Everclear recorded 19 songs last winter. But after recording what he thought was the group's next album, leader Art Alexakis gave the completed album a good hard listen, and decided it just didn't cut it.
So, he did some serious musical soul
searching. There, amid all the voices he has loved in the past, he found it, he said.
"I'm 35 years old. I listened to the Beatles and Elvis Costello," Alexakis said about the wide range of influences he revisited before completing the band's upcoming album, So Much for the Afterglow due out Oct. 7.
He scrapped about half of the initial tracks for the album -- the follow-up to their breakthrough effort, Sparkle and Fade -- at the beginning of '97 and took some time off to re-think the direction of the band, and listen to old records. "I took a couple of weeks off in Hawaii with my wife and wrote down ideas," he said. "I came back with 40 pages of ideas and implemented most of them. I wanted big guitars, more acoustic guitar, banjo, strings, horns. But a couple of the songs had to be balls-out. I love that shit. That's what I grew up with."
Although their sound has never been what most people would consider punk, Alexakis said he assumes some of the "younger kids" might be disappointed at the less-aggressive nature of the new effort. "It's not a punk-rock record for sure," he said.
The roiling track "Amphetamine" may not fit a definition of punk, but it certainly borrows from that genre's unblinking, in-your-face honesty. "I was trying to get the music to get to a high, and then come down," said Alexakis about the track, whose lyrics and music literally feel like a rush before the crash. "Subconsciously, I wanted something really hard and then take it into something ultra-soft with no percussion, just voice and strings." To achieve the effect, Alexakis recruited Paul Cantelon of the Wild Colonials to play violin and a friend of Cantelon's, Gerri Sutyak, to add some atmospheric cello over Alexakis' murmured lines, "I tell myself the same damn thing/ Everyday/ Ooh everything will be alright."
That departure is preceded by a more jarring shift, the instrumental mayhem of "El Distorto De Melodica." The funky, distorted jam is a loud, cacophonous blast of over-amped guitar and caterwauling vocals that Alexakis said "just happened" while the band was fooling around in the studio experimenting and jamming. The group chose the best parts from that and created loops of their own percussion to add to it, Alexakis said. "It basically turned into this huge, moving mass with me behind a distorted mike caterwauling." Alexakis is so proud of the results, which are much funkier than any previous Everclear songs, that he said he'd even consider doing a dance remix of the track if there were any takers. "I grew up with all kinds of funky stuff, but I've always been contentious of white funk bands."
Part of finding his inner funk included a conscious decision to sing instead of scream on the album's 12 vocal tracks. The singer, who also produced the album, even penned a homage to one of his heroes, "Otis Redding," that didn't make the album, but which he said captures what he was trying to accomplish vocally this time. "I really worked on my vocals and I'm happy with how they came out," he said. "I wish I could sing like Otis Redding and I think I pushed myself to put more of what is in my soul into my voice this time. I pushed the limits and I did more than I ever thought I could."
Another oddball experiment is the loopy short bit "Ataraxia (Media Intro)," for which Alexakis recruited Lars Fox, formerly of Grotus, to help set-up computer and sequencing equipment. "I wanted some weird propaganda thing from the '50s about drugs, specifically about anti-depressants," Alexakis said about the found tape track. "Lars found this thing at a video store where they're basically talking about the treatment of emotional problems with drugs, which back in the '50s was a new thing. So they made this propaganda film about the 'relaxed wife.' "
The song leads into the song "Normal Like You," in which Alexakis explores his 10-year experience with anti-depressant medication. "It's not a judgment about anti-depressants or Prozac," he said. "I meet people every day who are on it and I just think it's weird. I think 'Ataraxia' just fit real well with that song."
The results, while certainly different, are not as jarring as they sound, but they do show a willingness to change. "If I made music just for money," Alexakis said, "people would see right through it."
Laughing, he added, "I'm not good enough to do the Celine Dion pop thing."
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