January 11th - The Essex Green plays Track and Field’s Winter Warmers in London with British Sea Power and The Pipettes. Simon Price of the Independent writes:
All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey. And The Essex Green have come to paint London a deep, deep blue. The bleak midwinter may not be quite the most auspicious season to be hearing something as autumnal as the mellow mood music made by this Brooklyn band, but that’s perhaps as it should be. The Essex Green are a band out of time (they evoke the late 1960s/ early 1970s) and, if their apparently Anglophile name is any guide, a band out of place too: The Essex Green possess an elegance, and a mastery of poignancy, of which you might, quite understandably, have concluded that the present generation of American bands is utterly incapable. But they’re here in quaint Olde Englande tonight, to headline the first of the Winter Warmers, a three-night stand hosted by Track And Field, the club/organisation dedicated to playing ‘the music you never hear on the radio’ (think post-Cutie, think Bowlie weekender, think Belle & Sebastian, from whose song the collective takes its name). Central to their charms is the clear, pure voice of Sasha Bell, the singer/multi-instrumentalist who carries herself with the repressed demureness of Katharine Ross in The Graduate, and sings like Michie from The Mamas And The Papas. Bell plays a flute, plays a guitar, plays a Korg keyboard but makes it sound more like a vintage Farfisa, wears a tweed coat of the kind The Supremes‘ Mary Wilson used to wear (oblivious to the heat, because style is more important than comfort), and never smiles. Every boy in the room is falling in love with her. None of them will admit it. An Essex Green discography/family tree would be a complicated business: a reshuffled line-up of the same band will play the following night under the name The Ladybug Transistor, and they once recorded a whole album using the alias The Sixth Great Lake. For now, the most important artefact is The Long Goodbye, The Essex Green’s full-length hello. And listening to the album at home is a preferable experience to standing in a sweaty room and watching them (they don’t move much): with the exception of the odd surf number (‘Lazy May!’) from co-vocalist Christopher Ziter, their repertoire evokes The Carpenters at their most bittersweet, Saint Etienne at their most subdued, Jimmy Webb at his most conventional, and the themes to Seventies American TV shows you never saw. Not that this has prevented many people from standing in a sweaty room to watch them: it’s packed in here. ‘How come,’ asks Ziter, ‘it’s hotter than when we played here in August?’ Once anachronistic, always anachronistic.
February 3rd – Summer Hymns: Value Series Vol. 1: Fool’s Gold.
February – Cloud Recordings reissue The Olivia Tremor Control’s Music from the Unrealized Film Script, Dusk at Cubist Castle.
The Sixth Great Lake at the Crossing Border Festival in Amsterdam.
February 16th – Chris Ziter of The Essex Green and The Sixth Great Lake, interviewed in SoundsXP:
In Sweden [The Essex Green has] been very, very lucky. We’ve been played on national radio over there and our first show in Stockholm last August was sold out and the show we’re playing in a week is apparently sold out. It’s been very good for us. I’m very interested to see Spain. I know that The Ladybug Transistor does well there; we’ve never been there before. I don’t have a sense of what’s going to happen in Holland. I’ve played Amsterdam before with The Sixth Great Lake. They flew us over for a festival and it was amazing. They didn’t seem to be as interested in The Essex Green as they were in the Sixth Great Lake record! But that was just one radio station that organised the whole thing so it’ll be interesting to see either way…The Sixth Great Lake is really just a recording project. It was just a way for us to get back together with a couple of old friends and record some songs. Between all the different groups it’s hard to tour with all those bands and The Sixth Great Lake doesn’t have the same name as The Essex Green or The Ladybug Transistor in terms of how many people are going to come to the shows. So we just did a two-week tour to play the songs because they haven’t been played. And it was really fun.
March 16th – Cloud Recordings reissue The Olivia Tremor Control’s Black Foliage Animation Music Vol. 1. John Fernandes, interviewed in CrownDozen.com: “Dusk… and Black Foliage were out of print since Flydaddy filed for bankruptcy in 1999. …Strangely enough, we ended up paying Flydaddy $4000 for the rights to our albums, even though they hadn’t paid us for 40,000 records sold in ‘98-’99.”
March – Laura Carter posts news of the long-rumored Neutral Milk Hotel rarities collection on the Townhall: “we’ve gotten half an album’s worth of non-released NMH/Jeff songs approved by Jeff, but the rest he’s not interested in releasing, so we are trying to get more stuff that he likes. We are thinking now that it will be two discs, the second being a DVD of a live show that we played in San Francisco.”
