Blurred harmonies for Valencia
“WE’VE all heard it said. Just write about what you know,” says Evan Way of his band of 13 years, folk-rockers The Parson Red Heads.
“If there is one thing I know about, it’s The Parson Red Heads - this is about as accurate of a nutshell version of our whirlwind history as you’ll ever see.
“We formed in 2004 in Eugene, Oregon, while we were all attending college for various degrees we never used or even completed.
“We would rehearse in the living room of my house for hours until my roommates would be driven crazy - writing songs together and playing them over and over again, and generally having about as much fun as a group of people can have. We weren’t sure if we were very good, but we were sure that there was a special bond growing between us, a chemistry that you didn’t find often.”
Evan continues with his story of how the band developed, moving to Los Angeles in 2005, ‘in an attempt to take music more seriously and learn how to be a real band’.
“We were all really young and all pretty dumb,” he noted.
“We caravanned down the I-5 in small cars filled with our junk. Brette’s car broke down before reaching the Grape Vine, and we had to leave it there for awhile in a town called Buttonwillow. “All four of us moved into a one-bedroom apartment in West LA directly beneath where the 10 and 405 freeways cross - it sounded like the ocean roaring, constantly. Eventually the population of the apartment ballooned to seven - all folks who played in our band at that point, too. Like I said, we were all young, and we were all pretty dumb. But also like I said, we were having about as much fun as a group of people can have.”
They played all the gigs they could, ‘which turned out to be a lot of shows’.
“We must have played 300+ shows in our first two years in LA,” he said.
“We found ourselves to be part of a special and beautiful music scene just blossoming around Silverlake and Echo Park, and we played our hearts out. We practiced non-stop and wrote a ton of songs, and eventually recorded our debut album, King Giraffe, at a nice little studio in Sunland, with the help of our friends Zach and Jason.
“As a band, we didn’t know what we were doing in the studio, but somehow it turned out good in spite of us. Sometimes good songs can transcend a lack of basic-studio-knowledge, and even a lack of basicinstrument-skills.”
After three more years of playing, writing, touring, recording and releasing an EP, working, and generally surviving, they began writing and recording their first ‘full length’ entitled Yearling.
“We were going to call it Salmon Valley Rose, but Brette thought the name sounded smelly so we dropped it (probably a good call),” he said.
“Partway through mixing that album, we decided to quit our jobs, quit our apartments, go on tour with our best friends who were in a band called Cotton Jones, and then relocate to Portland. LA had been good to us, some of our dearest friends in the world were (and still are) there, but it was time for something different. We’d felt we had, in a way, reached a ceiling in that city that we were having a hard time cracking, and on top of that - it was just time for a place with a slower pace, as they say.”
It’s been 3.5 years since the release of Yearling, and they can’t stop touring and ‘singing our songs for people’.
“We decided to make our newest album, titled Blurred Harmony (a name inspired by a Donald Justice poem), a little differently - if we were going to make it happen and do it well, we were going to have to track it ourselves,” he said.
“Sam, our lead guitarist and oft-songwriter, had built up a home studio at this point, so we went to work. The resulting release is more a true part of us than any record we have made before – we put ourselves into it, made ourselves fully responsible for it. Even the themes of the songs are more personal than ever – it’s an album dealing with everything that has come before. It’s an album about nostalgia, about time, change, about the hilarious, wonderful, bittersweet, sometimes sad, always incredible experience of living. Sometimes it is about regret, or the possibility of regret. These are big topics, and to us, it is a big album, yet somehow still intimate and honest.”
Blurred Harmony (released on You Are The Cosmos Records on June 9, 2017) is musically diverse – ‘it is a distillation of the sounds and styles that we as a band love’, he notes.
“It is the overdriven jangle of Teenage Fanclub and Big Star power-pop, the skewed psychedelics of the Paisley Underground, the bittersweet energy of New Zealand’s Dunedin Sound movement, and the muted twang of Cosmic Americana, all crammed into 44 minutes,” he said.
“It is an album that displays what we’ve learned and internalised over the past 13 years as an active band, constantly growing, shifting, and evolving.”
Well, thanks for that Evan; it is a concise as it can be whilst still doing the band justice.
In varying degrees, The Parson Red Heads’ back-catalogue is a great journey through folk and west coast rock, the breezy guitars, vocals and harmonies have remained, the band has not jumped from one wagon to another in search of fame and fortune, they have spent their time wisely improving on what they do best and the net result of this, the nadir shall we say, of their output is undoubtedly Blurred Harmonies.
As Evan has already acknowledged, those subtle nods towards power pop and country rock - never too much of each as if trying to appeal to all camps – make for a listen that can only be described as a honey coating on the listener’s ear.
The album has plenty to offer fans of real music, in particular those who enjoy the likes of Midlake and Grandaddy.
Blurred harmonies can be streamed through Spotify and if you like what you hear then get along to Sala El Loco in Valencia on March 7.