Nothing is quite as compelling on record as the restless fluctuations
of the fractured heart--something singer/songwriter Michael Cerveris
proves brilliantly on his ferocious and fragile solo debut album Dog
Eared. From the roiling anthem of "SPCA" (Cerveris'
cheeky, power-pop collaboration co-written and sung with Sleater-Kinney's
Corin Tucker) to the melancholy, but muscular musings of "Can't
Feel My Soul", Dog Eared is Cerveris' lush declaration
of liberation not only from lousy love affairs, but from his complex,
parallel life as a critically acclaimed, Tony-nominated actor -- an
extraordinary, but convoluted path for a rock musician. Cerveris originated
the title role in the Broadway hit Tommy and in the late 90s,
he starred in the smash cult hit Hedwig and the Angry Inch
on London's West End, off-Broadway in New York and in Los Angeles.
Cerveris -- former frontman of British band Retriever (Hinterlands)
and guitarist/vocalist on Bob Mould's 1998 US/UK "Dog and Pony
Show" tour -- and his co-producer Adam Lasus (Madder Rose, Clem
Snide, Helium) chose to make Dog Eared a unique "family"
effort. They reached out to Cerveris' extended, diverse network of
musician compadres and friends -- Sleater-Kinney's Corin Tucker and
Janet Weiss, Ken Stringfellow (Posies, R.E.M.), Steve Shelley (Sonic
Youth), Laura Cantrell, Norman Blake (Teenage Fan Club), Jeremy Chatzky
(They Might Be Giants), Kevin March (Guided by Voices, Dambuilders),
Anders Parker (Varnaline, Space Needle), Lara Gray (Luna, Ben Lee),
Joe McGinty (Psychedelic Furs), strings arranger David Arnold (Bjork),
Alex Lutes (Nightnurse, Retriever), Claudia Chopek and Leah Coloff
for recording sessions that took place sporadically over the course
of six months in locales ranging from Brooklyn's Red Hook waterfront
to Portland, Oregon to Glasgow, Scotland. The album was mixed by Nick
Brine (Oasis, Stone Roses) and Adam Lasus at the famed Rockfield Studios
in Wales.
"The
reason I chose not to continue [with Retriever] on this record was
partly logistical -- the band was in London," explains Cerveris,
who lives in Manhattan. "But I also felt that there was a musician,
a person and a life I needed to shed.
"During
a rough time in my life I learned to reach out to people in a way
I'd never done before," he continues. "And reaching out
to my friends, these musicians, for this album was very much in the
same spirit." He laughs. "God, it was like rock group therapy!"
To simply
call Dog Eared a "breakup" album would undercut the
universal poetry and power of Cerveris' nine original tracks and two
carefully chosen covers. From the playful, but incendiary hooks of
the title track "Dog Eared" to the driving drums and lyrical
snap of "SPCA," the grinding guitars of "Another Time"
and the hushed, hypnotic beauty of "Snowbound," Cerveris
and his rag-tag "supergroup" have found a gorgeous balance
between sorrow and luminous self-discovery, dark mood swings and gentle
fury.
"I
didn't start writing these songs with the intention of writing a breakup
album," says Cerveris who wrote the voluptuous, distorted ballad
"Golden" just a few whiskey-soaked days after a three-year
relationship foundered. "I just started writing because there
were these thoughts I really needed to rid myself of -- it was the
emotional equivalent of the medieval practice of boring into people's
skulls to let demons out when they had migraines. But I think of this
album less as a document of a breakup and more as a recovery record."
Self-resurrection
following heartbreak is traced on Dog Eared from the ground
zero of ghostly tracks like "Golden" which, cleverly and
perversely, ends the album -- a raw memory of a lost love bound by
electronically-altered, whispered vocals, twangy, raucous guitars,
and Ken Stringfellow's sinuous organ work.
"It
was a really intense slow jam," says Stringfellow who worked
with Cerveris and Lasus in both Portland and Brooklyn. "Michael
knew I could go rogue [on the track] and he let me have free rein.
