"Rock 'n' roll dreams vs. real life"

Sunday,October 22,2006

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When aspiring rockers grow up

As life pulls at their pockets, struggling musicians must decide how long to chase the dream | Page 5

Murfreesboro band Glossary is still plugging away after 10 years.

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MUSIC

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Glossary performs in its hometown of Murfreesboro at Wall Street.The band has been supporting its latest album, For What I Don’t Become, with whatever touring their day-job schedules can allow.

And that juggling act, says singer/guitarist Joey Kneiser, gets tougher and tougher with each passing year.“When you’re in music and your band’s not supporting you in any way, the older you get the harder it is to rationalize doing it,” he says.

Rock ’n’ roll dreams vs. real life For post-collegiate rockers, reality often gets in the way of the dream

By NICOLE KEIPER

Staff Writer

Bingham Barnes, 33, makes an unlikely businessman — playfully disheveled beard, campus-kid-issue loose jeans and T-shirt, friendly and sweetly shy mumble — but it’s half of what he is.

Grand Palace is where the businessman half lives.

On the square in Murfreesboro, it houses a small record store (cool stuff only, like hard-to-find vinyl) and a live venue space, across from the print shop where Barnes and his compatriots screenprint posters and T-shirts for other venues, bands and labels. The place used to be a righteous dump, GP partner Chuck Bruner says, but they cleaned and fixed it up quite a bit, and they’re proud of it.

“Because of the band, that’s why I do

what I do,” says Barnes, who for some 10 years has been the bass player in Murfreesboro Americana fixture Glossary.

“I learned silk-screen printing to make Tshirts for the band and to do the covers for the first 7-inch we put out.”

He knows it’s a pretty good setup, as far as struggling-musician day jobs go, even if the intent was to be on tour more than at Grand Palace, and it’s ended up the opposite.

Continued on Page 6 www.tennessean.com

IF YOU GO What: Glossary performing with Bang Bang Bang,The Shazam, AutoVaughn and more at NSMF2 Where: Belcourt Theatre, 2102 Belcourt Ave., 383-9140 When: Friday, Nov. 3, doors 4 p.m., show 4:30 p.m. to midnight Tickets: $10 advance and $15 day of show Contact: www.belcourt.org

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Sunday, October 22, 2006

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MUSIC Glossary singer/songwriter Joey Kneiser, 31, comes at that situation a little more typically — he took a temporary job in a kitchen because of the band, too, and goes a little stir-crazy, since it’s really not his thing, and it’s now been a seven-yearlong thing.

Wife and co-singer Kelly, 27, keeps two day jobs — one at Hastings, an entertainment retail chain, one at a local pottery place.

“I mean, they’re good jobs but obviously they don’t go anywhere,” Kneiser says, fidgeting with a thick stubble. “We can’t have a job that really goes somewhere and be in a band at the same time. It’s one or the other, and that’s one of the sacrifices you have to make.”

Any number of struggling, sacrificing, post-collegiate musicians could’ve made the same statement. And the same can be said for a lot of the statements Kneiser makes in Glossary’s latest record, For What I Don’t Become, which is a piece of why he wrote them. The Onion A.V. Club writer Noel Murray calls For What I Don’t Become “one of the most exultant albums ever made about failure,” but Kneiser just calls it “very human.”

“The ideas on the record were just very simple,” he says. “Just really thinking about what it means to be pursuing something that may never pan out.”

“And I’m burning like fire, shaking like a flame, running from the dead. Trying to fool myself into thinking I don’t need something to believe in.”

— Glossary’s “Shaking Like a Flame”

By day, Glossary bassist Bingham Barnes runs his own business called Grand Palace with partner Chuck Bruner, and screenprints T-shirts and posters for other artists.

It’s pretty fulfilling as day jobs go, he says, though he wishes the band could afford to tour full time.“At the same time, we just like playing,” he says.“As long as (singer) Joey (Kneiser) keeps playing songs, we keep having a good time, it really doesn’t matter if we ever make it out of Murfreesboro.”

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Sunday, October 22, 2006

When Glossary trucked out to Texas to record For What I Don’t Become in 2005, there was a lot of hope that things might move toward panning out, but band/life juggling already was tougher. Work took longtime drummer J.D. Reager to Memphis, and the distance made working on new songs a struggle. (He’s since parted ways with the band.)

Financially, things have never been anywhere near panning out.

“I mean, me and BJ (Barnes) have been in the band for 10 years, and I think I’ve probably made 100 bucks,” Kneiser says.

“We put all the money back in the band and just try to keep it going. Any money that we’ve ever taken home . . . it’s been $60 one time, $40 another time.”

If anything, pursuing music has been a financial suck — $3,000 to press records here, $1,200 to replace the old Dodge band van’s transmission there.

It makes for a level of instability, Kneiser admits, that gets tougher every year he spends in that kitchen.

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MUSIC “Especially when you start creeping into your 30s, and you’re like, ‘I have no retirement, I have no plan.’ It’s such a . . . it’s a life of uncertainty,” he says. “If you wanted to be a lawyer or a doctor, you know exactly what to do. You know what road to take. This, even the people who do make a living out of music don’t know how they did it. It’s one of those things that kind of picks you, you don’t really have a say.”

Maybe the toughest part of trudging through starving artistry into your 30s is that you tend to make art — like Glossary’s — that beams the slightly more mature sensibilities of the 30-something. And reaching the audience that relates to that, Kneiser figures, can be tricky.

