Reed, Eggers & Viola
Melody, Harmony
&
The Spaces In-between
Andy Reed never ceases to amaze
me. It started in 2000 with the Haskels, a great new-millennium power pop band
that slugged it out in the trenches, gigging’ for a few buck and drinks. They never
gave up and by 2001 they recorded Rewind for Chad Cunningham’s alter ego
Bullfrog records. It was a great disc from the opener Have You Heard This Song
Before to Song of Hope, Tomorrow Knows and Comic Book Hero. It was an
incredible first effort that gave us all a glimpse of Reed’s xxxx talent. The
Haskels released a power pop masterpiece entitled Let Down before cashing in
their chips. Reed took a gig in Detroit to further develop his craft and he
learned a thing or two about the music business- you got to take the bull by
the horns, nobody else is going to do it for you. He came back to mid-Michigan ready to advance
his craft as a songwriter. Reed released the textured and beautiful LP Songs from
the North in 2005 followed by the Great Compression EP (2006) and Fast Forward
(2008) with each disc representing Reed’s unstoppable growth as an artist. In
2009 Reed Recording studios opened for business. He started getting business by
word of mouth. He may not have been an immediate but the word was passed around
like boys on a playground. Soon enough bands from across mid-Michigan were
knocking on his door including the Verve Pipe, Brett Mitchell, Mandi Layne, the
Tosspints, Big Brother Smokes, Laurie Middlebrook and dozens of others. Reed has the capacity to provide warm analog sounds
as well as powerful digital recordings with his use of vintage and modern gear.
Before long, Reed made a name for himself as the premier producer in
Mid-Michigan. He was our Todd Rundgren - A Wizard & True Star. As Reed’s notoriety
as a singer/songwriter grew past the boundaries of Michigan, he released his penultimate
masterpiece, the exquisite Always on the Run by American Underdog (Andy’s alter
ego) in 2011. Reed’s CD/LP was getting serious interest across the power pop
charts and the internet reaching all parts of the states and overseas. Andy was
gaining accolades like lovers kissing and then kissing again and again. It was
in this backdrop of ascending fame when Reed formed friendships with Steve
Eggers of the Toronto-based power pop trio The Nines; and with Mike Viola (That
Thing You Do, Jellyfish, XTC).The event is billed as Mike Viola, Steve Eggers,
and Andy Reed Together-Alone “One Night Only.” This is a triple threat of musical might,
beautiful sounds and good vibrations. The concert is at the historic and sexy State
Theatre in Bay City on Friday February 15th, 7:30pm. General
Admission is $10. Love is in the Air!
The following interviews of Mike
Viola and Steve Eggers reveal their like-minded pursuit of sound and substance
and keeping music alive.
Steve Eggers
Climbing Mt Everest
What led to this collaboration with Andy and Mike?
I actually got onboard toward the end of the
planning, and I thought it was a great opportunity. I knew Mike but I hadn’t
really worked with him outside of a show we did together. Mike actually reached
out to me and said he was doing the show with Andy in Michigan and asked if I’d
be interested in doing it as well. I said, “Yeah, absolutely,” because I knew a
little bit about Andy’s stuff and I knew Mike, so I thought it was a great
opportunity to kind of hitch onto their gig.
While doing research for the interview I heard an organic link between
the three of you. I think you match up really well as singer/songwriters. You have
a catalog of music that has a power pop feel
Yeah, I think most people kind
of get tagged with any label, you know. I think most musicians are always going
to be saying, “Well, we’re more than that. We’re not just kind of tied into
just a label.” It’s a bit defining, but at the same time, the luxury with that
is if you like these particular bands, it’s a good way of identifying what kind
of music you play, right? So if you’re looking to find that type of music, like
Eric Carmen or Big Star in any of these kind of bands. It helps if you’re
eclectic. It’s hard starting out to get a fan base so at the very least what
that label does is pinpoints or gives people an indication of the kind of music
you play, so it helps to promote you in that way. Actually I don’t mind it that
much.
How do you get that big warm sound? I think it’s just a spectacular
sound.
How do I do it? I don’t know.
I think its trial and error, to be brutally honest with you. Like when we first
started the technology was pretty limited. You either paid a lot of money to go
into a big studio - most of us didn’t have the money - or you had to do your
own thing. When I started out with four-track cassette decks and things like
that. I actually kind of fiddled around with a four-track. They were literally
like a cassette that would allow you to record multi-track four times over.