You have to find little places to breathe in a way, where the notes
can stop. It was exactly like a meditation ... which is a good thing
to experience."
Cerveris has a decade-long friendship with Stringfellow but was still
surprised when the ever-busy musician asked to be involved with virtually
every track. "He's one of those guys who plays so many instruments
so well," says Cerveris, who was appearing in Tommy when
he first met the R.E.M. sideman, former Posies member and solo artist.
"[Ken] has this technical ability to respond immediately to what
he hears and a lot of his work on this album was just done in one
to four takes."
In addition
to his original songs, Cerveris includes two intriguing covers on
Dog Eared: Guided by Voices frontman Robert Pollard's "Drinker's
Peace" and Volebeats singer Robert McCreedy's tune "Two
Seconds." The latter was covered by grassroots country singer
Laura Cantrell on her own debut album Not The Trembling Kind
and when it came time to record the track himself, Cerveris asked
Cantrell if she'd jump aboard the project.
"I
thought it was really interesting what Michael did with it,"
says Cantrell, who traveled to Lasus' Fireproof Studios in Red Hook
to sing harmonies on a bitter cold day in early February. "Michael
brought ["Two Seconds"] to even a moodier, quieter place
than I had thought to do which was cool. It communicates a very basic
longing and the way Michael has done the song, it does have a sort
of late night, introspective vibe ... or like [the way you feel] on
a cold day when you just want to curl up and put a blanket over your
head."
Several
compositions on Dog Eared evolved from sudden epiphanies. While
hanging out at a guitar shop near the Chelsea Hotel one warm October
afternoon, Cerveris spotted an old Gibson ES-125 archtop guitar, began
noodling with it and within a half-hour had found the bare-boned essence
of both "Can't Feel My Soul" and "Dog Eared" (and
yes, he bought the guitar). While he was working on "SPCA,"
Cerveris reached westward to his friend Corin Tucker, who was between
tours with Sleater-Kinney. He sent her an instrumental demo of the
track and encouraged her to run wild with her words.
"Everything
that I'd written dwelled on the loss, longing and sadness," explains
Cerveris. "But Corin's thing was the loss, the sadness and 'fuck
you because you'll regret this!'"
Tucker recalls that the skeletal demo of "SPCA" was rather
melancholy and somber. "At first I did consider a Leonard Cohen
type thing about a taxi pulling away in the morning," she recollects.
"But eventually I took the theme of splitting up and turned it
into a 'you'll be sorry' type song, a la Connie Francis. This is just
my sort of natural 'rise above' spirit, which crept into Michael's
record -- I think to his surprise."
Cerveris
admits he was happily taken off guard and credits Corin's lyrics and
the rowdy Portland sessions -- Corin's harder vocal edge, Janet Weiss'
powerful drumming and Stringfellow's endless ideas -- with firing
up Dog Eared with an irreverent, bulldog ferocity that crept
into the final mix and in later compositions like "Girl."
That track, the last song written for the album, inspired Cerveris
to travel to Glasgow to work with his longtime compadre Norman Blake
in his tiny home studio.
"The
first night Michael got here we got unbelievably drunk on whisky AND
vodka which I regret doing ," says Blake, laughing. "But
somehow we got up the next morning and put the song down. We kept
it simple, really stripped it down to the basics with a bit of vocals
and a bit of guitar." The one problem -- Blake's proximity to
a railway line.
"The
trains are pretty frequent so we had to time when we were recording
between trains," says Blake. "I should have downloaded the
train timetable from the internet. 'Cause we'd record five or six
minutes between each train and I know there are a couple of takes
where you hear a rumble in the background!"
Blake is
fascinated by Cerveris' career path that has kept the singer's feet
straddling the disparate worlds of theatre and indie rock. "It's
an unusual background but I do think that his theatrical skills have
helped him in rock and roll. You know the classic thing about actors
wanting to be musicians -- but Michael can really do both."
Cerveris'
ability to navigate two worlds has been a blessing -- and a conundrum.
