Back to the start
Here’s how Beau Jennings rerecorded his band’s debut LP without playing a note.
Fifteen years ago, Beau Jennings was excited to explore anything through a song.
The Oklahoma-born musician, now 38, was navigating his 20s and stitching together his first batch of tracks under the moniker Cheyenne.
These days, there’s less banjo and more Springsteen-induced bravado, but Beau’s early songwriting blueprints seemingly have never been a source of embarrassment. That’s the thing about Cheyenne’s debut LP, “I Am Haunted, I Am Alive.” It’s a loud first impression full of mostly somber, soul-searching meditations.
The alt-country leaning 2005 album marked Beau’s lo-fi emergence out of a bedroom laboratory and into laying the foundation for a sound that helped define the local music landscape. “I Am Haunted” also acted as an early reference for Blackwatch Studios engineers, another unmistakable force in Oklahoma-bred music.
“When I think back on the album, I can see definitely see where Cheyenne was defined,” Jennings said. “A world was made and … it was a concept record even though I wasn’t trying to make one.”
I was surprised to hear Bea unot only planned to re-release the record but also aimed to recruit former bandmates, buddies and contemporaries to re-record the whole LP.
So, why’s the original “I Am Haunted, I Am Alive” worth the fuss? A lot of artists probably would pay you to destroy their first record.
For one, the title feels like a rallying cry. “I Am Haunted” succeeds as an auditory promise that Beau
and Co. would foster into more disciplined songwriting efforts. Sorta like how his fascination with Will Rogers slowly grew into “The Verdigris,” a heartfelt documentary film and complementary record that arrived much later.
Beau hatched the scheme to collect covers after meeting with Chris Stellman — who’s a doctor when he’s not putting out records on his recently revitalized Clerestory AV label. Stellman thought it’d be fun to work with the band again. It wasn’t a stretch. His boutique label had put out a couple Cheyenne EPs back in the day. That new, vinylonly reissue landed Friday — amid Cheyenne reunion rehearsals for what could be the band’s final gig.
What began as an idea for an “I Am Haunted” rerelease grew into something a lot bigger. More than two dozen artists got involved in covering the record and the project swelled to include 27 tracks from Cheyenne’s song collection. The digital companion piece is called “Cheyenne Songs” and is packaged with the vinyl. Everyone from Samantha Crain and Travis Linville to Student Film and BRONCHO hada connection to the Okie band.
Weatherford’s Jared Deck didn’t hesitate joining this project. When he bought the band’s very first EP, he played the CD so often it died.
“That CD won’t play anymore,” Deck said with a laugh. “The song ‘I’ll Be Gone’ is on that. I always loved that track . ... When the cover opportunity came around it was a nobrainer.”
Another notable piece of the new collection invited Tulsa’s John Moreland to interpret Cheyenne’s rollicking “Big Weather” as a stripped-down guitar ballad. It’s different from the original track in the best way.
I sat across from Beau as he picked apart a plate of Pepe Delgado’s green chili pork — he’s also a bona fide spicy stew expert — while he chewed on the song’s inspiration.
“That’s a great example of me feeling like I had lost the plot of the song,” Jennings said. “I wasn’t sure exactly where it was going when I wrote it. Sonically, Cheyenne ended up making a nice recording of it, but I never found the emotional center.”
Jennings said Moreland restyled the song — which actually comes from a Cheyenne followup called “The Whale” — and in doing so pinpointed a stirring core. The deconstructed rock track definitely retains its roots as a Tom Pettyesque banger, but Moreland’s weathered voice amplified the sentiment.
“I think ‘Big Weather’ was ultimately about uncertainty or dread,” Jennings said. “Some verses are trying to be defiant in the face of something oncoming . ... ‘Big Weather’ existed as one thing for me, and I just appreciate how John flipped it on its head and found something else in it.”
Cheyenne revisited
Beau’s bandmate Chase Kerby has been a fan of “I Am Haunted” since he caught Cheyenne performing live at The Conservatory a decade ago. From the minute the show started, Kerby knew he had a new favorite band.
“That record is my all-time, favorite release of any local band,” Kerby said in an interview. “Every time I listen to it ... feels like the first time I’ve heard it. Beau’s style is so unique in his storytelling. He paints such a vivid mental picture that it feels like reading a book when you hear a song.”
Kerby recruited Cheyenne regulars Michael Trepagnier and Dustin Ragland to help him kick off the new edition of “I Am Haunted.”
“This record is a testament to how close the Oklahoma music community is,” Kerby said. “It’s cool to be a part of something so tight-knit where everybody involved has a special memory or attachment to that record.”
