshed seamlessly with the neo-soul coming out of Philadelphia. After three albums together and laying the blueprint for conscious rap, No I.D. seemed to disappear.

“I have a system of thoughts that focused me to deal with that,” he explains. “Me stumbling and everything: I realized most people don’t have a long career and I kind of made an assessment that it’s because once you start living within the successes or acknowledging them as you set new goals – setting them next to your goals – you’re liable to trip and fall. I’m a person who never takes my plaques and puts them on the wall. I treat everyday like I never did anything. And I also leave space to make mistakes and try different things and stay humble, not turn people off. It’s a calculated move on my part, because I realized the only way to make a full, real-life career out of this is to keep having space to reinvent yourself, re-educate, and readjust. And don’t let success get in the way of that.”

So he bided his time until moving to Atlanta and hooking up with Jermaine Dupri. Along the way, he had introduced West to friend Kyambo Joshua, an A&R rep at Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella imprint. Joshua signed West to his own Hip Hop Since 1978 label, paving the way for West to work with hip-hop’s elite. West would drop No I.D.’s name in album verses, which facilitated his unprecedented return. While he never stopped doing beats and kept busy in the South, No I.D. was permanently back in the game with two key credits on Jay-Z’s Blueprint 3, “Death Of Auto-Tune” and “Run This Town.”

“A lot of what I learned early is what I used,” he says, “and I kind of ‘hybrided’ it with what’s popular now. So, again, it’s like a nice tool set or skill set to have been in that era and know how to do it properly – even down to the fact when I came into music, people were using reel-to-reel and now it’s just computers. But that perspective teaches me a lot of how to make a record sound different. Most people are just working with what they have, and it’s all they know. But I have a different reference point just because of the eras I’ve been through while making music.”

As for the age-old quandary of making Chicago a hip-hop capitol, he says it’s up to artists like him to share what they know. The talent level is unquestioned.

“We don’t have teachers, so we have to teach ourselves,” No I.D. believes. “We make innovative choices, and there’s a will and desire to work over every single obstacle to prove your worth, versus, ‘Hey, I’m handing you an opportunity.’ It’s like, the heavier the weight, the stronger you get.”

But still, it seems our talent needs to leave to shine.

“It’s not that we’re not good enough, but the business infrastructure is what’s not in Chicago,” he argues. “That’s why people have to leave Chicago. You can’t just build the business aspect of it. Because, again, you’ve got to have the people to show you how, the resources, and it’s just the simple fact of cash flow in that sense. You’ve got to have qualified people, experienced people . . . that’s just not in Chicago. You can’t say, ‘When will it get it together?’ Chicago has some of the better artists. You look at R. Kelly, Kanye West, Common. When you look at [a smaller city like] Atlanta, the first thing you see is [Antonio] L.A. Reid, who had this experience with Babyface and let him be more of an executive than a producer. So they built a business scene and helped educate Jermaine Dupri. Experienced people helped build the infrastructure as well as money streams from their success.”

It wouldn’t hurt to have more proteges like West, who, when 14, No I.D. chided as “Hammerish.”

“When he was younger,” he snickers, “he really looked up to [MC] Hammer as an artist. He thought he was a really good artist – not saying that I don’t – but I’ll always remember a day when he was wearing the actual Hammer pants. He was a character.”

Well, he had a good teacher.

It might not go down as the most unforgettable song of the year. But Mark Foster’s #1 smash with his punky fizz-pop trio Foster The People, “Pumped Up Kicks,” certainly provided the soundtrack to the summer of 2011, thanks to its infectious blend of handclap percussion, bubbly bass, vocodered verses, and a sugary – but weirdly homicidal – chorus of “All the other kids with the pumped-up kicks/ You better run, better run/Outrun my gun.” On the surface its sentiment is so Columbine-creepy that the words “gun” and “bullet” are usually bleeped when its concert-taped video clip airs.

But listen a little closer, “Kicks”’s composer invites, and you’ll see his true intention – a Raskolnikov-pensive rumination on the possibility of offing every last kid at school who’s tormented you. His protagonist, Foster explains, “doesn’t actually do it – it’s really more about the psychology of what makes him tick, and him playing with the idea of doing something like that. I really wanted to just paint his world, his home life, his emotions, the conversation that’s going on in his head. That’s more interesting to me than telling a story about someone killing somebody – like, What is driving this person to think this way?”

Foster The People’s whirlwind year led up to a kinetic performance of their smash on the Ben Stiller-hosted episode of “Saturday Night Live” this October, plus an even more hyper run through another track from their recent Torches (Columbia) debut disc – the soulful keyboard stomper “Houdini” – in which they were joined onstage by the wailing sax of Kenny G. Currently, Foster and his bandmates – drummer Mark Pontius and bassist Cubbie Fink – are finishing up a fall/winter tour of Europe, where their thinking man’s alt-rock has caught on like wildfire.

Is it possible to be a seriously literate musician in this shallow, social-networking era? Foster thinks so. He’s a huge fan of Oscar Wilde and C.S. Lewis, and seedier American authors like John Fante and Charles Bukowski. Ayn Rand’s Objectivism theories have also affected him. “And I just read this great sci-fi series by the late Philip Jose Farmer, the ‘Riverworld’ chronicles, a series of books that are just brilliant,” the singer/keyboardist enthuses. “It takes place in the afterlife, and everybody wakes up along this 10-million-mile-long river, and all their lives and beliefs were smashed, and there’s no heaven and no hell. And everybody who’s ever lived in civilization is there, including neanderthals, and Cyrano De Bergerac, Mark Twain, and Odysseus are main characters. And they’re all basically trying to get to the head of the river, to figure out where it starts and who’s running the show.”

Is there an FTP track in there somewhere? Probably so. Foster – whose voice often slips into an old-school-R&B falsetto in song – has plenty of clever tricks up his sleeve. In fact, he says, he was so soulful that he was actually invited to showcase for Dr. Dre himself, who was interested in signing the kid, pre FTP. Dre’s company envisioned a smooth, Raphael Saadiq-assisted solo set, but Foster said No. “I wanted to make the type of music that I’m making now,” he asserts. “But I had this other batch of songs that was just vocal and piano, more Elton John and Billy Joel-type stuff. More like classic songwriting, and that’s what they wanted – they wanted to make a classic-soul record with me.”

