 |
After years of supporting roles in various bands, Jay
Bennett (left) and Edward Burch are finally stepping to
the forefront.
|
The day that Jay Bennett and Edward Burch tell the story of how they were finally able to make their debut album, The Palace at 4 am (Part 1), is indicative of the pair's seven-year working relationship.
Bennett had just returned to Chicago after a two-week stint in Toronto producing the Canadian band, Staggered Crossing, and was attempting to find the appropriate luggage carousel at O'Hare where he could retrieve his bags. Burch was somewhere in downtown Chicago buying a new harmonica.
In the same city, telling essentially the same story, yet separated by many miles, Bennett and Burch are the classic story of two creative minds destined to work with each other against all odds and intrusions.
"When I'm out of town, I'm able to push the world away," says Bennett, catching a smoke outside before finding his luggage. "When I have a job to do, I justify in my own mind that it's OK to not think about anything other than my job at the moment. I think that's somewhere between an excuse and a justification. And now my world is going to come crashing in on me."
Bennett is certainly the higher profiled of the duo. Since 1995, he has been an integral part of Wilco, sharing a fair amount of songwriting duties with frontman Jeff Tweedy and getting a good deal of notice because of it. When Wilco veered away from the dusty Roots Rock of A.M. toward a more baroque Pop sound, the addition of Bennett to the band was as important to that direction as Tweedy's desire to try something different.
In addition to his Wilco work, Bennett parlayed his Pop reputation into a boatload of session gigs for the likes of Sheryl Crow, Tommy Keene, Steve Forbert, Allison Moorer, Garrison Starr, and a host of others. Although his hectic Wilco and session schedules left Bennett time for little else, he still managed to carve out time to collaborate with Burch on material that would find no other outlet than their basement partnership.
Burch was by no means sitting on the porch with his guitar awaiting Bennett's return. His schedule was nearly as packed, with his founding of the Kennett Brothers as well as a duo with Wilco keyboardist LeRoy Bach, and his integral membership in the Viper & His Famous Orchestra and the Handsome Family. As busy as the pair have managed to make themselves over the past seven years, they squeezed enough time out of their planners to write over 50 songs together, a remarkable feat considering their collective responsibilities.
"For the longest time, it was just this thing that we were doing," says Burch, fresh from his harmonica purchase. "I think we always knew that we would eventually put it out, but when and how, we weren't really sure. It really hit home the morning he called and said, 'I'm leaving Wilco. Are you dead serious about the music? Do you want to do this?' And that's when it started to become, as Tenacious D would say, 'really real.' "
Bennett and Burch met nearly a decade ago, when both were involved in the thriving Champaign, Ill., Pop scene, Bennett as a member of Titanic Love Affair, and Burch kicking around in a variety of like-minded enterprises. They immediately established a rapport: Both were Chicago natives transplanted to Champaign, both were fairly restless creatively, and both had an abiding love of grandiose '60s Pop. Their first informal show-me-your-stuff jam sessions evolved very quickly into an official songwriting collaboration, an arrangement that became complicated by the time constraints of Bennett's membership in Steve Pride's Blood Kin, a relationship that eventually led to his association with Wilco.
Over the years, the pair continued to amass a sizable song catalog, while their schedules became more and more clogged. In 2000, Bennett began work with Wilco on the follow-up to the band's highly regarded 1999 Summerteeth album; by the time the arduous sessions were completed and the resultant album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, was delivered, the band found itself dropped by its label Reprise, and both Bennett and drummer Ken Coomer had left the band.
Although much has been made of his departure, Bennett insists that it had more to do with running toward the fruition of his work with Burch than running away from Wilco.
"At various points in my time in Wilco, these feelings came up; 'By being in Wilco, am I denying myself the ability to do what I really want to do?' " says Bennett. "The thought crossed my mind pretty early on, but there was always enough reward to push the idea into the background. That has nothing to do with personalities, it was knowing that I had this bulk of material piling up at home. It wasn't money, it wasn't musical direction, it wasn't personal conflict at a level any different than at any other time in the band. It just finally was time."
