Getting Back On The Treadmill

Getting Back On The Treadmill
The return of Treadmill Trackstar probable in 2008

When word surfaced in mid-2007 about a possible reunion show by members of the long-defunct Columbia, SC band Treadmill Trackstar, nobody could have guessed how it would turn out. Since the group disbanded following an ill-fated Atlantic Records debut, Only This, in 1998, band leader Angelo Gianni had moved to California and mostly gotten out of the commercial music business, instead focusing on the making of actual commercials, among other film work. Another move, to Asheville, NC–just a few hours up the road from his old musical stomping grounds–made the rumours more than just a possibility.

The occasion was a full-blown music festival built around another long defunct local landmark, the live music club Rockafellas, which Gianni played in several incarnations of bands including Treadmill Trackstar. A number of other local bands reformed for the event also, but the buzz prior to the weekend of shows was all about Treadmill’s long-awaited return.

Why was it that important that a band broken up for a decade was playing again? Well, to understand that one must go back to 1997 and the release of Treadmill’s independent debut, Excessive Use of the Passive Voice, which established their formula of rock guitars layered with liberal amounts of cello, supporting the obtuse poetic lyrics of Gianni. In the post-Hootie & the Blowfish landscape of Columbia, Treadmill was the band everyone expected to follow their peers onto the pop charts, and “Shouldn’t I Take,” from that debut even garnered a significant amount of local and regional radio airplay.

After touring nationally and appearing on an early incarnation of the Vans Warped Tour schedule, Treadmill signed with Hootie-owned Atlantic subsidiary Breaking Records and re-recorded a number of the debut’s songs for Only This, which fizzled out on impact in the general marketplace. After fighting the good fight for going on eight years, the members simply moved on with their lives, never to look back–or so we thought.

Fast forward to 2007 and the roomy confines of Five Points Pub in Columbia, scene of Treadmill’s much-anticipated set at the Rockafella’s Reunion, and the years melted away as the band took the stage. Gianni was a little less thin, with shorter hair and heavy-rimmed glasses, but as soon as he opened his mouth to sing it was like the band had never left. Their trademark sound was always a wall of sound sonic attack not unlike the early Smashing Pumpkins albums, and with original cellist Heidi Brown as his onstage musical foil and drummer Tony Lee behind him (original bassist Chris Grigg’s spot was filled by local musician Mike Mills of the band Almost Jason), Gianni was able to faithfully recreate the band’s back catalog.

The songs, from, ”Pale The Bright Sun,” to, ”Velveteen,” “Walking With Madeline,” and the big ‘hit’, ”Shouldn’t I Take,” sounded as fresh as ever, and a lot less dated than one might think given their decade-old pedigree.

Gianni, for his part, was in a mood of apparent euphoria throughout the set, with a grin permanently pasted across his face even on the less-than-joyful numbers; the audience was in a similar state of disbelief, not only at the fact the band was playing at all, but that they sounded this good after a ten-year absence.

At the close of the set, Gianni thanked the crowd and jokingly said, “See you in another ten years!” Gianni and the band must have had a good time, because it seems we may not have to wait that long for some new music from Treadmill–A blog posted on the band’s Myspace profile recently hints at a possible new CD release sometime in the coming year, with new material and some multimedia surprises.

CD of the Week: Daylight Hours, How To Make a Mess Of Things

The Daylight Hours
How To Make a Mess Of Things
self-released

David Adedokun is an anomaly, but don’t tell him that–he might notice. A knotty-haired black man, he looks more likely to be fronting a reggae or progressive rap act than either his former hard-rocking ensemble Courage Riley or the more subdued singer-songwriter tones of his latest effort, The Daylight Hours.

After the breakup of Courage Riley a few years ago, Adedokun kept a fairly low profile but referred on occasion to a new batch of songs and a new recording project in the works since 2006.

Two years in the making, How To Make a Mess Of Things isn’t a grand statement or a life-changing epic on the Radiohead scale, but it is a thoroughly satisfying album with songs that get under your skin, whatever color it happens to be.

