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Violent Mae - Flame
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Violent Mae - Flame
Dec. 27, 2012: Becky and Floyd (Now Violent Mae) Make A Record
[Note: Since everything I ever wrote for the Hartford / New Haven Advocate is no longer online, I've decided to re-post everything here.]
For more than a year, Becky Kessler and Floyd Kellogg have been recording an album together at Casa de Warrenton in Hartford. It’s a great, old, expansive house, situated on a little less than half an acre, owned by architect Jeff Jahnke. The halls are lined with stacks of drums and amplifiers. I visited on a recent Saturday morning to listen to raw tracks with Kessler, Kellogg, Jahnke and Andy Comstock, Kessler’s partner.
Although she’s only been in the state for two years, Kessler is already well known to Advocate readers. She won this year’s Grand Band Slam award for Best Singer-Songwriter. She gigs often. Kellogg, a multi-instrumentalist, splits his time between Nantucket and Connecticut, producing bands and playing in You Scream I Scream, with partner Audrey Sterk and keyboardist Jake Vohs. Kellogg drummed on a desk. The previous night, he and Kessler and Kellogg opened for guitarists Nels Cline and Julian Lage at Hartford’s Arch Street Tavern. Now, at 10 a.m., Kessler was still giddy. She wore a dazed, happy look and last night’s clothes. Two years ago, Kessler and Comstock, a chef, owned a restaurant on North Carolina’s Outer Banks; they currently manage a friend’s property in Roxbury, Conn. and plan to start an organic farm. They keep chickens.
“I moved around tons when I was growing up,” Kessler said. “The Outer Banks was the 11th place that I lived, and I was 14 when we moved there. But that’s my home, because it was the longest place I ever lived.” She came north for college, enrolling at Berklee College of Music in Boston. She studied jazz guitar for two years, went part-time for a spell, then dropped out. “I was definitely one of those typical Berklee drop-outs,” she said. “It was too much.” She briefly went quiet. Jahnke offered her a space on a couch in front of a flat-screen TV displaying a ProTools-like recording program. Kessler ribbed Kellogg for cutting his own hair. “You can’t tell, right?” he said. Jahnke said it looked kind of mullet-y. I stayed out of it.
We checked out the adjacent room, where drums are sometimes recorded. Kellogg, who runs the recording end of Casa de Warrenton, met Jahnke at UConn, when Kellogg was in a band called Adios Pantalones, and from a string of later encounters. “The bass is recorded in the basement,” Kellogg said. “There’s a guitar cabinet in the other room.” They run headphones everywhere, for communication. Bands from New York and Boston come through town, to record and stay at the house.
Neighborhood musicians pop into Casa de Warrenton, to add parts as needed. They rolled home a vibraphone they borrowed from jazz player Ed Fast of Conga Bop. Kellogg brought a portable recording get-up to Kessler and Comstock’s farm to add a piano part, using the property’s 1920s Steinway. The album wasn’t supposed to take this long.
“It was funny, because Floyd kept saying, ‘Minimal, organic...’ Kessler said. “And then we got into it, and it was such a blast. He got real inspired and went nuts.” Kellogg does what he wants to the tracks, and Kessler trusts him. Kellogg and Jahnke will add percussion parts using broken glass that end up sounding like a slot machine. There are some backward tracks. Early on, Kessler said, “We had one big block session for three days, up until five or six o'clock in the morning. We would get up at noon, and we would start again... We were totally absorbed in it. It was like the outside world didn’t exist.” “Some records take a year to make, or more,” Kellogg added, “especially when it’s just a couple of people going at it, playing all the parts, producing it, engineering it, which you can do, but it becomes a little more painstaking.”
It was time to hear something. Kellogg played “Anytime You Fall.” Kessler sings in a dark, husky alto over delicate, reverb-ed guitar. Using a device called an e-Bow, Kellogg drapes a few sustained, distorted single-string guitar lines over the top; underneath, he adds earthy, organ-pedal bass. “It was 4 o’clock in the morning,” Kessler said. “Floyd asked if I wanted to do one more, and I really didn’t... I can hear 4 o’clock in the morning in those vocals.” Kessler wrote it soon after she and Comstock moved to Connecticut. “Some of them are going to get thrown away, but you just keep writing. On the albums, the real good ones make it, and you just toss the rest, or save them for later,” she said.
