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Deer Tick

Deer Tick started in Providence, RI. Deer Tick will end in Providence, RI

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We also do nude modeling.

Deer Tick began in December 2004 as a two-man drum and guitar band as a new vehicle for songwriter, and Providence, Rhode Island native, John Joseph McCauley III. After hearing a Hank Williams song on the radio, McCauley purchased as much Hank Sr. as he could at a record store, got his underage hands on a big bottle of brandy, and locked himself up in his cold and drafty bedroom listening to ol' Hank until the bottle was dry. It was a departure from the dissonant rock n roll scene that McCauley had been familiar with growing up in Providence. Alongside him was his best friend, Paul Thomas Marandola, on the drums. The two made some tapes, played a couple small shows, and tried to find a bass player.

The duo used the tentative band name My Other Face. This went on for a few months until Brendan "Viking Moses" Massei crossed paths with the 18-year-old McCauley, and infected him with the tour bug. Parting ways with Marandola, McCauley drove across country with Viking Moses, leaving his movie theater job and shitty apartment behind. McCauley, all by himself now, ditched the My Other Face name (because it sucked) and began pondering new stage names. Feeling that monikers were stupid, he imagined that he was in a band and that he should be thinking about band names instead.

The town was Bloomington, Indiana. It was the summer of '05. McCauley was now 19. McCauley and Massei went hiking around a state park where McCauley got a deer tick on his head. McCauley discovered the pesky arachnid on his scalp late that evening and, drunk, began freaking out. McCauley grew up in the city, but had taken numerous camping and fishing trips with his pops in areas of the northeast that are notorious for ticks. Still, he never got one until now. The name Deer Tick came to mind once McCauley calmed down and realized that this was really no big deal. From that day forward McCauley was now in a band called Deer Tick, he just had to find his band mates.

Playing with several incarnations over the years with help from all sorts of talent (Dirty Projectors drummer Brian McOmber, New Hampshire bassist and songwriter Nat Baldwin, Spencer Kingman of Spenking), McCauley found himself in love with the stylings of Pawtucket, Rhode Island drummer Dennis Michael Ryan. Ryan had played drums in many local bands that McCauley liked. It was May of '07, and seeing that Ryan was not doing much with his time, McCauley asked him to join his imaginary band Deer Tick to help bring his dreams to life. Ryan agreed, and to McCauley's surprise, this Ryan kid was a damn good singer and harmonist.

However, before Ryan's time in the band, McCauley had recorded War Elephant, and scheduled its release with short-lived Houston, Texas-based label FEOW! Records. No current members of Deer Tick actually appear on that record (except McCauley of course).

The two Tickheads embarked on a very ambitious tour in the summer of 2007, covering the entire U.S.A. and venturing into new places like Canada. The tour was booked months in advance with the idea that Deer Tick would be supporting their first record. Delays happened, and then more delays happened, and the record was not released in time for the tour. Deer Tick enlisted the help of Las Vegas musicians Jacob Smigel and Joe Kendall for the first half of the tour, and Massachusetts born and bred pianist James Alphonse Falzone, Providence songwriter and guitarist Diego Perez, and the Washington D.C. rooted songwriter and multi instrumentalist Liz Isenberg on bass for the second half.

The second half of the tour became a financial disaster and morale remained low throughout most of it, especially during the final weeks. The Tickheads came home to Providence, their souls battered, not reminiscing much of their time on the road, instead drinking and abusing drugs in silence and behind closed doors.

Though not all was wrong with the tour. McCauley and Ryan met "Big Rob" (that's a whole 'nother story though) and McCauley spent his 21st birthday amongst very close friends in Austin, Texas. McCauley's birthday party show took many, many Hefty garbage bags to clean up after.

So now the band was back to basics again, just drums and guitar. This would not do. In the past, Deer Tick had featured Dennis' half-brother, Providence native, Christopher Dale Ryan (who will be referred to as C.R.), on bass, and the two wondered if they could rope him in full time. C.R. was one of the few guys around town with an upright bass, he was a hell of a player, and he played left handed, which looks cool. Arrangements were made to jam once C.R. returned from his VW Van adventure to Costa Rica and back (though legend has it that he only made it as far as Guatemala). At first C.R. was iffy about joining full time, but he agreed to come on tour in the fall to see how it went.

