REAFFIRMATION ROCK Backyard Tire Fire
Feb 12, 2010
With their Steve Berlin-produced album doing gangbusters, the Bloomington band's definitely on the right path.
BY ANDY TENNILLE
Ed Anderson is on a roll.
The affable frontman for Backyard Tire Fire is chattering excitedly about Good To Be, the band's fifth album and debut on their own label, Kelsey Street Records - best record yet, most accessible, WXRT in Chicago is already spinning it - when I suddenly interrupt to ask how he'd categorize the music he's made with drummer Tim Kramp and bassist and brother Matt Anderson and for the better part of the past decade.
"We're a fuckin' rock ‘n roll band, man," Ed says definitively. "This isn't a hippie band. We don't have that word-of-mouth granola factor. We're certainly not a bunch of ringers that are gonna wow you with our fuckin' chops. And we're not some flavor-of-the-month indie hipster band with tight jeans, thick-rimmed glasses and whiney voices that gets on the right blog and blows up overnight. We don't really fit into any of these categories, or whatever, which is kinda like Lobos. Maybe Steve saw that in us."
"Steve" is Steve Berlin, long-time sax and keys man for Los Lobos. An acclaimed multi-instrumentalist and producer who's worked on records with Sheryl Crow, REM and The Replacements, Berlin first heard Backyard Tire Fire through a dressing room wall when they opened for the legendary Los Angeles Chicano rockers in October 2008 in their hometown of Bloomington, IL.
"They sounded familiar instantly to me," Berlin recounts. "I ran out and caught the second half of their set, and it was love at first sight."
According to Anderson, the feeling was mutual even before the two met.
"One of the things that I've always respected about Lobos before we even met Steve or played with them was that they've always done what they've wanted to do," he says. "Their sound is amazingly diverse with a lot of different kinds of influences. They're not ashamed of that, and they don't shy away from it. It makes them hard maybe to label. If they would have stuck to doing one thing, they might have been bigger and more famous, but they didn't. They do what they want to do, and I respect that tremendously.
"Getting a chance to play with them was one of those rare instances when you meet one of your heroes and they live up to expectation," he adds. "We've certainly played gigs in the past where people got off their bus, walked onstage, played their set and then got back on the bus and left without saying a word to you. That's happened before, but hanging with Lobos was the exact opposite of that. It was a blast."
A week or so after the gig, as the band was beginning to consider its options for producers for Good To Be, Berlin reached out.
"It kinda fell in our lap," Ed admits. "We knew we wanted to work with someone with more experience than me, so when Steve called and asked who was producing our next record, we were like, ‘Are you kidding? You are if you want to!'"
The band decamped to Type Foundry Studio in Berlin's hometown of Portland, Oregon, and quickly settled into a former brothel-turned-bunk house above the town's oldest watering hole, the White Eagle Saloon.
"We all crammed into this one-room shoebox for 12 days," Ed says. "The first night we came back after working all day in the studio and drank a case of Rainier, so they ordered ten more cases after that night. Every night, the three of us would go back, drink a case of beer and listen to what we recorded that day on the bar's PA after everyone had cleared out. By the time we left, the folks who ran that place were like family."
As familial as the cozy confines of the White Eagle were, Anderson says the decision to leave Bloomington to record for the first time was an effort to "stir things up a little bit."
"It took us out of our element," Ed explains. "There weren't any distractions or friends wanting to stop by, so we really focused on the music. And as comfortable as Steve can make you feel on a personal level, musically he was always pushing us and challenging us. He made me re-write one song totally and was constantly suggesting ways to make other songs better. You had to be on your toes at all times ‘cause you never knew what he was going to throw at you.
"The way I figured it, working with someone new in a new place was the one thing we could do differently that was within our control. There are a lot of things that are out of hands - we can't make people come to the shows, play the records on the radio and buy them at a record store, but we could choose to go to Portland and work with Steve and see what happens."
While its predecessor - 2008's The Places We Lived - was a melodic, pop-oriented album written largely at the piano, Good To Be marks a return to the guitar-based songwriting of past Backyard Tire Fire albums like 2005's Bar Room Semantics, the result of a pawnshop find by Anderson.
"I got this cheap nylon-stringed Esteban guitar at a pawnshop for sixty bucks," he recalls. "I bought it mainly because it had these thick strings that wouldn't tear my hands up when I played, but I ended up going on a tear with it and writing a few dozen tunes over a couple months."
Though not necessarily a concept album, the songs on Good To Be hang together with a common theme of the journey Anderson and company have taken over the past nine years, slogging it out on the road while playing their brand of heartland rock at every beer-soaked subterranean shitbox that would have them. They could easily be a bunch of road-worn, jaded assholes, but the songs on Good To Be sound more like a band reborn than a band rebuffed. Some might say it's a testament to their Midwestern roots, but Anderson is quick to deflect credit.
"I write this stuff because it helps me get through life. I almost feel like I have to do it," he says. "But in the end, Steve chose the songs for the record. Believe me, there were a bunch of depressing songs that I sent him. There was a song called ‘I Know You're Crying' that was a real big fuckin' downer that he didn't put on there. Steve picked the ones he wanted from what I gave him. He arranged them how he wanted them, got the performances that he wanted and put them in the order that he wanted them in. In a way, this record is as much Steve as it is us. When you get somebody that you respect like that and you realize that he's interested and into what you're doing, it just reaffirms that you're on the right path."
[Photo Credit: Brad Hodge]
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