A Delightful Evening with Morning Recordings
By: Jennifer Wagner |
Friday March 17, 2006 |
| Pramod's vocals are a soft touch on a rough face, his lyrics lingering fingers trailing the shape of a jet stream of a plane long gone, now somewhere else entirely and eager to land. |
Photo By Hayley Murphy
I was on my back porch before going to this interview and I met my new neighbor. "Hi, I'm Lynn!" she said cheerfully, "How do you like living here?" She was quite simply the picture of adorable, responsible, upstanding citizenry. "I'm fucking out of fucking batteries. Fuck. Hi." With a telling little smirk and one eyebrow raised she asked, "What size do you need? C?! I may have some..." "No...hehehehe...no! Triple A; they're for a recorder." Ahem. Allusions to non-operational sex toys aside, Lynn was thankfully able to produce the batteries I needed, and soon I was all revved up and ready to go. "I'm going to this show at Subterranean, do you want to go? We can talk about those other kind of batteries..." "Are you coming on to me?!" "A little bit, yeah." Lynn was unable to attend the show. I dragged my heavy heart to the club and things got better. The guys were upstairs, having just finished their sound check. They were eating some pretty damn tasty looking tacos. So this is Morning Recording's first, uh, recording, right? Music for Places; and you wrapped that up at the beginning of this year? Pramod Tummala: Yes. I wrapped it up at the beginning of last year, and it got released at the beginning of this year. And it was released on Loose Thread? PT: Loose Thread and Better Looking Records, which is based out of L.A., and Loose Thread out of Chicago, which is a label that I run. So, you guys did a bunch of promotional shows in support of the album in April? PT: We did...on the Midwest leg we supported this band named The Album Leaf, yeah, so we did Detroit, the Virgin Megastore in Chicago, then we did Aimes, IA, and then we came back to Chicago. Jon Hensley: Not in that order, though. PT: It wasn't in that order?! JH: Des Moines was before Detroit; I thought Detroit was the last show we played. PT: Detroit was the first show. So that was a really memorable performance, then? PT, JH: Yeah, yeah. PT: Jon was loaded up on Xanax at the time. Which enhanced your performance, but you forgot exactly where you were. JH: Yeah. PT: We didn't actually play Des Moines (laughter). Was there a favorite city out of those or like, a favorite gig that you played on that particular little stint? PT: They were all good in different ways. The Aimes, IA gig was probably the best one because they treated us really well. (quickly turning to Jon): Jon, do you concur that you played Aimes, IA? JH: I concur. (laughter) Aimes was at Iowa State; they actually put us up for the night in their dorms, and they fed us and gave us free drinks. So what stands out in your mind, over the aesthetic sense of the show, is being put up in a co-ed dorm room, given alcohol and fed food fit for freshmen. JH: (deadly serious) Right. So Pramod, you wrote all the songs on this (album)? PT: Yeah, pretty much...some people like to develop their own parts, and if it wasn't something specifically that I had in mind I might give some simple direction, nothing too specific, just to maybe guide them in the direction I had in mind. How did you guys find each other? PT: That's a good question. Tom I've known for a very long time; we played in our last band together (Melochrome). (Just at that moment, Tom bounded upstairs to join the group and plopped down next to Pramod on the far end of the couch.) There he is, right there! Hello, Tom. Recording an interview for Static... Tom Stanely: No. PT: No?! Tom's shy...(we) go back ten years, and then Jon is in another band called The Cricket Rumor Mill, also on Loose Thread. JH: Yeah, Darlene (bass player for Melochrome) moved and they needed a bass player so I kind of filled in from time to time, and I don't know (looking at Pramod), you asked me to fill in on your solo stuff! PT: Darlene actually had a shoulder injury so he filled in on bass for a couple of shows. Jon, you actually injured that shoulder yourself, didn't you?! Pushed her down the stairs? JH: Yeah. PT: Nancy Kerrigan. And then, I met Eric through Jon actually, because Eric played in a band... Eric Bandurski: Jon and I played in a band about, gosh, like... JH: Seventy years ago. EB: Seventy years ago?! You're both looking incredibly well, considering. EB: It was seven or eight years ago, it was way back, and we haven't really done much together