Pulse - Ashtray Hearts: An Old Conversation
by Steve McPherson

Thursday 05 May

In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘The Moose,’ passengers on a bus late at night fall into fitful rest hearing “[i]n the creakings and noises/ an old conversation/ -not concerning us,/ but recognizable, somewhere.” Those half-heard conversations that feel strangely familiar when you’re alone and it’s late are the Ashtray Hearts’ bread and butter. Their first album (2002’s Old Numbers) was the perfect soundtrack to late night nostalgia and melancholy, and their new long-player Perfect Halves continues in that vein, even if things are a little different this time around.

“The songs for the first record [were ones] that I had written before we were a band,” explains singer/guitarist Dan Richmond. “This is a more full-band record, for sure; we made it that way from the ground up. I’d come to the band with the skeleton of a song, then the band fleshed it out, moving around from instrument to instrument to figure out how it’s going to sound.”

Dusk is falling outside Aaron Schmidt’s (vocals, trumpet, piano) house in southeastern Minneapolis, and over a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon, I chat with Schmidt, Richmond, Steve Yernberg (guitar/vocals) and Brad Augustine (accordion/piano). “As far as the words, I keep a pretty good journal of everyday life, and [the lyrics] are taken from pieces here and pieces there. Some songs are directly about something, but others are a combination of different experiences. I don’t like music that’s really obvious; you don’t want the lyrics to be so straightforward that there’s no room for interpretation. I don’t know if there’s a whole lot of mystery to it; it’s just finding words that sound good together, ideas and a story behind the song.”

Richmond makes it sound easy, fashioning songs that sound like one side of a breakup conversation on a phone in a coffeeshop, but his bandmates clearly get it. “For pretty much every song on this record,” says Yernberg, “I can place it with some memory of a certain event or events, and I don’t even know if it’s the same thing Dan wrote it about, but I definitely have certain things that I think of for every song on the record.” They leave enough space to let the listener into the song, to fill in their own experiences.

Heartbreak and longing are constants in the Ashtray Hearts’ world, but their new album displays a subtle modulation up in the emotional register: If their first album was the sound of being knocked flat on your back, Perfect Halves captures the moment you get up to your elbows and get ready to take another crack at it. As bassist Ryan Huber Scheife and drummer John Jerry join the conversation on the stoop, Jerry notes, “There are a few songs with sticks on this record.” Opener “Rules” starts out with the gentle sound of Augustine’s Wurlitzer, but Yernberg’s biting solo halfway through the tune serves notice that this isn’t going to be a retread of their first disc.

For one, the recording process was a lot different this time around. “We recorded at Sacred Heart, which is this landmark church, way up on a hill in Duluth,” explains Richmond, “We heard about it through friends that had recorded there; Bellwether had recorded a couple songs there, Haley Bonar did her record there, Low did Trust there. Just for our own sanity, we wanted to change things up and not do the same thing twice. None of us are getting rich off this, so it’s all about the experiences and having a good time doing it. We went up there for four weekends last year and recorded eleven songs.”

Whether it was Sacred Heart, or just the natural process of growing together as a band, Perfect Halves is a much lusher and stronger record. Its 10 songs present a picture of a band hitting its stride, and it’s striking how unified the vision feels. Scheife, in addition to bass duties, designs the band’s albums and explains, “I was actually listening to some of the tracks that didn’t make it onto the record yesterday, and I think it was a good call because they don’t fit. I don’t know if it was a conscious effort, but as a band I think we know.” Their sense of texture and the addition of instruments like the Chamberlain (which uses actual tape loops—think “Strawberry Fields”) and the Hammond organ expand the sonic palette this time around, and a slightly different ethos had to go into making a record on tape as opposed to on a computer. “We worked in an all digital studio before,” says Richmond, “and we had a lot more room to make errors and go back and cut and paste things, but when you’re working with tape, you want to keep things simple so you’re not spending thousands upon thousands of dollars. You just to get to a point and say, ‘That’s good,’ and try not to worry about it. When you add all the elements, they all just kind of fall into place, kind of like it does in the live show where you know not everything’s perfect.”

The record as a whole breathes in a way that Old Numbers doesn’t, and I could go on at length about the virtues of each song, but that job has already been done better by their friend Wade Ostrowski in the copious liner notes. They wanted to do something kind of over the top, and in much the same fashion as Blue Note records from the sixties contained mini-essays, Perfect Halves has a track-by-track examination of the disc. Amazingly, this actually adds to the enjoyment of the record. They’ve known Ostrowski since they were high school kids, and that camaraderie shows through, along with the generally warm and welcoming vibe that seems to surround the Twin Cities music scene. “[2024 Records’] Dave Campbell and I were talking last week about this: It’s just really good here to play music: it’s really comfortable, and everybody helps each other out,” says Augustine, and Richmond chimes in, “You don’t have to fight tooth and nail to get your music heard. Think about it: There are two weeklies that are covering local music and three radio stations that play a lot of local music; there are not a lot other cities that can boast that.”

So does that lack of competition make bands soft? I had heard a rumor about an attempt by Martin Devaney to start a feud with the Ashtray Hearts at a bill they were splitting at the Entry recently. When asked about it, the band breaks into laughter; “No, no,” chuckles Yernberg, “we would never do that. You can tell that poser he’s not even worth it.”

It’s so on.