My Son Bison

It wasn't until I was finished studying at university that I fully understood the limits of pains and joys that an obsession with music can bring. It isn't that I hadn't been obsessed. I just hadn't pushed my obsession to its limits.

I moved to Philadelphia. I bought a grand piano from some shady guys in New Jersey. It was a Hyundai with the heaviest keys of any piano I've played. The resistance was like weight training.

We were not creatively at a loss because the songs kept coming, but maybe organizationally we were totally gone. I think Liz suggested we just have one band. We found a bassist, this guy who I had played a jazz gig with. We made a list of names on the white board in our kitchen, and erased the worst ones every time it got too crowded. How we ended up with as bad a name as My Son Bison beats me.

Finding a name is one thing. Figuring out what our sound was going to be was an entirely different challenge. Without choice, we sounded like an indie folk band, but we also sounded like country, salsa, jams, and the jazz kept slipping out. You are what you eat, but you also are what your parents ate. My parents are Colombian immigrants, my mom's parents are from Argentina; Dane is of Basque and Filipino, so that stuff probably sneaks in too.

None of our previous recordings really captured what our rehearsals sounded like. I pitched making a purely acoustic album. Dane was entirely for it. I could tell he was excited to make something in a studio using the instruments we rehearse on: grand piano, acoustic guitars, upright bass.

We narrowed the songs down to the ones that fit together--the instrumental limitations helped us choose. I think the only way to justify recording an album in whatever you call the present era is to be able to point to the connective tissue. I think I can. The instrumentation is probably the most superficial connection. Then the harmonic stuff--I hear myself playing 4ths and 5ths everywhere. I'm so modern. There is this Latin thing too, the result of the stereo in my mom's minivan. Maybe Spanish on a couple of tracks, but really the sounds are from Argentina and Colombia. And the classical sounds: big and orchestral like Ravel's Bolero or loopy and layered like Reich. All of that through the filter of jazz musicians playing mathematical pop music. I swear to god it's accessible. I swear to god.

We started recording the album in July of 2014. We had finished recording and started mixing in February of 2015. And then the sucker punch. Our whole lunch. Buried in the sandbox. Something happened and the record was lost. 

I wrote a song. (It won't be on the album.)

“Life is Hell”

I know all of these songs.
I’m showing them off. I’ve heard them a million times.
Why should I show them the world
as if each one could have a life.

For the fame nor for the glory.
I doubt there is either in these tapeless times.

To restore the data ghosts.
Insert a joke about cyber crimes.

Playing Prussian roulette,
Hammer to the head of portraiture in pastel.
Art imitates life by failing to see the light that life is hell.
Life is hell.”

We spent three weeks playing frustrated gigs and rehearsing with tension in our mouths. Then we went back into the studio, fueled by the melodramatic grief we needed for some of our darker tunes, and pushing ourselves to take the fun stuff further.

Since we first started work on it, my abuelita and my cat died. Dane and Kirk each lost grandmother's and pets too. Nick got married, bought a house, and started grad school. (Yay) The rest of us quit jobs, got new jobs, or went back to the jobs we had quit. But, when I listen to this album and these songs, I know the art we made is worth it.