That’s where I started to learn to do my own stuff. So a lot of the early songs
we did were pretty low-fi, but I think as you get older, you just get a little
more used to fiddling around in the studio plus the technology’s better now.
I just think flat-out you’re a great singer.
You sound like Eric Carmen to me or Steve Martin from the Left Banke.
You have a great falsetto.
A lot of those guys I like.
It’s funny. Eric Carmen. I kind of went through a phase. I even went through a
phase that people might think would be kind of cheesy. Like I really enjoy the
Eric Carmen solo album, some of the stuff on that was great. He’s just a super
strong song writer. So yeah, that’s a compliment, so thank you.
The Nines were described I read as a band that picked up where the
Beatles left off. What do you think of that? What does that mean to you?
That’s a little far-fetched,
but I’ll use it as a quote. (Laughter) Yeah, that’s super-complimentary. I mean
the Beatles! You know you’re talking about this power pop thing. I think most
musicians in general aspire to find the Mt. Everest of music and that would be
the Beatles. There are so many people who have been influenced by them. It’d be
a complete lie, of course, if I said I wasn’t influenced by them. It’s a
promotional thing.
You know the reason I think
why there are so many people who still really like the Beatles and still follow
the Beatles is because of their ability to evolve and to kind of embrace all
these kind of different influences and to digest that and create something
brand new. So I think if you went from aspiring to be like them to creating
something else, to fiddle with them and make them your own.
Now you’ve collaborated with some pretty big hitters like Andy
Partridge, Jason Falkner, Bleu and played with Roger Hodgson from Supertramp.
Were these times of growth?
Oh yeah, for sure. I’m a fan
of these guys, right? I’m a fan first and foremost. I remember with Roger
Hodgson, it was… I felt like, you know, a little kid. Literally. I mean I grew
up listening to Supertramp. They were just such monumental albums. Listening to
these people is what inspired me to get into music. Yeah, I remember doing all
the fan type of things where I brought my Supertramp record to the gig and got
it signed (Laughter).
I was super-conscious of not
looking like a super geek fan, right? I was just over the top. All these guys
were great. Andy Partridge was incredible. I’ll tell one thing, working with
some of these guys…first of all, most of them were super humble people and
super self-effacing, so it was great to meet these heroes and to realize that
they’re cool too. You know, you can be totally disappointed with people that
idolized when you’re a little kid.
And from a growth perspective
it was totally cool too. I think you get used to as a musician kind of your own
thing and then when you’re up against these heavyweights, you’re forced to look
at it like work in a way, to kind of push yourself to do the best you can.
It seems to me that you really went deeper with your recent LP album,
Gran Julke’s Field. You’re talking about a metaphor to escape
and solace.
I remember coming up with the
name. We just had this whole storyline that we created as kids. As I got older,
I did that album probably in my 30’s. We kind of went back to it and just took
the name and thought we had this funny storyline. We tried to give it a little
bit more depth to it than just the rambling of a couple of high guys. So we
took the idea of the whole record itself and linked it to the idea that music
is therapeutic for people, at least for me. I’ve always been more of a musical
person to some extent than a lyrical person. Music has always been a way of
escaping into this altered reality. So that was the premise of the record and
how we approached it.
It seems that your daughter Elizabeth was in there as an inspiration as
well
Yeah, yeah. Chantel Elizabeth.
She was only five at the time and when you have little kids, you know, it’s
actually pretty cool because you start to live through your kids. You relive
your youth because you see a lot of the naiveté they have and the way they look
at things. So I wrote this tune. It reminded me of that song in “It’s a
Wonderful Life,” “Buffalo Girls, Won’t You Come Out Tonight,” and so that was
the premise behind it. Yeah, you write about what’s around you.
Are the Nines still together?
Yeah, we’re kind of funny.
Since when we started, we were always kind of a quirky band. We got songs on a
major label in Canada when we were really pretty young. It was funny. We didn’t
play a lot of live shows. We did a lot of recordings and stuff so we got signed
off demo tapes and things like that back in the day when you could kind of
submit demo tapes. We always had a core of musicians that I’ve always played
with over the years when we do album. The Nines to some degree are a studio
project and has been going on for several years, so we’re kind of together.I
don’t look at us in the same way as I would a typical band that’s touring and
playing a lot of live shows and stuff like that. We’re more of a studio
project.
You recorded a disco song that was a tribute to the Bee Gees and the
era. Did your fans understand what you were trying to do in kind of
resurrecting that era disco?