C.R. proved to be a great addition to the band, and his knowledge of classical music and jazz was very useful, as he could write string arrangements for the band. He studied music at Providence College for four years, graduating in the spring before joining the band.

War Elephant was finally released on September 4, 2007 on FEOW! Records. The reviews started coming in and Deer Tick started to get a bit more popular on a national level. Deer Tick was set to tour with Castanets in October to support the record.  The record sold out by January and was not repressed. It became nearly impossible to find and Deer Tick was back to selling CD-Rs if anybody had time to burn them before the show. By the time the band made it to South by Southwest and their audiences across the country were getting bigger, the issue of not having an album anymore became quite an embarrassment.

Tim Putnam and Ian Wheeler, founders of Brooklyn-based Partisan Records, caught wind of Deer Tick and expressed interest in rereleasing the album. Deer Tick was all freed up and had nowhere else to go. Partisan Records was a godsend for the trio. The band was going to make their comeback!

In August of 2008 after returning home from a trip to Memphis, McCauley was looking for a guitar player to add to the band. C.R.'s new roommate, Florida-born Andrew Grant Tobiassen, played it pretty well and McCauley was curious to see if he could make the cut. The two spent many sleepless nights together playing guitar and working on songs. Like Ryan, McCauley was also thrilled by his singing abilities. McCauley made up his mind and hired Tobiassen just days before Deer Tick was scheduled to start a new recording session.

In September, just before the press were starting to talk about the rerelease (which caught 'em all by surprise with shocking new cover art), Deer Tick entered Yellow House Studios in Baltimore, Maryland. This was where McCauley did almost of his recordings in the past, including War Elephant and various Deer Tick demos. The time schedule was hectic, McCauley had just moved to Brooklyn, New York with the other three band members still living in Rhode Island, and the band as a quartet were underrehearsed. After a week or so of unproductive sessions, a panic-stricken Deer Tick got their act together, and in a span of 20 days recorded what they felt was nothing short of the perfect followup to War Elephant...  absolutely perfect.

McCauley and the boys thought long and hard about prospective album titles. Flag Day in the United States is June 14, McCauley's birthday, which he shares with his beloved, departed Uncle Frank. As a testament to his roots, McCauley decided to go with the title Born on Flag Day... kind of like Born in the U.S.A. meets Born on the Fourth of July, a great album and a great movie, respectively. Nobody could make any sort of disagreement on the title because late one night on a drive from Providence to New York City, the band was listening to the album, taking notes on the mixes, when suddenly a dark sedan with a vanity plate reading "JUNE 14" passed the Deer Tick Mobile (which at the time was a GMC Safari covered with stickers that would frequently get the band pulled over). The group totally lost their shit.

In support of the Partisan Records rerelease of War Elephant, the band hit the road again, this time opening shows for folks like Jenny Lewis and The Felice Brothers, and of course the occasional sold out headlining gigs in Providence and Brooklyn. But what would happen with Born on Flag Day? It had been over a year since War Elephant first hit the streets, and Deer Tick had nothing to show for all that time in between. (Well, they had a pretty sweet Daytrotter Session, and that goddamn Sean Kingston cover)

By Christmastime '08 Deer Tick and Partisan Records decided they'd stick together, and they began making arrangements for the release of Born on Flag Day, and for the band to do another studio session for a third record. So in January '09, with Born on Flag Day bearing a TBA 2009 release date, the band released a cover of Paul Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years" over the internet. This little gem, from their latest recording session, was released to keep the fans at ease while Born on Flag Day is given "the treatment".

So now, with two records pretty much ready to go, 2009 is shaping up to be what one might call "The Year of the Deer Tick". In 2009 Deer Tick will attack the music industry twice with two dope-ass records, finally as a quartet - the way John Joseph McCauley III envisioned it long before War Elephant.

- Cecil Thyme, New York City, January 2009

Dawes

Having a largely unknown band come onstage and blow you away is one thing; hearing in this band a sound for the ages, the potential to be a major voice in its generation, is about as rare as the sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker in the Arkansas Delta.