“Music has abandoned (them) a little bit, to be post-college, to be late-20s/early 30s,” he says. “Even most of the bigger indie-rock bands appeal to a younger audience, and obviously pop music altogether has abandoned that age. But there’s millions of people that age out there who want good music. It’s just, how do you get

Glossary singers Joey and Kelly Kneiser are a fortunate couple in that they share a passion for music. But the other side, Joey admits, is that a married couple of struggling musicians makes for a household of financial instability. Still, he’s not about to change it.“You can go into some place where there’s men and women our age working some midlevel job, and have some kind of security,” he says. “(Maybe) they’re owning a house and got two cars or whatever. But if you go and ask those people,‘Would you rather be doing this or would you rather be in a rock band?’ they’re all gonna say,‘I’d rather be in a rock band.’ ”

Continued on Page 8

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Sunday, October 22, 2006

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to those people?”

As Nashville pop singer David Mead, 33, promotes Tangerine — the first record he’s released on his own label, Tallulah Media, and one with a similar range of lyrical sensibilities — he’s struggling with the same question.

“Marketing music to people our age is really difficult because we are basically the No. 1 choice primo demographic to market everything to,” Mead says. “We’re starting to buy homes, we’re starting to have babies, we’re buying new cars . . .

(But) if one producer at NPR was to say, ‘I like David’s record, let’s do an “All Things Considered” piece on him,’ within a week I would break even on my project. It’s that simple. And there are things like that that are completely attainable for an artist like myself or a band like Glossary. But getting to (them) is really, really difficult these days.”

Directed marketing comes with its own artistic complications, too.

Middle Tennessee rock act The Features’ former label, Universal, wanted the band to record a cover of The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” for a credit card commercial, and potentially use it as a single for a new record.

The band, hinky about the artistic implications, balked, and got dropped.

“The whole experience was, to say the least, not very fun,” says singer Matthew Pelham, 31, whose band released its new Contrast EP independently. “It felt completely wrong . . . and I’m thinking, ‘Well, there’s a good chance we’re gonna lose our record deal, and we’re not gonna have money and I’m gonna go right back to work.’ But I think in the end . . . we just

AT TENNESSEAN.COM To hear “Days Go By” from Glossary’s latest album, For What I Don’t Become, visit Tennessean.com and enter the keyword GLOSSARY.

wanted to feel like we made the right decision, and didn’t just let someone step on us and sort of use us to do what they needed.”

“And when my blood stops running, so will I.” — Glossary’s “The Reckless” Glossary’s made some headway since the new record came out on indie label Undertow — the band finally scored a booking agent, which can be tougher and ultimately more helpful than corralling a record label, and has some solid dates, including its first West Coast jaunt.

But like a lot of good things, that has its Continued on Page 10

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While the job that Glossary singer Joey Kneiser has held for almost seven years cooking at the Front Porch Cafe is ostensibly quite far from his music life, it does have its parallels, he says.

“Playing music is like being a cook or somethin’,” he says.“It’s like, you don’t decide whether you’re a good cook, the people who eat your food decide if you’re a good cook. Music is the same way.You don’t really know what you have until people get to hear it.”

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Sunday, October 22, 2006

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MUSIC

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Taipei Folk Dance Theater has presented over 600 performThe members of Glossary crack open a couple of PBRs before getting down to rock ’n’ roll business at hometown Murfreesboro venue Wall Street.

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CHEERS FOR PEERS In the way that The Wiggles’ music warms your average pre-schooler, My Chemical Romance woos many an angsty teen and Tony Bennett snuggles more mature sensibilities, Glossary’s For What I Don’t Become speaks elegantly to the burgeoning adult, balancing a waning adolescence and blooming grown-up aplomb.

It’s not the sexiest of life’s phases, but it’s an important one, and it does get threaded into song from time to time (even if it’s less often than your more carnal concepts).

Here are a couple other locally rendered rock records tailor-made for the post-collegiate set: The Features, Exhibit A (Universal) The “write what you know” adage certainly applied to Middle Tennessee band The Features’ major-label debut, Exhibit A, which ranges from an impeccably cool post-punk piece of wedded bliss (“The Idea of Growing Old”) to an impeccably cool postpunk lullaby (“The Way It’s Meant to Be”).

Singer Matthew Pelham, 31-year-old dad to twin 5-year-old girls, and his band managed to make all that grown-up stuff sound as edgy and thrilling as any paean to sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, even if being a parent and a struggling musician can be a complicated juggle.

“Before (the twins) were born we were just sort of,‘What are we gonna do for this, and what are we gonna do for money, how are we

ances in over 40 countries in Europe, America, Asia, and Africa, receiving numerous top awards in international dance events. Critics Have Hailed Taipei Folk Dance Theater as “the dance company that contains the most of the ethnic Chinese culture,” “the most impressive and powerful oriental dance company.”

gonna take care of these kids?’” Pelham says.

“And we worried about it for nine months.

(But) once it falls in your lap and it’s there, it’s just something you deal with however you can.

You don’t worry about it so much anymore, so much as just go and do what needs to be done.

And I think that’s sort of what we’ve always done with the band — if we can’t practice this week then we’ll practice next week. If we can’t go in the studio now, we’ll go . . .We just do it as it comes. It’s not as easy as it was, but I think it’s still just as much fun.”

David Mead,Tangerine (Tallulah Media) Walking from Nashville pop singer Mead’s early major-label material through to his latest album,Tangerine, you hear an artist maturing from a restless romantic into a young husband pondering the ideologies and idiosyncrasies of marriage and adulthood.

From the outside, the musician lifestyle may seem to lend toward prolonging adolescence, but Mead figures it just informs a particular kind of maturation.

“I would like to think that maybe being a musician has just allowed me to live more presently in the fact that nothing is stable,” he says.“There’s just no way to create any life for yourself that’s truly stable, because anything can happen at any time.You can’t insulate yourself from the world around you, no matter what your career is.”

— NICOLE KEIPER, STAFF WRITER

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Sunday, October 22, 2006

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