stephaniesid

this video was shot and produced in greensboro, nc by our friends at monkeywhale.  we spent a crisp 3-hour morning in their great house with a red phone.  xoxo, harvey and carolyn.

thought we had a free weekend.  which is a luxury.  the baseboards have white fuzz all gunked up in them since we babysat our friend’s dog a couple months ago.  so yay!  time to purge allergens, be domestic, sport yoga pants nonstop.  but friend molly (of paper tiger) asked me to run the merch table for her late-nite-afterparty show on thursday,  so of course i said yes, and it all went moogness from there.

i got to dancing (rbts win and paper t were encouraging thus, and what with all the lights and the jameson, i forgot baseboards and remembered hips and fuzzy hats and got jealous that all these freaky people were going to do this for the next 3 days), and then… as a gift from the universe… this white-haired man (by the auspicious name of nik moon) had an extra ticket to the fest. and he signed it over, just like that.  i squelched any native iowan tendencies to refuse the offer. then i started trying to remember who was playing over the weekend.  because you screen out this kind of info when you’re planning to vacuum.  and floods of ‘oh, flaming lips! oh my god! tv on the radio!’ flooded their floods. and i’d get on itunes when i got home, and introduce my ears to the bands i hadn’t heard of.  electronica is a whole other world for me. despite my alesis micron prowess and chuck’s nord badassing, i don’t really know the social culture of electronic music, from the inside.  (e.g., when i first arrived and said to a neon gal in the crowd, “i’m looking for molly,” she craned her neck around the room and then looked at me, and she said, “oh, you mean, like, a person?”).   but i digress.

i found a surprise comrade:  bob boilen, a friend of molly’s and founder/host of npr’s all songs considered. down for the fest, just off the heels of cmj.  bob is instantly likable, with round glasses and a journalist’s hat.  he is sensible, perceptive, warm, grounded.  and such a fan of music.  he was psyched to be buying $3 beers.  and i got a sense he was digging this city, though i trust he’s been here before.  i’ve lived in asheville long enough to feel ownership its delights, and i’m always happy to give this town to people who aren’t from here.

so i danced.  which is my thing.  i miss it sometimes, since i don’t really seek it out by itself.  since i’ve been in bands, dancing has become incidental to the act of playing music.  when i took over the guitar role in stephaniesid, i put on a rock n roll harness, in a way.  not all bad, for sure.  but anyway, i committed to a weekend of unbridle.  i befriended a wasted girl in a strobing gas mask contraption and long black pigtails.  bob took a picture of her.

“day 1″

four points hotel, people-watching in the lobby while waiting for nik moon and the official sign-over.  loving seeing all the big-city energy in little-city asheville.  people in expensive clothes, working out their dreams and lusting after coffee.  it’s always the same scene in the hotel lobby at a festival.  i pretend not to, but i’m always on the lookout for rockstars.  i like to see how they are in a real setting, how they treat the hotel clerk.  if they’re testy i know they’re not happy.  just because you’re a rockstar doesn’t mean you’re happy. but everyone i saw in there was nice as a ripe pear.  nik showed up and i was wristbanded and thankful.

matthew dear opened the fest.  they are exciting.  i wondered if i thought so because the trumpet player is a friend of jacob’s and we met the band as people before we heard them play.  but i’m pretty sure they were awesome.  troopers in the rain (why was there an outdoor venue at moogfest in october?  with no space heaters?  and nothing to protect artists’ gear?)…. matt himself is dreamily handsome, and has a deep sort of psychadelic furs voice.  greg (trumpet) later told us he was playing a quarter out of tune in the cold.  joys of the outdoors.  but the crowd was committed.

i had answered a plea to help with the opening of the brian eno installation entitled “77 million paintings“.  so i spent friday nite there, at the ymi cultural center, working the box office.  organizing everything was lauren snelling, the coolest girl i met at the festival.  she is funny, smart, pretty, and down to earth.  she told me about some hilarious interactions she’d had with eno, and trained me on the ticketing machines.  i was working a merch table again (as is the so often the case when your actual goal is to play music), but his stuff sold for tons more money than mine and my friends’.  note to self:  when you become a world-famous innovator, charge more.  i texted my friend (former stephaniesid/current toubab krewe drummer) vic, a huge eno fan.  he asked me to pick him up a deck of oblique strategies cards by eno and peter schmidt.  i did.  on each card in the deck, there’s a “phrase or cryptic remark that can be used to break a deadlock or a dilemma situation”.  like “honour thy error as a hidden intention.”  “ask your body.” “only one element of each kind.”  the deck costs $45.