March 20th – Circulatory System plays with The Sunshine Fix at the 40 Watt.
April 6th – Elf Power: Walking with the Beggar Boys. In an interview a few years later with Athens Exchange, Andrew Rieger said of the album’s cover photo, “Beggar Boys, it’s actually kind of an homage, well, actually it’s a rip-off, but homage sounds nicer – of the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young album, Déjà Vu, with them all dressed up and old-timey. I wasn’t even a big fan of that album, I just liked the cover a lot.” AllMusic wrote: “For a band that once wrote a song called ‘Simon (The Bird With the Candy Bar Head),’ the decidedly un-psychedelic sound emanating from Elf Power’s sixth full-length recording, Walking With the Beggar Boys, is more than a deviation — it’s a complete departure. Joining frontman Andy Rieger, multi-instrumentalist and ex-Neutral Milk Hotel member Laura Carter, and drummer Aaron Wegelin are Eric Harris, formerly with Olivia Tremor Control, and Craig McQuiston from the Glands. What sounds like an Elephant 6 love fest is actually an exercise in restraint, and after a few listens Walking With the Beggar Boys reveals itself as a near perfect little pop record.”
of Montreal – Disconnect the Dots
Also released on April 6th is of Montreal’s Satanic Panic in the Attic. With Kindercore locked in a legal battle with the Telegraph Company, of Montreal had moved on – to what would be an extraordinarily successful signing to Polyvinyl Records. In retrospect, Satanic Panic is a transitional album with enough to please both fans of the “old” of Montreal sound as well as those of the dance/funk/glam to come. Andy Gonzales and Derek Almstead had left the band, but for the recording of this album Kevin Barnes was largely alone, recreating the brand from the ground up. In a later interview with Paste Magazine, Kevin reflected:
I guess [I began writing more personal songs] around Satanic Panic in the Attic. I got married to Nina and moved out of the house with the band, and me and Nina and my brother got a place together. It was a supportive environment being with the band, but it was also more challenging as far as accommodating everyone, being in a communal household, being reliant on each other for so many things, and then you’re in a band together, and you spend so much time together. Every artist I know is totally crazy and neurotic, so it’s kind of a dangerous situation to be in. It was really liberating for me to get out of that and move in with Nina and David. They didn’t really have any demands, it was just do what you want, just create something we find interesting and fun. Their life wasn’t really—I mean, it was connected to mine on an emotional level, but not a financial level. And they had their own creative outputs, so it wasn’t the same situation. Like when [the band and I] were living out in the country, if I wanted to do something like on Satanic Panic or Sunlandic Twins—where I recorded every part—then feelings would be hurt. [Former bassist] Derek [Almstead] would be like, ‘Why are you writing the bass lines? I want to write the bass lines,’ which is totally understandable. I was depriving them of their creative outlet that was fulfilling and exciting. So that was a difficult transition for the band, when I took it over again and started doing everything by myself.
Under the Radar wrote of Satanic Panic, “It is the experimental indie pop album of the summer.” Pitchfork was taken by surprise at the new directions being explored: “Satanic Panic displays a considerable maturation in Kevin Barnes’ songwriting. Everything, from the Sgt. Pepper’s-copping album art to the wontedly verbose lyrics and song titles, would suggest a predictable collection of spindly psych-pop. But when the music actually starts, the differences become apparent. ‘Disconnect the Dots’ begins with a Doppler-affected drum sample, before the abrupt appearance of both handclaps and a verifiably indelible guitar riff. Seconds later, Barnes arrives, bearing an invitation: ‘Come disconnect the dots with me, poppy,’ he intones, before deliquescing into a blissful mini-chorus. From there, the song shifts effortlessly from section to section, orchestrating a dense but well-balanced array of organ drones, vocal harmonies, astral guitar peals, and interlocking electro-acoustic percussion… ‘Disconnect the Dots’ is more than just an album pacesetter– it’s a mission statement for a band remade, or at least reconsidered. The new of Montreal grab your attention, not deliberately invite it to wander…My naysaying of of Montreal’s earlier work is only meant to underscore the impressive growth displayed here. While albums such as The Gay Parade and Coquelicot often drowned in oppressive amounts of cheerfulness, it’s possible to take Satanic Panic seriously while still enjoying even its stickiest melodies…Satanic Panic in the Attic is idiosyncratic without being hokey, and although the band has been stiffed recognition for the consistency of their previous work, this album should make the group much more difficult to ignore.”
