emiLy - riverrun CD (plus bonus tracks)

The Backstory:

Doug: Thanks to Finer Time being distributed by Ebullition, we ended up getting in touch with a bunch of people over in Europe. I corresponded regularly with a couple of them, including a French guy by the name of Yann Dubois, who did a zine called Sanjam. In late 1995, he told me that he was starting a record label and wanted emiLy to record a CDEP as the first release*. We went to Miami Street studios and recorded 11 songs over Presidents Day weekend.


We had to cut the CD down to eight songs to meet the time restriction for Yann. Now and then someone made some noise about trying to put the remaining songs (or at least "Trinity" and "Mulberry") out as a 7-inch. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, now everyone can hear these songs!

The original cover design was made by cutting and pasting a photocopy of the first and last pages of Finnegans Wake together in order to position the word "riverrun" about 2/3rds of the way down the page. All the text except that word would be faded out and the band name would be positioned above it. I forget why the cover got changed, but I'm sure it had something to do with my utter inability to do things like color separations.


The live photo is from a show at the Crawlspace in Chicago.



Joe: The photo on the back of the lightbulb is from my bedroom at the Miner St house. The Miner Street house doesn't exist anymore.



I walked around the lot a few years ago (I was interviewing for a one-year job at St. Mary's) seeing if I could find any of my Legos that the neighbor kids played with on our stoop (and ground into the ground and scattered around the block). I didn't find any.

D: Speaking of Miner Street, I think all the songs on the CD were written in the summer of 1995, when the three of us were all living at that house, along with my friend Kevin from PA.

When we played at Prufrock, Kevin made a flyer for the show using photos he took the afternoon that we let the neighborhood kids come in and play my drums. I remember that a bunch of the kids had a good idea of what they were doing, but there was one little kid who started flailing so wildly that half of the other kids ran as if afraid of injury.



Joe: I hate to admit it, boys, but I think that I may have been emo. As a lyricist, riverrun marks the completion of my shift from charmingly strident punk rock incompetence to full-blown early 20's pretentiousness. For my next significant era as a songwriter -- undersexed, painfully earnest graduate student -- please see my late 90's and early 2000's offerings, The Intelligibles and Check Engine.

Fortunately for me, the music on riverrun isn't bad at all, and I can claim just enough of the credit for that that it almost redeems the lyrical belly lint.

D: While poking about online, I found the Maximum Rock & Roll review of riverrun, which I remember reading for the first time in Orbit Records. It's pretty damn good:

Hey, this band really gets props for originality. Mining a vein symmetrical to bands like Mission of Burma, Rites of Spring or Sideshow, these guys manage to report their message to the world in a completely personal and unique voice. At turns, their sound is grinding and transcendent, their vocals poetic yet direct. I'd love to see these songs in a live context. Get this if you're tired of being jaded and tired of what's hip.

The Songs:

1) riverrun

D: I wrote the drum part at the laundromat next to Bai Ju's. I had been listening to a lot of Universal Order of Armageddon at the time. The tin whistle solo at the beginning is the Irish folk song "Finnegan's Wake."

J: Doug's drum part on "riverrun" still sounds amazingly studly.

M: I'm pretty sure the "drum noodling" going on during the tin whistle intro was a clip of Doug sound checking the drums from the Finer Time recording sessions.

2) Atoms Are a Boy's Best Friend

J: "Atoms" works well as a song; Mike's bassline and the sweet sweet aggression with which he plays it is so very nice, as is the kappakappakappa drums on the chorus. One of the very few emiLy songs that I remember how to play.

M: Loved this song title the first time I heard it. When we finished this one, I felt we'd evolved from post-punk quite a bit - this just feels like a great rock song.

D: A frequent show opener. Love the couplet "Drowning in the broth thought to be bread / Drowning in the bread thought to be alive."

3) ayin

J: "Ayin" is like an awesome song and a crappy one locked in a battle for supremacy, making for a song that in the end can best be described as "way too damn long". "Ayin" is the Hebrew letter "O" which means both "eye" and "lust". I thought that was, like, totally deep, so I spent four minutes committing crimes against Rabelais about it.

