The Vacationist - Chapter 1
We are a band called The Vacationist. Here’s a little bit about us…
Ok, I’m going to stop saying we/us, this is Cary. I’m the lead singer. I feel just a little douchey saying, “I’m the lead singer”, but we all play the roles we play, for better or worse.
Saying, “I started this band…” doesn’t feel accurate. This band started itself.
I used to tour around the U.S. as a solo artist, mostly colleges, the money was decent, the experience was priceless, and the exposure it provided for my music only went so far. I grew tired of driving across the midwest alone, setting up and playing for people that were at times appreciative and at times confused why I was there in their cafeteria playing while they were trying to rush through their homework they had to get done by the next hour’s class. I think it was a moment in Indiana when a kid walked right in front of where I was playing with earbuds in. He paused right in front of me for a second to see what was wrong with his iPhone. He saw me and quickly realized the glitch wasn’t his phone but that there was an actual human sweating over a guitar and microphone. He put his phone back in his pocket and walked on. I don’t blame him, by that point I didn’t want to be there either.
Fast forward a year or two.
I took a job at a local music store. By local I mean a store that was geographically close to the house where I rented a basement room. It was actually behind the ‘pro-audio’ counter at a big box conglomerate store. I used to hate going into this store and it’s clones that were located across the country in any city with a metroplex population of 100k or more. I used to play mental bingo with the words ‘bro’, ‘dude’, and ‘man’. I always won. To be fair, the Boise version is actually quite pleasant and miraculously, has a very kind soul managing a good group of hardworking musicians that I count as good friends.
Back to the story. This kid with tight curly hair, down to his shoulder blades, which if had been pulled straight would have probably hit his knee pits, comes in to return a pop filter I’d sold him a few days previous. I knew what he was doing, that is ‘renting’ an inconsequential piece of gear he could easily return because of the convenient 30 day return policy. I held no judgement, I had used the rental program as well on occasion when I had to fly out to shows and didn’t want to go to the trouble of checking a guitar amp. I called him on it. He laughed a timid sheepish laugh and we talked.
Fast forward a few months.
The curly headed kid I came to know as Conor was into electronic music and was lusting over the new Ableton Push controller. I had learned that he also owned a Native Instruments Maschine which I had just purchased as well. I struck a deal. ”Hey, I can give you one of my ‘friends and family 20% off coupons” if you’ll come by and give me a basic lesson on my Machine”.
"ok", he replied. (turns out he’s actually certified by Native Instruments as a Maschine instructor)
"this means you have to pretend to be my friend or family", I said.
Fast forward another few months.
"hey, do you know if you guys are hiring" said Conor.
"yes, I think they’re looking for someone to work back here, you’d be great" I said.
He applied, they didn’t hire him. I don’t remember why, but I’m guessing he was a bit on the shy side to wear a ‘sales associate’ name tag. He’s also one of those people that is too smart for his own good. He doesn’t really understand that most people’s brains are running with a lot fewer GBs of RAM than his. Their loss. At this point I knew he was talented and extremely intelligent. In retrospect, totally overqualified to answer questions from aspiring hobbyists about ‘the cheapest interface that will sound professional”.
A new guy comes to work one day and I realize they didn’t hire Conor, so I reluctantly send him a message that went something like, “sorry dude, it looks like they hired someone else”.
"That sucks", he replied.
I don’t like letting people down. I try to look for positives in negative situations and reassure those around me.
"we should collaborate on a song", I texted, impulsively.
He agreed, who knows why, I was just another schmuck behind the counter at a music franchise.
Within 15 minutes he had sent me an idea he was working on. I jumped out of bed and paced my room typing out lyrics at the speed of thought. I’d just watched a Jason Silva video about ‘radical openness’ and had been thinking about how to solve the mortality problems all humans face. It’s not an exaggeration, I think about things like this. They keep me up at night.
Within about 20 minutes of me breaking the news to him and us exchanging ideas we had written a pretty solid outline of what would become the first collaboration of The Vacationist. The song ended up being called “Binary”, though I originally wanted to call it “Bionary”. When I suggested the campy spelling to imply the mix of digital and biological matter, Conor’s silence was enough to tell me it was just a little too clever.
Some time went by, we released the song to throngs of soundcloud crickets and we had a few conversations about doing another.
The weeks went by. After successfully funding a kickstarter campaign to make a new solo album, I had rented a small office in a complex shared by several videographers, photographers, and an aspiring hip-hop producer. Somewhere along the line Conor had rented a little office with an accounting firm. Maybe it was a real-estate agent, I’m not sure, but he had a place to go in the evenings to work on his music.
One thing led to another and I talked to him about taking an office at the place I was at to make collaborating easier. I sold him on the fact that the energy was good there with all the different artists there, and that was true for a time.
Conor is great at all things electronic and relating to sound design. I had a really solid set up for recording actual audio. Between the two of us we realized we had the gear and skill set to record and produce other artists, we just needed to buy a few more mics and treat the rooms we were occupying. The idea was that we would have that space to isolate from our respective homes and take music making a little more seriously. The intention was never to have an actual business, but figured we’d make rent by opening it up to a few friends. That wasn’t to be.
By the time we were finishing up painting the archaic vocal booth that was left behind by the aforementioned hip-hop producer we had people walking in trying to book sessions.
My first impression of Kaleb was that he looked like he’d recently moved out of a frat house, but after a few conversations found a hard hitting rock drummer who also had a hard earned savvy for how a band should work and a sensitive/intuitive demeanor. He just happened to be a great guy to hang out with after business hours to boot. We got hired by his previous band to help with production ideas and provide a place for them to work on writing their next album and record demos along the way.
