Like every band everywhere, Sundae Drives was derailed by COVID-19 last spring.
After an extremely successful two-year run, which found the band developing pockets of support in Chicago, Detroit and Nashville — capped by Sundae Drives' Cincinnati Entertainment Award win for Best Alternative/Indie artist last November — guitarist/vocalist Adam Lee and multi-instrumentalist Nick Heffron had blueprinted a fairly expansive tour for early 2020. The Indie Pop/Rock/Soul duo had barely dented that schedule when the lockdown brought it all to a screeching halt.
"The plan for 2020 was to release a couple of singles, and we had a month-long tour planned for April, the longest tour either of us had ever been on,” says Lee in a recent phone interview. “We'd put together a completely independently booked headlining tour — from Charlotte, North Carolina to St. Louis, Missouri, to a couple of dates in Nashville, which is kind of our second home, to a couple of nights in Atlanta — and they were really good cards. The tour kicked off April 1 and the world shut down on like March 24. It was unbelievable.”
It was particularly disappointing for Lee, having deferred a considerable amount of time with his two young daughters in order to research and arrange not only the dates but also opening acts in each city. Lee had also set up an extensive media schedule for himself and Heffron in each market, making maximum use of available publicity resources to advance the dates.
“It was the first time we'd ever set up a media run,” Lee says. “Even if it was, 'What's the hottest blog site in town? We're gonna go hang out with them.'”
When it was clear that the shuttering of venues was widespread and for an indefinite period, Lee and Heffron sat down to hammer out a solution to an essentially unsolvable problem: How does a band move forward in a musical economy that has come to a full stop?
“Me and Nick got together and sat in my car and just talked,” Lee says. “He's my brother, we love each other, and this is our baby. And it's just me and him; there's not five people to deal with. It sounds cartoonish but we were like, 'What if, during all this fuckery, in our little world, we made it work for us and managed to not let 2020 beat the shit out of us?' Right there, we devised a plan and, step by step, we've executed it.”
The band's plan began with a fundamental divergence of opinion: Heffron felt Sundae Drives should be working toward a full album and Lee was pushing a singles approach. The pair compromised by envisioning a five-volume collection of EPs, each volume featuring four or five tracks to be released song by song at regular intervals. With the release of a complete volume, those songs would then be made available as a physical EP; and all five EPs would fall under the overarching banner of #medicinemusic.
"They say, 'Where there's a will, there's a way,'” Lee says. “Well, we willed our way through it.”
Sundae Drives' first volley in their march to reclaim the rest of 2020 began on Sept. 28 with the release of the digital single “Coloring Books,” a stripped back and reflectively autobiographical track. It's also Sundae Drives' ethos in a single song — an intensely personal lyrical expression set to a soundtrack that defies simple genre categorization.
"'Coloring Books' is one of our more acoustic songs. It doesn't go a bunch of places, it has great meaning, there's a real message behind the song,” Lee says. “But that shit has worked for us and against us for our entire career. It's beautiful not being able to be put in a box, but people need to put you in a box in order to like you sometimes. I think our fans and supporters love us for the right reasons. It feels good to know we don't stray from our flavor even though our flavor isn't for everyone.”
There's no particular connective thread running through the material contained in the series. Some of the tracks date back a couple of years and have become live staples in Sundae Drives' sets, others have been written in the shadow of the pandemic. And true to the band's established form, there's no adherence to genre continuity.
We have all these songs that have become fan favorites, but they don't exist anywhere but the live show,” Lee says. “It's past the point of being cool because it's exclusive. During a pandemic, you start thinking about weird shit like legacy and 'If I die tomorrow, what am I leaving behind?' So we worked on finding the right studio, the right engineer and on lacing up these songs that range from crazy personal to Hip Hop-oriented stuff to Pop and sad boy music.”
One of #medicinemusic's most unexpected twists is the presence of Noah Smith behind the console. A CEA winner himself for Best Country artist, Smith has suddenly become a secret weapon in Sundae Drives' arsenal.
"It's not an obvious pairing,” Lee says. “We went over there to track one or two songs and on the car ride home, Nick and I were like, 'Is this it? Did we just find the fucking formula?' We're now two volumes in tracking with Noah and it's been fantastic. What he brought to the table was that he believed in our direction enough to not fuck with us too much, and yet he always knew where to challenge us. He didn't challenge a bunch, but when he did, he was right. That speaks volumes.”
Over the next few weeks, the remaining three songs from Volume 1 — “Strep Throat,” “Vultures” and “Track Marks” — will be released. As the #medicinemusic project moves forward to the end of this year and into 2021 — the second volume will begin dropping early next year — another aspect of the presentation will become readily apparent. Each individual song is accompanied by its own unique artwork, all of it provided by photographers who are friends and fans of Sundae Drives, in keeping with the duo's desire to keep all aspects of the project in the local realm.
Looking ahead to the final volume's eventual release, theoretically in late 2021, all of the physical EPs will be made available in a box-set format. The individual song artwork will be shelved and a new design motif will be introduced; each EP will be represented by a different color, and the box will offer a lyric booklet — an idea that Lee has resisted in the past in an effort to avoid that level of transparency in his lyrical intentions.
As evidenced by the title of the last song in the first volume, Lee has survived a good number of harrowing moments in his life, as well as the subsequent psychic aftershocks. That may well be the impetus for him to publish his lyrics with #medicinemusic, but it's not because these songs are any more personal than his previous material. Lee's honesty has always been evident on his well-worn sleeve.
“My brother's doing a life sentence, my dad is dead, my stepdad died not too long ago, all my best friends are dead, all from heroin overdoses,” Lee says. “A lot of our subject material is taboo. It's raw. Somebody critiqued us once and said, 'Even your happy songs aren't about happy things.' At first that fucked with me, then I realized I write about what I know. I know about Pop music because I love it. Michael Jackson and Mariah Carey are my idols. But subject-wise, I know about poverty and drug addiction and heartbreak and incarceration and resilience and vulnerability and the light at the end of the tunnel and beating the odds. I know about those things.”
The #medicinemusic project has only just begun and it's already proving to be a labor of love. The name is not derived from the pandemic but from a hashtag coined by a Facebook fan four years ago when the band had been out of town for weeks and was finally coming home for a local show. And the songs themselves represent Lee's unrelenting honesty as a lyricist and the healing nature of his songwriting.
"Music literally saved my life, but it's also the most selfless and selfish thing that I do,” he says. “In the beginning, I was writing and performing songs for my own therapy because I needed that. But when I started paying attention, my therapy was actually becoming other people's therapy. That inspired me and it became more therapeutic for me, and I gave out more and it became more therapeutic for other people and it became this big circle of us being therapeutic for each other. And that's music.”
Perhaps the most important element of #medicinemusic is the almost supernatural chemistry Lee shares with Heffron. Every song on Volume 1 is steeped in it and every song to come is likely to follow suit.
“#Medicinemusic ties into the feeling you get listening to this music, lyrically and sonically,” Lee says. “I write the basic tracks and take them to Nick, who is just fucking incredible. He takes the bare bones of my songwriting and builds piano parts around my melodies. He's my best friend, he's my brother, he's a wonderful partner, he's a master percussionist, he plays bass, guitar, violin, drums. And together we take the music to where it should live.”
Learn more about Sundae Drives and listen at facebook.com/sundaedrives.
