The story of PARAE – the long version – by eriq

I had started learning how to record and engineer music back in 1997 while in college. Whereas it seems most kids cut their teeth playing in punk rock bands during what we’ll call “formative years,” developing a sound, stage presence, and coherence, I chose to hide out in a recording studio. I had always hated performing live, probably traumatized by years of unenthusiastic piano recitals and high school marching band. At the time, I reckoned that it made more sense to learn the art of audio engineering, so that I would be better equipped to completely capture my musical aspirations without the dependence of other people or the expense of recording studios and time limitations. I was probably wrong. Working with the equivalent of an 8-track via early versions of pro-tools, my goals were never lo-fi, nor were the results at all hi-fi (though I certainly aspired for them to be!) It was all just a long stretch of over-obsessed ideas that sometimes worked but usually fell short of my own expectations. A learning process, if you will.

Flash forward to about two weeks before the towers fell in NYC, I went to the local music store with Tommi and said to the salesman, “Gimme your cheapest drums!” Two big boxes and four hundred dollars later, we were setting them up in the living room of our apartment in Santa Cruz. I picked up the sticks and gave them a try for about five minutes before giving up and realizing that I had bitten off much more than I could chew. Tommi said, “My turn,” sat down and proved to have a natural hidden talent that had been denied throughout childhood.

Realizing that I now had an unexpected drummer (Tommi had been interested in learning Bass), it was around this time that I finally started to actually make an effort to put together a live band. Unfortunately I did it all the wrong way. I was too headset on working with pre-existing songs that I had already written, and hadn’t yet learned to simplify or let things evolve organically within a group of players (it would remain this way for a long time). Nevertheless, band members came and left, and we did eventually play some meager shows with our friend Erin on keyboards. I continued recording in my accustomed mid-fi manner, learning via trial and error how to successfully incorporate Tommi on acoustic drums.

Somewhere along the way I fell into producing a “remix” for the folly that was the Dismemberment Plan’s remix album. I had heard of them, but never actually heard any of their music. When they offered via their website the opportunity for anyone to try and remix their music, I figured, why not? Perhaps this could be my big break! So I chose my track based on the most pretentious sounding song title available. I chose to only work with the original source samples, and was quite surprised when they liked my initial attempt. They made some suggestions and I gave it another go, the next thing I knew, my remix of The Face of the Earth was the lead off track on the record they put out. Anyway, turns out I had picked a pretty great song to work with and destroy (which again, I chose to discover after the fact). Critically the album didn’t do that well, and after giving it a listen myself, I didn’t much care for most of the other remixes either.

Eventually, Tommi and I moved to San Francisco and we put together a pretentiously titled CDR (DESCRIBE - 2004) of the songs we had recorded over the past couple of years from when we lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Not very many people heard it. We bumped around the city, working crappy jobs, losing our youth, and I was pretty depressed for awhile. When I did start writing songs again, most of them were about failure. By this point we had stopped playing live for about two years. After awhile, we were offered some shows, I came out of my funk and we started trying to get our shit together. Much like the joke about Spinal Tap and their drummers, we had had a long string of friends who spent short stints of time in the keyboard position. It wasn’t until early 2007 that we met a handsome young man named Colin off of Craigslist who ended up playing with us for six months and would have a great impact on both myself and Tommi and the way we worked.

With Colin on board, we started jamming together and improvising ideas all the time. No longer was I the sole dominant songwriter within the group; we had found an equal just as passionate and creative with whom we had great chemistry. Colin had just as many ideas for songs, and for the first time I would be forced to work with someone else’s material if I wanted to keep them around (which I did!) During the six months that the three of us played together, we worked up eight original songs together, several of which he sang lead on. Collaboration was a new thing for me, but in the end (and after some time of me being a complete asshole) I learned that the results were well worth it. Unfortunately Colin could not stay indefinitely, for he had already committed to go to film school in NYC, and in the fall of that year the band returned to being just Tommi and me.

