Sometymes Why: Uncensored and Undefined
Sarah Hagerman
Alluring, absorbing, and a little bit far out with a whole lot of chutzpah – welcome to the uncanny world of Sometymes Why. Kristin Andreassen, Ruth Ungar Merenda and Aoife O’Donovan are three musicians who have done a lot of string band groundbreaking. But they came together as Sometymes Why because of the common turf they shared as songwriters.
“I’ve been writing since 2001, but there was a lot of songs that didn’t really fit in the Uncle Earl band model, they were too weird,” Andreassen explains. “What I like about Uncle Earl is we keep it upbeat, danceable and not too weird. My good friends Ruth and Aoife realized they had songs like that too, that didn’t fit in The Mammals or Crooked Still. The only place we had to sing them was the after party, sitting around after the show being quiet, and eventually we said, ‘You know, let’s do a gig and sing these songs.’ It just evolved that way, organically.”
Playing their first official gig at the Sidewalk Cafe in January 2005, they may have started out as a vessel to catch those quiet, weird, after-the-show pieces, but have carved a lusciously fresh and innovative sound on their own terms. Their fantastic new record, Your Heart is a Glorious Machine (released March 10th on Signature Sounds) leaves you with a spun head spun and a swelled heart, and is an exciting expansion from the lo-fi glow of 2005’s self-titled release, So come along, sweep your assumptions aside, and follow the winding ribbon, as we attempt to unravel Sometymes Why with Andreassen.
“It’s really fun for me because it’s a totally different move from Uncle Earl. I don’t really like one better than the other, but I think it’s nice to have those two different personality outlets,” Andreassen says. Built on the strong foundation of the three’s distinctive, yet complimentary, songwriting, “It’s almost more like an institutionalized singer in the round thing where we just bring a song we’ve written and the other two then just back it up. I think that’s why Sometymes Why is just so easy, it naturally comes together.”
Their live shows are set up to reflect this individuality, with each woman owning the spotlight for her words, while the other two provide vocal and musical support. The trio easily draws the audience into an inviting rapport, as Andreassen describes: “We sit and we play, and we all sing around one mic. We just take turns in the middle seat, singing lead, and I think it’s really natural and totally impromptu, we always spend a little time just sort of gossiping or conversing onstage. It’s natural, as though you were in our living room.”
The band is still trying to figure out the best rooms for their sound, and Andreassen delves into this dilemma: “I really am curious where to get our agent to try to book this band, because you know we did pretty well [on the last tour] in these venues in Seattle and Portland, but they are kind of the same places Uncle Earl or Crooked Still would play. And Eugene in particular, the venue was a bar and it got pretty quiet for us, but basically it was a bar, and it wasn’t the perfect listening room at all. But going all the way into art centers just seems a little bit like over kill, because we do want to get a younger audience that can pay a reasonable ticket price.”
The challenge then becomes finding venues unique as they are, and Andreassen discovered at least one on the last tour in, “Bellingham, Washingon…We played this little place called The Green Frog Tavern. It’s this crazily cool little venue that sort of feels like a dive bar with peanut shells all over the floor and cheap beer, but it’s all really reasonably priced micro brews, and a great guy who runs the place. The whole room was just used to being a listening room. So this dive bar all of a sudden becomes deadly quiet when we start playing, it was amazing. There were even three or four dogs sitting in the room listening to us, it was very Bellingham.”
What’s In a (Genre) Name?
“People are always like, ‘What kind of music are you playing right now?’ and I’m always like, ‘I don’t know what to call it!’” Andreassen laughs. “What exactly do you play?” is the age-old question punted at musicians, but it’s certainly a good sign if there isn’t an easy catch-all answer. Andreassen pondered this in terms of Sometymes Why:
“I think we are kind of destined to be misreported because we spent so much time in the bluegrass and old time scenes. I think the people that are writing about us see us that way and they will forever introduce us as, ‘Kristin, Ruth and Aoife from Uncle Earl, The Mammals and Crooked Still, have made a record that doesn’t really sound like bluegrass,’ instead of just finding a way to say what it does sound like. I mean you have to admit, the record is so far from bluegrass. It really doesn’t have anything to do with bluegrass… and it’s even debatable whether our other bands play bluegrass. It’s kind of funny, it’s just the word that chases us around all the time. I am waiting for reviewers that maybe listen to other kinds of music, people who listen more to Feist or Andrew Bird or Laura Veirs, that songwriter parlor music that’s kind of quirky and out there. I feel like those people would like our record, but I’m not sure. I mostly read from the folk press.”
