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You can't BE creative; it just happens, mostly when you're not forcing its hand, and hardly ever on the eve of a deadline. But when inspiration hits, when everything clicks and your muse suddenly comes into focus, that's when you find the potential for magic or terror. Either way, the results are usually transcendent.
Unfortunately, when you're in a struggling rock band, you don't always have the luxury of waiting around for your muse to show up. Brazil's Jonathon Newby realized this when, just days after completing a 14-month tour in 2005, he came home to Muncie, Indiana, to resume his day job at a metal shop.
"We were out with bands like Sparta and Coheed and Cambria," Jonathon remembers of the campaign, which also found Brazil supporting Engine Down and Rainer Maria. "The next thing I know, I'm back home, working all day at the shop. Coming back into a routine like that, it just gets harder and harder to be creative when you're exhausted and sweaty and covered in mud from, you know, handling glass and aluminum frames all day."
But a funny thing happened when Jonathan, who rounds out Brazil with his keyboardist brother Nic, guitarists Aaron Smith and Eric Johnson, bassist Philip Williams and drummer James Sefchek, returned to the daily grind. "The more uncomfortable I got with my working life outside of the band, the more I needed to write," he says, "That whole period of discomfort gave birth to a lot of new material." Soon, the songs started flowing, and the members of Brazil, all of whom were feeling a similar existential tug, just clicked. Sealed off in Jonathon's garage, they began working furiously on the material that would become their second album and their Immortal Records debut, The Philosophy Of Velocity. With Jonathon's typically alluring lyrics interweaving characters such as existential steam robots (Mr. Mercury) with manic-depressive submarine captains (Captain Mainwaring), the new album is a farcical document of the creative process itself, full of odd vignettes and absurdist rabbit holes that eventually lead the listener to the heart of the story. Musically, Velocity burns with fully realized sonic explorations by the band and producer Dave Fridmann (The Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev)who collectively utilized "nearly every piece of equipment at our disposal," according to Jonathon, including multiple pianos, orchestral percussion, and experimental miking techniques, to create Brazil's most artful and ambitious album yet.
Of course, fans will tell you that creative tension has been central to Brazil's music from day one: In 2000, after the breakup of his unremarkable former group, Jonathon left the U.S. to live in the Arab quarter of a small Belgian town; after months of laboring overseas in warehouses, during which he kept himself sane by formulating plans for a new musical project, he returned to the States, finally settling into the chapel of an abandoned, century-old church. It was here that the nucleus of Brazil (a reference to Terry Gilliam's classic Orwellian-nightmare film of the same name) would arrive.
After recording a handful of demos in the church's dank basement, Brazil started to play out, gaining a small but devoted fanbase throughout the Midwest. In August of 2001, the band hit the road for a three-week, self-booked U.S. tour in a dying mini-van, an experience which, if nothing else, revealed "just how long the human body can survive on peanut butter and multi-vitamins," Jonathon remembers. However, impressed by their near-masochistic determination, Fearless Records offered to release the bands 2002 debut EP, Dasein (it translates roughly to existence) and once more sent them out on the road in support.
Like many debut releases, Dasein was a snapshot of the young band's attempts to reconcile their influences with their ambitions; and while the overall response to the EP was mixed, even Brazil's biggest critics recognized the potential within. "[Dasein] hints that big things may be in Brazil's future." wrote Aversion.com. Skratch Magazine concurred, adding, "Fearless Records has a monster band on their hands." And indeed they did, though not even the label was prepared for the album that would follow.
Released by Fearless in April of 2004, A Hostage And The Meaning Of Life was such a quantum leap forward, it might as well have been the work of a different band. The skittering rhythms and cloudy keyboard atmospheres of Dasein had given way to crystalline keyboard figures and a grand, eloquent sense of rhythmic flow that extended all the way up to Jonathon's chilling upper-register pipes. Alternative Press responded right out of the gate with a 5/5 review, calling the band "mad geniuses." Emotionalpunk.com upped the ante to 10/10, proclaiming Brazil to be "the best-kept secret on Fearless Records until now." And Synthesis magazine concurred, adding, "[Brazil] effectively transcend the commercial crap of the industry and offer a high-energy alt-rock alternative to the mainstream." Don't believe the critics? Hostage is among those exceedingly rare albums on Amazon.com to have a unanimous five-star rating from fans.
While the aforementioned 14-month campaign supporting Hostage found Brazil picking up momentum with each stop, the decidedly unglamorous return to daily life left them wondering: what next? So Jonathon moved into a tiny house back in Indiana, the tinier garage of which would become the Petri dish for Brazil's new material. In March of 2006, after being floored by the new demos, Immortal Records offered the band a deal, and soon afterward, Brazil holed themselves up at Tarbox Road Studios in remote Cassadaga, New York, with aural genius Fridmann to commit The Philosophy Of Velocity to tape. With the band finally having access to the giant canvas their art has always begged for, the result is a blissful, expansive marriage of pure sound that, although right in line with the Brazil of old, weaves together the wombadelic impressionism of My Bloody Valentine with the melodic and harmonic ambitions of Queen and Yes, as well as the wry lyricism of Lou Reed and Nick Cave.
Of course, there is some danger involved in revealing a band's influences when the work they produce is decidedly next-level, and with The Philosophy Of Velocity, Brazil have moved beyond the obvious into a thrilling new sound that's unbound by genre and indebted to what's come before it only as much as rock is indebted to, you know, music. And while it may not be a surprise that none of this could have happened without a wandering spirit and a drudgingly unremarkable shift at a metal shop, stop for a moment and ask yourself how many songwriters in similar situations have actually broken free of that grind to create something with universal truth.
It suddenly casts the line "Don't quit your day job" in a whole new light, doesn't it? |
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