Romantics frontman goes full-on in supergroup
Romantics frontman goes full-on with rock supergroup
The Empty Hearts is not an easy band to bring together. The quartet is a bit of an oldschool rock supergroup, with drummer Clem Burke and singer-guitarist Wally Palmar also committed to Blondie and the Romantics, respectively. Bassist and former Chesterfield Kings member Any Babiuk is busy with his Fab Gear store in upstate New York and also writes books and consults for auction houses.
Free time is not abundant with these guys, in otherwords.
But they did find time to make a second album as the Empty Hearts — aptly titled “The Second Album,” recorded last year and released late in August, six years after the group’s self-titled debut.
“We haven’t done that much, and a big part of the reason for that is basically logistics ,” guitarist Elliot East on, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Cars in 2018, acknowledges. “We have to find a window where everybody’s free, and it gets kind of tricky sometimes. Clem was still doing shows with Blondie, Wally’s doing Romantics shows, Andy has the store.
“I’m the only bum with no job,” he adds with a laugh.
The four have stayed in touch during the intervening years, however, and Palmar says their chops were such that they quickly fell back in place, even after a lengthy period apart.
“Everybody’s just talented guys — I think it’s fair to say that,” notes Palmar, 66, a Hamtramck native who now resides in Birmingham. “They all play very well and they sing very well. We’re very familiar with each other. Clem played quite a few years with the Romantics, and we’re very familiar with Cars songs. We call come fromthe same background and are about the same age— Andy’s a fewyears younger — but when we get together it all clicks into place. Someone throws out an idea and everybody hears their part and we just go from there.”
Both Easton and Palmar discerned a different atmosphere for the Empty Hearts the second time around, however.
“I think it was more natural this time,” Palmar says. “On the first album we knew each other a little bit but it was more of a feeling-out period of finding out what we could do best. On this one we really branched out. We didn’t want to repeat ourselves from the first album.”
Easton says those stretches can be heard in the range of “The Second Album,” which spans styles from power pop to garage rock, R&B infusions and occasional Beatles homages. Easton’s aggressive “Death By Insomnia,” meanwhile, is the most aggressive outlier on the 13-song set, which was produced by Ed Sta si um and released, like the first album, on Little Steven Van Zandt’s Wicked Cool Records.
“I think that’s anorganic thing,” the guitarist says of the diversity. “Not to compare the quality of it, but I think it’s like a later-period Beatles record. They could have everything from ‘Helter Skelter’ to ‘Honey Pie’ to ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road’ to ‘Good Night,’ all on one record— and ‘Revolution 9’ and ‘Julia.’ You got the smooth and the harried, the sweet and the salty, but it all sounds like them. It’s unified by the people involved, and I think that’s kind of the course we took with this album.”
“The Second Album” even has a direct Beatles connection, with Ringo Starr drumming on the track “Remember Days Like These” after the Empty Hearts agreed his style would be perfect for the song. Palmar, an All-Starr band member in 2008, made the call — “They put me on the spot, y’know?” he recalls— and wasn’t sure how Starr would answer.
“He doesn’t do that kind of stuff very often, but the other guys said, ‘ Well, what’s theworst thing that canhappen? He’ll hang up on you?’” Palmar says. “As it turns out hewas open to the idea. We sent it along to him and four or five days later his producer calls up and said, ‘OK, we’re done with the track,’ and sent it over.
“That’s pretty big stuff for us, y know?” It certainly was for Easton, who grewup a Beatles fan in Brooklyn.
“What can you even say about that?” the guitarist says. “You can wax philosophic and go back to Feb .9,1964( when the Beatles first played on‘ The Ed Sullivan Show ’), and everything you’ve been through to lead up to having one of the Beatles play on your record. It’s very special— more or less kind of like a completion of a circle. It’s a dream.”
The pandemic shutdowns are keeping the Empty Hearts off the road, of course, and with band members living in different parts of the country the group isn’t considering any sort of viral performance at the moment. The band has done video for the track “The World Has Gone Insane” and hopes to play live once concerts start happening again.
“Itwould be a lot easier to do something if we were all in the same city, but we’re all over the place,” notes Palmar, who adds the Romantics is also biding its time to be able to return to the stage. “Everybody’s in the same boat, trying to figure something out. We can just hope for next year, I guess.”
For Easton, meanwhile, “The Second Album” offered a chance to resurface publicly for the first time since the Cars’ Rock Hall and induction, and especially since the death of frontman Ric Ocasek in September 2019. “I loved him and I miss him,” Easton notes. “He was like my big brother in many ways, such a big person inmy life. We got to realize our dreams from childhood and see the top of the mountain together. You can’t go through that stuff with someone and not have a special bond.”
Easton and the other surviving Cars have weekly conference calls with management to discuss ideas and proposals, and he predicts theremay be more Cars recordings in the future — including unreleased material fromthe vaults that Ocasek wrote and vintage live recordings. “Whateve rwe do, it will be in good taste,” Easton promises. Meanwhile, the Rock Hall induction at Public Hall in the late Cars bassist Ben Orr’s hometown is a sustaining memory.
“Itwas really nice spending that week together, rehearsing and everything,” Easton remembers. “Everybody got to hang out and have dinners together and have some laugh sand play and talk about stuff, maybe even get some healing, if that was necessary — just to be a band again, y’know? And then after thatwas over we stayed in touch, texted silly little things back and forth to each other. It really felt great.”