M: Wait, I thought were done with post-punk. Nevermind. Will never get it out of my system.

4) Little Bit

J: "Little Bit" is some good ol' self-pity pop-punk about aimlessness and a girl. Nice.

D: For reasons beyond my recall, this song was also known as "Sex Cat, " which had something to do with one of Mike's family's cats.

M: Yes. Every time Josh said "sex cat" to our cat, she meowed. I have no idea.

5) A Boy and His

D: The name for this came from a catalog for Wow Cool, then a zine and comic distributor from Berkeley, CA. While trying to come up with a song title, I started stabbing my finger down at random spots on the page and reading out whatever was printed above the spot. This phrase was the first one that sounded good. In fact, I thought it sounded so good that I ended up using it as a zine name and an email handle.

The song has another one of my favorite emiLy lines: "We become more familiar with what we would destroy."

J: The guitar part on "A Boy and His" is one of my favorites, and the lyrics are simple and short enough that I almost didn't embarrass myself. My comment about this song at the time was: "Watching TV like you're casing the joint."

M: This was absolutely one of the most difficult songs for me to play. I'm not sure I ever made it through this one cleanly. Love the song, but I can hear my mistakes too clearly on the recording.

6) Sap

J: Yeah! Pop punk instrumental with Jawbreaker-worship pauses. That little descending line of Mike's rules all over.

M: So much fun to play. I think I stole the line from Mike Watt.

D: This originally followed "Man Made Boy," almost as a second part to that song.

7) The Liar at Work

J: "The Liar at Work". If I ignore the self-important self pity of the lyrics, this song is a hell of a lot of fun. I like how my jingle jangle guitar suddenly goes "rar!" We played this at the NAZZ and the reviewer in the Observer went "tsk" at my cusswords, which impelled me to write a letter to the editor full of half-seriously intended French-philosophy nonsense about what the song lyrics really meant. I think I used the phrase "sous rature". For a while there, writing silly letters to the editor of the Observer was a bit of a hobby of mine. It's really not my fault; they kept printing them...

M: This and "Atoms" were two of our strongest songs of the time.

D: Hands down, my favorite emiLy song to play. One of my favorite drum parts to play period.

8) Talking God, Talking Girls

D: The bit at the end is a recording of James Joyce reading from "Finnegans Wake." A pen pal from Slovenia referred to it as a "sermon."

J: The little warbly thing that happens at 0:56 may be the favorite sound that I have ever been recorded getting a guitar to make. To this day I have no idea how I did it.

It's like this one time in fourth grade I tried to blow through my cupped hands and make a birdcall like I saw some other kids doing. There it was, clear as day, "whoo!"...Then I tried it again. No dice. Every so often I'll remember and try it again, and still can't make it work. Hold on a sec, I'm going to....Nope.

M: Joe's sound effect sounds like a sample from "Star Trek."

J: In conclusion, who's down for 2013?

SBP90s BONUS TRACKS (aka the rest of the Miami Street sesison):

9) Man Made Boy

D: As mentioned earlier, this was originally paired with "Sap," though we ended up playing "Sap" a whole lot more than this.

10) Trinity

D: This seems like it was a staple of emiLy sets for a long, long time. I'm surprised it took us so long to record it.

11) Mulberry

D: The last of the three emiLy songs that were built around drum parts (with "riverrun" and "Minuteman" being the other two).

* The CD is still listed on the SanJam site, though it's now out of print.

listen/download:



see also:
emiLy on MySpace
emiLy on last.fm

V/A - sfumato (1995)

sfumato was the third and final ND campus band CD compilation of the 90s. The first half of this disc is a great encapsulation of the strength of the mid-decade Power 90s scene. Hot tracks from bands that need no introduction to readers of this blog. Everyone sounds great here, as production quality was sharp. The packaging is also pretty cool, with a massive full-color foldout collage of band photos.


