Bryan John Appleby’s second full-length record, The Narrow Valley, follows a single narrative of a California town before a catastrophic event. It is dark, steady, lush, and utterly unexpected. We sat down with him to get to know the process behind the record, how his music has grown and changed, and an open invite from the Seattle Orchestra for accompaniment.
This record does not follow the standard separate-song-one-album standard, but rather uses intros and outros as separate tracks and runs together as a singular piece. What made you choose this format?
Bryan John Appleby: A lot of my favorite songwriters use interludes. It’s something that always catches my ear, it can make a record so fluid. Brian Wilson's Smile has been on my top 10 list for a long time. That whole record runs together in that way that leaves you feeling surrounded, almost disoriented. Most music that is around for our consumption is dished out in chewable three minute chunks, so I find the challenge of the more patient, immersive experience very refreshing and stimulating. With Smile, if you’re not in it completely then you aren't there at all. It’s too overwhelming to listen to passively. But once you’re in there – that expansive world, it completely envelops you and gets the imagination really firing, just like a good movie. The interludes are a big part of that experience.
So, wanting to attain the same effect, I copied that format when I could. Sufjan Stevens is good at that too. Richard Swift’s first record, that’s another good example. Even the way Paul Simon starts Diamonds on the Souls of Her Shoes, it’s like a miniature song before the song. I used that approach as well. It all adds to a fluid experiential stream.
Music with a very cinematic quality has been my jam for a long time. I love it. Think about Disney’s Robin Hood, the feeling you get when you hear Roger Miller pluck that warm guitar and start in on kazoo. That warmth, that was something I was after. So in 2013, when I was really getting going with demos for this record, I was mainly listening to records by Harry Nilsson, Les Baxter, Randy Newman, Scott Walker, as well as a steady intake of older soundtracks, Dumbo, Vertigo, Fantasia, Snow White, Ennio Morricone’s stuff. All of that stuff is dripping with a warm, dreamy, lurid feeling and a lot of it has an ominous undertone. I wanted to make a record that felt that way.
One of my demos, a song about an earthquake descending on a small town, got my imagination going and I ended up building the whole narrative of the record around that song. The musical opening for that track is directly inspired by some of the darker-sounding exotica records from the 60s. That song, titled The Fault Line, sets the musical and lyrical stage for everything on the record to follow. And the whole project just kept pushing itself in the direction of deeply visual, cinematic territory.
To me, the album falls somewhere in between a regular concept album and a soundtrack to a movie that doesn’t exist called The Narrow Valley. It’s as if the films were lost in a warehouse fire decades ago and all we have left are the soundtrack tapes. Anyway, the interludes are totally necessary for that.
I know that California was the influence for this record. What story about California did you want to tell, and why did a single source appeal to you?
BJA: A single source is appealing in general because it helps narrow the focus down. You understand this as a writer, that when you're trying to write about everything, it’s hard to write about anything. So you zoom in and then zoom in some more until there is something interesting cupped in your palm, something you can deal with.
There are a bunch of reasons why California as that source made sense for me. For one, I grew up in Central California, in an isolated town called Aromas. So all that landscape, the redwoods south in Big Sur and up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the blankets of fog draping around the foothills, the eucalyptus trees clustered in groves, and all those warm colors, that stuff is all lodged in there from my youth. It was a ready well of images for me to draw from.
In a more abstract sense I’m using California as the backdrop for my own story about departure. I’ve turned that story into a place, The Narrow Valley. I created a fictional version of a town loosely based on the actual town I grew up in, and the narrative of the fictional town is a metaphor about the process of letting your views shift, which is a process reflected in my actual experience. Similar to the town I grew up in, the fictional Narrow Valley is a place where you can sense the ocean is close but can’t see it. It’s landlocked and lower than the hills that close it in. Those living in the valley live in a collective isolation.
This is a metaphor about the evolution of a person’s perspective, particularly, away from the more rigid worldviews that hold people stubbornly isolated, stagnant, dry…narrow. You get it. The earthquake acts as the singular disruptive event – possibly allowing the central characters an opportunity to transcend their origins, to grow beyond the valley. My characters are all in the midst of that dilemma. They feel bound to the valley, too scared to leave.
Aesthetically, a lot of the music that really gets my imagination worked up is the classic music that was created around or reminds me of California. So the visuals, the colors, the sounds, the influences, the story, the earthquake, my history, it all comes together around that state. It just made sense to me.