In one fell swoop, opening for Delta Spirit at the Bowery Ballroom in New York on February 21, the Los Angeles-based, unsigned quartet known as Dawes did exactly that, and did it again the next night in a smaller venue before a smaller, but still packed, house at Arlene's Grocery (where, during a rafters-shaking version of the monumental, Band-like anthem, "When My Time Comes," several fans up front were waving upraised arms to and fro, as if they were having a religious experience). Looking back, it's still hard to believe what unfolded in those two performances. On the Bowery Ballroom's website, Dawes didn't even merit a descriptive paragraph about its music, only the band name, linked to a rather sparse MySpace site, where there's just enough music to make one sit up and take notice of a gifted artist at work, and of what sounds like a mellow, folk-rock band, all languid rhythms and profound ruminations. Wrong.

Oh, they're profound, and there's some folk-rock in the repertoire, but in concert they are a full-on rock 'n' roll juggernaut of classic dimensions and potentially legendary proportions. On its lone, self-released, North Hills album, pressed in February and available only at the band's shows and on iTunes, you can hear some of Dawes's sonic power, but the overall effect is one of subdued introspection, more akin to The Band and early Crosby, Stills & Nash; in concert, The Band aesthetic and the CS&N harmonies are fully present and accounted for, but the muscle in the music springs from the likes of Springsteen, Fogerty, Dylan, Neil Young and some southern soul influences centered on the twin shrines of Memphis and Muscle Shoals. Lead singer/songwriter/guitarist Taylor Goldsmith's songs are packed with telling and unsparing details of love gone cataclysmically wrong, rife with literary allusion (the songs on North Hills were written while Taylor admits to being under the influence of "F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and guys like that, with a little bit of John Steinbeck on some of the later songs on the record.") and a large measure of melancholy, wistfulness and bitterness; they're also sometimes intentionally literary and wordy in striving for transcendence--not unlike, oh, the young Paul Simon's songs--but also compelling, impossible to dismiss, and demanding attention be paid (hello, Paul). In fact, if Matt Vasquez of Delta Spirit is his generation's John Lennon, and he may be, then Dawes's lead singer/lead guitarist/songwriter Taylor Goldsmith may well be its Paul Simon. But where Delta Spirit looks out at the brute world and raises a clarion call against injustice and apathy, Dawes looks to an inner geography, to the holiness of the heart's affections. Delta Spirit has a Rubber Soul, maybe even a White Album, in it; Dawes has a Bookends, and maybe a Graceland, looming.

Taylor Goldsmith: 'I've always written songs, I've always wanted to be a musician, but I didn't want to start treating the material so preciously. Every time I come across artists who take themselves too seriously, it tends to be a bad experience."

Dawes goes about its art with a bass player, Wylie Gelber, who plays in a florid, melodic style equally beholden to Stax/Volt and Paul McCartney; a stupefyingly accomplished 18-year-old powerhouse drummer, Griffin Goldsmith, Taylor's brother, who possesses the subtlety, the groove-sense and the stamina of Levon Helm; and a keyboard player, Tay Strathairn, whose majestic, nuanced, gospel/soul instrumental voice is straight out of the Spooner Oldham textbook. And then there's Taylor, the frontman. Of average height and build, with a stubbly growth on the face, dark hair suitably and musicianly mussed, with intense, dark eyes and open features, he hunches over his Telecaster as he crafts riveting, intensely emotional, howling solos reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen's first great lead guitar showcase, Darkness On the Edge of Town, and specifically the song "Somewhere In the Night" off that album. Darkness seems to be Taylor's sole Springsteen influence-one album, and one song from the album (indeed, in conversation, Taylor is rapturous about Darkness: "That's the one. That's my favorite Bruce album. He played all the lead on that one.") When he steps to the mic to sing, he leans in close but never lets his gaze stray from the audience. He'll gesture to emphasize a point in the story, but his posture remains coiled, his expression dauntless, as if there's so much aching to get out that it's doubling him over; but rather than being vanquished by his emotions, he's rearing up to let them all burst loose, his veiled melancholy rushing out in a torrent of effusive, accusatory poetry and, emanating from the Tele, barbaric yawps.