But said solo demos do exist, Foster clarifies. And maybe one day, he’ll release them. “Because that’s a side of me that I love, and that’s a side that I want to start working in on Foster The People’s second record,” he says. The group already tracked one tune in that vein called “Ruby,” and it was originally meant to be included on Torches. “And I think we’re gonna start playing the song on this tour, actually – it’s a piano ballad. But it’s a big side of me that nobody really knows about yet.”

Where did it all begin for Foster? Oddly enough, his backstory is even quirkier than his success with “Pumped Up Kicks.” By the time he’d graduated from high school in Cleveland, he’d parlayed his love of The Beach Boys into several short-lived bands. His father’s graduation gift proved crucial: knowing his son’s diehard love of music, he urged him to relocate to Hollywood for a year or so, just to test his songwriting chops. He knew the Midwest simply couldn’t contain him anymore.

But at the tender age of 18, Foster was unprepared for the Bukowski-grim side of Los Angeles. He lived at a pimp-and-gangster-frequented flophouse, subsisted on one 7-Eleven hot dog per day, and worked more dead-end jobs than he can remember, just to survive. Still, he managed to teach himself keyboards, then production skills, and eventually saved enough money for a PC, Cubase software, and a MIDI controller. Four years later, he wound up right back where he started, essentially – sick of showbiz and unsure which direction to pursue. He needed a guideline, he decided, other musicians to help shape and evolve his vision – enter Fink and Pontius in October 2009, and soon FTP had played their first show in Santa Monica to a crowd of 30 or so friends. By the close of their residency at L.A.’s Echo club, hundreds of fans were lining up every night to catch one of the city’s biggest new buzz bands. Foster The People had arrived.

Meanwhile, Foster – now in his mid-20s – had graduated to an eye-opening, craft-enhancing day job: writing advertising jingles for a company called Mophonics. In his spare time, he threw “Pumped Up Kicks” together and put it up on the FTP website, accidentally setting the blogosphere alight with 1.4 million streams, which quickly led to a contract (and an introductory EP) with Columbia/Star Time International. “A friend of mine introduced me to [Mophonics] a few years back, and I started doing spec work for them,” the auteur recalls. “I already had a home studio, so then I just kind of learned the ropes. And then maybe a year and a half later, they brought me on full-time and made me an in-house composer.”

Why does Foster think he was selected? He thinks about it for a minute. “Well, I think melodies are my strength,” says the unabashed pop lover. “And coming from the background of a songwriter, I know how to build and deliver a chorus, whether it’s instrumental or whatever. I guess I just have a good handle on dynamics, which is kind of what all commercials are about. So it was very natural for me. And I write in a lot of different styles of music, which is also an asset for composing, because you get jobs calling for hip-hop or bossa nova, rock, emo, or even Danny Elfman-type stuff. So you kind of have to be able to do all of it.”

His first assignment, in fact, really put Foster’s abilities to the test. To date, it was his most challenging work, he admits – a car commercial that required a synthesizer simplification of a complex Billie Holiday standard. “It was insane, because I don’t really know music theory,” he remembers. “So I was searching for the sheet music, because I play by ear and I could not figure out what the progression was, because it was pretty difficult jazz with a lot of different moving parts. They wanted me to do an electronic cover of the song, and I ended up getting there and making it my own, and it ended up being really cool. But that was definitely one of my toughest jobs, and it was my first week of work!”

Another head-scratcher: Getting hired by a Japanese boy band called SMAP for a multi-genre overhaul. “We did a series of things for them where we took this SMAP song that we had to remake in different styles,” Foster sighs, thinking back on the surreal situation. “We made a country version, a ranchero version, a classical version. We made all these different versions and had all these different session players come in. So there I was, recording this ranchero band that had won a Grammy, complete with trumpets and guitarrón and traditional Hispanic ranchero singers, but singing this Japanese pop song. It was, you might say, pretty epic!”

– Tom Lanham

For the full feature, click the December issue’s cover image, or grab a copy of Illinois Entertainer — free throughout Chicagoland.

You’re grinding through a grueling tour and your long-anticipated day off finally arrives. How would you like to spend your time? How about hammering out answers for interview questions?

“I guess I’m going to have to cancel all my fun plans for our off day in Ljublana [Slovenia] and hang out in a hotel room for the next few hours. Either that or get scolded by our management or label. Just kidding, kinda.”

Such is the plight for As I Lay Dying guitarist Nick Hipa, who graciously shoulders the burden and provides a short novel’s worth of material responding to our e-mail queries. Currently in the midst of a world-wide tour, aptly promoted as “A Decade Of Destruction,” As I Lay Dying is circling the globe to celebrate its 10-year anniversary. It’s a natural point to take a retrospective glance at the band’s history, refresh current activity, and set the stage for what lies ahead. As Hipa relates the band development, his narrative takes shape as an archeological excavation that reveals the evolution of earnest, wild-eyed kids into professional artists poised at the very top echelon of metal/hardcore artists.

“When Tim [Lambesis, vocals] and Jordan [Mancino, drums] first started the band back in 2001, they were pretty much the only ones absolutely dedicated to ‘the cause.’ At that point, however, there was never a clear direction as to what the band’s sound was. More than anything, it was a culmination of tastes influenced by the revolving cast of contributing musicians.”

Fast forward a couple of years . . .

“In late 2003 and early 2004 Phil [Sgrosso, guitar] and I joined the band. It was at this point that Tim and Jordan finally found dudes who were equally as passionate about pursuing music and also willing to stick it out, for better or worse. The first release we were part of was Shadows Are Security [(Metal Blade)]. Phil was 18 and I was 21 when we recorded it. As musicians, we were all still really young and had tons of room to improve, but that release is us doing the best with what we had.”

Unquestionably, the raw energy and razor-edged intensity are there, but in wild, frayed form; you can hear the limitations in the songwriting on Shadows, especially compared to where the band is today. There’s hardened precision and powerful depth on subsequent albums that are a result of the guys becoming more technically proficient while developing a methodical, deliberate songwriting process, and simply meshing together over time. Hipa explains how the creative process improved with each album.