May 4th – Icy Demons: Fight Back!
Part of the old Girl Scouts site left standing at Orange Twin.
June 12th – Flagpole:
The Orange Twin Conservation Community, located just five miles north of Athens on land that was formerly a Girl Scout Camp, hopes to serve as a model for other communities interested in sustainable, eco-based living while emphasizing artistic endeavors. To this end, Orange Twin has held a series of benefit shows on its property for the past several years. As many of the bands on the Orange Twin record label have gained substantial popularity in the United States and abroad, these shows have been successful in not only delivering fine music and good times to attendees, but also in spreading information about the village and its goals. In a wonderful twist of fate, the show happening Saturday, June 12, at Orange Twin features a full day of events beginning at 2 p.m. (horseshoes, anyone?). Starting at 3 p.m., The Instruments and Art Rosenbaum perform at the community swimming hole. DJ Andrew Rieger (of Athens rock-masters Elf Power) spins a set of music during dinner around 6 p.m. The always interesting Kingsbury Manx and eco-warrior musicians Brightblack play at 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., respectively. The feather in the cap of the entire event is a performance by Bonnie “Prince” Billy at 10 p.m.
Laura Carter told Farming for Artists, “We built an amphitheater for the Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy show. We carved it out of the hillside with a Bobcat.”
July 13th – Old Enough to Know Better: 15 Years of Merge Records features new tracks by The Ladybug Transistor and The Essex Green, and older tracks by Neutral Milk Hotel and The Music Tapes.
August 4-7th – Athens PopFest 2004, the first of several successful Popfests hosted by Happy Happy Birthday to Me Records. From a 2009 profile of HHBTM’s Mike Turner for Blur Magazine:
‘There’s a time from 2002 to 2003 where all the things that came out were Americana,’ Turner [said]. ‘It wasn’t Elephant 6, it wasn’t pop, it was very much roots oriented acoustic music — folky ’60s based. And right after that there may have been more like psychedelic pop stuff, which led to the twee pop.’ And it was at the time of more twee when Turner, living in Panama City, Fla. decided to take a chance on creating a music festival — 400 miles away in Athens. Set to play at Tasty World and the 40 Watt Club, Popfest 2004 saw the 50 or so bands (including Sunshine Fix and the Rosebuds) play four days and nights in early August. Turner moved to town just in time for the festival’s festivities. ‘I thought, you know what, I’m just going to put together a festival,’ Turner said, laughing. ‘I’d been visiting Athens and I fell in love with it . . . I made friends with people who were putting out records at that time. So I just moved up here and put together a festival with no real job. The first year of the festival was a success in that it went off.’ With Eric Hernandez at his side as the festival’s stage manager (he also does artwork for the label), Turner knew he had a good idea, but with several kinks to work out. ‘I learned everything not to do, then it was trying to fix that and make back the money that was lost,’ Turner said.
August 5th – At Castle Clinton in Battery Park, NYC, Beulah plays its final show. The band officially calls it quits. Brian Heater (who took the photo above) interviewed Miles Kurosky before the final concert:
[Kurosky] asks me about the weather. The reports haven’t been all that promising as of late. It’s overcast, definitely something to be concerned about a few hours before performing under the open sky. It likes to rain here in August, and often does so without much warning. A mother sent Kurosky an e-mail a few days before. Her daughter is flying out from Kansas City to catch the band’s final show. What will happen if it rains? Kurosky hasn’t sent a reply. He doesn’t know the answer. We exchange a few Keith Relf/electrocution jokes, and then make our way into the hotel room that he is sharing with Beulah’s guitar-playing keyboardist Patrick Abernathy. The New York show has allowed the band the opportunity to stay two per room, instead of their customary three. Rooms on other floors of the hotel are housing Beulah wives, Beulah girlfriends and a Beulah baby. Miles Kurosky looks calm. He has skipped a day or two’s shave. He admits that he feels ‘a bit loopy’ without his coffee, and occupies himself by re-stringing his guitar—a shiny red Gibson—throughout the bulk of our interview, but otherwise it’s fairly easy to tell that this is not a man deep in the grip of some existential crisis. His answers are easy and forthcoming, and the muckraker in me feels a slightly sadistic tinge of disappointment, realizing that Beulah’s is not a breakup born of any of the usual rock tabloid fodder. ‘I think like anything,’ Kurosky begins, ‘I mean with any career, you just know when you’re done. And it isn’t so much a burned out thing, or being bummed or upset with one another. You reach a point where you go, “well what else are we going to do?”