The son of a university music professor and a modern dancer, Cerveris
grew up in West Virginia and spent his youth appearing on stage in
political Bertolt Brecht plays -- and playing noisy electric guitar
to Joy Division and David Bowie records. After studying acting and
voice at Yale University, he landed an array of music-oriented roles,
ranging from the TV series "Fame" to films like "Tokyo
Pop." But that dichotomy of artistic interests eventually paid
off in securing Cerveris his breakthrough gig originating the role
of "Tommy" in the 1992 revival of the Who's rock opera --
after he impressed director Des McAnuff at an audition, ripping through
Bowie's "Young Americans." Not only did Cerveris land a
major, critically-lauded role on Broadway, but he worked closely with
mentor Pete Townshend on developing the role. Cerveris later performed
with Townshend during the legendary guitarist's "Psychoderelict"
tour. And in a memorable two-day session, he had the once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity to record the Grammy-winning original cast album under
the guidance of famed Beatles producer George Martin.
"My
whole career as a musical theatre person is such a fluke," Cerveris
says. "It was never what I set out to do. But the only reason
it happened, oddly, was because of rock and roll. I bet no one else
went in to audition for "Tommy," brought a guitar and played
a Bowie song."
Not surprisingly,
despite a well-received run in the 1997 Tony-winning musical Titanic,
Cerveris realized that he was too much an indie-rock maverick to be
happy in traditional musical theatre. He jumped off the Broadway ship
to go back off-Broadway, taking over for John Cameron Mitchell in
what is widely considered the ultimate glam rock musical -- Hedwig
and the Angry Inch. Cerveris went on to open the show in Los Angeles
and in London's West End. In between his acting gigs, his songwriting
remained a constant via bands like the New York-based Lame and London-born
Retriever. He played one-off gigs with the Breeders, Frank Black of
the Pixies, Stone Temple Pilots and Boy George, eventually landing
a gig as touring guitarist/backing vocalist on Bob Mould's tumultuous
US/UK road trip "The Last Dog and Pony Show." He subsequently
appeared on the album capturing that band's last London gig, BobMouldBand:
Live Dog 98. Cerveris made London a second home base for his music,
working and recording with UK musicians like Norman Blake, fellow
Teenage Fanclub member Francis MacDonald, Euros Childs of Gorky's
Zygotic Mynci and Retriever bandmates Alex Lutes, Mark Kulke and David
Ledden.
Drummer
Lutes flew in from London to play on "Snowbound," perhaps
the ethereal centerpiece of Dog Eared, recorded -- appropriately
-- during New York City's February blizzard of 2003. A song that embraces
the uncertainty of the impending war with Iraq -- and Cerveris' own
emotional battles -- "Snowbound" breathes as softly as a
snowfall, pushed gently by Lutes' sensual drumming, Lasus' barely-there
bass work, Lara Gray's eerie accordion, and Anders Parker and Cerveris'
fragile, shuddering guitars. "Alex's playing on the track has
this slow motion march tempo," says Cerveris. "There's this
foreboding menace under it which, for me, is life in wartime. We had
this insane snowstorm and we were in this cocoon of a studio, the
city was muted and there was this end-of-the-world feeling."
"I
think it's one of the strongest songs on the record," says Lasus.
"That's what's interesting about Michael's work -- the very subtle
songs begin to creep into your mind with all these little hooks, drum
parts and vocal melodies. They stick with you ... and I think that's
a strength he has which he might not even know about. He has a great
sense of not overdoing things or trying to make it sound like things
you've heard before. There's not one moment of this album that has
that clichéd bullshit."
Deeply
personal and passionate, Dog Eared has accomplished exactly
what Michael Cerveris envisioned -- as he terms it -- a Band-style
"Music From Big Pink" front porch experience of friends
gathering to make a good album.
"It
was my way of making one big alternative reality," says Cerveris,
laughing. "I have such a literal or emotional connection with
all these people and it seemed as if they all belonged in the same
room together ... and that room became this record.