ROCKWiRED iNTERViEWS ASA BREBNER

i'M NOT GONE
ASA BREBNER TALKS TO ROCKWiRED
ABOUT HiS LATEST ALBUM SUENOS DE LOS MUERTOS
RETURNiNG TO MUSiC AFTER FOUR YEARS
AND THE ALLURE OF THE BOSTON MUSiC SCENE

iNTERViEWED BY BRiAN LUSH

Boston music veteran ASA BREBNER doesn’t give a damn about setting the world on fire. All he’s concerned with is getting the music out there. SUENOS DE LOS MUERTOS is BREBNER’s first album in four years and to say that this eleven song catalog of love and loss is “eagerly anticipated” would be a bit of an understatement. More than a mere release SUENOS DE LOS MUERTOS signals the rock n roll troubadour’s return to music after spending the past few years taking care of his ailing parents. Judging by the title, one would think that BREBNER’s latest offering was all doom and gloom from man who once toured and recorded with the likes of JONATHAN RICHMAN AND THE MODERN LOVERS and ROBIN LANE AND THE CHARTBUSTERS. SUENOS DE LOS MUERTOS is in fact an unflinching and unsentimental examination of life, love and everything set to a sparse yet punchy rock backing provided largely by BREBNER and drummer KEVIN SHURTLEFF. With his distinctive howl, BREBNER surveys the tattered landscape of a life that is rock n roll on the tracks I’M NOT GONE and NAME DAMAGE. A nice Latin feel is conjured up on the song COME TO ME but things are truly electrifying on TRIED AND TRUE – a stunning duet between BREBNER and Boston vocalist ANDREA GILLIS.

ROCKWIRED spoke with ASA BREBNER over the phone. Here is how it went.

This is your first CD in four years.
Yeah, it’s been a while. I was taking care of some elderly parents and kind of kept my focus on that for a while and kept playing in this one band that I play in called THE FAMILY JEWELS that does this sort of Do-Wop kind of stuff. The guys in that band are all quite good. We hardly ever had to rehearse. I kept doing that but I sort of kept the other stuff that I had been doing before on the back burner.

I actually first became aware of your work through THE BRAMBLE JAM.
Oh, no kidding?

Yeah, I interviewed them towards the end of last year.
Those guys are fun to work with. I’m glad that they got to make that CD.

It was definitely the first children’s album that I ever covered and I have no children. Me neither. How I got involved with them is that I was taking care of my mother and my neighbors were semi-interested in music and we had this epiphany about writing - not necessarily children’s music - but family music that wouldn’t drive you crazy on a long car trip.

Your latest CD has an interesting title. Talk about it.
SUENOS DE LOS MUERTOS means DREAMS OF THE DEAD.. I sort of came up with the title when I was sitting on a barstool one day. It’s all about looking back on ones life and trying to imagine what people who have passed away – should they have a consciousness – be thinking of about their lives, kind of like that THORNTON WILDER play ‘OUR TOWN’. The narration by people who have passed away in a small town in that play was a sentiment that kind of informed the album. It’s about looking back on life from someone who no longer has it. I’m not religious and I don’t really believe in an afterlife but you can use the idea of it to help form a feeling.

The due date for the CD is coming soon.
On February 13^th, we’re going to be having a release party at THE PRECINCT. It’s pretty nice club. I’ll be playing with some friends that I’ve known for a long time in various bands. We’ll all be on the bill together.

What’s all going through your head with regard to this forthcoming release? How do you feel about the album now that all the work that has gone into it is behind you?
This is probably the seventh album that I’ve put out and it’s nice to be back and making music again but I wouldn’t say that I’m anxious. I’ve been playing music for quite a while now without the ambition of trying to “make it” as a rock star. In my twenties, I was trying to do that, but at this point, it’s become a habit. I can’t live without it. It’s intertwined with the social fabric of your life as well. I live in a really nice city where there are a lot of clubs around that are walking distance from my house and that’s great. It’s sort of a microcosm and a macrocosm.

What drew you to music in the beginning?
It’s probably the most banal reason – to attract women. Everybody likes music except for certain people for whom it probably just sounds like noise to. I think everybody is emotionally drawn to it. Music seemed like a way to distinguish one self from the rest of humanity at the time when you’re in junior high school. It feels like a way to make your mark in the world and to have fun at the same time in an emotionally communicative way.