“I guess it depends on who you ask, but we all felt like [2007's] An Ocean Between Us was a big step up from Shadows . . . [W]e were able to be more meticulous with our parts and the album become even more of what we had intended . . . Before, we would do the ol’ ’show up to practice and see if anyone had a cool idea’ routine. By the time we started writing for [last year's] The Powerless Rise, we were sending full song ideas to each other before actually jamming. We had more material than ever before recording, and the caliber of that material was better than it had ever been. The older we get and the longer we do this, the more we understand exactly what we like and what we don’t.”

Hipa further elaborates the democratic and egalitarian nature of the songwriting process, which still retains a degree of fluidity despite the routine that they’ve developed.

“Typically, someone sends out an e-mail with an MP3 of a complete song, or at least rough arrangement of several riffs. Whichever of those songs gets the majority of the other members stoked is the one we end up rehearsing together. From there, everyone adds their own touch based upon what they feel it needs. It is this process that dictates how our songs come out. Since we’re all usually listening to and drawing influence from different things, we’re never certain of what to expect from our collective collaboration with one another. This has been a huge factor in the development of our sound, and we prefer it to occur organically and naturally this way.”

As he describes it, Hipa’s growth as a player follows a similar trajectory, and he conveys a comfortable self-awareness and keen sense of purpose, which drives his approach.

“Have you ever known someone who does something so naturally and excellently that it appears effortless? I see all of my favorite musicians this way. Unfortunately, I was not dealt the talent-developing luck. What I did get was the ability to love it enough to never give up at it. Whether I’m trying to write something or just trying to get better technically, I run into the same walls of frustration that any guitar player does. The trick is to keep on ‘keepin’ on’ and being tenacious.”

The culmination of that tenacity could be AILD’s Grammy nomination, and Hipa confirms how significant that was for the band. It wasn’t a signal of selling out or succumbing to mainstream pressures, but rather it was validation of their dedication and professionalism.

“Being nominated for a Grammy in 2007 is something I’ll never forget. Not necessarily because it meant we had ‘made it’ or anything, but because it was an achievement that my family could actually look to as tangible evidence that I was doing something worthwhile. Dropping out of college to play in a band wasn’t actually met with tons of fanfare, but when we started ending up high on the Billboard charts and getting award nominations, my extended family started to take what I did a little more seriously.”

– Patrick Conlan

For the full feature, click the December issue’s cover image, or grab a copy of Illinois Entertainer — free throughout Chicagoland.

Modern-art museums scare people. Maybe it’s a conservative hatred of the NEA and controversial exhibits, or a preemptive exhaustion for an afternoon to be spent doubting, That’s art? Getting in the door is the hardest part.

Running: 12/6 to 12/30 at Museum Of Contemporary Art (220 E. Chicago Ave.) in Chicago, with special ticketed performances 12/20 and 12/21.

For the month of December, the Museum Of Contemporary Art has agreed to let a pair of gentlemen musicians use their space in a symbiotic relationship that should help newcomers in the immersion process. One, Andrew Bird, is a local treasure who doubles as a world-renowned erudite violinist/troubadour, while the other, Ian Schneller, creates internationally sought-after, handcrafted instruments and amplifiers for his own company, Specimen Products.

The two have been at this before, most notably at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum in 2010, though Bird had already been utilizing Schneller’s unique horn speakers to great effect – as when he played a winter residency at Chicago’s 4th Presbyterian Church in 2009. The MCA provided a fresh challenge for their evolving collaborations.

“In a way it was a eureka moment,” says Schneller from his Chicago office. “There used to be 4-track, then 8-track, then 16-track, and 48-track recording studios. Most of us are familiar with the notion of layering up a massive song with all those tracks and mixing them all back down to channels. But what if you didn’t mix them all back down to two channels? What if you had an extra-special system to play back all the channels that were in a specified location? So that you had an orchestral representation of a composition? That’s the basic concept. It creates an environment that, what if you went to Orchestra Hall and, during Beethoven’s 9th [Symphony], you were able to walk up on stage and mingle amongst the viola and trombone section, and then saunter over to the tympani and cello. That’s sort of what the Sonic Arboretum is, and it lends itself beautifully to the concept of installation in an art museum, because that’s what that’s all about is walking around and checking out stuff.”

To pull it off, Schneller has installed more than six- dozen horn amplifiers in the MCA’s atrium, which will perpetually broadcast singular elements of a looping Bird composition created in an empty museum.
“[Bird]’s going to workshop for a couple weeks,” Schneller told IE in October, “and then once it’s installed he’s going to come in and work after hours and build up a library of compositions that will cycle and play during museum hours for the entire month. So, in a way, Andrew’s going to be in the room as a phantom entity along with his music as it plays back and recreates this spatial and sonic phenomenon when he comes and works on the system.”

It sounds . . . ridiculously compelling and completely out there. One can’t quite picture Schneller convincing the museum’s trustees much less himself that the project was even feasible.

“That’s an interesting diplomatic thing,” he says about those conversations. “It’s a museum, and they have other shows going on and other curators working and all this stuff. We work with what they put on our platter, and we tell them what they like, and we’ve come to very amicable terms about where the architecture will be. They’ve been very generous. We’re occupying a large portion of the atrium, and there’s going to be a giant, brand-new spinning horn right in front of the revolving doors at the entrance. I love that. It should be quite a spectacle.”

As for himself, “If you want to succeed at anything in life, it takes immense endurance and conviction. And when I get ahold of a concept, there are no limits. I’ll admit that certain concepts are preposterous, but I don’t want to hear about it. The first 150 sound engineers I mentioned this concept to, the first words out of their mouths were, ‘The reason this won’t work . . .’ I’m like, ‘Fuck that!’ I guess I’m obsessed. We’re gonna take close to 80 horns to the MCA and install this system. I’m building a 24-channel single-ended triode tube amplification the good ol’ fashioned way: completely from scratch, from the ground up using all discreet components and built like a tank infrastructure, enclosures. And we’re gonna feed this thing with a digital Tascam X48 recording deck, and once this thing’s installed, Andrew Bird’s gonna show up and compose on to it specifically for this location. I believe it’s probably an unprecedented undertaking. It’s totally site-specific, destination-specific. There’s only one place in the world to absorb these compositions.”

One gets the sense Schneller didn’t need to give Bird the hard-sell.