"sfumato: the achievement of smoothing or softening of contours creating imperceptible transitions between colors and surfaces: additionally imparting atmospheric effects"



The second half shifts direction some with acoustic and piano balladry, more conventional rock numbers, and jam bands. Long-running latin ensemble Sabor Latino also spice it up a bit with a hot salsa, and Q.E.D. close the CD nicely with a wicked prog-metal jam.

Track listing:
1. "Trophies and Cash" - Krautmiser
2. "Disquiet" - Sweep the Leg Johnny
3. "Bunny" - July
4. "REV" - Las Peligrosas
5. "King Permission" - emiLy
6. "Keeping Up With The Jones'" - decaf.
7. "Identifying Spiders Web" - Tacklebox
8. "Popsicle Crush" - The Roadapples
9. "Con Sabor" - Sabor Latino
10. "Next Time" - Michael G. McGlinn
11. "Hey Joe" - Emily Lord
12. "Fine With Me" - The Amateurs
13. "Lucky Number" - Little Milton
14. "Mellow" - The Big Earl Band
15. "Oddity of a Stranger" - George and the Freaks
16. "Terminal Space" - Q.E.D.

listen/download:


see also:
V/A - The Jericho Sessions (1991)
V/A - Incubus 1993: ND Music Compilation

emiLy - RTO 1.5329

In the fall of 1993, emiLy went to Miami Street Studios for our first professional recording experience. We recorded and mixed four songs in the space of two days or so, and the first three were released as a seven-inch EP called Finer Time. While waiting for the records to be pressed, we decided to make some quick copies of the recording session on cassette that we could send out to labels and venues we found in Book Your Own Fuckin' Life, the massive punk/DIY resource guide put out by Maximum Rock and Roll. (BYOFL started in 1992 and was a big bound newsprint magazine up until 2003 or 2004, when it turned into an online resource at www.byofl.org.) We sent the tape out with a simple insert that asked people to "Write us if you can help us find places to play, people to play to, vinyl(or tape(or CD)) to be on, or good Indian food in the MidWest." The tape did help us in the first two enterprises, but not so much in the latter.

The tape features the same four songs on both sides. The first three are the same tracks from Finer Time ("Cartoon Sex", "Finer Time", and "5(Frialator)"), and the fourth is a studio version of "Fortune 13", which appears in a different form on engineering means i Like you. Aside from the hundred or so people who got to hear this tape in person, this is the first opportunity for most people to hear "Fortune 13" in all its Miami Street glory. (I have no idea what the significance of the .5329 is, aside from indicating that it was not meant to be a regular RTO release.)

Not too long after this demo came out, we played a show at Dalloway's with Comeuppance. We called it our birthday show, as it was roughly a year to the date from the first emiLy show. The flyer advertised free cake in honor of the occasion, and we delivered on that promise. I bought a bunch of Little Debbie snack cakes and gave them to James K. to distribute at the beginning of our set. James jumped up and ran around the room, yelling "I'VE GOT CAKE! WHO WANTS CAKE?" and handing cakes to all who asked.

listen/download:



see also:
emiLy on MySpace
emiLy on last.fm

emiLy Live at Prufrock's - March 1996

Guess what, boys and girls? The South Bend Power 90s crew is now unleashing video on your unsuspecting eyes. Yes, the same technology that distilled mp3s from old audio cassettes is now pulling sound and images from dusty old VHS cartridges and stitching them into magical streams of 1s and 0s that let you relive the 90s right on your monitor.

Our very first offering is footage of emiLy playing at Prufrock's Coffeehouse in Lambertville, NJ. The show took place in March of 1996, at the beginning of our spring break tour which consisted of this night in Lambertville, a show in the back room of Blue Chair Records in Tampa, FL, and a house party in Gainesville, FL.