But she would emphasize, “Don’t get me wrong! I’m really glad that No Depression and those sort of bluegrass and country magazines are reviewing the record, I think it’s great if Uncle Earl and the Mammals and Crooked Still can draw someone into our records. I think it’s fantastic they will follow us into this new aspect of our songwriting universe.”
“I guess there’s some need for a new genre name,” She continues. “Like a couple of years ago I heard the term ‘apartment music.’ Someone told me, ‘You know, in Rhode Island now there’s this whole scene of apartment music,’ and I’m like, ‘What’s that?” and they are like, ‘Oh you know music that’s not loud enough to wake the neighbors.’ And I said, ‘Oh that’s a good description, maybe that’s what we play!’ [laughs] It’s like little toy instruments you might have in your living room, so that kind of works. But then Aoife’s dad called us ‘folk noir’ which I really like too. Like folk music, but it’s got this kind of vibey, mysterious edge. Those are the two closest genre definitions I’ve heard, but just calling it folk to me seems sort of strange. We play in weird keys and we go in and out of time signatures and use these really strange harmonies. The songs are not very accessible in some ways, I mean I don’t really know what defines folk, but it seems like there’s something not quite folk about it.”
A term that I find myself drawn to is, “leftfield folk.” It doesn’t wall itself into traditional acoustic structures, although it starts with pieces of the scaffolding. Rather, the music runs off into the stranger corners of the field, wanders to places where road songs and mountain ballads don’t quite apply, thumbing a ride to the bright lights and the rumble of the city. What it maintains is the sense of adventure and the aching heart that comes from those wide-open spaces and asphalt scars, only bringing them into darker, hushed corners, exploring out-there instrumental hardware and arrangements, unafraid of embracing a pop sensibility. It’s down to earth with a wry sense of humor, not artsy fartsy, preferring a good pitcher of microbrew over a sipped glass of champagne. But it’s a little too offbeat and hushed for a crowd that wants nothing more than to holler and kick up some dust. So it’s somewhere to the left, hanging out with the folks who pull their wardrobes from thrift stores, daydream on colorful canvases, and scratch rough poetry on bar bathroom walls.
Your Heart is a Glorious Machine website
The band’s natural chemistry was inherent on 2005’s self-titled album, which Andreassen refers to as ‘The Black Album’ (there was also a family friendly silver version released, but more on the song that necessitated that later). Describing the recording approach for the first album, Andreassen says, “We were recording a rehearsal just for kicks and we ended up with a whole ten song record by the end of the day, which became the black album. That recording is just in mono, most of it’s on one mic that we are singing into. We happened to record it in a big space so it sounds full, but it’s the real deal [laughs], a one take, no edits, as-is performance.”
The sessions for latest album, Your Heart is a Glorious Machine took place in Dreamland Studios, outside of Woodstock, New York. If the walls of this studio, once a 19th century church, could talk, they would dish out tales of The Band, NRBQ, the B-52s, 10,000 Maniacs and Ron Sexsmith for starters. The band’s sense of on-the-spot, DIY ingenuity was as finely tuned as ever in this inspiring setting, as they created sounds out of the various instruments living in every corner of the newly-reopened studio.
“It’s a super great vibey place and we were the first thing that happened there in about 8 years because the studio had gone out of business. Everything was sort of dusty and covered up, and they had just cleaned it up to start using it again. We used just about every keyboard in the place. There was a grand piano, an upright piano, a Wurlitzer, a Rhodes, a toy piano and a Hammond organ and we used all of them.”
Producer was the multi-talented Jose Ayerve, whose credits include founding ever-evolving indie rock group Spouse, with whom Mike Merenda occasionally plays, and producing albums by bands such as Winterpills. Using a producer also marked a difference from the approach of the first album, but Ayerve was a perfect fit, and a familiar face to boot.
“Jose is an old childhood friend of Mike [Merenda], Ruth’s husband,” Andreassen explains. “Jose’s just a really talented guy with a great ear for music. So we thought of him for Sometymes Why because we were on the fence about whether we wanted a producer at all, we thought we didn’t want someone who was going to be extremely heavy handed. Jose is a nice middle ground in terms of somebody we knew as a friend and respected, but also had really good musical ideas.”