…I think we’re pretty happy,’ he admits. ‘It seems like we were a success in terms of what we did. In this business, it’s hard to sell 500 records. It really is. There are plenty of bands that are just trying to get a fucking record label to put out their record…I think we were a pretty good band when I look back on it. I think we made good records.’ …When I ask him what he plans on doing, his answer comes easily: ‘I plan on golfing. I fucking love golfing.’ With half a record’s worth of songs already, and the promise of collaboration with ex-Beulahs should the recording process ever ensue, it seems a bit early to drop Kurosky off into the indie rock retirement home, though he insists that maybe a final act isn’t such a bad thing after all. ‘It’s good to have a last show. I like to have an ending to it. I don’t think there’ll ever be a reunion.’ A few hours later, Beulah is laid to rest. The show starts earlier than scheduled, with hopes of beating the rain, and though the sky opens up two songs into the set, the rain clouds soon part, and after a few last request, some teary-eyed sing alongs, a couple of microphone-to-mouth electric shocks, and an encore featuring ‘Life During Wartime,’ the band finishes their last show under the watch of the nearby Statue of Liberty. A good band may be easy to kill, but the show will always go on.
Cooking with Rockstars: Miles Kurosky, interviewed as Beulah draws their final tour to a close.
August 17th – The Sunshine Fix: Green Imagination CD (a limited release included a DVD of SF videos bundled with the CD). Dayton Daily News said: “The second album by The Sunshine Fix, Green Imagination (SpinArt) shows the mature confidence and relative restraint of Bill Doss, a grad of the band The Olivia Tremor Control, indie-rock masters of kitchen-sink psychedelia. Though lacking the colorful rushes of the Tremor Control, Doss’ latest project steadily unearths power-pop nuggets with the unforced ease of late ’70s Todd Rundgren or many a Beatles album cut. Yet Green Imagination pulls out stops on occasion: A few songs use a children’s choir, a gimmick that never fails.” In 2006, Bill Doss explained to Optical Atlas how he was able to snag the background vocals of the Georgia’s Children Chorus for “What Do You Know” and “Runaway Run”:
I had always wanted to have kids involved in my music and the song ‘Runaway Run’ seemed like the perfect place to do this. My wife, Amy, actually set that up for me through her boss. He is involved with the local Presbyterian church here in Athens and the Georgia Children’s Choir is part of that church. So, he put in a call to the choir director and we met and went over the songs so that they could make sure there was nothing too off-color for the kids to sing. I was worried that the song might be too difficult for children to sing but to my surprise, the material they were warming up with was far more complicated than what I had for them! In fact, they learned and perfected the parts so quickly and with so much time left that I decided to also have them sing the refrain on ‘What Do You Know,’ which wasn’t originally planned. The director even had us all go into a classroom to discuss each line of the lyrics individually so that the children could completely understand what they would be singing. This was a little uncomfortable because of the lyrical content. I wouldn’t say that the lyrics are anti-God or anything like that–quite to the contrary–but they are definitely not pro-Christianity or even pro-organized religion. They more refer to a oneness that is expressed better in religions like Taoism. I think ambiguity helped mask that fact. Either that or the kids were down with the Tao! My goal now is to have the kids sing every song on my next record and me not sing at all. I prefer the sound of their voices to mine!
August 31st – The Minders’ Hooray for Tuesday is reissued on Future Farmer with bonus tracks.
The High Water Marks – Feel Everything
September 14th – The High Water Marks: Songs About the Ocean. Jason Hailman: “Songs About the Ocean is for those who’ve always wished Apples in Stereo drummer Hilarie Sidney contributed more to the Apples‘ discography. Here, Sidney teams up with Norwegian Per Ole Bratset to create a set of shimmery pop songs. When Sidney sings, ‘Time is so short, so feel everything,’ it’s more than a trite sentiment or thesis statement – it’s a small rebellion against modern alienation.” Uncut Magazine: “Clock-stopping, pulse-raising mega-pop. The sound of sherbert and acid fizzing in tandem drives this monumental example of psych-pop.”
