Something’s different this time: when I sit down in a booth at the Rainbo with five-sixths of the 1900s, they’re all smiling and laughing and joking with one another, and nobody seems to be itching to pick a fight with anybody else.
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Technically, they are a different band—two members who were aboard in 2007 are missing now. Drummer Tim Minnick and guitarist-keyboardist Mike Jasinksi left in August 2008. Matt Roan, better known as a DJ with residencies in several downtown clubs, is the current drummer; when he auditioned he hadn’t played in about a year and didn’t own any drums, so he did all his practicing on a Rock Band kit. Two other members—vocalist Caroline Donovan and violinist Andra Kulans—took over for Jasinki, with Donovan picking up the keys and Kulans switching to guitar on about half the songs. Bassist Charlie Ransford, vocalist Jeanine O’Toole, and front man Edward Anderson are still in their old roles, more or less. “Life as a six-piece is super awesome,” Anderson says. “It makes things more than one-seventh easier. It makes it like 47 percent easier.”
Before Return of the Century Anderson was incontrovertibly the center of the group—guitar-playing lead singer, primary songwriter and arranger, possessor of the vision that everyone else followed. When the 1900s went into the studio to make Cold & Kind, they brought a blueprint hammered out over months of planning sessions—using a whiteboard to chart out all the parts they wanted to include—and Anderson was largely responsible for it. “We learned a lot about recording on the last record,” he says.
Because the material grew so organically, the finished songs on Return of the Century are often very distant from their original conceptions. “We were brutal editors,” Anderson says. No element of a song—lyrics, instrumental parts, structure—was off-limits during these revisions. Most of the tracks, even the drums, were recorded multiple times in different versions or different styles. The band held onto detritus that usually gets discarded during this kind of drawn-out process—first-take guitar improvisations, drunken late-night vocals—and every tune was mixed from scratch at least twice, sometimes as many as four times. “There was a lot of cutting and pasting in a few of the songs,” says O’Toole.
Fri 11/5, 5:30 PM, Reckless Records, 1532 N. Milwaukee, 773-235-3727.