The closest musical reference point would have to be Jeffrey Gaines, due to the similar dichotomy of a black man singing what’s normally considered the kind of music made by self-absorbed, good-looking but whiny white guys. For a more well-known comparison, see David Bazan, Bright Eyes, or even Dashboard Confessional.

However one chooses to categorize or otherwise place The Daylight Hours into a box, the one thing that can’t be neatly wrapped up is the kind of raw-nerve emotion that Adedokun has injected into the songs.

“Truth About Girls,” puts forth Addedokun’s mission statement as it applies to relationships: “Don’t take the poison yet, cause once it’s in you it stays there.” He’s referring to guys getting interested in girls, and as far as Adedokun’s concerned there doesn’t seem to be much positive in the outcome of that interest.

“Dear John Reply,” is one of those “letter” songs, but the recipient ultimately resists the urge to reply in kind to a breakup note. As the narrator goes through what amounts to the various stages of grief, from recognition to anger to acceptance, he writes a one-sentence answer, “This is the day I let you go,” but doesn’t mail it.

The downer spell of the songs is occasionally broken with a more upbeat tune like, “Only One Juliet,” which ramps up the instrumental cadence as it offers a nearly optimistic, yet somewhat unfocused take on the search for love: “A thousand star-crossed Romeos and only one Juliet / What does not kill me or offer me a drink still won’t help me sleep.” The loping, country-rock vibe makes it the most immediately affecting listen here, though anyone wanting only surface-deep songcraft and pretty songs would do well to look elsewhere.

Adedokun is in that unique position that nearly everyone finds themselves in at some point in their lives, past the youthful, optimistic, impressionable years of high school and well into the illusion-shattering arrival of married life, kids, and what passes for reality. Hopefully for his sake, songwriting is a way of escaping those pressures, giving sweet-voiced release to the kind of sentiments expressed in songs such as, “Mr. Someone Else.”

“I want to burn my clothes and drive my car off a cliff and just disappear like a ghost and show back up in a brand new skin, shake your hand like we never met, ‘Hello my name is Mr. Someone Else, someone who hasn’t hurt you yet.”

It’s one of those universal feelings that anyone who has hurt someone they love can identify with, and Adedokun sings it with such pained expressiveness that one can’t help but know that it’s a feeling he’s intimately familiar with, just as most of these songs are delivered with a long-suffering, Job-like voice of experience with emotional struggles.

The question left open is whether or not the characters in these songs have the kind of faith Job possessed in the ultimate outcome–more often than not they’re left hanging after the last verse fades with no indication of a satisfactory denoument.

Regardless of the answers, rarely do questions like these get framed in such painstakingly precise emotional detail. As the title of this disc implies, Adedokun may know how to make a mess of things, but he also has a gift for pouring the results into some heartwrenchingly beautiful songs.

They’re playing our songs–Campaign Songs for 2008

There are a couple of presidential primaries coming up here in South Carolina the next two Saturdays, and me being the music wonk that I am instead of the policy wonk that I would be if this was a political blog, my thoughts today turned to what songs the candidates should use for their theme music–the stuff you hear at rallies and events as they enter and exit. Even after searching online for an hour, I still haven’t found all the actual songs being used, so I decided to suggest a few they should be using.

Hillary Clinton — Celine Dion’s “You and I” was an early choice in the campaign, as was Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s, “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.,” and lately, “Taking Care Of Business.” While the latter is better than the former, neither captures the mood like hubby Bill’s use of Fleetwood Mac’s, “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,” way back when. I hear thatBig Head Todd & The Monsters wrote a song for her, too, but they should have just let her use, “Brokenhearted Savior.”
With Hil’s love of entitlements like universal health care, I’d suggest the classic, “Lean On Me,” by Bill Withers or the 80’s remake by Club Nouveau.

Barack Obama — “City Of Blinding Lights,” by U2, is his usual song, and it’s hard to argue with that one just because it sounds cool. After the week or so he’s had in the campaign, however, I’d love to hear James Brown’s, “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” instead.