“He’s the man for the job,” Schneller explains, “because he has a special sensitivity to building up and layering these kinds of tracks. He’s a phenom. His solo stuff, behind the looping pedals, I think he’s unparalleled at this sport. The beauty of our collaboration is he’s got his part to do, and I’ve got my part. I’m loathe to use this analogy, but one guy writes the lyrics and another writes the melodies. Obviously they have to integrate, and there is some collaboration, but basically we both have our specialties and there’s an immense amount of trust involved to let the other do their thing. I know that Andrew’s gonna show up and make beautiful music on the system, and he knows I’m going to bring a system that’s going to open up new possibilities for him compositionally.”

Schneller approaches sound, he says, from the standpoint of a repairman. And while he’s adept at restoring an aging or damaged piece, his mind flies ahead to imagine how sound in any capacity could be improved. So much so that he’s funding the Sonic Arboretum – “a labor of love” – himself. But ideas like these aren’t far-flung, random projects of a mad inventor. There’s a goal.

“I would say one of the causes I’m trying to champion here that’s an aside from my artistic revelations regarding the horns,” he says, “is bringing 1940s electronic technology into the present tense. We live in a world that’s full of disposable crap. Nobody expects to still be using the iPhone they have in their hand in two years, because they’re going to replace it with a newer model. We just take all this in stride. What I’m trying to convey and present is the notion that even in the present tense, with our hands we can make these beautifully simple, low-wattage tube amplifiers that blow away any kind of high-fidelity system that’s made today. The 2A3 electron tube is the most linear audio device ever made, and I’ll put its 3 watts up against anybody’s 200 watts of solid-state bullshit any day of the week. You’ve simply got to hear it to believe it. So that’s part of the Arboretum, is to present this ‘ancient’ technology and illustrate how it interfaces beautifully with today’s cutting-edge, digital technology. You plug an iPhone directly into this 3-watt amplifier that’s hooked up to my horns and it will blow your mind.”

Just so we can distinguish the puddles of brains from the actual art.

– Steve Forstneger

Don’t go the top-40 route or an Amazon recommendation on a passe indie-rock band. Give the music lover who has nothing or everything an item to really chew on this season. It might cost ya, but the following boxsets will occupy them for years.

The Beach Boys
The Smile Sessions
The Smile saga died down prematurely in 2004, when Brian Wilson completed his decades-shelved followup to The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds with a backing band he’d cultivated. Seven years – exponentially less agonizing than the 37 that had preceded them – later, and audiophiles/completists/rock snobs get what they were initially asking for: the Smile archives.

Part of the ongoing fascination has been Wilson’s reportedly fragile mental state, which The Smile Sessions (Capitol) amply demonstrates over five CDs, two LPs, two 7-inch singles, and a 60-page book. Between waiting for the acid to kick in at one point, and sounding exhausted between two other takes, the Wilson drama lives up to the myth the sessions acquired. Beyond that, the documentation this $140 set provides far outstrips reissues of completed records, and reaches as far into the mind of a 24-year-old savant as could be reasonably expected.

Pink Floyd
Discovery Box Set
Pink Floyd’s tardy iTunes Store debut was deftly spun as a dispute over artistic control and royalty rates, though many saw it as a profound commercial miscalculation. Not completely sold on the new paradigm, they’ve combined their official digital launch with a heap of physical product: visually expanded “Immersion” looks at Dark Side Of The Moon (see “Digital Divide”), Wish You Were Here, and The Wall; their first greatest hits (A Foot In The Door); as well as this Discovery box that bundles all 14 studio albums.

Floyd fans are a committed lot, and most can have been counted on to ensnare the assorted remasterings through the years. If they haven’t, this repackaging offers highest bitrate resamplings from the original master tapes. (Bonus material is negligible.) The band were nothing if not immensely visual, however, which is where Discovery disappoints. Inside the sleek, discreet box, individual albums have been stuffed into flimsy cardboard cases prone to scratching the discs. Artwork on a whole has been diminished, with the runoff siphoned into a textless booklet of photos of guys who weren’t much to look at in the first place. Floyd might be late to the party, but understand you’ll rip the music to your hard drive and box the box in a storage box.

Billy Joel
Piano Man
If Discovery shows Pink Floyd trying to stuff their double-Ds into an A-cup, Columbia/Legacy has taken a big-picture approach to deliver a tasteful, concise, two-disc anniversary packaging of Billy Joel’s breakthrough.

After a pair of flops – one in the woeful Attila, then as a fledgling singer/songwriter – Joel became a lounge act in L.A. and changed his writing style from autobiographer to observer. Though Piano Man doesn’t represent him as a finished product – the Southwestern overtones try too hard to match Elton John and James Taylor – the second disc of this anniversary set gives a fascinating glimpse at his metamorphosis. While rebuilding his regional reputation back east, he stopped in Philadelphia’s WMMR a year-and-a-half before Piano Man’s release, and the often-bootlegged performance sealed his new image with audiences.

Howlin’ Wolf
Smokestack Lightning: The Complete Chess Masters
More than 20 years ago, the Chess Records masters were revived for nearly a dozen box sets, an emphatic stamp on a pivotal era in 20th-century music. Why the account has been reopened with Howlin’ Wolf isn’t entirely clear, but an extra disc and a halved timespan tell us things are about to get more in-depth. This quartet of discs takes a fine comb to Wolf in Chicago from ‘51 to ‘60, or when nearly all of his essential cuts – up until and including “Spoonful” – had been recorded. Wolf was by far the most idiosyncratic of the iconic Chicago bluesmen, but his role and influence were no lesser than Waters, Dixon, or Walter’s.

The Who
Quadrophenia: The Director’s Cut
The five demos in this vast reissue that didn’t make the original version don’t quite match movie-world “director’s cut” standards – they’re nowhere near finished – though Pete Townshend does deserve credit for contributing extensive commentary. Seen both as a new beginning and the beginning of the end of The Who, Quadrophenia nonetheless was a towering achievement in ’70s rock, and a personal vindication for Townshend, who almost destroyed the band and himself in the failed Lifehouse project.

Director’s Cut includes the obligatory remastering (last done in 2003), with a 25-track archival demo reel, and a 5.1 Surround-Sound mix. The treat, however, is a 100-page hardcover book including a 13,000-word essay by the guitarist himself.