The Sixth Great Lake – Downies
October – The Sixth Great Lake: Sunday Bridge. A relatively obscure sophomore release from a band once well-promoted on Kindercore Records, but AllMusic wrote: “The Sixth Great Lake returns with the subdued Sunday Bridge, a vinyl-only release on Memphis-based Tup Keewah Recordings. The band continues to conjure up country, folk and Southern spirits with their relaxed, acoustic approach. The group shares songwriting duties equally, with Zach Ward, Chris Ziter and Michael Barrett all contributing four songs each…The album’s intimacy makes it an excellent follow-up to 2001’s Up the Country.” I write (here, now) that this is actually one of my favorite E6-related albums of the decade. Not too many people have heard it, but it’s a gorgeous album which has aged beautifully.
The Late B.P. Helium – They Broke the Speed of Light
October 5th – The Late B.P. Helium: Amok. Bryan Poole (of Montreal, Elf Power) finally issues a solo album. He described the roots of the song “They Broke the Speed of Light” to Optical Atlas in 2006:
This song is one of many I have where I’m looking for what I feel I’ve lost. It’s the deep, dark, sad part of me. And it’s the reason I call myself The Late B.P. Helium. I felt so god-like as a child. I really believed that I had special powers and insight. I was emboldened. I used to have ‘tricks’ to put myself into trances where time seemed to race. I’d ponder and concentrate and achieve what now seem to have been out of body experiences. I was über confident. But of course, as puberty hit and nerdom arose and the torture of social interactions deteriorated my confidence, I slowly lost this grand light. Also, around the time I was 18, I was put on a medication I was told was for depression. Later in my mid-twenties I found out it was for people whose minds are racing. I’ve never felt the same since. I can’t concentrate the way I used to. And that realm inside my head seems but a memory. The title refers to a story I heard on NPR about scientists being able to freeze light and also to accelerate light past the known limit. It seemed fitting. The drums on the original were played again by old roommate, Ed Livingood. I was trying to help Adrian Finch [Masters of the Hemisphere] record some songs and he came up with the drumbeat, but neither of us could play it. So I grabbed Ed and he bashed out this beat. Adrian ditched the song. I stole the drum bit for myself and wrote the song. I find beats are a door to different songs for me. Drones are another door.
October – November – Elf Power tours, reunited (briefly) with B.P. Helium in the band.
October 12th – of Montreal: The Gladiator Nightstick Collection.
Robert Schneider and Brian Wilson, post-reconciliation (2008)
October 21st – Robert Schneider interviews Brian Wilson for Denver’s Westword. “Today, I interviewed my greatest hero in the whole world, and I freaked him out. Brian Wilson doesn’t know anything about me or my band. He doesn’t know that I’m famously just as spacey as he is. He doesn’t know that, like him, I’m good at singing pop songs and making records for stoned college kids to listen to through headphones. All Brian Wilson knows about me is that I am one nervous interviewing dude. Brian Wilson might tell you that, despite my ambitions, I should not be a journalist. Brian Wilson might even have my ‘Scoop’ hat revoked. See, I have a lot of nervous energy. I talk too much. I talk too fast. I’ve really tried to cut down on my sugar intake, but sugar just makes me feel so happy, you know? Still, I think I did a pretty good job of containing my excitement when I answered the phone and it was Beach Boy Brian Wilson. But as things went along, the pace of our conversation picked up speed like the brakes had been cut. He fed off my nervousness, and I fed off him feeding off me. Today I irritated Brian Wilson. I flustered Brian Wilson. I out-spaced-out Brian Wilson. Magazines of the world, is there anybody else you want me to interview? Let me at ‘em.” Sample exchange from the interview:
RS: I saw you perform SMiLE twice last summer in London, and I also saw Pet Sounds a few years ago in Denver. You seem really happy and relaxed, like you’re enjoying yourself. It’s really impressive to me. Being on tour for me is kind of weird, because you’re kind of in this suspended state, and your environment’s always changing.
BW: Okay, what’s your last name?
RS: Schneider.
BW: Schneider?
RS: Yeah, I play in a band called The Apples in Stereo.
BW: I see. Okay, now I see what’s going on here.
RS: But I like being on tour, because my responsibilities are very limited and specific. Are you enjoying touring and playing with your new band right now?
BW: Uh, yes.
RS: Does it wear you out?
BW: No.