A band with the intensity, commitment and conviction of Dawes is a natural fit on the Delta Spirit tour, Unsurprisingly, Matt Vasquez has become one of Dawes's staunchest supporters. "There's a good crew of musicians in Los Angeles these days that are very much from that Gram Parsons niche of California country music," Vasquez opines. "Keeping it very rock and roll. There's some that overdo it and start dressing like Neil Young a little bit too much. You know, it's kinda tough to dodge when you live there, because fashion goes along with your musical taste. Dawes is pretty good about not letting that happen to them. They're about the music and the lyrics."

"So if you want to get to know me/follow my smile down into its curves/All these lines are born in sorrows and pleasures/and every man ends up with the face that he deserves" --from "When You Call My Name," by Taylor Goldsmith

There's not a whole lot of history to deal with when it comes to Dawes. All the members are from Los Angeles, save keyboardist Strathairn, who moved to L.A. from Woodstock, NY (how fitting, for he not only channels Spooner Oldham, but he's got a bit of Garth Hudson going for him too). For four years Taylor and bassist Gelber were in Simon Dawes, represented on record by the well received, Tony Berg-produced Carnivore in 2006, and, prior to that, 2005's What No One Hears, and toured with, among others, Maroon 5. "Simon" was guitarist Blake Mills, whom Taylor calls "the best musician I've ever met." (YouTube offers plenty of concert footage of Simon Dawes, and hence Blake Mills, for the curious.) Dawes is the name of the Goldsmith brothers' grandfather. When Mills decided to pursue other opportunities, Simon Dawes was history, but Taylor and Gelber, joined by Griffin and, as of a year or so ago, Strathairn, then newly relocated to Los Angeles, banded together as Dawes. The current tour as the opening act for Delta Spirit is the band's first national road work, but they played all over the L.A. area while Griffin was finishing high school. (For the record, Taylor attended Pepperdine University for a year and a half--"It wasn't for me, but I wasn't really open-minded at that point at all towards anything. Now I look back and am upset for not taking advantage of that whole experience."--and Strathairn studied music at the New School in New York City for four years; Gelber left high school to work full time with Dawes.) North Hills was cut analog with producer Jonathan Wilson, and pressed just in time for the Delta Spirit tour.

"Jonathan Wilson is an amazing guitar player, and he actually played some of the guitar on our record," Taylor says. "He played with a lot of different artists, including Elvis Costello, and he was in a band called Muscadine, which is amazing. He comes from North Carolina and he moved out to L.A. He lives up in Laurel Canyon, and he's a producer. His whole rig up there, his whole producing situation, is all analog. We recorded it all to tape; there wasn't even a computer involved. It was all like the way it used to be done. For the most part everything was recorded live. We did the drums, bass and lead vocal and acoustic guitar and piano, all live, then we would overdub organ or another guitar or the background vocals. But for the most part, just about every track was recorded live. And because it was analog, we didn't really have the opportunity to go back and correct anything or smooth anything out. At first, it was something I was a little bit nervous about. My only experience with recording had been with digital stuff, and everything is so available. So I was like, Maybe we should clean this up. But I'm really glad we didn't do that, because it sounds a little more real, and doesn't sound too precious, which I think is good for the songs."

It's also quieter than the band is on stage, an observation Taylor acknowledges as accurate and, on Dawes's part, intentional. "Because listening to records like Harvest, Neil Young records, Band records, and then listening to their live recordings, it's always two different experiences. And we really respond to that. When you listen to 'Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,' it's pretty tame and really allows the song to get across, and it's not concerned with a live energy at all, which you don't need because you're just listening to the record. Then you listen to that song on any of his live records and it's so loud. And seeing him live, which we've been lucky enough to do, it allows the live show to be that much more fulfilling."