Paul Simon
One-Trick Pony/Hearts And Bones/
Graceland/The Rhythm Of The Saints
Lucky for Paul Simon he’s a skilled songwriter, because this phase of his recording career (‘77 to ‘90) shows him experimenting with production values that show their age. Hearts And Bones has some devastatingly precise lyrics, but trips over opener “Allergies,” and its frenzy of competing sonic interests. Even the vaunted Graceland could use a sonic-scrubnow that the wider world knows South African pop doesn’t require guitar processing. Rhythm Of The Saints feels fresh in comparison, and fares better than Hearts even as though its painted lyrics suggest an empty post-Graceland tank. One-Trick Pony, the most derided of the quartet (at least upon its release), actually rises in stature because its litely jazzy transition from Still Crazy After All These Years feels seamless, even if most of the material – intended, sort of, for a soundtrack – is slight. Suprisingly, at its silver-anniversary Graceland doesn’t get the expanded treatment; it, like the other three, includes a smattering of demos that have been officially available for years.

The Supremes
The Temptations
50th Anniversary: The Singles
While the James Brown singles collections lurch into an 11th volume, upon their half-centennials Motown’s most recognizable groups get all their As and Bs locked into three-CD sets. For The Supremes, this encapsulates their whole career and for the Tempts, to the point in ‘71 when Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams looked across the river to Windsor and then back at Detroit to say, “Take off, eh?”

While there’s no shortage of compilations for either outfit, collectors will dine on the German and Italian versions of some of the hits (“Baby, Baby, Wo Ist Unsere Liebe?”) and new comers get a chronology not just of Motown, but black America as the ’60s collapsed into the ’70s (“Love Child” and “Ball Of Confusion”), and these bands with them.

The Rolling Stones
Some Girls
Up until Exile On Main St. last year, The Stones – for all the money-grubbing accusations they field – have been rather lax in the expanded/reissued goldrush. Yes, the full catalog underwent a massive remastering campaign, but despite their mild reputation as a singles act the archives are reportedly lush. Some Girls is an interesting place to continue because not only is it of recent vintage and unique, but also the last great Stones album. One thing the empire is banking on is a “new” single, “No Spare Parts,” which Don Was rediscovered on session tapes. The 100-page book is a nice touch. But the real reason to come back is the songs – perhaps the last time the Stones were confused, a little angry, and thought they had nothing to lose. (Eagle Rock has also released Some Girls Live In Texas ‘78 on DVD.)

– Steve Forstneger

It’s 9:30 p.m. on a Friday. Mastodon drummer/vocalist Brann Dailor is having dinner in his hometown of Atlanta at a joint called The Rusty Nail. With his wife. Illinois Entertainer is interrupting. Obviously.

Appearing: November 13th at Riviera Theatre in Chicago with Dillinger Escape Plan and Red Fang.

“They said, ‘Hey, you wanna do an interview on Friday night at 9:30?’ I said, ‘Hell yeah, sign me up,’” Dailor jokes to make us feel better. We think.

Fact is, we feel awful about stealing Dailor away from his meal, his wife, and the Led Zeppelin on the jukebox. But it ain’t easy scoring an interview with Mastodon nowadays. Seventy-two hours earlier, the heavy-metal heavyweight released its fifth full-length, The Hunter (Reprise). Five days after we talk to Dailor, Billboard announces that the 39,000 copies it shipped in the United States are good enough for 10th on their main album chart. That same night, Mastodon performed The Hunter’s first single, “Curl Of The Burl,” on “The Late Show With David Letterman.”

See where we’re going, here?

Basically, we were lucky to talk to Dailor when we did, ’cause The Hunter is hot shit. Any doubts or questions about whether Dailor, bassist/vocalist Troy Sanders, guitarist/vocalist Brent Hinds (that’s three vocalists if you’re scoring at home), and guitarist Bill Kelliher could follow up 2009’s Crack The Skye, The Hunter shoots them down. There is riffage (“Blasteroid”), brutality (“Spectrelight”), beauty (“The Sparrow”), groove (“Curl Of The Burl” is ZZ Top on a metal trip), and, simply put, weird-ass shit (“Creature Lives”).

What there isn’t, is a concept. So technically, not all expectations can be thrown out the window because, who didn’t expect another massive, soaring, epic “concept album” from Mastodon? It’s been the Southern group’s modus operandi for some time now, dating back to its 2004 breakout, Leviathan. It, Mastodon’s “water” record, was loosely based on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Blood Mountain, from 2006, was its “earth” record, and Crack The Skye, about astral travel (and Rasputin!), its “air.”

The Hunter? Well, it’s just an “album” album. No one song answers to another, giving Dailor and co. the option of going wherever the hell they want from one track to another, which is exactly what they do. “It was really kind of freeing, you know? We had done three concept records in a row, and they are very hard to do,” Dailor says. “They are very labor intensive, and you have to come up with the storyline; you have to try to build some sort of continuity without losing the way the record flows. It’s a fine line. It’s not easy. It’s really stressful.”

Try interrupting someone’s dinner with a half-hour of questions.

IE: Was it strange, initially, writing songs that weren’t intertwined thematically?
Brann Dailor: No, not really. It was a lot easier, to be honest. It was way easier. It was almost like we didn’t even have to try. [Laughs.] No, we still had to try, obviously. It was a breath of fresh air for sure, when the decision was made not to do a concept album. I had already come up with a concept. My feelings were that’s what everyone expected from me, to come up with a lofty concept. I liked what I had come up with, but it needed some work. I went and shared it with the class, basically, and everyone dug it, but when we really started digging in and started writing, I think it was Brent who came up and said, “Dude, do we have to do another concept album?” I was like, “No, we don’t have to. We don’t have to do anything. Do whatever we want, you know – no big deal.

IE: So was it right there on the spot you decided to pull back the reins, so to speak?
BD: We decided to take a more stress-free approach to writing the record in the first place. There was a lot of stress surrounding the band, like personal things that were going on with different band members that were stressful enough. Whereas previously when you went in to write a Mastodon record, it’s a really stressful thing because you have concepts involved and really intricate song structures, and you’re in there every day banging your head against the wall trying to link up all these riffs that really don’t belong together – which is fun, to an extent, and also labor-intensive, and you’re there every day all day long trying to work it out. It’s stressful. You go home at night and you can’t sleep. Not that that was different this time around. I was stressed out, but more stressed out at what was happening at the outside of Mastodon. Then when we got in there and started writing music, we just sort of decided not to let that part of our lives be stressful and go from the gut as far as what we were writing music-wise. Like, three or four riffs strung together is a pretty basic rock song. Record it, put some vocals over the top, and yeah, we like that. On to the next song. Instead of really trying to be, “Oh, it’s not complicated enough.” We didn’t really crave that this time. It needed to be more of a fun release.