I really like the Bee Gees and I actually
thought that they were such a cool band and that they kind of went through
different phases, but the thing with the Bee Gees is their songs were always
great, like it didn’t matter what they were doin’, whether it be the earlier
British Invasion stuff they did all the way through to the soul stuff and what
became more disco. I just thought they had such brilliant songs. The
inspiration for that was so funny. I
rented a keyboard that was
like this retro kind of keyboard that I thought had a lot of really cool sounds
on it. The drummer that played on the record we did was a disco drummer. That’s
what he did. I almost forced him to do more kind of straight ahead rock beat
but he was actually a disco drummer so I thought, “Let’s do a disco tune.” It
was hard not to go full-out Bee Gees. Like we did it first as a demo, as a
full-out Bee Gees thing, and I thought, “Oh, I can wipe the vocals clean and
then make it more my own thing.” I just couldn’t do it because it sounded so
good. The funniest thing is it almost brought back a bit of the disco sucks
thing where some of the fans were like, “I don’t get disco. I don’t like it,”
and yet other people really liked it. You know, the luxury of not being on a
record label and not selling gazillion records is that you can do whatever you
want, and I really love that kind of music so I really didn’t care. I did it
for myself.
How does it feel to play solo, to be outside of that cocoon that the
Nines provided?
It’s a little scary in a way.
I have done shows like where it’s just been me. We’ve done shows where I’m not
on the bill. I’ve just come in and done guest spots on other people’s shows.
That’s how I hooked up with Mike when he was playing New York and we connected,
and he said, “Hey, do you want to come down and do a show?” I did it. It’s good
in a way. It’s a little scary, but I’ve really had the luxury of working with
really solid musicians that keep you protected in a way. I also feel that in
light of who I’m playing with in February we’re our own band. We’re essentially
doing a show but it’s still three of us playing together, so it’s a nice little
bridge to doing more potential solo stuff.
Do you look for hooks consciously?
\
I don’t know. I think it’s
just natural. It’s the way I do things. I tend do music first and then come up
with the lyrics after. I suspect a lot of people create the kind of music that
we do without putting the power pop thing around it. I just think that it tends
to draw out a melody, and that’s how I’ve always done it. I don’t wake up and
think, “Okay, I’m going to go downstairs and write a tune.” I’ve had to do that
and it’s been really challenging. I’ve done that when I’ve written with other
people where you have to sit in a room and say, “Okay, now we’re going to carve
a tune together.” I found that super, super intimidating just because…I’ve
often thought that, “Is that just because I’m just lazy and my normal thing
would be when I feel the tune, I’ll write it.
I just find that the act of doing it, sitting down and thinking, “Okay,
between 9 and 5 or whatever time, I’m going to write a tune” would be really
hard.
You really have facility for creating incredible melodies and lush
harmony - a perfect prescription for beautiful music. You have been compared to
Wings.
Yeah, that’s right. I was a
big Paul McCartney, Wings fan too because as a kid I grew up listening to a lot
of AM radio, it was just around my house all the time. I listened to Paul
McCartney, Eric Carmen, the Raspberries, all this kind of stuff, and actually
really super AM stuff like like David Gates and Bread. I just absorbed it all.
I was doing one of our albums and working with Jason Falkner of Jellyfish. I
was talking to him on the phone because he was doing some mixing for us and he
was working with Paul McCartney at the same time. It was funny because I was a
big Jason Falkner fan. I was talking to Jason, and he was on the phone with me.
“I just spent the day recording with Paul McCartney.” He was excited because he
was a huge fan too. So I’d be asking him all these questions about the
recording process or what McCartney was like and everything else. I almost feel
like I was one degree away from Paul McCartney, this icon of music. There are
so few legends in music now, and it’d be pretty hard pressed to find somebody
who is a bigger legend than Paul McCartney.
What’s your most satisfying experience as a singer/songwriter/musician?
I don’t know. I like just
simple things. The greatest thing for me still is coming up with ideas and
recording them. I think it’s a naïve and simple answer but I still have the
same inspiration as I did when I was a teenager. I really do believe, and again
it sounds kind of cliché and cheesy, but it keeps you young. It keeps you
creatively young and excited about things. I still have that real joy of
working with people and doing music.
How has the music business
changed?
