Last month a Chicago band called Houses hit the charts at the Hype Machine, a massively popular online aggregator that tracks which artists and songs more than 1,500 music bloggers are posting about. Their track “Soak It Up,” an airy, infectious bit of electronic pop, reached number six on the Most Blogged Artists chart the week of September 13 and number one on the Most Favorited Music chart on September 11—a notch above Brooklyn duo Ratatat, who’d just played the Riviera.
“I brought all this stuff over today to start,” he says.
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Tortoriello, 24, met Messina last year, and their relationship—like their band—took off so quickly it might’ve been charmed. But things haven’t always been so easy for him. Growing up in the western suburbs, he says, he got addicted to heroin and crack in his early teens.
The staff tried to persuade him not to leave, but he’d been off drugs since March 2006 and decided to take his chances. Tortoriello called on his AA sponsor, Jesse Logan, a former counselor of his who’d moved to Salt Lake City. Logan, who’s now 34, invited him to crash on his couch, and in October Tortoriello took him up on it. Logan was starting his own halfway house, which he called Safe and Sober Living of Utah, in the southern SLC suburb of Sandy—a local restaurateur, Kreg Van Stralen, had provided the house, and they operated without a license, offering “rooms for rent.” Tortoriello pitched in too, doing renovations and making a website.
“I remember he came up and shook my hand,” Messina said. “I thought he was really cute. We worked throughout the day and I heard later on, ‘Oh, he thinks you’re cute.’ I was like, ‘Oh, really?’ It was like eighth grade all over again.”
“Prior to meeting him, I was already set, in my mind, to get the hell out of here eventually,” she says. “Not just work a retail job, but actually get out and see the world.”
Tortoriello wrote the rest of All Night, whose ten tracks include both “Endless Spring” and “Soak It Up,” in about a week—he had lots of free time, since he’s on unemployment and living with his parents in Hanover Park. Within a month he and Messina, now a part-time secretary, finished the album, working in Logic Studio on his laptop at his parents’ house and in the basement of a friend’s place in Carpentersville where Messina briefly lived. They don’t have any immediate plans to enlist help onstage, but for their live debut they’ll get an assist from 19-year-old visual artist Alan Jensen, who’s created a video projection to accompany them.
