Stern
isn't interested in this idealized transition into adulthood, though.
Instead of storming headfirst into an anemic economy, he has decided
to focus his time and attention on music, at least for a little
while. “I'm much more interested in just doing this,” he says,
referring to songwriting, living in the city, and avoiding the siren
song of so-called security. “I'll regret that soon, but I don't
right now.” And, as he and his band Signals Midwest prepare to go
on the longest tour they've ever endeavored (“It's going to take us
across pretty much every state west of Ohio,” he states), Stern is
reminded of the physical distance that separates himself from those
around him.
The
concept of distance fascinates Stern, who devoted Signals Midwest's
second record
to a discussion of the subject; released in 2012 by Tiny Engines,
Latitudes
and Longitudes
captures something more central to the twentysomething experience
than the leap from graduation to “reality”—something more
universal, more mature, more real.
The
whole of Latitudes
and Longitudes emerged
when Signals Midwest wrote “In Tensions”, the record's first
track, which was unlike anything the band had written before. The
song is a menagerie comprised of many animals—the winding,
foreboding lead snaking out from the silence; the back-and-forth
between the band's fierce, unified bark and the sleazy snarl of
Stern's guitar; the sudden stampede driven by Steve Gibson's
galloping drums, guitars roaring and rearing in time—each
transitioning seamlessly into one another, different parts of the
same beast.
As the stampede settles, a string of
flickering notes rises from the dust, introducing the first verse;
strung across Jeff Russell's gobs of guitar, dangling above the
enormous mumble of Loren Shumaker's bass, Stern states that writing
this simple string was a breakthrough for Signals Midwest. “We
hadn't really done anything like that before,” he says. “Later,
there's a part where it transfers from four-four to six-eight time,
and we had never really done any time signature switching. There are
quiet parts in it too; it's a much more dynamic song than we were
used to. [When we wrote 'In Tensions,'] we sort of looked at each and
were like, 'Aw, I think we're onto something new here.'”
During the second verse, Stern roars,
“I chased after you / but the tempo kept increasing and my lungs
began to freeze. / And as the darkness spread / I heard a voice that
said,” until it suddenly shatters; as Russell's fuzzy chord fizzles
into the darkness, as Stern's chords are splayed into slower but
similarly flickering notes, he howls, “'Quit wearing those holes in
your shoes. / Things don't exist just because you want them to.'”
Here, the members of Signals Midwest
have not merely challenged themselves as songwriters; Stern, who
challenged himself to write from an perspective outside his own, has
stretched himself as a lyricist as well. “I wrote that from the
perspective of my grandmother about my grandfather's mental illness,”
he explains. “Distance can be applied in a lot of different ways
there, whether it's physical distance between people or emotional
distance, between life or death.”
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of
“In Tensions” emerges after a final swell of cymbals and
climbing, stacking chords: As he strums his melancholy acoustic,
Stern bellows, “I was counting the miles, you were counting the
days. / Ain't it strange that the numbers we wanted were moving in
opposite ways?”
“That
little lyrical couplet was very representative of what I wanted to
talk about as a whole,” Stern states. “I was traveling a lot,
experiencing a lot of new places, and my friends were starting to
move away and make their homes elsewhere. So many people in my life
started to stretch themselves out to other places and other
experiences, and it hit me pretty hard in a lot of different ways.
That was just me trying to make sense of a lot of that.”
This
melody, combined with this lyrical couplet—he calls it “the
coda”—returns throughout Latitudes
and Longitudes. It
appears in the last measures of “Monarchs”, the record's second
song, and during “The Quiet Persuader” on side B; both songs
feature a speaker stuck without a cell phone signal and desperate to
bridge the distance he and his love. It returns during an eruption of
distortion-drenched chords and spraying cymbals in the middle “The
Weight and the Waiting”, the album's last song addressed
reluctantly to the dearly deceased; minutes later, the song towers
into its swaying, horn-blasted climax before returning to the
winding, foreboding lead from the record's first few seconds.
The
coda applies to the different kinds of distance that Latitudes
and Longitudes explores—including
the physical, the psychological, and the emotional; between the
present and past; and separating socially expectations from what's
personally fulfilling. And the theme of distance isn't explored only
during these four tracks; it spans the entire record as a complete
piece of art.
Maybe this is why Stern seems so
comfortable with the distance between his desires and the
expectations of the college grad. And maybe this is why he seems
comfortable with the idea of distance in general, which tends to
scare the shit out of typical twentysomethings. Maybe it's because
he's explored this idea with such depth and intimacy already.
But maybe Stern's comfort stems from
his passion for playing music. “It's not being able to say that we
opened for this band,” he concludes, “or we did this tour or we
sold this many records, but because it's just so fun to play music
with my friends.”
Then again, it's possible that Stern
isn't as distant as he feels from his peers. Perhaps he, too, is
pouncing on “reality,” the perilous landscape that his parents
warned him about. For now, he'll slide that degree into his back
pocket and use music to explore the real world—and maybe conquer
it, if not tear it apart.
Stern recorded these songs from his parent’s house near Cleveland on a hot summer evening. Days later, Signals Midwest would leave for a tour that took them through the Midwest to the West Coast.
“The Quiet Persuader" appears on Signals Midwest's 2012 record titled Latitudes and Longitudes. At the time of its recording, “The Things That Keep Us Whole” was an unreleased song that Stern intended to appear on the next Signals Midwest record. “A Lover Sings" is a Billy Bragg cover; the song originally appeared on the 1984 album Brewing Up with Billy Bragg.
Visit the band's Bandcamp page for more music.
Sorry, but these songs were taken down due to space constraints. Please download The Switchboard Sessions, Volume Three for a track from this and other sessions recorded in 2012. If you're desperate for a copy of these tracks, please see the "About the Switchboard Sessions" page for info on how to contact the author.
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