When I was younger you could send a demo in or be at a club and you’d have scouts come to check you out. Record labels would sign you up and do development deals. They just don’t do that now. I came from that time when if you didn’t have the machine behind you, you were really trying to sell your record at shows or to push them to the record store. The great thing about the internet is that it opens up the doors to expose your music and have a way to get it out there to a lot of people. The negative part of it is there’s just so much stuff that it’s hard to find interesting or cool bands. You really have to search it out. Music’s a lot different now. I remember people like my dad saying, “Oh yeah, well I remember the days of rock and roll and the excitement of Elvis.” The bottom line is that it is kind of sad because there was a time when you could buy records and albums and kind of experience the whole album.
The other side of it is that there’s some creative control that you can have and also to your point, you can make money selling your records and playing shows and selling merchandise. I think the musicians that are truly successful are jacks of all trades.
Mike Viola
It’s
all just one glob of effort, inspiration, and luck.
How did you find out about Andy Reed?
I found out about
Andy through the network of like-minded pop, I guess pop for the lack of a
better description, but singer/ songwriters that play like in the Beatle vein.
Unfortunately our little niche doesn’t have a proper word to describe who we
are, but pop music I guess. There’s a little network of like modern musicians,
and Andy came to my attention a guy who was doing it right up in the Detroit
area. I was up there on tour, and I met him. He was a great guy, and we started
sharing records with each other, and yeah, I just fell in love with his music.
He’s just a strong writer.
There’s labels attached to your work – power
pop, singer-songwriter that may fit imperfectly
It’s actually
misleading, you know, because a lot of the stuff we do is nuanced. I feel like
Steve Eggers is our modern-day Billy Joel and Elton John, like he’s covering
those bases - so for someone like Steve power pop doesn’t make any sense at all
but to call him a singer/songwriter would be doing his recording work injustice
Whenever I hear the
term singer/songwriter I think of Gordon Lightfoot, who I love or James Taylor
who I love but that’s not what Steve’s doing and it’s certainly not what Andy’s
doing
I’ve watched you on YouTube and you do a lot
of acoustic stuff. You seem too have a singer/songwriter vibe…and you wrote
some cool songs like El Mundo De Perfecto
Yeah, but then it’s
like you do a record like Electro de Perfecto, and it’s clearly a band record
or like the record I did with the Candy Butchers called Hang on Mike. That one
is definitely a singer/songwriter record but there’s more to it because it’s
almost like in auteur, like being a filmmaker who just puts all his chips on
the table to make this film that he hopes some people see. Even if no one sees
it, it doesn’t matter. He has to make the film. He’s obsessed with it. He knows
how it should look, what the music should be like, and he puts all his money
into it. That’s what a guy like me does with all my records and that’s what
Andy and Steve do. People like Bleu is
another one that’s in our camp or Jim Boja from Philadelphia. Like there’s one
of us in every state, that’s what we do, we make these little art pieces. We’re
not trying to get on the radio. We’re not trying to do anything except fulfill
this vision. It’s a little niche that has evolved out of the great records from
the late ‘60s and the ‘70s and also into the ‘80s, but it pretty much ends
there. It’s this walk of musicians/artists that just pour everything that they
have into it - money, talent, no talent, over-reaching and expectations into
these records. Lo and behold after all these years, I’m still doing it. It’s what
I do for a living and I think Andy and Steve are the same way.
We are able to make
our little statements. So that’s a long way around. That’s a scenic route
explanation for me to just say it’s definitely more than a singer/songwriter
because I have friends who are singer/songwriters like Dan Bern who is a folk
artist. He is definitely a singer/songwriter. That guy can go on the road for
six months with just his guitar in a van and get people to copy what he does. When
I play live with an acoustic, it’s just the tip of the iceberg, you know, and
the same thing for Andy and for Steve because there’s so much more there. It’s
like going to watch Steven Spielberg talk about Jaws, you know. It’s not going
to enjoy the movie. It’s just talking around it. That’s a difficult thing. I
wish that one of us could come up with a nice term, a neat little term for our
niche, but so far we haven’t.
Maybe it’s just that you’re really talented
guys. It’s like Here’s the Rub. You’re a great singer but you didn’t have to
sing pretty when you sing that one. Did you see that as a new direction, as a
new sound for you?
It was for that particular record.
But whatever I do next, I’m not sure what it’s going to sound like. I
don‘t know until the songs come up. I don’t really have an idea for what the
next thing is. So that’s another thing about guys like us, our sound changes
depending on what records we’ll do. I think the director analogy sums it up the
best - just because you do Jaws doesn’t mean you’re going to do Jaws 2. Someone
else is going to do Jaws 2. So, yeah,
that’s kind of what it’s about. It’s the sound for that record.