You chose to use a string section, incredibly varied percussion, and other effects to create a soundtrack feel. What was the experimentation like in the studio, how did the songs evolve, and what do you envision for a live set with these songs? (Fingers crossed for a touring orchestra)
BJA: We had a lot of fun hunting down special sounds and experimenting with a wide range of instruments. One of my favorite instruments we used is the Optigan. It’s a toy organ that Mattel made in the 60s. It sounds so wonderfully shitty and fully unique. Sam is a very adept electronic musician and near the end of the recording process we got into some sampling. There is some Moog on there, autoharp, mbira, farfisa. We gained access to a high school music room down in Tacoma where I tried my hand at timpani and tubular xylophone. I’m surprised we were able to use those tracks because I played very poorly. They’re in there though. Also, the earthquake sequence on The Fault Line was a blast. The clarinet player Rosalynn De Roos played some very strange, beautiful improv parts during that section. I get chills listening to her parts.
Optigan
But really, even though the record might sound like a musical funhouse full of spontaneous sounds, everything was the result of a lot of planning and careful decisions. There wasn't a ton of improvisation. Because the songs are so dense, it means that every piece has to be placed just right to fit into the whole. There’s not a lot of room for the spontaneous jam session with these tunes. So in that way, there were some carefully placed parameters for any on-the-fly experimentation.
The whole process was tricky, because I really wanted to accomplish that large production sound you hear in 50s and 60s pop records, Roy Orbison’s denser stuff or the lush sounds of exotica records. In some ways, that type of production and songwriting is totally out of my reach. The conversation between me and Sam became, “In what ways can we approximate ‘The Sound’ and in what ways do we need to go all the way, not cut corners?” Sam worked out different methods to allude to the 48-piece orchestra that we didn’t have. The warbling Disney choir that I imagined turned into layers upon layers of my voice mixed with Jessica Dobson’s and a few other friends’. On the other hand, a lot of those sounds are real instruments being played by fantastic musicians. The French horn, strings, clarinet, vibraphone, B3 organ, saxophone; for all of that we hired a bunch of really expert players from around Seattle. And the result feels good to me. To me, the album succeeded in always alluding to those giant classic records and, sometimes, I think we really got it.
From the beginning, the goal was always to make a captivating record with zero regard for the concerns and limitations of the live show. Some bands make it the goal to capture a very literal version of their live sound in the studio. I wanted to take the opposite approach. Here’s why; I like listening to records closely, through nice, warm speakers at home, or in the car alone. I also love hearing the energy of a band overtake a room from on stage. To me, these are such vastly different experiences, totally different ways of hearing music, so it’s more fun to approach them individually. They are two completely different mediums. As long as the songs sound awesome live and also great on the record, why do they need to sound the same? Always play the room. If the room is a studio, why not go crazy with the tools at your disposal? If the room is a noisy bar, do something else. Adapt. Right now we have stripped down to a four-piece band (although for the album release, we are going to add a bunch of orchestral elements). It’s a much more efficient, slightly less dense sound. Don’t get me wrong; it’s deceptively full-sounding for just four guys playing everything. Kyle, our lead guitarist/keyboard player, has been coming up with all sorts of tricks to bring in extra layers and samples for the live show. He had a big hand in reshaping the songs from the album versions into the live versions. Cole sounds like two drummers playing at the same time. He is very nuanced but complex. Joe’s bass parts end up drawing not only from the the bass lines on the record, but also different orchestral melodies and variations. Joe is a singer but he doesn't want anyone to know. The next project for the band is getting him to take some of the background vocals and harmonies that are featured on the record. So yeah, everyone in the band is staying very busy while playing these songs live and they are all contributing to make it into a unique experience that is very different than the record.
I do wanna say, if the Seattle Symphony ever wants to back these songs for a show, um, yes please.
Do you feel this record is as introspective as your debut, Fire on the Vine? It's set around a fictional narrative, but do you still feel personal truth is in there?
BJA: Absolutely. My first record, Fire on the Vine, was for me laced with feelings of anger and accusation, feelings that were very necessary for me to explore at that time. It was kind of a breakup record, a moment of departure from what I assessed to be a broken worldview.
But just like a break-up, hopefully, at some point you move on. I hope that The Narrow Valley ends up meaning a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For me, there’s a lot layered meaning in there from my personal and family history, but in a larger sense it represent the other side of that break-up, the part when you exhale and decide, “I’m okay. In fact, this is a huge relief to be outside of this now.” I’ve moved from anger into relief. The last full track on the new record is called Praise the Void, and it’s meant as a conclusion as well as a new opening. Its message is one of ascent. The characters leave the Narrow Valley, finally arriving at a place of freedom. They no longer need to pretend to know the answer, to feel defensive of rigid positions, to be constrained with a need to hold it all together. They can go anywhere. I feel settled in that uncertainty now more than ever. That uncertainty is exciting to me, because it allows for untethered exploration, open dialogue with the world around me.
Interview by Kathleen Tarrant
