Happy New Year! To kick off 2012, I’m happy to introduce a new contributor to ENS, Jonathan Goolsby. Jonathan co-hosts Salina Underground on Cincinnati’s own WVQC already, and I think after you read this piece you’ll be impressed with his writing skills as well. Enjoy!

Taking a Chance on Artistry and Brotherhood

Jonathan Goolsby

It has been seven years since Ashley Peacock worked on his last album. That record – Begin, released under the moniker “The Times” – was a polished pop-alt offering which attracted attention from Nashville and Hollywood alike. Tracks from the album were featured on the WB’s One Tree Hill and MTV’s Teen Mom. Major labels were knocking on his door. But things, as they are sometimes wont to do, fall apart.
“In 2006, Kyle [the Times’ bassist] left,” recounts Peacock. “We tried to keep it going. There was a lot of interest in the material. And there was a week when we were doing a really ill-fated tour out East and I felt like I needed to maybe hang it up. So I took a week and prayed, and it felt like God told me to st- . . .”

Peacock pauses, reconsiders. Continues: “To quit. Or at least to stay home. After I’d made the decision to not continue with the project, I found out my wife was pregnant with our first kid, so there was something else going on there. Atlantic Records wanted the project, and I didn’t tell them no, but I said they’re gonna have to deal with an artist who won’t tour, because I’m staying home with my family, I’ve made a decision.”

So began a prodigal intermission. Peacock parted ways with his manager. He and his wife moved to South Carolina, then back to Cincinnati, raised chickens in their back yard and welcomed two children. But, as the family grew, so too did a certain creative emptiness.

Meanwhile, Todd Gilbert, Peacock’s high school friend back in Flint, Michigan, bounced in and out of local cover groups, finding no root and feeling shiftless.
“The main thing I wanted to do was to write and make my own music,” Gilbert says. “Not so much worry about a paycheck, but be more concerned about the art, playing music for anybody that wanted to hear it. I kept trying different bands, to see if any of them would bite on such a thing and it just never panned out.”

But the pair kept in touch. Off weekends, Gilbert would hop a Megabus. They would write and record. Something organic grew in the niche. Enter the Chance Brothers.

“Every time we would work together on something, we’d really gel,” Peacock asserts. “We wrote and recorded a song, and it was great. Then we wrote and recorded another song, and it was fantastic. Those two songs are going to end up on the record. And they’re probably five or six years old, at least.”

***

It is late December on a Sunday afternoon. The light is coming sideways; sun is down on the southwestern horizon. In front of me: a dilapidated ex-Catholic church in a well-worn part of Norwood. I’ve been invited to a recording studio; it has been carved out of an old Sunday school classroom. As reporter? As critic? As witness? All of the above, maybe; I don’t know.

It is eerie. Vast and appropriate. Peacock meets me outside.

“This is where Over the Rhine records,” he says, opening an adjoining room. “That’s all their merch.”

There is a lot of merch.

There is also a fully-equipped soundroom. A $10,000 board. A classic four-piece Ludwig kit. A Shure SM57 behind an improvised baffle fort. The track lights are disc-shaped; they hang like trains of flying saucers. I wait to be transported. The beat-down puke green couch in the corner looks like as good a spot as any.

“Every studio needs a big, comfy couch,” Peacock says. To Gilbert: “What did we decide? Every studio needs a big, old, ratty couch, a stack of porn and a cat.” He cocks an eyebrow. “Our porn is a stack of Modern Drummer magazines.”

The building is not insulated. Though no longer a cathedral, it is in use for something. A non-denominational congregation is holding Christmas choir practice upstairs. Squeals of kids running up and down the hard-tiled hallways and chipped mahogany staircases bleed through the walls. No worry for our intrepid brothers Chance.

“I want to document an experience,” Peacock expounds. “I want to put those songs in a time and place. Think of all your favorite records throughout history. You can probably associate either a city, or a room, or something that was happening at the time of that record.”