i saw the installation.  i had wondered if i would look like a giant screen saver, but it didn’t.  It was extremely meditative.  i wasn’t ready for that.  i was excited to see tv on the radio later that night, and the backs of my eyelids were still burned with gas mask gear and pigtails.  still, i wished i could have spent more time in there.  like every saturday morning.

as i gabbed with lauren, a bald man walked in with a broken black umbrella.  he wanted to put the thing down, but was afraid of getting the floor wet, so we found a place to put it in the office.  he was typically british-i-don’t-want-to-be-a-bother-nice.  it was eno, checking on the installation.  he had told lauren it was the best presentation he’d seen of the installation so far.  and check out this one.  she was so happy.  i asked mr. eno to sign my deck of cards for vic.  he noted that these were 3rd (and not the latest) edition, because they’d found an extra box of 3rd editions (70′s era) in a corner of his house.  the shrinkwrap covering was more rigid than the kind they make today.   bonus.

hauled over to the tv on the radio show, at the civic center.  the sound in there is like a giant bathroom.  jesus.  it’s most suitable for bands with slow, big beats that give one boom time to ring out fully before the next.  i.e. thievery corporation, massive attack (moogfest 2010).  tv on the radio, though one of my favorite bands, was hard to cling to in there.  i danced like crazy because i kind of didn’t give a shit, and i was with friends.  but in the cacophony, i didn’t even recognize my favorite song from ‘dear science’ until halfway through, and not because the band was willing it that way.  that said, they were way fun to watch, and i dig them enough to just love being in the same room.  molly and bob were there, and another friend was in from out of town.  she’d lost weight due to a lot of stress.  at one point, i hugged her and she started crying and crying.  i don’t know the details, but that giant room and those lights and that hug were necessary for all.

“day 2″

breakfast at sunny point in west asheville with chuck, jacob, and jacob’s friend greg.  we talked about greg being on the road w/ matthew dear and some changes the band had just made, what it’s like to be a sideman on someone’s project when you have your own music to manifest, and then we all engaged in competitive suffering re: trying to play an instrument in subzero weather.  i think the horns win, but i did tell my story about my shriveling hand at pride fest.  so we all clocked in.

by this point, chuck ended up with a pass to the fest, but was bemoaning his badly sprained ankle (basketball), so he went home while i headed to the ‘moogaplex’.  i hope no one reading this created the piece of ‘art’ that greets people at the plex. it’s a big bubble of aluminum foil and wood, and there’s a tv in there for good measure.  you have to have a tv in your art if you’re a hipster.  it’s necessary.  it shows you’re trying to subvert tv culture.  or that you’ve done your homework and seen that to be a hipster you have to include a tv.  either way, that piece of ‘art’ was way too aware of itself.  but i digress.

there was a panel on sound design.  it included eric persing, diego stucco, and a couple other guys who seemed to do great stuff but whose names i don’t remember.  eric created all those sound effects you hear in movie trailers and commercials and whatnot, like the big boom that happens in a trailer right before someone says, “IN A WORLD…. ” — and diego is the guy that did this piece of awesomeness. it was good to hear their conversation, because you could tell they all liked talking to each other a lot.  they swapped stories about clients who hire them to create certain sounds but don’t describe them well… like “make it sound more purplish”.  one of the others said someone asked him to make the sound of 70,000 generations being born through time (he asked, “not 50,000? 70,000 exactly?” “yes, exactly 70,000 generations,” they answered.)  i was inspired by this panel to record everything around me, like i was doing for awhile a couple of years ago. i did birds, footsteps, machine noises…some of which ended up on starfruit.  i didn’t know they used inexpensive recorders like i do.  awesome.

afterward, i talked with josh naster from moog, who was holding a circuit bending contest not unlike a chef reality show: entrants are each given the same 3 or 4 early electronic toys (atari controller, speak and spell, etc.) with the task of achieving the “best sounding, best looking” creation made out of fucking with all the circuits and soldering stuff together.  the contestants were all sitting at their tables, hunched over their circuits like 80′s bartleby-the-scriveners.  one guy flew in from germany for it.  anyway, josh was patient in explaining this pursuit to me, and we got to talking about the instrumental music he makes in a local project called razor & blade.  and yay!  people tell them they need a singer.  i’ve never heard their stuff, but i want to get in touch with them.  i’m brewing an idea i’m calling “i hear voices” …i’ll wait to reveal the details.  anyway, don’t steal the name (though you wouldn’t be… i’m sure it’s already out there), because i got dibs.

