Gum takes time to chew on things
After lengthy break, OKC rock band to release new album
Oklahoma City rock band Gum knows how to make the most of empty space.
It’s found in the airy, striated instrumentation on its new record, “When the Water Hits the Moon.” And when everything drops out, leaving expansive sonic room for a tiny piano twinkle or a chugging guitar, it’s those moments of temporary emptiness that make the songs’ returns that much more impactful.
We haven’t heard much from Gum lately. The band, which played its first show in January 2009, maintained a near radio silence for the past year, performing only twice and vaguely teasing the production of the follow-up to its 2014 selftitled full-length album: a mention of a recording session here, a photo emblazoned with a large “2018” there.
Something was happening in that empty space, to be sure. So why the holdup?
The opening track to “When the Water Hits the Moon,” titled
“Does It Feel Like You,” answers that question out of the gate, reasserting the band’s philosophy that it’s OK to leave a little room: “You can take all the time you like,” sing vocalists John Baber and Joe Bello. “You gotta settle in.”
“We started the album in late 2015 and had a couple of false start songs,” Baber said. “They got us going, but we realized we were heading a different way and took a few months off.”
From there, Gum took its time self-recording working demos and finishing some of the tracking at Bell Labs in Norman. The production time on the record spanned about two years, with the remainder of the wait spent saving money for the record’s release.
Baber sings and plays keys, Bello sings and plays guitar, and on the record, both are credited with the bulk of the band’s songwriting. The rest of the lineup, though, rounded out by Levi Bello, Sam Bray and Taylor Dragoo, enjoys creative freedom on their respective instruments. Most of Gum’s members have known one another since middle school, and the band’s nearly decade-long run leaves everyone comfortable with bringing their own ideas to the table.
That long-term trust is also what makes Baber and Bello’s collaborative songwriting work.
“I’ll bring him stuff, and it might be a certain amount done, and I might have hit a wall,” Baber said. “When I show him, he can zero in on something that unlocks the rest, something that might already be there. I remember one song I was stuck on for like a year, and he said, ‘Take that chord out.’ And then it was done.”
Musically, the pair is a study in contrasts, despite sharing many of the same influences. Bello said he’s the more direct of the two lyrically and favors lush, dark instrumentation. Baber, on the other hand, likes leaving room for interpretation and prefers brighter, twinklier sounds. The album’s lead single, “Tired Eyes,” exemplifies those preferences: The song’s instrumental break is marked by a deep, bassy synthesizer line punctuated by harpsichord.
Where the two fall back in sync is the lead vocal duty. Most of Gum’s songs have Baber and Bello both singing lead, often the same melody. Listeners can find more evidence of the pair’s songwriting simpatico in the album’s lyrics.
“I don’t want to get too specific, but the last record and this record are super reflective of where we all are in our lives,” Bello said. “Whether we mean them to be or not, we kind of can’t help it. There are things you feel like you’re supposed to do when you get to a certain age.”
The two are in their early 30s, and accordingly, their songs tackle marriage and relationships, artistic goals, tiredness and the challenging landscape of adulthood. Sometimes, being in a band can seem like a young man’s game, frivolous, worth growing out of. A lack of momentum has made many artists question their intentions and effort.
In Gum’s case, it seems the opposite: They’ve grown the band into a steady, potentially infinite endeavor among the highs and lows, a venue for creative accomplishments, something that can wait out the busyness and, fittingly, fill in the empty spaces.
“When I’m not playing music, it kind of bums me out. There’s a big part of me that needs that,” Bello said.
“There’s a certain amount of music that I want to have made, and certain kinds that I want to have made,” Baber said. “I don’t know how long that’ll take necessarily.”
In the space between finishing this album and planning the release, they’ve begun tracking another record, to be released at some nebulous point in the future. But right now, they’re working on getting back onstage for the release of “When the Water Hits the Moon.” For a while, at least.
“When we play, we want it to mean something,” Bello said. “You play a lot when a record comes out, but then what are you playing for? When you’ve been a band for this long, you lose the need to feel like you have to play all the time, or at least there’s an emphasis when you do play to make it special or important. I think we’re more interested in making records.”
“I would say so,” Baber said. “Shows are fun, but it seems like our time would be better spent zeroed in on working on the next reason to play shows.”