IE: How hard would it have been to top Crack The Skye as far as super-epic, super-proggy, super out-there, anyway?
BD: I don’t know. For us, we don’t think too much about previous releases once we start working on new music. We are just sort of consumed with the music that is being created at hand, not really even . . . the music that happened before is gone. It just doesn’t even exist. We want to sound like us still, but we definitely don’t want to be retreading. We don’t want to be running in place. We wanna hear something new, you know? We’ve had that same question after every record. How are you going to top Remission? How are you going to top Leviathan? How are you going to top Blood Mountain? So on and so forth. I guess the answer is that you just don’t really pay attention to those records once you go in to write new stuff. You just write new stuff and trust yourself to police yourself in the same way, and you’re gonna travel down all those musical roads that are offered up, I guess. You can talk all day about what kind of record you wanna write, but then when it starts coming to life, it definitely takes on a life on its own. I think you’d be doing that particular music injustice to stop mid-stride and say, “Oh we can’t do this. We can’t write this. We can’t play this song because it’s not Mastodon.” We’re playing it, we’re liking it, so there must be a reason for that. You need to go all the way down that road, otherwise you’re not really doing what you want to do. You’re kind of letting the possibility of someone else’s opinion govern what your art sounds like and looks like. That’s not fair.

IE: “Creature Lives” is a good example of what you’re saying. Is that the weirdest song Mastodon has ever released?
BD: I guess that’s a good example of a song where, it’s really, um, I just think it’s a really great thing that [song] can live on a Mastodon record and be a Mastodon song and, in some people’s eyes, have the audacity to call it a Mastodon song. In other people’s eyes it’s something fantastic. The guys in the band, we really love it. We welcome it into the catalog as something that could spark music in the future from us that, maybe wouldn’t sound exactly the same, but another musical avenue that we’re interested in. I just think it’s cool to have stuff like that in there. Once it’s all said and done and Mastodon goes away, hopefully the catalog, and the type of music the catalog is representative of, is vast and extremely varied.

IE: Sticking with this theme, “All The Heavy Lifting” seems like one of the catchiest songs you guys have ever done. Troy’s vocals are amazing on that tune. It seems every album he makes leaps and bounds as a vocalist.
BD: Yeah, that’s pretty catchy, I guess. Troy is awesome on the record. He killed it for sure. He worked really hard and took voice lessons and stuff like that, so he’s been working hard on his vocals. He’s stepped up on this record. The last record Brent sang a lot, so Troy was like, “I’m gonna sing a lot on this record.” [Laughs.] It’s not as cut-and-dried as that, but it was kind of the idea to get more Troy in there for this record. But yeah, he did a great job and that chorus is pretty infectious, I’d have to say.

IE: How do you work out the vocal parts with three of you singing now?
BD: It’s real diplomatic. A lot of times when we’re writing, we already have a vocalist in mind for a certain part. Like for “All The Heavy Lifting,” I went in and laid the groundwork for it, but we knew Troy would sing over top of it. For “Thickening,” we knew Brent had an idea for that part, and for like “Dry Bone Valley” I went in and sang it and everybody dug it. We all admire each other’s vocal stylings, and basically, a lot of times, it comes down to whether you are able to pull it off live. “Can you sing that and play it at the same time?” If someone is dying to sing something, we’re going to let them.

IE: And how about the mandatory Scott Kelly [Neurosis] appearance?
BD: Well Scott’s just a great person and a good friend of ours, and he’s a huge inspiration on the band. We’ve said it many times before, but if it weren’t for Neurosis there wouldn’t be Mastodon. Any time we can get him to sing on something, it’s definitely welcomed. But we wouldn’t shoehorn it in there. We have to sort of hear it on a part. We wrote “Spectrelight” and weren’t sure that song was really going to come together. But once we were in the studio, Bill came up with a couple different parts to add to the two parts I had, and we just kinda slammed it out. It ended up being pretty killer. Then we gave it to Scott to see if he would be interested in doing something on it, and he was all about it.

– Trevor Fisher

For the complete interivew, click the November issue’s cover thumbnail, or grab a copy free throughout Chicagoland.

Ozzy Osbourne. Kiss. The Ramones. Ministry. And, of course, Cher. It’s not a game of “one of these things is not like the other” (um, Ozzy?), but a list of artists from whom Judas Priest are straining to create some distance. Yes, the November 12th date in Hammond is part of the veteran British metal outfit’s “Epitaph” farewell tour. But it’s a not a retirement: they very well could come back.

Maybe.

Appearing: November 12th at The Venue at Horseshoe Casino in Hammond, IN with Black Label Society and Thin Lizzy.

“We’ve been touring for 40 years now,” exhales guitarist Glenn Tipton, “and every tour takes at least 18 months out of your life. We didn’t want to cause confusion with the initial announcement: we’re not going to be doing anymore global tours. If a string of dates came along that made sense, we’d certainly consider them. We definitely have one more album in us, maybe more. So it’s certainly not the end of the band, but we don’t plan to do any enormous tours anymore.”

You could say Priest backed themselves into such a disclaimer by not only being colleagues of offending unretirees, but by also naming themselves for one of history’s most notorious double-crossers. Yet for Chicagoans and Midwesterners in flyover country, this could seriously be it. Since the dawn of press junkets, British and European musicians have traditionally flown to the U.S. only for handfuls of East and West Coast dates before returning home or continuing to Japan or Australia. The States on a whole are endangered, because even a jaunt to New York requires work visas and invasive body scans. It’d be so much easier to chunnel to Paris and then embark upon Europe on the band’s newly favored conveyance: the coach.

“Our touring schedule is arduous,” Tipton reflects. “It’s enjoyable time, but now we prefer just a tourbus because of all the airport security. It’s pretty tiring, really. We’ve always taken a break at the end of a tour. A lot of it’s psychological, as well as physical. You get saturated with [music]. You write it, you record it, you perform it, you tour with it.”