October 26th – Ulysses: 010. The Pop Cult interviews Robert Schneider about Ulysses:
Just recently, I got finished with a solo album this last summer called By the Way of Marbles. It’s my band name for my solo stuff. I wanted to record the record a couple of years ago but I was just having a hard time getting inspiration to do it. I needed to record a record because I owed it to my record label SpinArt. I signed a contract for it a couple of years before. John Ferguson and Ben Fulton from Big Fresh have amazing recordings and I love to see them live. I just thought, watching them, that those two guys might be fun guys to get together with, try to record, I thought that I might be able to get more excited about my Marbles record if i got a little band together. The Apples has just gotten done. We had just finished touring for our last album pretty heavily and in those tours there have been a lot of changes in my life and at the same time I started to write songs in a really different style. We were in Spain on tour and one night in Barcelona, I sort of had this half-dream, the sound of music, and I wanted to start writing songs that were nothing like the Apples songs, or any other songs that I had written before as far as the field goes, the directness, and lyrical nature. That’s what I really wanted to focus on. Writing lyrics that were very direct. It was more of a musical style dealing with the kinds of chords I used and the way I played guitar or sang the lyrics. I started writing these songs and they didn’t fit into the Apples or the Marbles record, which had songs that were really poppy. I got together with Ben and John one night at John’s house and we were going to start rehearsing songs. John was on drums and Ben was on synthesizer. They were going to play other things on the record but it was just the instruments we had around. I kind of wanted to teach them the songs on instruments they may not even play on the record just so they could get to know the songs from the inside-out. Before we started playing my Marbles songs I said ‘Hey, I have this new song. Can we try this real quick just to see what this sounds like?’ I think it was ‘Evening Star.’ It’s kind of Velvet Undergroundy kind of song, kind of poppy. We started playing it and it sounded great. I realized it sounded like a band, like a new band. I had them playing styles or instruments that they didn’t usually play. Ben tends to play more flourishy stuff on the keyboards in Big Fresh than he plays in Ulysses. He had to play bass and then filter the synthesizer with his other hand. Then John is an excellent drummer, but it’s the instrument he’s least comfortable on, so I like the idea of putting him on an instrument he’s awkward on. We recorded our album just about two months after we started the band I think.
Magnet Magazine – “Fresh Fruit: The Apples Have Fallen from the Tree” by Matthew Fritch:
Robert Schneider has been known to have a few fires going at once, but his main flame—The Apples in Stereo—is eerily dim at the moment. The band’s most recent album, Velocity of Sound, appeared in 2002, about the same time Schneider separated from his wife, Apples drummer Hilarie Sidney. Both members of the now-divorced couple have recently debuted new groups. Schneider has been focusing on Ulysses, a quartet he formed with members of Lexington, KY, bands Big Fresh and Hair Police. ‘I got sort of burned out on making huge, ambitious productions,’ says Schneider of 010 (Eenie Meenie), which was recorded in just four hours. Ulysses will please those disappointed by the sugary, kiddie-punk buzz of the Apples’ recent work; 010 offers the more plaintive, moody sounds of Pavement or the Velvet Underground. Says Schneider, ‘It definitely influenced the overall mood of loneliness or emptiness, but I wasn’t specifically writing about [Sidney]. I’ve always written like that. I just decided to focus on that and push that particular style.’ ‘It’s all too personal for me,’ says Sidney of 010’s lyrical content. ‘People will read into it how they will.’ Sidney’s combo, The High Water Marks, issued Songs About the Ocean (also on Eenie Meenie) in September. After meeting songwriting partner (and now husband) Per Ole Bratset in Oslo, Norway, in 2002, the two began tradiing four-track cassette tapes through the mail. An upbeat, jangling pop effort on which Sidney shares vocal and guitar duties with Bratset, Ocean doesn’t fall too far from the Apples tree. ‘Robert writes so many songs that there wasn’t room for me [in the Apples],’ says Sidney. ‘It’s really nice to have another outlet.’ Although members of the Apples are booked through 2004—guitarist John Hill plays in Dressy Bessy, bassist Eric Allen performs with jazz combo the Perry Weisman 3 and Schneider will issue Expo, an album by his Marbles side project, early next year—signs indicate the core band isn’t history just yet. ‘I’ve got a lot of songs written for our new album,’ says Schneider. ‘Our marriage breaking up was a bump in the road, but the band has actually been easier since we broke up.’
Late December – Christmas with the Marbles 7”