What's also more fulfilling, or more fully appreciated, in encountering Dawes live is Taylor's dynamic lead guitar work. On the concert stage the band is all-electric, whereas on disc a pronounced acoustic backdrop does its intended job of focusing a listener's attention on the storytellin absent the raw scream of the electric quartet. There's enough there to tantalize, without giving much away about experiencing the band up close and personal. Any talk of how striking his guitar playing is, though, elicits a hearty laugh from Taylor. He's fairly new at it, you see, because in Simon Dawes he stood well out of the spotlight while Blake Mills wowed the crowd with six-string pyrotechnics. "I would just kind of strum along and sing," he says sheepishly, failing to add that at times he played a pretty fair keyboard. When Simon Dawes morphed in Dawes, Taylor was confronted with the necessity of crafting an instrumental voice suitable to the material he had penned. It was tough sledding at first. "There were these songs that called for the guitar to step out more than I was capable of, so we spent a large part of the beginning of our Dawes shows with the lead guitar being pretty sub-par. I was trying to keep up with Griffin, Wylie and Tay, and I didn't have much experience doing it. So me really fucking up bad only three or four times a night was looked at as a good thing. But after playing every single night with Delta Spirit and feeling a little more confident about my playing, it's really cool to hear someone compliment me, because I never considered myself a guitar player.

"Now," he adds with typical understatement, and a touch of dry humor, "I'm beginning to consider it."

Tay Straithairn (left) and Tylor Goldsmith at work on stage: "We spent a large part of the beginning of our Dawes shows with the lead guitar being pretty sub-par," according to Taylor. "I was trying to keep up with Griffin, Wylie and Tay, and I didn't have much experience doing it. So me really fucking up bad only three or four times a night was looked at as a good thing.

About those songs... This is where it gets interesting. "Give Me Time," soft and reverent, like a hymn, pleading gently for patience and understanding, with harmonies as exquisite as Crosby, Stills & Nash's. The epic album opener, "That Western Skyline," a song that moves from dreamy to angry to melancholic in recounting a love affair and a spiritual journey from Alabama to California, one rife with hints of betrayal and remorse and longing. It takes the form of a one-way conversation between the narrator (Taylor) and a fictional character named Lou, whose only role is to listen (and have his named rhyme with "true"). Laconic and bittersweet, with a bit of the feel of "The Weight," and further enhanced atmospherically by Strathairn's funereal organ hum, the song wistfully recounts a courtship between the narrator and an Alabama preacher's daughter he wooed ("I did not feel welcome," he sings, and he doesn't mean by the girl). Visiting Birmingham, "where the aching soil is so much richer," he tries to walk the walk: "I watch her father preach on Sundays/I know the hymnals all by heart"--and then the critical revelation: "But oh, Luke, no my dreams did not come true/No, they only came apart," followed by a somber, agonizing chorus of voices rising up and singing a plaintive trifecta of "oh, oh, oh, oh, oh," aching with the narrator's anguish.

It's a true story of romantic misadventure turned into mesmerizing art. "The song's about this girl who is real, and is and was a part of my life," Taylor explains. "She lives out in Alabama. I met her out there, took a liking to her, kept in touch with her. We didn't really know each other that well because we lived so far apart, because I live in Los Angeles. She came out to L.A. for her work and we started hanging out more. Coming from a small town, with a father who really is a preacher, growing up in that kind of environment, she didn't really respond well to Los Angeles. The city, the people and the pretense all turned her off. She grouped the whole judgment up into one thing, and her feeling towards me was changed based on her impression of how she felt about Los Angeles. So the song's about how where you're from really deciding what kind of person you grow up as, and despite your priorities in your life, the things you consider important, what you want those to be sometimes isn't even up to you. It's up to where you come from."

"That Western Skyline" sets the stage for everything to come. A signature song, "Love Is All I Am," gentle and bitter all at once, finds Taylor spitting out his contempt for someone who values the gestures of love more than the substance of its daily commitment: "Love is not excitement/it's not kissing or holding hands/I'm not some assignment/No, love is all I am," he cries in a voice wounded and seething. The Band-ish "When You Call My Name," led by Taylor's circular, Robbie Robertson-style Tele filigrees and his nasally, soulful vocal as the song marches forward, breaking into a soaring chorus after Taylor sings softly, "If you wanna get to know me/follow my smile into its curves/All these lines are born in sorrows and pleasures/And every man ends up with the face that he deserves."