saw naked and famous play.  i found them derivative, and i think my opinion is solid on this one, because i don’t even know that much electronic music.  i didn’t feel an authenticity.  stuck around for dan deacon, and despite great love for his recorded stuff, i couldn’t get into the live thing at all.  he wasn’t on the stage (during the time i was there)… he was in front, with “the people”, who mostly seemed happy to be at the party.  but i didn’t get the joke.  maybe it was the ripping cold.  planned to see yacht, but they canceled.  rumor was they couldn’t get out of mexico.  hoofed to civic center with my friend eric for sbtrkt.  was beginning to think at this point that i wasn’t an electronic music fan, but we were also dead dog tired & thus unreliable judges (you have to be at the top of your game to like this stuff.  let’s call a spade a spade:  it’s party music, by and large.), so we snuck over to thomas wolfe to get in the comfy chairs and take a nap in the dark.  i spent the next 15 minutes in escapist mode, slumped down,big furry coat up over my ears, while terry and gyan riley did their thing.  i did manage to note that gyan is an excellent guitar player.  and that the two have familial chemistry.  but with all due respect to the seminal nature of riley’s work, i was not a fan of the actual product.

flaming lips.  let me start by saying i’m not a good crowd member.  i’m egomaniacally averse to following the herd.  and besides, i’m short, i’m easily bored, i don’t like beer, and i’m too much of a control freak to smoke an unvetted joint.  but i’d had my nap, and i was committed to the weekend of unbridle, and, all bundled up like a football player, i wasn’t gonna take any shit.  eric had gone, and jacob had arrived when i got there.  the mob was building.  the lips have a huge reputation, and i usually hate being part of something that has a lot of hype (it’s a quality i need to get over, clearly).  so my dukes were up.  but when this guy (i’ll call him nate) started petting my fuzzy coat, and this tall guy (i’ll call him slim) started jumping around and running into everybody, i found myself to be a more benevolent soul than i’d anticipated.  nate was endearing, with his blonde hair and blue eyes and apologetic i-just-can’t-help-myself kind of eye contact.  he gave me the right attitude.  his eyes said not “duuuuude, yeah, music is my liiiiife, y’know?  like they’re gonna melt my face & shit.” but rather, “i do all kinds of things…but right now i’m gonna have a bunch of fun with all those balloons and that light-up vagina!”  slim continued to bump into jacob and me.  jacob put himself between slim and me, so i wouldn’t have to deal with it.  he’s chivalrous that way, and i found myself wanting to be chivalrous back.  when slim did it again, i took him by the skinny shoulders and said, in my most maternal and loving way,  “dude, you gotta stop. you’re annoying the shit out of people.”  he sort of cowered.  nate, who turns out to be a friend of slim’s, says, smiling, “quit bouncing them.  you’re bouncing them!”

the show was awesome.   i thanked nik moon and the lips and the privilege of being there.  chuck came to pick me up so i could make it over to see my buddies in truth & salvage company, over at the grey eagle.  not part of moogfest.  his ankle was hurting pretty badly that day, but he’s a lips fan, so we listened to the encore from the van, in the bank of america parking lot.  we couldn’t see the band…only some gorgeously autumned maple trees.  but pieces of confetti flew by, and it was magical (and warm) in the car with my sweetie.

truth & salvage (formerly from asheville but now LA-based), was tight, unabashed, and familiar… they’re ostensibly way too rootsy for my taste, but i love them.  with their guitars, 4-part harmony, wood, and earth, they were a welcome saturday-nite 180 from skinny jeans, synth and sky.  i got to sing the last song with them.  chuck and i stayed up all night with billy (the drummer), my old flame and one of our oldest friends, all nite, talking about how the dream is playing out.  in the choose-your-own-adventure of life, sometimes people are jealous of each other for taking the path they themselves decided against.  and sometimes the grass is greener on the other side.  and for sure: it’s hard to make a living playing original music, no matter how you slice it.