since. Eric, do you have a classical background? EB: Yeah, I started really young, I actually started with the Suzuki method...so I have really good ear training, which has allowed me to do non-classical stuff, and that's all I do anymore. So you didn't feel you had to break out of any certain methodology, then? EB: No, I don't know, it's sort of like an impressionist painting where you learn how to do the basic stuff, and once you have a good background, you can kind of do whatever you want. (to Chris): You're up! Chris Erin: Can you repeat the question? (laughter) How did you hook up with Pramod? CE: I was friends with Mary and I guess Pramod was looking for a trumpet player, and Mary recommended me to Pramod, and we joined up that way. PT: That was a nice happy ending. Pramod, you mentioned work on a new album, tell me a little more about that. PT: Well, this one is different in a lot of ways, because the first record was pretty much me going in with songs and recording myself, whereas a lot of these new songs, we've rehearsed in the band, we played those shows together like in April and we just started bringing them in early on. We already knew what we were going to do, and these guys came up with all their own parts. Sort of a hoaky question, but I'm intrigued with the inspiration behind the album name and the band name. PT: (smiling) Uh, I should have come up with a good answer. You need a little joke or something, as a segue? PT: I should have come up with a joke, most of mine are too off color for publication. Most of everything you do is too off color for publication. PT: I think Morning Recordings came up because I like the vagueness of it and I liked how it sort of rhymed, and Music for Places, was just...I'd been doing a lot of traveling in the process of recording and writing. Were certain songs inspired specifically by certain places? PT: Well, "Airports" was inspired in airports. (loud laughter) I have to apologize, I don't have the album yet...so, "Airports" was inspired in bus stations, you were saying? PT: Yeah, Greyhound, wishing I was at the airport. I chose the album name Music for Places and a song called "Airports" is that Brian Eno has an album called Music for Airports. Ah, got it. That's clever. I wanted to know about the creative evolution during recording, and after release, and how that has shifted, if at all? PT: I'm not sure what it means...it sounds great, though! CE: In my experience it's screwing up in the studio and taking it, and trying over and over and it not getting any better, then living with it, and it turns out to be cool. Well, guys, I'm pretty much done finding out what I was looking to find out... PT: There's no money shot?! Yeah... As if on cue, an attractive blond woman came bopping up to the couch and split Pramod's skull with an audible, accurately marked head butt, leaving our fearless leader sort of prostrate on the couch, whimpering. She spun indignantly on her heels and split. Your fiancée? PT: (rubbing his head) Yeah... That was my money shot. I went down to the show. The opener was a French singer called Delaney; her set was sexy, slow, and at times monotonous. She had incredible breasts, an amazingly sultry voice, and an unpretentious manner. I am pretty damn sure I saw Jon lurking around behind the drum set at one point, hunched over with a box cutter clenched in his hand, eyeing Delaney's right Achilles' tendon with a menacing leer. He noticed me notice him and scampered off stage mouthing something to the effect of "Sumbitch journalists..." The Morning Recordings set was mostly new stuff. I liked the unassuming quality of the trumpet, an instrument that in my opinion is most effectively played that way, adapting to the surrounding sounds, a little wistful. The inventive, meandering cello, understated guitar, and languid synth wove in and around, taking turns taking the focus. Pramod's vocals are a soft touch on a rough face, his lyrics lingering fingers trailing the shape of a jet stream of a plane long gone, now somewhere else entirely and eager to land. Pretty blissed out from my evening, I made my way home on the red line, stopping for a quick martini near my house. At the end of the bar sat Lynn, my neighbor talking with a woman holding a Pekinese in her lap. When she spotted me she whispered something, her thumb jacked in my direction, then drained the rest of her beer and walked out in a hurry. I slowly traced her retreating form with a melancholy index finger, looking to touch down. |
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