On an album with hardly any weak moments, especially in the writing, the showcase piece is the monument titled "When My Time Comes." From a distance we hear another rolling thunder guitar lick, from afar but gathering strength as it surges in intensity until it crests and takes the band with it, propelling the whole enterprise ruthlessly forward with pummeling force, Taylor declaiming the lyrics with fierce resolve, as he questions the validity of his own art, indeed his own existence: "So I pointed my fingers and shouted a few quotes I knew/as if something that's written should be taken as true/but every path I had taken and conclusion I drew/would put truth back under the knife/and now the only piece of advice that continues to help/is anyone that's making anything new only breaks something else." Each chorus is preceded by a stop-time figure, barely enough of a pause to catch your breath, and then the most magnificent chorus explodes in a volley of drums, burbling bass, gospel organ, a driving guitar riff, and all four voices rising in exalted harmony, singing, "When...my time comes... oh-oooohhh-ooohhh-oh/when my time comes/oh-oooohhhh-ooohhh." The buoyant, close harmonized chorus--the moment in the song when personal aspiration meets spiritual conviction, and a hope rises in the anticipated hallelujah those "ooohhh"s signify--suggests an ecstatic epiphany, triumphant and transcendent all at once.

"Now it seems the unraveling has started too soon/Now I'm sleeping in hallways and drinking perfume/And I'm speaking to mirrors and I'm howling at moons/While the worse and the worse that it gets/you can judge the whole world on the sparkle that you think it lacks/yes, you can stare into the abyss, but it's staring right back"--"When My Time Comes"

"When My Time Comes" is a textbook example of the literary influence in Taylor's songwriting process. The song was inspired by his reading of Rainier Marie Rilke's Letters To a Young Poet and "other serious writers who are constantly reminding you that without doing so you wouldn't be able to live. I've always written songs, I've always wanted to be a musician but at the same time I didn't like looking at it that way. I didn't want to start treating the material so preciously. Every time I come across artists who tend to take themselves too seriously, it tends to be a bad experience. Being way too serious and proud are qualities I never want to be accused of. That song was me trying to come to terms with my approach--you know, the artist's dilemma. Whether or not it's worth it. But dealing with the doubt, not feeling confident enough, but at the same time mulling over whether it's good for me or doing me a disservice. When is it useful and when is it ego driven?"

If his songs are any indication, at the tender age of 23 Taylor seems to have really been put through the wringer, at least when it comes to love. Intimate and personal as they are, the lyrics find Taylor scourging himself as unrepentantly as he does his fickle partners. (In one of the many memorable lyrics in "When My Time Comes," he's practically come unhinged, bellowing, "Now it seems the unraveling has started too soon/Now I'm sleeping in hallways and drinking perfume/And I'm speaking to mirrors and I'm howling at moons.") Taylor insists personal experience is his only reference at the moment, although he notes that there are a couple of moments on North Hills when he considers more general philosophical dilemmas. He mentions Dylan's "Tangled Up In Blue" and "Simple Twist of Fate" as "songs that have a storytelling quality to them, but you know they weren't experienced by the writer." His problem, he avers, is that "for some reason I don't know if I'm really capable yet of being able to tap into other peoples' possible experiences. I don't know. In my own opinion I don't feel I've developed enough as a writer to be able to really understand what someone else's emotions would be going through something. That being the case, every song in the band ends up being based entirely on personal experience. Any time I've tried to get out of that it's felt dishonest. Even though I really think it would be good for the music, would give the material a broader scope, I still don't know if I'm quite there. So all of it tends to be based on personal experience, and most times there's a person attached, be it a girl if it's a song of longing, or whatever. Sometimes not, like 'Peace In the Valley' has to do with living in Los Angeles and trying to wrap my head around what that means to me, and a song like 'Take Me Out Of the City' is more concrete and decided, more of a decision than a thought."

From the Bowery stage Taylor told the crowd that the members of Dawes had given up their apartments and all worldly possessions to go on tour with Delta Spirit, in announcing the availability of CDs for sale downstairs. The subtext of that appeal, though, goes to the heart of this chapter in Dawes's brief history: just as the band gives up everything on stage for its audience, so has it done so offstage, in its commitment to the dream. "We're all very lucky guys with loving families and we're not going to be left out in the cold or anything," he explains. "But there came a point where we were either going to devote everything to do this and put all our eggs in one basket, or we were never really going to take it that seriously or take it that far. So this tour I feel like is the biggest example of us making that decision."