After some disastrous shows as a duo, we concluded that we couldn’t do the kind of material we had written with just the two of us. My voice had gotten stronger and more confident, and I had moved past most of my stage fright and performance anxiety. We now had 30 songs that had been recorded over the past 3-4 years, and I was dead set on putting them all out together in one big overwhelming double CD collection (META AMBIGUE - 2008). It was time for us to do this thing as a real live band. We found a new keyboardist, Jerry, who would stay with us for a year, and shortly thereafter we met Corey.

At the time, Corey was this 19 year old power-pop mod skater recently transplanted from Salinas that Tommi had become friends with at work. I met him one night when I came home to find him passing out on my couch and thought, hmmm, who is this cute little brat? He and Tommi had been engaged in a contest to see who could out drink the other. Tommi won that round. Around this time Corey had a theoretical band going on with some of his friends and said, “Hey Tommi you should be in our band, we need a drummer!” To which Tommi replied, “Fuck that, we need a bass player, you should join my band!” [i did not say this! in fact i was very polite and explained my time constraints and obligations - tommi] And from there, with Corey and Jerry on board, we became a four piece and started playing shows together.

It was now 2008, and I had just spent too much money putting out a double CD that only our keyboardist Jerry listened to, and we were now starting to act like a real band. It wasn’t until about six months later that we found Jimo.

One night Tommi decided to go out drinking and I elected to stay home and lounge about (being the old man that I am). From all accounts, much dancing, drinking and shenanigans ensued. All I know is “a friend” had been made by the name of Jay who at the end of the night ran off with one of Tommi’s gloves (as insurance for a future encounter). According to Tommi, he was new to San Francisco, also a musician, and susceptible to leaving long and awkward phone messages. He was also interested in utilizing Tommi’s drum skills for his musical project (James Genteel and his many Regrets), and a CD of some of his tunes came my way that left me pretty impressed. About a month later we were having our annual summer house party and I was hiding from our guests by playing DJ. Suddenly this stranger came running over to me screaming, “OMG! OMG! You just put on my favorite ENON song!” To which I replied, “Why that’s because it’s my favorite ENON song too!” He introduced himself as Jimo, said he played guitar, and within five minutes I had formally offered him a position with the band, which he quickly declined (he was bluffing). It wasn’t until much later in the night that I learned that Tommi’s long fabled glove thief Jay was the same person as my eccentric new friend Jimo. A week or so later, Tommi and I conspired to bring Jimo to hang out at band practice. Though Corey had initial doubts about the new guy, Jimo deemed us worthy and decided to join our operation. We played our first show as a five piece about three weeks later.

We started recording what would become the TINNITUS record shortly thereafter, with Jimo taking an active role in producing, recording and mixing. About halfway through the initial recording, Jerry retired from the band, and we pressed ahead as a four piece. It was a slow process though, many songs had to be recorded twice, as we were still learning how to best work with each other as a group. Eventually we found that we wanted a live sound and energy, and chose to eschew click tracks altogether. While some songs featured layers upon layers of overdubs of guitars, synths, percussion, and vocals, others were recorded nearly or completely live. Our goal was to find a balance between the rawness of a live band mixed with the hi-fidelity of modern recording technology (with the tools we currently have at our disposal).

I’m not sure why this project has been called and has continued to remain with the moniker PARAE. Its origins are much less interesting than any story we could collectively fabricate, and yet linguistically it retains an aspect of being foreign and pertaining to something that may be unknowable. Language is a unique tool of expression, with words having collectively construed meanings. When you take those meanings and cultural constructs away, what remains can cause discomfort within an English dominated culture as one strives to assign pre-existing meaning and symbolism to something where there is none. While we could argue that this is in itself an apt metaphor for us as a band, we proudly state that it is with great admiration and respect that we are indeed stealing (either consciously and sub-consciously) from each and everyone one of our collective influences. Perhaps our only innovation is our willingness to be whatever it is we desire at any such moment in time. We will only acknowledge that we have a tendency to be an experimental and noisy fucked up POP band.

Moving forward, we have this record that the four of us have worked together to make, TINNITUS. We arrived at this title because we couldn’t agree on anything better, and that’s what Jimo and I acquired during the making of the bloody thing. It is the best record we could make at the point in time in which we made it and we are very proud of it. World domination soon to follow...