Early “I Am Haunted” inspiration started while Beau was working log home construction in Wyoming. Jennings overheard his boss asking a homeowner how her writing was coming along. Annie Proulx said it was going well, and she went back inside. An avid reader, Beau researched her work — you’d know her best for writing the short story “Brokeback Mountain” — and found “Close Range: Wyoming Stories.” When the job was done, Beau left for London to study abroad and brought the book along.
He started writing songs in England. Almost everything on “I Am Haunted” started pouring out. In a way, he missed home.
“I was trying to process all these things that had been happening in my life,” Beau said. “It was like a combination of the landscape of the Southwest, the imagery and the influence of her writing. All that congealed into a collection of songs.”
Tragedy, God, love and war; it’s all there. The universal themes and modern folk sounds might be why they lent themselves to be covered. But there was an initial hesitation to put together the “I Am Haunted” compilation.
“Can we ask people to do this?” Beau wondered. “It feels a little presumptuous ... but the enthusiasm was great from the artists who said they’d do it.
“I would get songs back, and it was thrilling to hear new takes. They sounded like new songs. I didn’t think of them as songs I’d written.”
Everything felt amplified, Beau said. Songs he was proud of back in the day he became especially proud of.It also reminded him how far he’s come as a songwriter. Overall, it was just a joyful experience. His former bandmate Ryan Lindsey tackled “Anymore” and turned the sleepy number into a glammy, garage rock ballad his band BRONCHO would slow down a concert with.
“I just never would’ve done that,” Beau said. “Ryan played that song with us hundreds of times. He had played piano and sang harmonies. I love that he didn’t play it straight this time. He found his own version of it.”
Beau’s attitude on the compilation was to tell everyone to go nuts because nobody’s gonna mess it up.
“Some people were very cautious about it, and some sent me the craziest thing and didn’t even ask,” he said.
Recordings ranged from studio efforts to bare-bones iPhone voice memos. One showed up entirely in French. You never know what you’re going to get from Cheyenne fans.
Banding together
Oklahoma City’s Sherree Chamberlain was a teenager when she first heard Cheyenne. She was aware of their records, but she didn’t have them memorized. She used the opportunity to cover the track “Houses” as a refresher.
“Beau’s been so supportive of me and invites me to sing harmonies at his shows,” Chamberlain said. “He’s a great songwriter. I approached the cover as if I were to write a Beau song then what would it sound like?”
She gave the song a listen while quickly scribbling down lyrics and tried playing her version of a first impression. It’s not a straight cover but almost like a documentary of how a song lingers.
Penny Pitchlynn, of LABRYS, took a different approach. She spent eight hours recording with Brine Webb at Lunar Manor, a literally underground recording studio in OKC.
“I came in with the intention of speeding it up,” she shared in a text. “I’ve been in this slow groove place, so that’s where the initial boom chick beat kinda started. ... I listened to the song a few times to get the melody in my brain and just added some of my natural melodic inclinations to the progression Beau already had in place. The original version is super minimal, so I didn’t wanna muck it up too much.”
Dustin Ragland — who also plays with Beau’s current full-band collective known as The Tigers — took a left of center approach covering “The Prose And Not The Poetry.” He decided to give the intimate, guitar-driven track an experimental edge. He synthesized vocal samples into keyboard sounds and created “a strong dynamic contrast between the verses, with their Civil War–era tale of loneliness, and the instrumental sections in-between.” Ragland’s drawn to the song’s melancholic chord progression and storytelling.
“When you have a story that is ostensibly ‘out there’ in time frame — like the late 19th century — yet you can locate yourself in the story then it makes a unique authenticity possible in the music,” he said in an email. “Beau has become a friend, an artist and father I admire and learn from. I am biased on the legacy of Cheyenne.”
Ragland says Beau represents a songwriter who can embody Oklahoma music but can’t easily be roped into one genre — rock, folk and country all come to mind. He’s excited to join Beau onstage when he gives what could be the last Cheyenne concert ever at Norman Music Festival.
The plot remains the same
There’s a great line in some old Cheyenne promotional material that reads:
“Beau Jennings can’t decide which is more important — his day job as an architect or his real job as the singer and songwriter for his band Cheyenne. Or maybe he shouldn’t have to.”
Architecture metaphors ensued, but I had to ask Beau if that schism still exists — or could it ever not?
Beau used to think quitting one or the other would be inevitable. He just never did.
“At this point in my life, I don’t want to be away from home,” he said. “Family goes into the records I make. It’s what I write about now.”
In a 2005 interview with
The Oklahoman, Beau had a similar train of thought about balancing music with a 9 to 5.
“I’m realistic enough to know that one’s a little more certain than the other as far as making any kind of living,” he told Gene Triplett. “But so far, I’ve been able to balance the two and stay afloat. I’d also like to think they help each other out.”
With another “I Am Haunted” in the books, Beau’s getting more help than he could’ve imagined.