Three years ago Dan Schneider, the sole constant member of the Singleman Affair, was riding pretty high. In June 2006 the first Singleman album, Let’s Kill the Summer, had been released overseas by Poptones, a label run by British music-biz legend and Creation Records cofounder Alan McGee. It had begun as a home-recording project for songs Schneider felt were too “wussy” for his other band, Hummingbiird (formerly Pedal Steel Transmission, and now defunct). Using just his voice, a guitar, a sitar, and sometimes percussion, Schneider had four-tracked an album’s worth of psych-folk songs, and after some studio tweaking those recordings had been blessed with the imprimatur of the man who’d discovered the Jesus and Mary Chain and Oasis. The album didn’t have an American label, but that seemed sure to follow.
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Schneider didn’t feel it financially either—he still isn’t even sure if he’s owed any money. In any case he’d only given Poptones distribution rights to Let’s Kill the Summer—he’s always owned the recording, and he reissued it on his own Cardboard Sangria label last summer.
Because the Singleman Affair is basically Schneider and whoever he knows who’s available, there was little risk the band would fold. Drummer and engineer Graeme Gibson, who helped Schneider turn his home recordings into Let’s Kill the Summer, is his steadiest collaborator—he acts as a producer, in the old-fashioned sense. Schneider put together a live lineup in early 2006 that’s been reasonably stable—Gibson on drums, his old Boas bandmate Jacob Smith on organ, and Don Ogilvie and Brett Barton from Hummingbiird on percussion and bass—but there have always been substitutions. For his trip overseas, Schneider took Gibson, who’s also in the Fruit Bats and Disappears, and guitarist and pedal steel player Gary Pyskacek from Hummingbiird, who now plays in the Part Five and helps run Cardboard Sangria. Lately Adam Vida (U.S. Maple, Singer) has been filling in on drums, and Toby Summerfield (Crush Kill Destroy, Never Enough Hope) has been standing in for Barton, playing upright bass instead of electric. On the follow-up to Let’s Kill the Summer the personnel situation is even more complicated.
Schneider’s music may not belong squarely to any one genre, but one term that everyone who’s ever reviewed the Singleman Affair seems comfortable using is psychedelic. “I just don’t get what that means,” says Gibson. “I mean, it’s like, what makes a sandwich gourmet? I still don’t know what that means either.” Schneider doesn’t object, though. When he first started writing songs, another of his touchstones was D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Monterey Pop, whose visuals he thought created a hallucinatory effect. “I like the idea of this expansive journey,” he says, “that your mind gets into the record.”
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