Part 1 of the video starts with a snippet of "Sap" and a quick glimpse of my parents' cat Cuddles, whose possible godhood we declared in the liner notes of engineering means i Like you. It then moves into "ayin" and "Tactical". Between the initial snippet and the two full songs, observant viewers will note that the suits we donned for the occasion disappeared. It was too hot to keep them on.



In part 2, Joe introduces a quieter set of songs, "Finer Time" and "Fearless". Prufrock was getting complaints about the noise, so much of the set was a struggle to keep dynamics in check, especially on drums. At times I put a t-shirt over the snare drum. At other times I played parts meant for the ride cymbal on the floor tom, as it didn't ring so much. The hi-hat does tend to drown out the rest of the band at times, flooding the microphone on the camcorder Ted was using to tape the show.



Part 3 begins with "Tear in My Eye", a song unrecorded at the time, before progressing through "Talking God, Talking Girls," "Atoms Are A Boy's Best Friend," and "Trinity". We recorded the latter three songs (as well as "ayin" and "Sap") a month earlier for what became the riverrun CD. Check out the microphone jury rigged to what is definitely not a microphone stand!



The rest of the tour was a bit more eventful. We played with Grade and a bunch of grindcore bands in Tampa. We also played a crazy house party in Gainesville. Anyone who remembers anything about that show remembers more than me, as I made one too many trips to the gas station for 32's of OE800. Ah, youth.

Keep an eye on the SBP90s channel on YouTube for more videos in the future!

see also:
emiLy on MySpace
emiLy on last.fm

emiLy - Walking Home on the Emergency Bed

It was finals week, I think. We were camped in our usual spots in the basement of Lafortune Hall. Totally cool.

Some months prior, I'd clambered into a booth in that same basement next to Ted Leo, demanding that he tell me the first word that came to mind. I'd been walking around Lafortune doing this to everybody. You see I was trying to name a band.

That's not to say we didn't have a working band name. It was "Barge Mounted Winch." Don't ask; I have no answers, and the first guy to make a joke about BMW gets stabbed in the face.

In any case, I shook Ted down for a name while he was talking to Emily Davis. He looked at me with a combination of amusement and worry and said, "Emily!"

We liked it. So we became emiLy. I'm not entirely sure how the little e big L thing happened. Mike and Doug most likely have better memories about this than I do.

I do remember that Mike often claimed that the big L was for love, man.

But that's all beside the point. The thing is, Mike was really tired. He'd been studying hard, I think. He got up from the booth, staggered, and stammered blearily: "Oh man, I'm walking home on the emergency bed."

Jaws dropped, and an album was named.



When emiLy went on its final tour, I remember Mike putting this tape on while we were driving. I also remember cringing and writhing on the back seat and begging him to turn it off. I think that I may have been more sensitive, at age 24, to the spastic, googly, songwriting of my 20 year old self, than I am now at 37. (Fuck. I'm 37.)

Now I listen to it, and I'm surprised. It sounds like a young punk band. Just as good and just as bad as a young punk band. I'm not entirely sure what all my writhing and begging for it to stop in the Suburban was all about.



Sometime in the late nineties, Steve Sostak of Sweep the Leg Johnny approached me with a business proposition. Sweep would buy the name "Walking Home on the Emergency Bed" from emiLy for the price of one thirty-pack of Old Style.

We totally got the better end of that deal. If they paid up. I can't remember if they paid up. Damn. It is possible that I was drunk when that deal went down. Sorry guys. I owe you all some beers.



In conclusion, I'm happy that the best song on this tape is "Minuteman": "I pray to god/that I never learn to do this right." Some prayers do get answered.