Over the course of me working on my solo album, at some point I’d asked Conor permission to do a new version of “Binary” to throw in the basket of potential songs. He said it’d be okay. As time passed I found myself asking for advice and help with creating sounds, programming drums, as well as working on our sample library we started creating for what we know called, “The Wormhole Studio”. We’d record my voice making noises and Conor would run it through his gadgets and build synthesizers from the files. I’m pretty sure there’s still a Kontact instrument called “CJ Synth” on a hard drive somewhere around here. It became clear that Conor was more than just “a friend giving advice”. I opened up the idea of, “hey, maybe we could make a new band out of this”. For a time we thought we’d do it as a duo with a backing band, sort of a Hall&Oats/Tears For Fears/MGMT kind of thing.
Well, near the end of Kaleb’s time at The Wormhole he had become a good friend and confided in us that he didn’t feel satisfied with his position in his current band, which I understood. Kaleb had a lot of fresh ideas during the sessions we spent with him, and while I really enjoyed the sound of his band, they were aiming for a safe pop kind of sound that I suspect his experimental spirit felt a bit confined. I mentioned maybe we should have him drum for us to Conor around this time. I don’t remember if Conor ever said yes, but by now they were roommates and I blurted out on impulse, “hey the guy that I’ve been talking to about drumming for us just got a new job and is super busy, you should be our drummer.” I don’t know if he’d been hoping for this offer or not, but he was pretty quick to accept. My best guess is he was sad to let go of the old band he’d put a lot of work into and had some serious potential, but wasn’t ready to be a musical orphan. I’m just speculating, so he’ll have to login and write his version of the story some time.
flash to a different scene (I can’t remember if I’m flashing forward or back at this point)…
Sunnie is my girlfriend. She’s a professional photographer. I don’t mean in the way that your buddy is a pro photographer and will “totally shoot your wedding/little brother’s senior picture/photo of your band for fifty bucks”. She gets paid well for the work she does and she’s great at it, a true artist.
Sunnie comes into my little tracking room one day while I’m working on a song called “Cosmonaut” and I think it’s a good idea to have her sing this background part. She’s never sang outside of her car or the shower as far as I know at this point. I coax her into the booth and she sounds decent. Not amazing, but decent (since then she started taking vocal lessons twice a week and she’s quickly become a respectable singer that will probably pass up my novice technique by the end of next week). It was fine though cause my idea was to hard tune her through a vocoder to make an angelic alien/robot sound. It sounded awesome.
My brain is glitching on whether that happened first of the next part, but they were pretty close. Conor, Sunnie, and I were nerding out on videos of live stage shows we really liked when I had the idea that Sunnie should do light design for us, or maybe she volunteered, but it sounds like something I would trick her into doing. She was interested, and as the idea unfolded it catalyzed on the image of her actually on stage singing back up and controlling the lights in real time, played from a MIDI keyboard that would be synced up to a DMX (light design stuff) program on a laptop. She was into it, she wrote light parts for every song that added a visual dynamic that is beyond awesome.
Part of this conversation led into projection mapping and having multiple screens on the stage that had corresponding imagery to go with each song (or maybe this happened first). At some point Sunnie and Conor started researching how to do it and out of nowhere Conor showed up at the studio with some fancy software that would enable this. In turn he and Sunnie had to coordinate her light parts to ‘harmonize’ with the projections so that they would compliment each other the same way musical parts intertwine and harmonize. I still don’t understand how most of it works, but it’s amazing to be on stage and having lights blow up when a heavy guitar part hits or I go into a big belting high note, or to walk out in front and have strange images projected on every inch of my body as I sing.
Sam is the guitar player for The Vacationist, a kind soul, and one of those people that knows how to fix anything. This fact still blows my mind. Sam is into creating rhythmic sound-scapes on guitar. Something I love doing, but something he does better than me. When it started turning into a band, if I remember right, I reached out to him and his brother Joe. They’re both in my favorite Boise band, A Sea of Glass. Sam would have been my first choice as The Vacationist guitar player but I’m pretty sure that my invite was on the timid side, being that he and his brother have a band together that I’m a fan-boy of.
There was no initial commitment from either of them, which I understood so I started asking around to see if I could find someone that would fit. Some time passed and Sam hit me up to tell me he was interested. He came by the studio one day when I’d locked myself in my room trying to write lyrics for what would become, “The Theory of Everything”. When I do this, I put a sign on my door and won’t answer the door, short of the building around me falling down. Instead of taking off, he and Conor started building beats and slinging guitar parts for what would be come, “We Are The Glitch”. Further proof of Sam’s kind and patient demeanor. He and Conor barely knew each other and both just took the opportunity to create. I think that may have been the day I realized I was in a band that was bigger than me.
At some point my friend Scot got coaxed into playing bass for our first few shows. Scot is, in a word, awesome. He’s an incredible bass player, has extensive experience in all things music, and one of the most patient, kind hearted people you will ever meet. As a side note, he is one of the founding members of a band called Dishwalla (if that sounds familiar to you, yes, THAT Dishwalla. If it doesn’t, “Tell me all your thoughts on God, cause I’d really love to meet her…”, that’s his band). I’ve wanted to do some sort of project with Scot since we met. He played on a few tracks of my last solo album. At present, Scot refers to himself as “a helper to The Vacationist”, so I guess I’d be over-stepping to call him a member of the band, which is fine, I’m just stoked we get to have him around for a while.
That’s all so far, I think there’ll be more to tell soon. Our album is out, people seem to like it and I’m enjoying music again, more than I think I ever have.
A lot of our story is in the songs. You can stream it and even buy it here. Thanks for reading this far. You have more patience than me.
https://thevacationist.bandcamp.com/album/the-vacationist
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