Fittingly, it was Delta Spirit's Matt Vasquez who offered Taylor the unalloyed truth he and his mates have embraced in their push forward.

Recalls Taylor: "Recently, in Cambridge, Matt took me aside. He'd had some drinks and was in a particularly sentimental mood, I guess. He let me know that it was important that we reminded ourselves daily that we're giving everything up for this, and this has to be our main priority, and if we don't do that we're really doing ourselves a disservice. He said, 'This has to be more important to you than anything else, any other person.' The way he put it, which was very funny and very Matt Vasquez of him, was, 'You know, a member of your family gets sick, you gotta take care of 'em; you gotta do that. If you have a baby, you have to take care of it. Otherwise, nothing else comes before this.'"

"If all my lovers sing the big words/and all my brothers keep them small/Then I got lost in the difference/between their whisper and the echo of their call/so I am headed for the ocean/to let the sea smoke guide me in/I'll give up my belongings and questions/they only ever taught me to begin/So I will not turn around, as I step up to the train/But I'll hear it when you call my name/And I will not be the sound/of your roof under the rain/but I'll hear it when you call my name" --"When You Call My Name"

Emily Jane White

Emily Jane White is a rare solo performer who can cut through noisy club din and turn antsy foot traffic into apt listeners. Her voice pierces the egos of those within earshot; it's a low, lilting alto, often compared to Chan Marshall and Hope Sandoval. Ghostly melodies float through her songs on ornate piano passages and simple guitar figures. But no matter how you find your way into White's world, it's easy to stay there. Like the best songwriters, the San Franciscan leaves room for the listener's subjectivity, with lyrics that read more like a Cormac McCarthy novel than a diary entry.

White's characters are defined by what they lack. Lovers drive away; the dead require mourning. Men beyond redemption deliver images from a very American landscape. These are people who admit to their evils, to dancing with the devil, to having holes in their hearts and only "lady luck" for company.

"I would say isolation is definitely a consistent theme in my music," White concedes over coffee, adding that her intention is to "[reach] out for an understanding of, an empathy for, other people's experiences" Her words are underscored by storytelling languages of the musical variety: blues, folk, and American spiritual traditions. Her religious references bring an atavistic sensibility to the work, making her subjects' isolation more universal. White's capability with ancient musical traditions also gives the songs a devotional quality, so the simplicity of a line like "oh, father lay me down," from the song "Bessie Smith," really connects. The title of that track also displays White's admiration for the late blues singer's "strength and influential and transgressive contributions to the history of the blues," she explains.

White developed her brand of "dark folk," at UC Santa Cruz in the early '00s. Her vision was shaped by both classic country and blues songwriters (and contemporary fare like Nick Cave and P.J. Harvey) and her discovery of cultural mythologies through the American Studies program. Although the Santa Cruz music scene provided White a comfortable place to develop her sound, she lacked the confidence to go beyond the house-show circuit with her band the Diamond Star Halos. A post-collegiate sojourn in France increased her sense of self-reliance and further shaped her outlook. "My experience of the world became more vague, spiritual, strange, less concrete," she explains. Playing music to a warm Bordeaux audience provided new encouragement. People she met there wondered "why I didn't have a CD out, why I wasn't touring, why wasn't I on a record label," White explains. "And I didn't really know what to say."

In 2006, White moved to San Francisco and started performing with new musicians under her own name. Her debut album Dark Undercoat, which will be released in September on Oakland's Double Negative Records, draws on five years of songwriting, collecting together songs that "felt the most tangible." Indeed, the album has a warm physicality; you can feel the weight of her fingers on the keys. The song "Wild Tigers I've Known" features a particularly beautiful lead melody accompanied only by graceful piano passages and a brief vocal harmony. Though the song was written for Cam Archer's film of the same name, it is movie-like on its own; visually rich and starkly scored. And like the rest of White's work, it demands a repeat audience.

  —by John Garmon (SF Weekly)

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