“day 3″

brunch with truth & salvage.  bill shared stories from his brother, who’s head trainer for the dallas mavericks.  and not only for the mavs… for the olympic team, the last 3 years in a row.  i remember when bill and i were dating… it wasn’t hard to believe that casey would go on to great things.  he’s easy to be around and lives and breathes what he does.  billy’s the same way.  watching him play drums and sing his songs, so joyfully, makes me cry almost.  i wonder if i was as supportive to him as i could have been.  his big adventures seemed to start after we broke up.  i learned a lot from that love.  anyway, i’m thoroughly thankful we’re friends.

naptime after breakfast.  i think going to festivals is a lot like being in kindergarten.  you have all this fun bonking around on the playground, and then you drop for an hour, and then you roll up your napping towel and drink some chocolate milk for another hyperactive go-round.  fittingly, i went to see active child with my friend eric.  so lovely!  the frontman is multi-instrumental, with a weird, high, sort of operatic voice.  he’s clearly a composer, and he did for me what some of the bands at the fest didn’t:  he found the intersection of sound design and musicality.  harmonies were creative, frequencies were tastefully out of each other’s way, and i found him to be a genuine person.  i didn’t feel the same about M83, though judging by crowd size, i’d say my opinion was the minority.  i felt i’d like to see that particular band without much synth at all.  they wrote pop songs, not vibe scapes.  i don’t know if i’d like the songs if i’d heard them that way, but i just wasn’t moved the way i felt the band was intending to move people.  again, though, i was overstimulated.  it was possible that i could not be moved.

i debated sticking around for ghostland observatory, and/or going over to the eno installation to be there for bob’s moogfest wrap, live on all songs considered.  but this train was out of steam.  i went home and got in the tub. washed off the weekend.  then watched several episodes of the wonder years, huddled on the sofa with chuckie, whose foot was blue and in ice.

i spent the weekend as a music fan.  how fun it is to be a music fan.  xoxo

oct. 18 was the worldwide release day for stephaniesid’s “starfruit” through nine mile records! get the album that alli marshall calls a “sparkling new pop gem” and wncw says cements the band as a “forward moving force in music today.”

get the album:
itunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/stephaniesid/id450022523
bandcamp (physical cd): www.stephaniesid.bandcamp.com
…or use the links above.

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in honor of the day, stephaniesid spent all day on facebook and twitter, giving away cd’s as fans answered questions about starfruit and the band by hunting through this website.  it was a blast… read the recap here.

“lush pop, layered vocals, rich horn parts and a certain velvety darkness” — alli marshall, mountain xpress

“starfruit… brims with lush, sophisticated pop, hip-hop and jazzy atmospherics” — hector saldaña, san antonio express-news

imaginative, innovative songs married to musical arrangements that are as much jazz-based as rock or pop are something that stephaniesid does unlike most other groups out there these days. it’s something that sets them apart in a world of copy-cat music and makes them interesting and intriguing.” — bill kramer, staunton news leader

“their recent appearance in wncw’s studio-b debuted some of the danceable delights from ‘starfruit’ and shows stephaniesid is a forward moving force in music today.” — dennis jones, wncw

“it’s an incredible album that gets better with each listen… support your ears and your brain’s request for incredible sonic input (what the brain calls “music food”). what we’re saying is that it’s fu**ing amazing. this is our favorite album we’ve heard all year, hands down.” — tom scheve, asheville disclaimer‎

call, request, and/or listen to stephaniesid on these actively spinning stations and please help us add more by calling your favorite!:

MAIN-FM (Asheville, NC)
WNCW (Spindale, NC)
WUSC(Columbia, SC)
WPRK (Orlando, FL)
WMSE (Milwaukee, WI)
WHFR (Detroit, MI)
KSYM (San Antonio, TX)
KFSR (Fresno, CA)
KTUH(Honolulu, HI)
KTSW (San Marcos, TX)

WQFS (Greensboro, NC)

KCSB (Santa Barbara, CA)

it’s soooo close to release time!! go here to get the album –it appears in stores oct. 18, but you can still get it early.

… here’s an article alli marshall wrote about it, in asheville’s mountain xpress, entitled, “ripe for the picking”:

The new stephaniesid album, Starfruit — despite its name-association with things tropical and celestial — was conceived in a dark basement. “A universe leapt out of the grayness,” says front woman Stephanie Morgan.

An advance listen of the album reveals lush pop, layered vocals, rich horn parts and a certain velvety darkness (perhaps it’s the snarl of baritone sax or echoes of reverb ). But even through an edge of bitterness (despite dance beats and bells, the track “Starf–ker” is not without teeth), the record is backlit by undeniable sparkle.