--Joe Cannon





This cassette was recorded in April of 1993 at "Radium City" (WVFI), and was engineered by Ted Leo. Live tracks were taken from a March 20, 1993 show at Dalloway's Coffeehouse. This was split-label released as RTO1/SS003 (Rent To Own + Sudden Shame).


listen/download:


see also:
emiLy on MySpace
emiLy on last.fm

emiLy - Tinkertoy EP

As mentioned earlier, emiLy had an epic recording session at Miami Street in October 1994, just before Mike left for a semester in London. The second release to result was the Tinkertoy 7-inch, which was our second (and last) vinyl release. Side one began with the hyperactive blast of "King Permission," before slowing down for the first half of the title track. If I remember correctly, "Tinkertoy" was one of two songs (the other one being "Beef") that featured a strange tuning. The verses at the beginning and end of the song are among the slowest emiLy parts ever. Side two kicked off with "A Step Closer, A Step Further Away is By No Means Dancing (Pop Song 94)," slid into the Rodan-inspired "Connery," and ended with the longest-lived (and possibly most frequently recorded) emiLy song, "Air." "Air" was one of the eight songs Joe had written the first time he and I played together, and it was a regular setlist feature all the way through our last tour.

The front cover featured a picture of me from when I was four years old, playing a guitar made out of tinkertoys and singing into a vacuum cleaner handle while my dad looked on. The back cover photo was from a basement show on Hill Street. Everything was laid out over a blown up version of the "e" in a light bulb logo Lael Tyler designed for the first seven inch. As with Finer Time, the covers were printed at Punks with Presses in California. We went with single color covers to save money.

Tinkertoy was received somewhat less enthusiastically than Finer Time, as we had the strange luck to get two separate reviewers in two different zines who had decided to compare every band they reviewed to either Swiz or Avail, regardless of the actual sound. So it goes.

listen/download:



see also:
emiLy on MySpace
emiLy on last.fm

emiLy - the "Dwayne Dibbley" EP

Before Mike went off to London for the spring 1995 semester, we booked time at Miami Street Studios to record as much as we could in the little time we had. John, the owner of the studio, offered us a discount rate because he claimed to never make any money off of us since we worked so quickly. In the end, we recorded 16 songs (plus one throw away improvised noise track to kill off one of the reels) in the space of a weekend during October 1994. Five songs went to our second seven inch, Tinkertoy, and another five songs went to a short tape we put out as a self-titled release. Well, it was officially self-titled, but the unofficial title is The "Dwayne Dibbley" EP, in honor of the uncool alter-ego of Cat from the BBC sci-fi comedy series Red Dwarf.

Speaking of cats, the actual cover photo is Edgar and Puck, the two cats who lived at the Miner Street house where Doug and Joe also resided. The actual tape covers were printed on either red or green cardstock, and then the emiLy logo (a lightbuld with an "e" in the middle, originally drawn by Lael T. for the Finer Time cover) was silkscreened over the cats. The tape was also notable for being the first emiLy release to include a lyric sheet. The second, and last, emiLy release with printed lyrics was the riverrun CD.

As far as the songs go, this tape rivals the CD for my favorite collection of songs. It starts off with the tense "Beef" before kicking into "Red Line Metro", written by Joe for his younger sister. "Tactical" is one of my very favorite emiLy songs, built out of one of Mike's bass lines that I recall having to hear a ridiculous number of times before I sorted out the timing of the intro. When we played "Fearless" at a house party for the first time, there was a guy standing in front of Joe the entire time who blurted out something along the lines of "MAN, IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU'RE PLAYING TWO GUITARS!" in the middle of the song. "He Had A Loud Mind" was written for Dave M. of hace frio, and musically inspired in large part by the NJ hardcore band Merel.

listen/download:



see also:
emiLy on MySpace
emiLy on last.fm

emiLy - engineering means i Like you

"It's Mike's turn to be in the zone! Mike, welcome to the zone... "

So, my first entry on South Bend Power Nineties. I am in the zone.

Imagine a time when you could load up the beat-up old Chevy Suburban, drive west all the way across the state of Illinois to a place called Galesburg, unload guitars, amps and drums, carry everything up a long flight of stairs into a small studio serving as a radio station at Knox College, set up and play a live set that was simultaneously being aired over the radio and recorded for posterity, then break everything down again, carry it back down to the truck, go eat dinner, then do it all over again that night, 'cept this time instead of a radio station it was a show at the campus coffeehouse with a crazy fast hardcore punk band called Haymarket (one of many). I get tired just thinking about it, but we're old now.