Explain the songwriting process. How does that work for you?
There are several different ways that it can work. I write some kind of emotional, cathartic, love-and-loss type songs and those usually come from some kind of base experience. Those are the songs that usually end up writing themselves in a really short time and just have to be tweaked here and there. Then there are the subject matter type songs that aren’t quite as emotional but are probably a little more satire. There is a song on the record called ALLNIGHTUPTIGHTBAGBITEKOKAINEPAH which is a satire of a certain period – the late seventies and the early eighties. Cocaine was ubiquitous and record companies were handing it out to bands. On the one hand it was really stupid but at the same time, there is this dumb nostalgia for whatever was happening in your early twenties. You may have been coming of age when MOTLEY CRUE was on the radio and that was your BEATLES. It just happened to be the wallpaper of music was when you were coming of age. The drummer that plays with me is about fifteen years younger than me and MOTLEY CRUE was what was there when he first started opening his ears to what was on the radio. At the time, I dismissed their music but in retrospect, I look back at those bands that I used to hate and think they were actually pretty good. I came of age in the late sixties and early seventies and that was a time that was kind of an anomaly. I think a lot of the artists that were on the HIT PARADE or on the top ten were actually really serious and important artists like THE BEATLES, BOB DYLAN, JONI MITCHELL and THE ROLLING STONES. I’m not sure if that’s the same now – not to put down what’s going on right now. I know that there is tons of good stuff out there now. It’s almost we’ve come full circle from the EISENHOWER era when we made these people like PAUL ANKA and now we have JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE, BRITNEY SPEARS and LADY GAGA. I’m not saying those people don’t have any talent. I’m not trying to put them down. I’m just saying that it seems like the sixties was this anomaly.

How did you approach recording this album?
The basic tracks were all recorded up in Northern New Hampshire while I was taking care of my mother who was dying. My friend KEVIN SHURTLEFF came up one weekend in the fall and it was just me on guitar and him on drums like THE WHITE STRIPES. We did all of the basics that way. I took the tracks to a friend’s studio and I basically fleshed out the bass and second guitar parts. I had friends come in and do the back up singing. CHARLIE LEDGER plays harp on one the songs.

From the album, what songs resonate for you the most and why?
My favorite track on the record is COME BACK TO ME. It’s got a little bit of a Latin feel to it. I think that song is one of those romantic songs that I wrote in ten minutes. It sort of tumbled out as a catharsis. Those are the kind of songs that happen the most for me. It’s a short song and it’s pretty simple. It’s all about love and loss and longing. That is the one that ticks out to me the most. I’m also partial to TRIED AND TRUE because my friend ANDREA GILLIS sings on it. She is a big punk rock, R&B singer around here who I love dearly. It’s a song about rediscovering a lost lover or a forgotten friend.

From a distance, it looks like Boston has this interesting music scene. Would you talk about the scene that you are surrounded by.
It’s a big college town. I started playing when I was in my early twenties at THE RAT which was this famous place – it’s gone now – it was a melting of people that were just beginning to make baby steps away from the corporate rock thing that was going on. I thin that in many cities, punk rock became a reaction to a lot of the Corporate FM radio. BERKLEE SCHOOL OF MUSIC is here to there is a super jazz scene. The great thing about Boston is that all of these different styles of music co-exist and crossbreed. I know that Manhattan is bigger place and there are a lot more clubs but you don’t know a lot of the people that would be your constituency. In Boston, everyone kind of knows each other, if not directly. It makes for an interesting social network. It’s big enough of a city to be a city but it’s also small enough where you have this very interesting social scene. All different genres of music are able to rub elbows here.

I interviewed a band from Boston called LUSTRA a few years back and they had told me about something called the “Boston Curse”.
That sounds like the RED SOX. I don’t know what they’re taking about. I think a lot of bands here end up being insulated in Boston and never break out into the national scene. I was in a band called ROBERT LANE AND THE CHARTBUSTERS back in the late-seventies and early-eighties. The band was big in New England and sold about sixty-thousand records and toured all over the United States in a Winnebago for months. We were never really able to break out of New England. That might be what they mean by the ‘Boston Curse”

That was what it meant.
You’ve got a few people who’ve gone national. You’ve got the MIGHTY, MIGHTY BOSSTONES, BOSTON, J. GIELS BAND and THE CARS. I guess you could say that it’s kind of an insular thing. I don’t really think about it. I’m not trying to go for the brass ring like I was when in my twenties. Making music is just what I’ve always done. I’m not trying to become matinee idol. More like a manatee idol. It’s still enjoyable to me. I love music. I don’t know, this may be the last record that I put out. If the music comes to me, I’ll sit down and work on it and if I like it , I’ll record it. That’s how the process works. This could be the last time that I write a record. I don’t know.

What would you like someone to come away with after hearing SUENOS DE LOS MUERTOS?

It’s rock n roll. I hope it makes ‘em rock. Rock n roll is about sex, fun and living and I hope that some people get some inspiration from that.