The result is an album which takes those organic elements and unforced charms of the first release and combusts them into a record that’s as addictive as it is inspired. This is also a great headphone album. There’s loads of texture and detail to get lost in, whether it’s the ethereal washes, the cricket samples on closing track “The Sound Asleep,” the interplay between twinkles and bassy growls and tom drums, the interlaced vocals, the fiddle that will sneak in the back door, or the Hammond B-3 that will shatter the windows, like on the killer cover of Concrete Blonde’s “Joey.”
“Joey” is just a bloody fantastic song, the kind that makes you want to grab a hair brush and shamelessly belt along in the bathroom mirror. Sometymes Why gives it the powerful, passionate treatment it requires. Andreassen explains how the band settled on it as a cover choice: “It’s a ‘you’ song, which is the only thing it has going for it thematically [in terms of the album]. What we were looking for in a cover, was a song that’s spoken to a person named ‘you,’ it’s a song for ‘you.’ Because that was what we noticed – by sheer accident every single song [on this record] is to a ‘you’ – ‘I want to take you home,’ ‘you were my friend and then I kissed you,’ ‘I want to fold you into a paper crane,’ – it’s a very personal record, the whole record is basically this letter. And so we wanted a song that did that. And ‘Joey’ – ‘If you’re somewhere passed out on the floor/I’m not angry anymore’ – [the song is] talking to this person. So that was how we thought of it, we were brainstorming songs that were talking to people.”
“The Sound Asleep,” meditates on times in our lives when things fall apart, reading like a letter to one’s self. Andreassen provides insight into this song:
“A whole bunch of things kind of collapsed around me, last February or March, when we’d sort of finished all the Uncle Earl touring and other things in my life had just fallen apart at the same time. I just found myself at home with no job, no concept of what I would do for a job even, and all alone in the house for a week. That’s when I wrote that song. I was so tired and the major thought that I had was that I was sleepy. I was sleeping like twelve hours a day and I was thinking how good that is, but how the only reason I was able to rest was because nothing else I was trying to do was working out. When I’m actually working, or when my life is so-called working, I sleep like three or four hours a night. So it’s about the imbalance of that, sometimes you have to fail at something to be able to get the time to rest. The universe forces it on you. But the upside of it is that even when you’re in the middle of a deep hole, where you can see that things are collapsing, it just means they are changing. Like Ruth says a lot, when something bad happens, you have to seize the moment and write a song about it right then, because otherwise you’ll turn around and things will be looking up again [laughs].”
The album is made up of seized moments. As much as these songs are a deeply personal windows into Andreassen, O’Donovan and Merenda’s lives, they are also mirror of our own experiences – our relationships that have gone sour, our sense of ambivalence and confusion in matters of the heart, our deep sense of longing for another person, even if its just for one night – as expressed in sultry opening track, Merenda’s “Aphrodisiaholic.” This is a record that explores the nuanced shades of women’s hearts and sexuality, with refreshing sincerity and fearless wit.
Coming from a strongly female perspective when it comes to below the belt subjects, even in this day and age, still makes some folks a little uncomfortable. But as Andreassen reflects, “You know if there are people that are uncomfortable, we probably don’t know who they are because they probably stopped coming to our shows and won’t buy the record. Most of the people that come up to us and talk to us think it’s really funny, or really bold and they appreciate that. I think we put [‘Aphrodisiaholic’] as track one on our record just as a nod to the last record, the black record. We got a bit of a reputation in the folk underworld – maybe that’s what we should be, the folk underworld – because we had the ‘I want to f**k you’ [O’Donovan’s ‘Too Repressed’] song on that record, so we’d meet people and they’d be like, “Oh, you’re Sometymes Why.’ We were kind of known for this one sexy song. So we kind of put this one song on there first be like, ‘Hey we’re still here and we’re still gonna make you squirm a little bit, but maybe just a little bit.’ And that’s ok with us. Not that we want to make people feel uncomfortable, but we’re trying to not censor ourselves. And if people don’t like it they can just not buy the record. But for the most part I think people buy the record because of it. It’s really honest, it’s really uncensored.”
Amen to that! Follow Andreassen, Merenda, and O’Donovan down this path and discover the vision of Sometymes Why – uncensored, undefined and utterly unique.
Jackstraw Says:
