“Greg Calbi, who does our mastering, had just gotten through with a session where they used that orchestra, and he was playing it for us,” Messe recalls. “And it just sounded so beautiful; it sounded so much like some of those great string sounds that I loved from the late ’60s/early ’70s records. It immediately captured my mind, and I was like, ‘This is the sound that I want for Eveningland.’ So he hooked us up with the liaison over there, and we flew out, and we spent about one sleepless week recording it. That was almost the first thing we did, so basically the whole album we had to build around these string orchestra parts.”
The string parts were arranged by Greg Pliska, who also handled many of the arrangements on the first album. The close association with Pliska, who had worked with Messe on projects previous to Rabbit Songs, is another major asset for Hem, and another thing that sets the band apart.
“I think a lot of folk bands or country bands or pop bands would be a little intimidated to work with someone like Greg,” Maurer says. “He teaches music theory on a grad-school level, and he’s this really learned musician who would intimidate a lot of guitar-strummers like myself. But he’s just a music lover, and he wants to be in both worlds as much as possible. He’s one of us; when he’s in the studio, it’s like he’s part of the band.”
The resplendent impact of Pliska’s arranging is at its peak on the Eveningland title track, which consists almost entirely of the Slovak ensemble (plus accents of glockenspiel from Messe and cymbals from Brotter). Ironically, though, as Maurer and Messe worked incessantly on assembling the album after the rest of the recording was done, they found themselves confronted with an instrumental embarrassment of riches that threatened to overwhelm the songs.
“We got a little overenamored with all the orchestra that we had to play with,” Messe observes in retrospect. “Every part was great, but it was getting in the way of the emotion of the song. It was getting in the way of Sally’s voice, or it was just not effective. You’d listen to it and you’d be like, wow, that’s beautiful, or wow that’s cool — but it would leave me cold.
“So we just went through a process of stripping back, whittling away at a lot of the layers. And slowly the song became more emotionally resonant, and just more effective. And then some songs we just had to re-record from scratch.”
In the midst of all this, the bottom fell out of their major-label experience. In January 2004, Universal bought DreamWorks Records and folded it into its Interscope label, dropping much of the roster (including Hem).
Waronker, however, helped ensure Hem’s ability to obtain the rights to Eveningland, which they eventually decided to release on their own Waveland label with distribution through Rounder. “We looked at other major labels and stuff,” Messe says, “but, you know, there isn’t another Lenny Waronker out there.”
The end result of the band’s turbulent ride over the past year is, artistically at least, an unqualified treasure. As auspicious a beginning as Rabbit Songs was — Waronker says, simply, “I think it’s a classic” — Eveningland is an even better record. The orchestral accents, though reined in, remain majestic; Ellyson’s singing expresses a greater range; and the ensemble’s playing feels more assured from the experiences they’ve shared.
Messe’s material, meanwhile, is even more melodic and memorable than on Rabbit Songs. Compared to the more folkish foundation of that record, Eveningland leans more toward classic pop; tracks such as “Lucky”, “Receiver”, “Redwing” and “Carry Me Home” bring to mind the late ’60s/early ’70s golden age of AM radio.
To Messe, it’s not just the notes, but also the words, that turn a song into magic. “For me, the sound — that sonic, hopefully cinematic world that we create — is based on the lyrics we’re writing,” he says. “I think my favorite albums are always albums that capture a time and a place. For example, you can listen to Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombone and feel like you’re inside an old hotel, or Scott Walker, feeling like you’re in Paris in the rain.…It’s usually a great image, a great lyric, that I keep coming back to.”
Ellyson shares that sense, and feels it keenly in Messe’s work. “His music is so descriptive; it evokes such beautiful pictures,” she says. That connection was there from the first time she heard Messe at the piano, shortly after he’d serendipitously listened to her lullabies tape.
“We sat down and he started playing these songs, and it was like, it tapped right into all the songs that meant so much to me,” Ellyson remembers. “All the old Disney songs that I would listen to when I was a child, and had such an effect on me. I just thought, oh my gosh, these are gorgeous, gorgeous songs.”
The Disney reference is, in fact, quite relevant: On its 2001 EP of covers, Hem included the Cinderella chestnut “A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes”, which Ellyson had previously recorded on her lullabies tape. “The first record I remember loving when I was young was the Disney Cinderella album,” she explains. “I’d play it when I’d go to sleep, and it would end up with this big deep dig groove in the middle where it would just spin all night after I had gone to sleep. And that song always meant so much to me. I always thought it was so full of hope.”
Interestingly, Messe speaks in a similarly wondrous way about the music of another classic children’s movie, Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. “That’s an amazing soundtrack,” he raves. “How could you not love those songs? I mean, just the arrangements — I think if I had to point any finger at where we got the sound for our arrangements on this album, it’s that soundtrack. If you listen to ‘Fire Thief’ [the opening track on Eveningland], the string arrangements are very much based on some of those Willy Wonka arrangements.”
It’s this reverence for the magic that music can cast during childhood, and a desire to rekindle the spell in our adult lives, that is ultimately the passage to the artistic realm Hem seeks to create, and inhabit.
“Part of my interest is always wedding high art to pop art, because to me, that’s what American art is all about,” Messe concludes. “And so it just seems natural that these songs are basically not even pop songs; they’re children’s songs, hopefully. And if we can take a children’s song and marry it to a band on one end and an orchestra on the other, then you’re going to have something pretty deep.”
