You can't chop down a Frankenpine and drag it home this holiday to fit in a tree stand.
But the band that snagged its name from wordplay for stealth telecommunication towers released its first album today.
It's a little like taking "boughs."
Called "The Crooked Mountain," the work features original music and lyrics of a five-part New York City ensemble whose sound draws largely from a rural and gritty heritage of strings.
The band was founded four years ago by singer, songwriter and guitarist Kim Chase and her banjo-playing musician and husband, Matthew Chase.
Liz Bisbee blends in her fiddle along with Saranac Lake transplants Ned P. Rauch on guitar/mandolin and Colin Dehond playing bass.
Saranac Lake music producer Jeff Oehler, who mixed tracks recorded over 10 days in Brooklyn at his Beehive Production studio, calls the new sound emerging from Frankenpine's rich collaboration "a little bit retro" with a gypsy-jazz core.
"Working with them was something I really thoroughly enjoyed. This is the first string-band Americana-fusion project that I've done," he said, "and the production approach was a little bit retro to emulate that old-time gypsy-jazz sound; it's very ensemble-oriented."
"They wanted a really organic, almost live-production quality. It is a unique, more vintage sound."
The rustic, gritty music is dark, he said, rolled out of muddy origins from boot prints on front-porch stoops.
"There was a component of working to go against the grain of the super-crisp, bright sound quality that's been predominant in coming out of Nashville over the last 15 years," Oehler said. "But Americana is a term for a genre growing into its own thing, progressively becoming darker, grittier with a deep full-bodied audio quality."
WALK THE BALANCE
Oehler credits the blend of musician-songwriters that comprises Frankenpine with a depth of collaboration that carries through in the sound.
"Three different people take the lead singer role, so I had to break everybody down individually and understand where they were coming from. Trying to walk that balance and give each an equally central voice is a difficult thing to do."
From their digs in New York City, the musicians talked about how they craft the music, melodies and lyrics together.
The lyrics to "La Fee Verte" were written in a café in Brooklyn where Kim and Matthew jotted down the goings-on around them.
Ned had already birthed the chord progression, not knowing then that when the two were laced together with strings, it would fit.
"I really don't know how it works," Ned said of their collaborative song writing.
"Sometimes an idea comes through my head into my hands like the shapes of sounds, and often that will lead somewhere. Then a week will go by and someone will say hey, I've got lyrics to that. Kim has this unnatural talent for conjuring melodies. She comes up with just beautiful melodic lines."
TELLING STORIES
The "conjuring," Kim said, is a process of drawing from word-like sounds.
"When Ned came up with the instrumentation for 'La Fee Verte,' I listened to it and just had an instinct of what the melody could sound like over it. When we got back to practice, we tried it out."
In fitting lyrics, she said, it is really important that the internal sounds of the words fall into the music.
"And we're really about telling stories with our music," she said.
"Cold Water" is one Ned wrote with help from Kim about two longtime friends who died within a few years of each other.
"They never knew each other, but one was killed in an avalanche, another skiing across a lake in Maine, and they were both really moving people, instructive in the way they lived," Ned said.
"That song became really interesting in recording it. It's always been a two-mandolin song. But on the album, we were able to incorporate a cello, an accordion and a viola as well as a fiddle. Making sense of all that was largely the work of Jeff Oehler. He made sure it didn't sound like a swamp."
Interpreting each other is kind of like viewing modern art, Kim explained.
"And each person has their own interpretation."
E-mail Kim Smith Dedam at: kdedam@pressrepublican.com
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