The general working order goes like this: Kessler writes, Kellogg arranges. “Our tastes just mixed perfectly,” Kessler said. “I couldn’t believe it... He acts like it’s one of his own tunes.” The group busts Kellogg’s balls for taking so long to finish the record, but he also has a life. He lost his father this year. His son was born in May. Unlike You Scream I Scream records, he also has to mix this one. “Everything’s got its fucking challenge,” he said. “It’s a balance between what’s going to feel right and keeping the emotion intact.”
The next track, “Hole in My Heart,” more of a straight-ahead, uptempo pop number, came on, and everyone fell silent again. Atmospherics are tempered. Two minutes in, a new chord pattern and contrasting melody are introduced, the phrasing becomes unpredictable. “We were playing it a lot faster than I had played it when I wrote it,” Kessler said. “I trusted Floyd, but I was like, ‘Damn, this is fast.’” Kessler and Comstock disagreed about the origins of the tempo. “When you play solo a lot, you tend to speed things up, to make up for the lack of other things around you,” Kessler said. “You have to be really careful. I finally started using a metronome and making myself be patient with it... You’re uncomfortable with how much is not there.”
When Kessler first met Kellogg, he and Sterk were visiting with recording engineer Carl Nappa, who mixed You Scream I Scream’s Zookeeper album and supplied some ribbon mics. Kellogg played some of Kessler’s recordings for Nappa. “He was like, ‘That little girl?’” Kessler said. Jahnke was the bridge. He talked about hearing some of Kessler’s early recordings with other Connecticut musicians. “Not to bash those guys, who are great musicians,” he said. But, he thought, putting Kessler and Kellogg together, “this is going to be way better than that.”
The last track, “Right Here,” started: three chords and a hiccupping drum figure, Kessler’s wordless syllables, murkiness as her voice drops out, three chords change to four, the guitar/bass/drum texture expands to include banjo, piano and feedback loops. It’s the best song so far.
“The cool thing about Becky’s stuff is that there’s tons of songs that have these odd time signatures, but I never feel like I’m playing math-rock,” Kellogg said. “It doesn’t feel like I’m walking down the street sideways.” “Stuff that Floyd does with You Scream I Scream, I actually felt like I was really inspired by that when I was writing that tune,” Kessler said. “Lyrically and manipulating the words, totally. ‘Buh-buh-buh...’ At first it was weird, me singing that. And then it just became natural.”
“Right Here” was written in a room in Roxbury, with a view of mountains out the window. “That’s how I got her to come up here,” Comstock said. “I said, ‘Becky, look at this room.’” When they owned the restaurant on the Outer Banks, they said, Comstock and Kessler worked all the time. Kessler played in a cover band. Moving to Connecticut allowed her to focus on writing. At first, she thought, Nobody’s ever written a song about Connecticut. I don’t want to move to Connecticut. “But there’s so much awesome stuff going on here,” she said.
Kessler and Kellogg have been playing live gigs to flesh out some of the tracks, to see how they live on the stage. They may change the name of the project, from “Becky Kessler” to something else, before the album release. They might look for other players -- a bassist and a “sound-y” person, a guitarist, piano, what-have-you -- but then again, they might not. They’ll return to Arch Street Tavern on Saturday.
“The stuff we’ve been doing lately is not going to be on the album,” Kessler said. “Of course, I’m more psyched about that because it’s new. But it’s going to be a lot different, a lot more edgier stuff... We’re thinking for the next one we’re going to record it differently too. We’re thinking about just putting a few mics in a room and just playing.”
“This one kind of got pushed together,” Kellogg added. The next one, he said, “would just be minimal, just a few overdubs.” Isn’t that what you said last time? Cue more ribbing.
For the first time all morning, Kellogg became defensive. “It’s not unheard of to take a year to do a record,” he said.
Violent Mae: Kid
Read John Naessig's review of #Connecticut band, @VIOLENTMAE new album #Kid ...
Violent Mae, a Connecticut duo, began their musical career in 2013 with a self-titled album. Two years later and the band has now released their sophomore follow-up, Kid.In many ways, it sounds like Violent Mae has grown up quite a bit. Becky Kessler and Floyd Kellogg deliver a much fuller sound this time around –many of their songs seeming to add more layers of much cleaner texture, and Kessler…
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Our Music Director, Delaney DuBois, spoke with Becky and Floyd from Violent Mae about their new album, Kid!
We loved them before, and we love them now. Heavy here at WZBT.
Violent Mae - In the Sun
(VIOLENT MAE)