I like the quirkiness of Trippin’
Over Nothing and Stumbling. It sounds like there’s something much deeper going
on in that song. What did it mean to you?
Well, it involved existential angst. It’s groping for meaning. You know,
where there is none. This is our world
today. This is a pointless little flame. You know we burn bright and then we go
out. That’s kind of how I look at it anyway. That sounds like a little bit of a
looking around for answers kind of tune.
You’ve been on a lot of TV
shows. I thought one in particular, Conan O’Brien, he seems to get it. Did he
give you any feedback or praise?
Yeah, he was really into it then. I lived in New York at the time and
they were filming in New York at the time, so we were the band he would call
when, you know, when it was quiet over there. If there was a spot open, he’d
call us ‘cause he really loved us so we got to play that show a bunch.
You’re Boston born and raised,
and there are some bands from Boston like Orpheus, the Cars and Boston. Did any
of those people inspire you?
Oh yeah, they all did… that was kind of my generation of bands like Dance
like Dumptruck, Scruffy the Cat - all those local bands at the time totally
inspired. I’m a huge Cars fan. I never really thought of them as a Boston band
even though they came out of Boston. I don’t think they ever really played the
clubs, you know. There was also another band out of Boston called Tribe that
was a big influence. They were friends. They were just a great band doing
something that no one else was doing. That’s the thing. I love local music, and
I love going to clubs to see music. I love playing in clubs, even though that’s
getting harder to do these days. It’s still something that I aspire to, and I
try really hard to make happen. This is how the whole gig up in Bay City
transpired because of Andy. He came see me at the Shelter which is a place
underneath St. Andrews Music Hall in Detroit. Andy came to see me last year. I
was playin’ there, and he was like, “You know, we should do a gig together.” I
said, “Yeah, any time.” And then we emailed back and forth and he was talked
about a gig at the State Theatre.
What was your experience doing
the movie That Thing You Do with Tom Hanks. Were you working closely with Hanks
on the musical part of it? Did he understand and appreciate it?
I really didn’t work with him,
with Tom but he had a lot to do with the music. He really dug deep to find that
song, and once they did, they were really aggressive to get me to do it. I
didn’t really want to do it because I had just got signed and I had just moved
to New York, and I just didn’t feel like going to LA and singing on this song.
Then, you know, it sounded like a really good gig because Don was working on
the music too. “If you come to LA, we’ll have fun. I’ll make it a really cool
thing.” It ended up being great. I got to meet Brian Wilson too, so it was
totally worth it.
You’ve collaborated with a bunch of cool people. They Might Be Giants,
Barenaked Ladies, Jellyfish, STC. Did these collaborations inspire you in any
way or change you in any way?
It always does. It’s like going over to a friend’s house, you know,
tasting their spaghetti sauce, like, “Hey, what’d you do to that?” “Oh, I added
basil.” “Oh, no kiddin, but don’t add it until the end.” “Oh, cool.” Then you’d go home, and you’d make a sauce
that way. Then you’d meet someone else and you’d change it again. By the end of
a chunk of time, you’ve got your own identity. I like to use metaphors. I guess
it’s just the writer in me, I don’t know, but it’s easier to explain things
that way. It’s like you take a little bit from everybody and you give a little
bit to everybody. I think that’s what this whole thing is about.
Okay. This leads to a question
about your creative process. Do you set time aside every day or wait for
inspiration?
Hmm, it depends what it is. For instance I’m working with an artist now,
his name Matt Nathanson. When I have to write for him, it’s a certain amount of
time at a specific time of day. If it’s for my own thing, it depends. Sometimes
I’ll not even have a song but know that I have to come up with something and
then on the way to the session I’ll come up with something. Then at other times
I just get tapped on the shoulder by it.
You’ve been on some different
labels. Which treated you with the most respect?
Probably my own label. No label. I have my own label that I’ve had since
2005. What I do is I make my own records, and I license them to bigger labels
so that I’ve got distribution through Sony but I’m the one in creative control
of what I’m doing and I’m in control of how much money I spend and everything
like that. This is definitely the new model for a guy like me.
What was your greatest
achievement ?
I think the biggest
accomplishment for me is being independent, being an artist and being able to
do whatever I want to do and not have to wait around to make records like I
used to. I used to have to wait until my label told me to do it; now I can just
go ahead and follow my muse
It’s all just one glob of effort,
inspiration, and luck.
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