He thinks a moment. “Think of all the top Billboard records of the past 15 years and they’re not timeless. They have no roots. They’re just top-heavy, floating works of pop rock that don’t have a place and a time. They don’t have stories. I like records that have stories. Listen to Wrecking Ball by Emmylou Harris. That was made in an old house. You feel like you’re there.”
Mm. Does Achtung Baby get made anywhere other than Berlin in 1990?

“Exactly.”

“I learned so much from the Times record,” continues Peacock. “I started thinking, ‘OK, what room do I want to record that in? What room do I want to put the Wurlitzer in? What room do I want to do vocals in?’ So you start thinking less in terms of which microphone is going to be best mic for the job, and start thinking, ‘Where do I want to feel like I am when I hear this record?’”

More kids on the stairs. Peacock chuckles.

“Remember what we said about documenting a place and a time? Careful what you wish for, because you can get dogs barking, sirens and cars door slamming. Sometimes, that’s the stuff that makes a record. When you’re listening to Wrecking Ball and you hear the drummer’s stool squeak — that’s the stuff that draws me into a record.”

More so to my point. So God told this guy to stay home for seven years. Maybe this creaky, leaky old church is the perfect place to offer up something new. He’s done His service. Could it be that the Almighty has staid the hand holding a knife, just before it sacrificed career on a willing altar? Not unprecedented.

The session begins. Between takes, Whitney Houston impressions and various pop culture non sequiturs, obvious singles present themselves. “Ruby” will be a straightforward, climbing rock ballad in quintessential Peacock style. It’s a fight not to jump in and sing along while the tape rolls.

Strong country threads hold seams together; Gilbert’s lead vocal on “Let Me In” belies a hint of stove wood, home and hearth. There is an element of dipping a toe back in water and keeping the other foot firmly planted, ready to turn back with the slightest trepidation. I imagine “Chance Brothers” was a carefully-chosen flag to fly. Are they not sure of themselves?

“Ash, I don’t believe the ‘question in her soul’ lyric,” I venture. “Seems crowded.”

A mometary, piercing stare. “Call it artistic license.”

I’ve treaded.

They are sure of themselves. There is a circle-the-wagons vibe. Not taking one last chance, per se; more like two pioneer brothers marking their claim in the woods.

Says Gilbert, “There’s a mutual respect between the two of us. We can honestly critique each other’s work performance and be completely OK with it. We’re very open to suggestion from each other. And lots of bands can’t do that.”

“I pride myself on being a vocal guy,” adds Peacock. “I know how to get a good vocal out of people in the studio. And [Gilbert] turns around and produces my vocal. I totally trust him. I’m not gonna turn around and say, ‘Who do you think you are, I’m the vocal guy?’ He tells me to take a breath here and try this different phrasing, I’m gonna trust him.”

Gilbert agrees, smiles. “Trust in each other is the big deal. To trust that the ideas and opinions come from a good place – it’s all about serving what the song itself requires.”

“If you’re like, ‘I really like my harmony on that song, I want it to stay,’ well, who are you serving then?” Peacock asks. “You’re turning up the ‘me’ button, and that doesn’t belong on any console.”

***

“It’s nice to be able to come to an open space like this and just create without any limitations, without any fears,” offers Gilbert. He has just given a final vocal take for “Moving On.” “It’s just you and the room. Sometimes, it’s hard to take yourself back to where you were when you wrote it. But it’s worth it, realizing [that] where you were wasn’t maybe the healthiest place to be. And through the song, you’re starting to realize that. By the time you get to the bridge, you’ve realized it and you’re pushing forward.”

I toss out Joyce and the notion of writing the epiphany.

“He was probably onto something,” says Peacock. “But didn’t he die penniless?”
Gilbert: “Crap.”
“Did you use the emotion in the performance?” Peacock asks.

“Yeah.”
“That’s all I ask. Go there, deal with it, get out, leave it behind.”
Peacock looks at the console, then turns back in his chair to Gilbert. “I thought you said we were gonna go get a beer?”

“After this.”
“Is that my reward?”
“Yes.”