Of Starfruit, Morgan says on the band’s website, “Only some of its characters are mortals. All sport coquettish dance moves or baskets of pineapples.” And, “Track by track, a mouthwatering other-world materialized, hovering a few feet above some cheap microphones, a laptop and the pit of the stormy sea.”

But Starfruit could have never come to fruition. Just last year, tired of life on the road and the drudgery of recording, promoting and touring, Morgan took time out to focus on other passions. “Being a woman and hanging out with a bunch of dudes is great,” she says (the band includes Morgan’s husband/keyboardist/vocalist Chuck Lichtenberger, drummer Tim Haney, Jacob Rodriquez on saxophone and Justin Ray on trumpet). “But I needed to sew, I needed to garden, I needed to be a girl.”

Part of that breather included joining a songwriter’s group with local musicians Molly Kummerle, Ami Worthen and Jon Reid. They called themselves Naked Babies and gave each other assignments each week — write a song inspired by a movie, a song in a certain tempo — “it pushed me as a songwriter,” says Morgan. From those assignments came the material that makes up Starfruit.

Morgan brought the songs to Lichtenberger, who added a bridge here or a chord change there, “but most of it came from Naked Babies,” says Lichtenberger. He says that usually at least half of the songs on a stephaniesid album start with a riff or an idea of his. On Starfruit it was Morgan who took the reigns. (Morgan points out the she considers stephaniesid to be a collaboration. The couple’s side project, The Archrivals, puts Lichtenberger squarely at the helm while Morgan takes the role of backup singer.)

Another departure: Starfruit was recorded in a home studio using lo-fi techniques gleaned from Tape Op magazine and using the equipment staphaniesid was familiar with and had on hand. Lichtenberger played his grandmother’s piano. Low overhead meant lower cost, so the band could take its time. “Recording in the basement is a great way to say, ‘if we want to record today, sweet,’” says Morgan. At the other end of that spectrum, Warm People, stephaniesid’s 2009 release, was recorded in four days at Collapseable Studios.

“I think Warm People sounds great,” says Lichtenberger, “but also the stars aligned.” Both Morgan and Lichtenberger say their previous studio experiences were positive, but this time around, according to Morgan, “musically, we were able to juice more out of ourselves.”

Basement or not, the end result of Starfruit doesn’t sound lo-fi. Not in a Daniel Johnston or Guided by Voices or (closer to home) Floating Action way. It sounds like crisp, bright indie-pop. It sounds like stephaniesid, though both Morgan and Lichtenberger say that Floating Action mastermind Seth Kauffman has been a big inspiration. (Morgan adds that someday she’d like to record a soul album with Kauffman. You heard it here first.)

Releasing Starfruit is also a bit of a lo-fi endeavor. Instead of gearing up for a big, blow-out celebration show in a local venue, Morgan and Lichtenberger opted to launch the new record during this year’s LAAFF. While the street festival setting means that stephaniesid doesn’t have sole rights to the spotlight, the benefits far outweighed any drawbacks.

For starters, they haven’t played a local outdoor festival since the first Downtown After Five of 2010 (though that heady performance with its upbeat crowd and refreshing mist of rain is hard to forget). Second, the Saturday dusk slot ensured that fans with kids and early bedtimes could still make the show and, being part of a popular local gathering means a built-in crowd and publicity and celebratory spirit. (Do catch stephaniesid at LAAFF — their local appearances are all too rare.)

What’s next for the pop act? A Northeast and Midwest tour in support of Starfruit and a move toward non-concurrent album cycles for stephaniesid and the Archrivals. “Our eventual goal is to do one thing at a time,” says Lichtenberger. “You’re recording or rehearsing or playing gigs, but not trying to do all three at the same time with two different bands.”

Then again, Morgan and Lichtenberger set out to play original music and that’s what they’ve been doing, even if the dream sometimes seems to languish on a distant horizon. Morgan says one thing she’s learned from Lichtenberger is, “you put everything into something, but you can’t be attached to the outcome.”

if you’re not hip to it, “LGBTQ” stands for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning”.  sid supports all humans in the search for love.  we’re honored to be playing this saturday at blue ridge pride fest!  we play at 4:30 with our 7-piece band… this is a free outdoor show, so bring it, kiddos.  we’ll play for an hour and a half, and will of course have our new cd’s and some new apparel (i had to make more…it’s been selling like crazy).  join us for a gay old time in pack square, downtown!  The lineup looks to be diverse and awesome. www.blueridgepride.com