With all of the controversy that mired the release of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the media has been trying to goad everyone involved into a contentious explanation of events, but Bennett has no interest in that agenda.
"They'll try to bait you into giving more of an answer, and I just can't give one," he says with a touch of exasperation. "If I had more anger, hatred, resentment, fear or lack of confidence, I could probably create some better explanation, but I happen to be feeling pretty good about what Ed and I have just completed. I'm very happy for Wilco, and I'm very happy for me, but I have a hard time getting people to buy that. I have two great albums coming out ... what do I have to bitch about?"
Bennett is obviously enjoying the deepening ironies that surround both The Palace at 4 am and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The Wilco album, refused by Reprise as non-commercial, is being touted as one of the albums of the year (it was picked up by Nonesuch, a Time Warner AOL sister label to Reprise, increasing the embarrassment quotient), and is selling briskly, despite being available on the Internet last year through the band's Web site. The simultaneous release of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and The Palace at 4 am on April 23 was a coincidence that was initially accidental and then became a benchmark for Bennett and Burch to achieve.
For anyone who was entranced by Wilco's Summerteeth or recent outings by the Pernice Brothers and Beulah, The Palace at 4 am will inspire similar shivers of moody Pop delight. With Bennett's involvement in so many baroque Pop projects over the years, the old chicken/egg question comes to the fore: Is this what he has taken away from his experiences or what he brings to the table?
"Well, obviously, a combination of both," says Bennett. "But I think it's more the vision I've brought to things. Obviously, I'm influenced by stuff. But this is more an execution of things I wanted to try and didn't have the means or the materials or the time or wasn't in the position of control. And that's not a bad thing. I'm not saying, 'Nobody would ever let me do this stuff.' This is a combination of approaches and sounds I've used before, and approaches and sounds I haven't used before, but I can't say that this hasn't been floating around in my head for the last 15 or 20 years."
With that much time to consider the options, it's no surprise that Bennett and Burch have created a voluminous archive of material, so much in fact that The Palace at 4am (Part 1) represents the first of three albums that the duo hopes to release over the next year-and-a-half. If cooler heads hadn't prevailed at Undertow, their small Chicago label, all three albums might have come out at once as a boxed set.
Of course, with Bennett and Burch, change is a constant state of mind anyway. The Palace at 4 am was originally intended as a stripped-down acoustic release, but quickly spiraled into a dense Pop studio exercise featuring a veritable who's who of Pop luminaries, including Wilco's John Stirratt, original Wilco member Max Johnston, former Elvis Bros. drummers Brad Elvis and John Richardsdon, and Pop genius Adam Schmitt. Bennett laughs at the thought of his sparer intentions. "There was just too much shit flying through my head; counter-melodies and harmonies and keyboard parts. I said, 'Let's just go for it.' "
As ornate as The Palace at 4 am became, its live presentation, with just Bennett and Burch on stage with their songs, is closer to the duo's original idea. Although the songs still sport the pair's avowed influences of early Bee Gees, John Cale's Paris 1919, Badfinger, George Harrison and mid-period Elvis Costello, in a live setting they come off, as Bennett notes, a lot nearer to the dark beauty of Nick Drake.
And whenever influences are discussed, Bennett's response is consistent. "My philosophy is 'Don't deny your influences,'" says Bennett. "If you start doing something, and you realize that it might be reminiscent of something else, you are being equally influenced if you stop it as you are if you continue. We're working now in a medium with a long history. We live in a very anything-goes Pop music world, and the boundaries are very wide and the rules to be broken are hard to find. Every rule you break is just another rule. I don't know if Rock & Roll songwriters have always felt that way, but I find it ridiculous that anybody, including Radiohead, is breaking new ground. Everything has an origin. Whether you draw from more popular ones or less popular ones all depends on what the songs you write ask for."
JAY BENNETT AND EDWARD BURCH perform at The Comet on Sunday.
Printer-friendly version