John Edwards — He’s using U2, too, but an unintentionally awful choice, “Pride (In the Name of Love).” How a song about Jesus Christ and the assasination of MLK can be chosen as a rich white guy’s theme song is beyond me. He used, “Small Town” by John Mellencamp in 2004, if he wants to sound a populist note this time around he ought to be cranking up some Hootie & the Blowfish, since they’re from his native South Carolina and they’ve supported him publicly in the past. “Hold My Hand,” would work, though the tempo is probably too slow to get the blood pumping at a rally.

Mitt Romney–Not sure what he’s actually using out there, but given his insistence on jumping into the “Change” rhetoric recently, maybe he could trot out Buddy Miles, “Them Changes.”

John McCain–Another one where I’m unsure of the real song being used. His war stories give lots of fodder for interesting choices, but I like the one suggested on another blog’s comments I read tonight–the classic Naked Raygun song, “Soldier’s Requiem.” Now that’s a song to get some blood flow going.

Mike Huckabee–He plays bass, he’s a minister, I can’t believe he’s not using a gospel song for a theme. “I Still Believe,” by the Call, would be an excellent choice, both for the bass line and the spiritual content. (Long gone candidate Tom Vilsack actually used another Call song, “Let The Day Begin,” for his song during his brief candidacy.)

Fred Thompson–The last conservative standing, he’s like an Andy Griffith candidate, and not just because he’s been on TV a long time. Hey, maybe he could just borrow the whistling end theme from the “Andy Griffith Show.”

Rudy Giuliani–Given the former NYC mayor’s constant use of his 9/11 experience as a reason to vote for him, I can think of no other more proper choice for Rudy than Bruce Springsteen’s, “The Rising,” but I doubt Bruce would allow its use, given how much Ronald Reagan screwed up with “Born in the U.S.A.” way back in the 80s.

Ron Paul–The only candidate with his own original songs from the start, all I can say is that Paul needs better songwriters. With the dirigible he’s been flying around, a Led Zeppelin song would be an appropriate choice, right? How about, “Achilles Last Stand” for his dwindling chances of actually getting enough votes for people to take him seriously?

Anybody else out there have any additional suggestions?

<<Super Tuesday Update: check out this video posted on Youtube featuring Will.I.Am from Blackeyed Peas, John Legend, and more, in a song that ingeniously and movingly puts Barack Obama’s words to music.

Out Of The Red, Into The Black

After a recent conversation with Columbia, SC singer-songwriter Hannah Miller, I’m convinced that the title of her new album, Into the Black, isn’t coincidental. You see, Miller is a fully independent artist with no label, management, or other business backing her. The real bottom line, therefore, isn’t just about how good the music is—and it is quite good, more on that later—but on how much it has cost her to put it out the way she wanted it to sound, and how now that it’s out there, her focus is on getting out of the red and into the black, financially speaking.
“I got hooked up with my producer Mitch Dane through a Jars of Clay album he worked on, Who They Are Instead.” Miller says. “I loved that album and listened to it a lot, so I figured that Mitch, who co-produced it, would be a guy I would like to work with. I found his website and email address and wrote him an email which gave him a link to my music and said I’d like to work with him.”
This audacious approach worked for Miller, probably because Dane heard something he liked in what she was doing.
“He liked, “Ashes,” which is on my Storms Of Summer EP, and he got in touch and we talked about doing something.” It was then that Miller realized what she was getting into, or at least the cost of it.
“First, he gave me the price tag of way too much money for a week’s recording, which there was no way I could do.” Miller’s persistence and follow-up paid off, however.
“About a year later I got back in touch and talked with his assistant about working with them on some song publishing, and he offered me a little better deal to do the project, which I really couldn’t afford either, but I decided to go for it and raised money through friends with a fundraising campaign–I’ve paid off about half of it so far.” The other half, Miller figures, will have to come from CD sales and her live performances.