Well, we did it, thanks to two guys at Knox College, Trent and Cyrus, who heard our Finer Time 7" (see previous SBPN blog entry below), liked it, enough to invite us to their school to do the radio broadcast and live show. They were also nice enough to let us crash at their place before driving all the way back to South Bend the next day, and feed us excellent vegetarian cuisine. Oh, and allow moi a superfreakout nostalia session of Atari 2600 geekness: Yar's Revenge. If you're out there and reading this, thanks you guys.

"All right! ... I'm in a much better mood now... "

I think this recording accurately captures the intensity and range of emiLy at the time, the 1993-1994 version of emiLy. Joe had reached the zenith of his screaming-lyrics ways, the songs were getting longer and more complex, and we were still screwing up just enough to keep it punk.

According to Doug, regarding this recording, here's "other pertinent info gleaned from the insert: recorded in two hours on april 9, 1994 (FOURTEEN YEARS AGO?!?? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!!?!?) in the WVKC studio at knox college in galesburg, il." That about sums it up.

Thanks.

listen/download:

see also:
emiLy on MySpace
emiLy on last.fm

emiLy - Finer Time 7"

emiLy once self-described as:

"We play music. It sounds kind of like what might result if you threw Jawbreaker, DC stuff, Rites of Spring, American Music Club, and an inept love of jazz in a blender and pureed the mixture into a fine mush. We are three fine young men who own and operate musical instruments and occasionally stir fry. Joe plays guitar and sings, Mike plays bass, and Doug plays drums. Buster plays his face, but he doesn't actually have anything to do with the band, seeing as he is a cartoon."

A fairly apt assessment, or at least as close as one could probably hope to get. Complete with an Animaniacs reference and everything!

Finer Time is the little piece of wax that propelled emiLy into international superstardom, or something like that. It was reviewed quite favorably at the time by HeartattaCk (UPDATE: review included below) and others, which is probably why you'll occasionally find rips of it floating around punkrock message boards.

"Great musicianship and a tight production make this an awe-inspiring record. Like Hoover they took the Fugazi sound and created something new. But unlike Hoover they sound fresh and raw and stir something in me that I can't quite describe. Listening to these 3 songs is better than dancing the one-handed mambo, it's better than garlic-pepper-tofu flavored edible underwear. -MH" from HeartattaCk #2

And now some thoughts from Doug:

"Better than tofu flavored edible underwear" -- that's the phrase that always stuck with me. I have no idea what the hell it has to do with the music, but we got a lot of mail as a result. For a year or so, Joe and I amassed a large pile of records through trades alone. It also led to us being interviewed in a Slovenian zine called Pssst and eventually getting a CD put out in France by a new label called SanJam.

Domestically, the record helped us get shows in Chicago, Galesburg, IL, Columbus, OH, and Tampa, FL. The Galesburg show led to the recording of our second tape, Engineering Means I Like You.

Finer Time was recorded at Miami Street Studio in South Bend. The cover art is by Lael Tyler, who was working as a designer out in Portland, OR last I heard from him. The drawing is of what was his front porch at the time, at 226 St. Peter Street, a house most famous for being the place where Unwound and Crain played. The "e" in the light bulb was also used for the labels on the record itself, and became a logo of sorts for emiLy. The covers were printed by Punks With Presses.

Side 1 has "Cartoon Sex" and "Finer Time", while side 2 features "Frialator." The latter was named after a deep-frying machine which was actually spelled Fry-O-Lator, and for some reason the song later became known as "5(frialator)." I'm pretty sure we also recorded a song called "Fortune 13" in the same session, but it only turned up on a demo that we sent to places in hopes of getting shows.

My parents have a copy of this (and Tinkertoy, our second 7-inch) hanging on the wall in their house, along with family pictures and diplomas.

listen/download:



see also:
emiLy on MySpace
emiLy on last.fm