***

Not over beer, but after-session midnight pancakes:

“I’d always wanted to get him writing and recording again,” says Gilbert of the effort to coax his friend and collaborator out of self-imposed exile. “We always seemed to bring out something in each other that we might not have normally gotten without working together. If we write something we do, if we don’t, maybe we tried. And we wrote eight songs in six days.”

Mouthful of French toast, Peacock bites:

“[In South Carolina] I spent every Monday night in a songwriters forum. It was just a bunch of middle-aged people playing really honest songs, and it got to me. It got me appreciating the craft of creating music again. I guess that kind of primed the pump, creatively.” He washes it down.

“What did I have to lose? Todd’s safe, yet he challenges me. I knew that Todd would be OK if it didn’t go anywhere. There was no pressure. It wasn’t like going to a writing session in Nashville. It wasn’t turning in my quota as a staffwriter. It was just getting together with my buddy and seeing what happens. But I also knew that Todd would be up for pushing the creative envelope if we were able to enter that headspace. He was the perfect collaborator.”

“We’ve always seemed to musically finish each other’s thoughts,” says Gilbert. “We can really sense where the other person is going.”
Peacock: “It’s ridiculous.”
“I’d come to him with a chorus idea and we’d work out the rest of it in 20-25 minutes. I think subconsciously, we both wanted it to go somewhere, but we were OK if it didn’t,” afffirms Gilbert.

Peacock again: “My headspace was ‘I can’t think about where this might go, but I don’t want to not take it seriously.’”

Gilbert: “It’s a lot easier to focus on the work you’re doing when you have the other person with you, pushing you to do the best you can.”
Peacock: “You wanna Skype with your girlfriend or you wanna make out with her?”
“Exactly.”
Gilbert pauses, looks Peacock up and down.

“I’m not saying I want to make out with you.”

***

The record gets made when the record gets made, says Peacock.

“I went into this wanting to experiment. And it’s the first time I’ve ever made music to make music – not as a business move. You know, I didn’t have a marketing plan, or tour routing visualized ahead of time. The only reason that I have been able to be as free with this project as I have, is that I haven’t cluttered my thinking with what’s going to happen after we’re done. Because you can’t not bring that to bear on a vocal take. I have to create art to make art. The only reason that this is getting made, in my mind, is that it needs to get made. I don’t care who hears it. I don’t care what format it’s in. I really don’t. Today’s evils are sufficient unto today.”

“It’s really hard to know the direction something’s going to go,” says Gilbert, “until you know what it is.”

I bite this time. Is that why you chose “Chance Brothers?”

“We had to name it something, says Peacock, looking at Gilbert.

“Couldn’t call it Cap’n Geech and the Shrimp Shack Shooters. That was already taken.”
Peacock ruminates. “It was more about brotherhood and fellowship than marketing. And that summed up the vibe of what we’re going for soncially.”
“Giving it its own identity, I think helps take it away from what people would expect from the two of us,” explains Gilbert.

Protecting yourselves?
“[In previous efforts with The Times] we’d set a deadline to hand things over to the mastering engineer, just so that we’d have a date when it would be ‘done,’” says Peacock. “And we stay up all night long mixing, mixing, mixing, mixing, until our hearing was numb, until we couldn’t hear sounds anymore.”

“You hear the same thing over and over and over and you can’t objectively think about it anymore. And you’re like, ‘Well, it’s 8 AM. The sun’s up. We have to be at the mastering engineer’s in an hour . . . I guess it’s done. And to not have the freedom to sit back and go, ‘I want to let that simmer and soak up some flavor, and then come back to it, and see if it needs to have anything added to it.’ We didn’t have that luxury. Now, we can do whatever we want with this, and it feels awesome.”

Peacock continues. “I don’t give a shit what anybody thinks about it. Fuck you. It’s my project. It’s mine, and it doesn’t have to play by any of those rules. It’s the first time I’ve ever had anything like that. And the fact that I have somebody to work with me that has the same attitude? He’s game for anything? He’s supportive but challenging? Man, I can’t envision making a record with anyone else.”

Gilbert sums it:
“We’re not writing it to convince anybody of anything. It just needs to exist.”