The talk about the business side of things for Hannah Miller would be pointless if her music wasn’t any good; the business is littered with self-financed vanity projects that have little musical value outside their creator’s circle of close friends and relatives. From the start, however, she has radiated the kind of heart-stopping stage presence and vocal command that demands attention even in a noisy bar or smoky coffeehouse. Her earlier recorded efforts were all in a mostly solo acoustic setting, as were the majority of her live shows, so the new album’s fully produced sound is sure to turn even more heads as she hits the road to promote it.
“I feel like I’m just getting started for real,” Miller says, “I’ve kind of had some false starts where I didn’t know what I wanted to do yet. If the EP was kind of like being born, this is me taking my first steps—so there’s a lot more to come and this is just a beginning, a starting place.”
Miller sounds confident and sure of herself in person as well as on the new disc, and her focus now is on continuing to improve.
“I finally feel like I’ve come into my own sound and style the way I want it,” She says. “You put something out there, but you keep writing, so once it’s out you want to go back and do it again. You’re really only in competition with yourself, trying to get better.”
The difference-maker between her earlier work and the current album has to be its producer, Mitch Dane, an observation that Miller is quick to agree with.
“Mitch Dane’s awesome, and even from the start he was helping me get better,” Miller says. “Over the summer I sent him songs and we picked which ones we wanted to record.”
Miller says that Dane’s outsider perspective allowed him to advise her on both major and minor points, from that song selection process down to just how Miller was actually singing them.
“I was going a bit more of a country-sounding route without thinking about it, and was sounding a bit more country in my singing,” Miller says. “He nipped that in the bud after listening to my other recordings–he recommended I get rid of the country ‘Reba’ kind of sound and re-focus my voice. I came from a very strict vocal way of singing and got kind of looser over the years, which is where the country sound had crept in, I suppose. Mitch picked up on my best voice, out of the four different ones he said I was using, and helped me find it. He also had me raise the songs a couple of keys and sing them in a higher voice than I was used to–it all resulted in a better record.”
Into the Black is indeed a better record—better than Miller’s previous work, and better than much of what one can hear on commercial radio, though several songs would probably fit in well on certain formats. The noncommercial and college radio stations that have already started playing the new disc have all picked up on the same song, “In So Deep,” which with its upbeat, breezy pop-jazz sound is probably the most refreshingly atypical song Miller has ever done. She says Mitch Dane, her producer, was largely responsible for the recorded version of that song.
“He had a vision for that song from the beginning,” Miller says, “I did it for him the first time I played in Nashville, but the lyrics were a lot different. We really worked on it, gave it that real 1970s vibe and re-wrote it together as a real joint effort.”
Dane gets a co-writing credit for, “In So Deep,” and several other songs on the album, something that Miller says was a new experience for her.
“I struggled with the co-writing thing but I wanted to give him credit,” Miller says, “I wanted people to know that I really appreciated his help. I’m glad I had the assistance with ideas on the songs, we tore up some of the songs and reworked them so much, going back and forth, but every time it made a better song.”
Miller’s songs tend toward the sad-eyed end of the girl-meets-boy spectrum, something that those who know her status as a happily married young woman might find a bit odd, but she says there’s no deep, psychoanalytical reason for that.
“I just like to write sad songs, it’s easier than writing happy songs,” Miller says. “It is just easy for me to get in that mindset. All the relationship songs have nothing to do with me and Jim (Miller’s husband and sometimes band member), however–I’m growing as a songwriter, and I think it’s good when I can write from different perspectives, not just from my own experience.”
Miller may not have problems with her songwriting muse, but as a self-professed Christian in a mostly secular music industry, she does have some issues in balancing her faith and her vocation.
“That is one of the big struggles I have with doing this as a career,” Miller says. “I don’t really agree with the Christian music industry, which I see as pretty much the opposite of a truly creative force, and I don’t want a deal like that–I feel like creativity is a part of God and Christian music is void of a lot of creativity.”
Miller’s own strong faith, however, means that there are specific Christian themes overtly placed within her own songs. The new album, for example, includes, “Ever Since Eve,” which decries the fact that, “We’ve been seeking paradise, but we haven’t found it yet,” and the closing track, “Ye Shall Love,” which lifts its lyrics directly from the Book of Deuteronomy in the Bible.
“I don’t leave the more religious songs off, but I don’t want to be seen as just a Christian artist,” Miller says. “I still struggle with that but I’m learning I can do both, people like both, and I just want to strive to write good music, real authentic music.”
Now, if Miller can manage to earn some good, authentic cash to pay off the debt she’s incurred in releasing her good, authentic music to the masses, we might get to hear more from her in the future.