He’s not complaining. In fact, you get the sense that Tipton gets more fatigued talking about nearly a half-century of mileage as he is the travel itself. In his own words, “The future’s bright. It’s looking good. There’s always things to delve into.” With the carefree attitude of an athlete looking forward to free-agency, Tipton, Rob Halford, Ian Hill, Scott Travis, and KK Downing’s understudy Richie Faulkner outsourced the track selection of their most recent compilation, the 17-strong The Chosen Few (Epic). A veritable A-list of metal contemporaries and followers picked the selections, a roster of automatics and deep cuts from Slayer to Metallica, Osbourne to Alice Cooper, and David Coverdale to Lamb Of God’s Randy Blythe, the latter pair of which each chose Priest’s cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Green Manalishi.”

“As the years have gone by you obviously become more experienced as a songwriter,” Tipton says. “On the other side of the coin, there were times where we’d write one thing and write another, and put those two together. And probably there’s some bit of naivete there. But the actual fact is that naivete may have worked for us and done something quite unusual that you wouldn’t have done if you [thought like] an experienced songwriter. You do gain experience at it, but whether that’s a good thing I don’t know. You just have to look at it.”

He’s reluctant to pick favorite sons – hence the manner in which they approached Chosen Few – but Tipton marvels at the sheer quantity the band amassed.

– Steve Forstneger

For the complete interivew, click the November issue’s cover thumbnail, or grab a copy free throughout Chicagoland.

Walking away from what some consider to be the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band might seem like a shocking and perplexing decision. But when speaking with Bill Wyman about his retirement from The Rolling Stones to form The Rhythm Kings, it was simply a matter of personal preference. Though he’s told the tale before, the founding bassist – who’d logged 31 years of service – was simply sick of traveling by air and, perhaps more importantly, wanted to dive deeper into vintage blues, jazz, and good old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll.

“There was a gap [after leaving The Stones in 1992] when I wrote a book, opened a restaurant, and got married, so there was a space before starting The Rhythm Kings,” he explains via phone from his U.K. home. “When we started touring, the audience would yell out for Stones’ songs and I used to say, ‘Sorry guys: this ain’t The Stones, this is The Rhythm Kings and we don’t do Stones songs.’ Then soon after that, nobody ever yelled anymore and they just accepted what we were doing and they loved it. I’m still doing it with them because it’s such a pleasure to go out there and play just a whole variety of music to an audience. We’ll play a blues song, then a soul song like ‘Land Of A Thousand Dances,’ then we’ll do a ballad, then a JJ Cale song, then maybe Fats Waller, Chuck Berry, or Elmore James – everything’s possible in this band.”

Wyman’s quest for variety over the past decade and a half arrives on full display on the brand new Collectors’ Edition Box Set (Proper American). The five-disc set bundles the studio projects Struttin’ Our Stuff (1997), Anyway The Wind Blows (1999), Groovin’ (2000), and the double-disc Double Bill (2001).

The 66 tracks span four hours, excavating obscure memories from Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, and Louis Jordan, alongside a slew of like-minded originals.

“We basically just want to show people there’s so much nice music out there that [has been] forgotten about,” explains Wyman. “You do have your collectors who know about this kind of music, but the general public isn’t aware of certain people from the past. It’s nice to do these archeological digs into music and come out with these little gems from the ’20s to the ’70s. We just redo them as close to the original as possible, while making sure you capture the original essence.”

Though fans in England have already become privy to such discoveries, Collectors’ Edition Box Set marks the first time American audiences can devour the discs domestically. And considering Wyman insists he’ll never board an airplane again, it remains the only opportunity for American fans to capture The Rhythm Kings in any format.

“We’ve had offers to tour America, Japan, Australia, and everywhere really, but I don’t fly anymore, so that’s out the window,” he assures. “I might come if you build a tunnel or a bridge, but I did it 40 years and I just got sick and tired of it. I was flying when I was doing my military service way before The Stones, and so I’ve been flying all my life. With The Rhythm Kings, we get in a coach and drive through Scandinavia, Finland, Eastern Europe, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Holland – you name it. And we get to see the countryside, which I never got to when I was in The Stones. All we saw was the airports, the hotels, and the gig.”

At 74-years old, Wyman is certainly taking more time to soak up the scenery, but he’s far from sedentary, also moonlighting with careers as an author, photographer, and even amateur archeologist. However, he’ll put all those interests on hold for a 38-city European tour this fall alongside The Rhythm Kings and special guest collaborator Mary Wilson from The Supremes.

– Andy Argyrakis

For the complete interivew, click the November issue’s cover thumbnail, or grab a copy free throughout Chicagoland.

When one mentions Disneyland, perhaps the most immediate connotation is “The happiest place on Earth” – a location built around innocence and happiness where one can engage in childlike celebration.

Such is not the case for Madina Lake.

Appearing: December 16th at Mojoes in Joliet with Me Talk Pretty.

“We called [our situation] ‘Disneyland’ to try to cushion the blow on our own end,” quips bassist Matthew Leone. In late 2009, the band were dropped by Roadrunner Records, which had released the group’s Attics To Eden only months prior. It sparked a run of bad luck that was of cartoonish proportions.

“Once the record deal was gone, [our] management company just absolutely disappeared,” he recalls. “From booking agents to everybody, as soon as the band gets dropped, nobody’s conviction really [held] enough weight to stick by the band. Everybody bailed. So, we were sitting here as a band that is left sort of with nothing but our conviction, our hard work, and belief that it will ultimately work out.”

Unfortunately for Madina Lake – which includes brothers Matthew and Nathan Leone, drummer Dan Torelli, and guitarist/programmer Mateo Camargo – the worst was yet to come, especially for the Leones. For Nathan, that meant a painful and sudden romantic separation.

“We’re not really one of those bands that writes a lot about heartbreak,” Matthew submits, “but Nathan had been dating this girl, who he thought was the love of his life, and, they were talking about plans to get their life going, to move forward with the relationship, and it was a very fulfilling feeling for Nathan. And suddenly, that all vanished. There was like a sort of, I guess, a mental condition that was veiled, that Nathan didn’t see. It sort of came undone, and she disappeared from his life overnight.”

