Music Preview: Modey Lemon singer calms down on surreal-folk debut

Thursday, March 09, 2006

Nine songs into last year's "The Curious City," Pittsburgh's Modey Lemon took an unexpected turn, pulling back from the punishing avant-garage abandon that's become its calling card with a haunted folk ballad called "Countries."

		Phil Boyd Release Show With: Weird Paul and Mikey C. Where: Modern Formations, Garfield When: 8 p.m. Friday. Information: 412-362-0274

Phil Boyd's solo debut, "Phil Boyd and the Hidden Twin," picks up where "Countries" left off, 15 tracks of offbeat psychedelic folk that feels a world or two removed from the explosive nature of the frontman's day gig, much of it written while sessions for "Curious City" were raging.

"A lot of the songs I write," he says, "I start humming them when I'm cooking breakfast or something, and then I go into my room and start recording."

In a way, he says, the music on "The Hidden Twin" is a return, of sorts, to the cassettes he used to make and pass around before he launched the Modey Lemon as a blues-punk duo with drummer Paul Quattrone.

"One of the ways I got to know Paul and one of our mutual friends is when I moved to Pittsburgh and started going to school, I'd make these half-hour cassettes," he says. "And I'd just hand them out to people. It was something I'd been doing since high school."

Even as he focused more on rocking with the Modey Lemon, Boyd would still record his own quieter songs when he could. "The Hidden Twin" is his attempt to gather the best of those solo recordings in one place.

With its whimsical echoes of the more surreal folk music of the past, especially Tyrannosaurus Rex and Donovan, "The Hidden Twin" could get Boyd lumped in with the weird folk movement, right alongside Animal Collective and Devendra Banhart. But he'd rather not be seen as part of that or any movement.

"When that movement started showing up in people's articles and those bands started touring, it was something that I connected with to a degree," he says. "But it was also something that wasn't necessarily entirely new to me either. In Pittsburgh, Alan Lewandowski has been writing these sort of surreal folk songs for years, and I remember the first time Jim Lingo put one of Alan's songs on a mix tape for me, I was like, 'Who is this? What is this?' Because immediately when I heard Alan's songs, I started writing my own. His imagery opened these floodgates. This was in 2000 or 2001, and that's when I think I started inching back toward feeling comfortable writing this way again. He helped get me back into the way I started playing guitar, which is sort of this folkier stuff."

A year or two later, when the weird folk movement reared its unkempt head, he was excited, Boyd says. "But I think I see some sort of shortcomings in the trendiness of it, which made me a little reluctant to put this out. I don't want it to get attention as a weird folk album in a way because I don't want to be something that would seem like it was solely inspired by this trend. It's a really natural way to write and everybody's been doing it for ages."

Marc Bolan, for instance.

"I remember the guy from Birdman [the label that's released the past two Modey Lemon records] was like, 'You have to hear Tyrannosaurus Rex; you'll love it.' He made me a tape of 'Beard of Stars,' and I think I listened to it for an entire summer straight, just over and over and over again. That's also what influenced a lot of the writing on 'The Curious City.' There were things that reflected a kind of natural tendency in the lyrics I was writing. It kind of reminded me of when I started writing, the excitement and I guess the playfulness of psychedelic music, the imagination involved."

That type of music also started feeling like a sanctuary from the Modey Lemon's touring lifestyle.

"Touring with the band and playing this really kind of physical loud music every night and just being in so many places at once, when I would finally get a moment alone, that's when I would record these songs, when I would have the mental space to create them. It was sort of my little holiday from traveling, being out on the road and working hard. It was obviously a much quieter and more subtle, calmer way to spend my time."

If all that talk about needing a holiday from rock would seem to indicate that he's grown weary of the Modey Lemon, well, the good news is, he hasn't.

"We're thinking of getting in the studio this spring and summer," he says, "and we have some ideas I'm pretty excited about. I think it's gonna take a slightly different turn once again. Jason [Kirker]'s come up with some really cool stuff and Paul has some ideas. It's definitely gonna be more rocking than my solo album, but in a way that we're not used to rocking, which is gonna be exciting. With each record, we try to do something slightly different and it looks like that's the direction we're leaning now."