Yet nothing could have prepared anyone for what would happen to Matthew Leone in June 2010. Coming upon a violent domestic fight, the bassist leapt into action to the woman’s aid. The heroic gesture would prove costly, however, as the attacker turned his aggression on the interloper. The beating not only left Leone with a fractured skull, broken jaw, and swelling in his brain, but put him in a five-day coma. It was a trauma that inspired and heavily plays into the band’s latest full length, World War III (Razor & Tie).

Released this past September, WWIII is the sound of artists finding solace in their craft. That the record was made at all, let alone released not even 18 months after the attack (whose perpetrator awaits trial), is nothing short of a miracle. It’s a turnaround that’s as surprising to Matthew as anyone, and he says the album’s creation was “one of those situations where you have to be totally flexible and prepared for when the sort of inspirational iron strikes. And, that happened to strike so hard and in such an overabundance that, we were all so filled with an emotional intensity, and enduring and surviving something that has been, really, the pinnacle of our challenges of life to date. So, to try to schedule or plan things under the circumstances we were dealing with last summer was impossible. I was beyond fortunate enough to get myself to a point where I was able and capable of doing it, just while Nathan was being able to translate everything we were enduring into the lyrical sentiment that he wanted. So, as soon as I was ready to do it, we were in there doing it to the best of what my energy would allow and everything else.”

Not surprisingly, the record serves as therapy.

“People talk about when they’re making music it’s sort of this cathartic purging for them,” he says, “and, yes, it was cathartic in that sense. Almost beyond any sort of measurable degree. It became, obviously, the most personal and important record we’d ever done. So we decided at that point that all we cared about was this record seeing the light of day.”

Indeed, WWIII is a highly personal listen, as evident in the anthemic and unsettled “Across 5 Oceans,” which offers a chorus of “Now that it’s over/I’m moving on/I got a life of mine to live.” While the lyrics are a response to Nathan’s lost love, they could just as well have been written to reflect Matthew’s situation, even having been penned prior to the attack. It’s a parallel the bassist sees, as well.

“Nathan’s lyrics have always had this weird, sort of prophetic element to them,” he confirms. “To where, at the time, for whatever purpose he’s writing them, they always wind up having this grave significance to events that would happen later. When I listen to that song, I barely even remember the intent with which he wrote them, but I am able to internalize them and see them for the sort of big picture.”

Yet nowhere is the record more vulnerable and a brother’s pain laid more bare than on the deceptively poppy “We Got This,” the emotional centerpiece that recounts how Nathan learned of his twin’s assault. If you find lines like, “I missed two calls and when we talk/you ask me why you’re in an ambulance,” particularly gut-wrenching, you’re not alone.

“I heard the lyrics one time, and, that was the last time that I would ever hear those,” Matthew admits. “When I was recording my parts to it, I had them mute the vocal track because I could not even get through the song while hearing those.

“When I was writing my bassline,” he continues, his voice cracking at the thought of the track, “it was probably one of the most simplistic on the album, because that was really me just trying to survive and get through it, knowing what that song meant. It’s just too powerful for me to deal with.”

Not every song on WWIII bears such weight. The especially crunchy and riff-laden “Imagineer” is the result of a collaboration with Billy Corgan. The pairing came after Smashing Pumpkins headlined a benefit for Matthew at Metro in July 2010. At the time, Corgan had never met them.

“[Billy] began to investigate who I was and who we were,” he says. “And then, fortunately, the people he asked, the [Metro owner] Joe Shanahans and the [ex-Filter/SP drummer] Matt Walkers of the world, who we do know, they told him a little bit about me, and sort of the spirit that I’ve had throughout my relationship with them, and that sold him on doing the show. So, after I got to a point where I was coherent and comfortable enough, about a year later, I wrote an e-mail thanking him. And, of course, the three or four people I showed it to, including the person who was going to pass the message on to him, they’re like, ‘Look, this is a little obscure, it’s a little out there. Are you sure you want me to send this?’ and, I said, ‘Yeah. Because it’s honest, and it’s a little bit eccentric, and that’s who I am. So just send it.’ So, against their better judgement, they did. And, as luck would have it, it resonated with Billy Corgan, and he wrote me back just such a profound, beautiful, powerful e-mail that it blew my mind. And that set off a correspondence between him and myself, that ultimately led to him inviting us to Sedona [Arizona, where Corgan has been recording new Pumpkins material] to write a song. And, I was going to go out there to do a final phase of my healing, to try to get ready to tour, ’cause that’s such a perfect place to do that. So, Nathan and I went out there and he welcomed us into his world, we spent five days in the studio with him while he was working on Pumpkins stuff, and then, on day six, he said, ‘Well, let’s work on a Madina song.’ And, there we had it.”

The last chapter in a narrative running through their catalog, the band’s real-world tragedies played right into World War III’s themes, and vice-versa.

“We wound up with a record that really epitomizes everything that we were going through and went through,” Leone affirms. “And, as luck would have it, it sort of also played right into the third and final installment of that sort of over-ambitious, grandiose concept thing that we tried to do. What we had set out to postulate from day one,” he continues, “was we sort of noticed the collective shift in values to, I guess, people really sort of exploring themselves and their consciousness and their subconscious, from, wondering what this is all about, and wondering if we’re in this world or that world.”

Understandably, the trials and traumas of the last two years, from label trouble to the attack, have granted the band a whole new perspective. As such, Leone speaks of the band’s “dramatic shift in priority in that it no longer became about how many [records] are we gonna sell, are we going to be able to keep our deal, are we going to be able to sustain our life and career making music, how is it going to be perceived by press, blah blah blah. After everything happened, none of that mattered.”

He explains, “Before in our career, achievement was always something that we were trying to attain that looked different to us. Like, achievement was, ‘Is it affecting this many people, or making sure these people took it the right way and understood it?’ None of that matters. Achievement to us took on a whole new meaning, and that’s for the best. So we could drop a little bit of our obsessive neurosis about how many people were hearing it and whether they liked it or not. It turned into something that was already an achievement in our mind, the second we delivered it. So, we now just feel accomplished and grateful and overjoyed that it is a record that is out there. This one was for us. This is like our selfish sort of desire to just get this out and let it be cathartic to us and that’s fine. We weren’t attached to any outcome, and we’re still not.”

For the members of Madina Lake, being here today is enough.

– Jaime de’Medici