Features | Interviews
Hem
By David Greenwald | 1 December 2006
Since the release of 2000's Rabbit Songs, Hem has staked out a position in the modern Great American Songbook that has gone nearly uncontested. In combining the orchestral sweep of chamber music with the authenticity of folk and the clarion voice of singer Sally Ellyson, the band occupies a niche between Tin Pan Alley elegance and Delta blues. Hem's latest albums, Funnel Cloud and the b-sides/outtakes album No Word from Tom (both released this year), are no exception, continuing to further the band's timeless style. Meanwhile, Hem's death-defying debut keeps on kicking, with the song "Half Acre" landing on a Liberty Mutual commercial. Songwriter/pianist Dan Messé phoned in from a recent nationwide tour to discuss Hem's recent success, the constant reissuing of Rabbit Songs and how discovering Ellyson almost didn't happen.
*****
CMG's David Greenwald (CMG): You guys are everywhere these days.
Dan Messé (DM): It's been a remarkable sort of aligning of the planets. With Funnel Cloud and the Liberty Mutual commercial airing all the time, lots of people are finding out about us.
CMG: Funnel Cloud has a lot more songs that could be considered country or roots music -- was that intentional, or did you just find yourselves playing songs that were a little more rockin'?
DM: It wasn't intentional in that we didn't say, start writing up-tempo songs. But we were listening to a lot of the Band and more current bands like Wilco and it informs the sound and the writing. In some ways, those influences have always been there and I think that now we have the confidence to tackle it. When we did the outtakes and covers record earlier this year, there was a moment when we did "Rainy Night In Georgia," at the end of that song when Sally's voice just burst forward like a dam bursting, and all of a sudden I realized what power she had in her voice. She's grown so much as a singer -- when we started with Rabbit Songs in 2000, she had never sung before.
CMG: It seems likeRabbit Songs has been picked up and reissued a million times over the last few years.
DM: Eight labels.
CMG: Is that the official count?
DM: Including overseas, yeah.
CMG: Could you give us the Cliffs Notes version of what's happened with that album since recording it?
DM: When the A&R people in America heard it, the kind ones were like, this is pretty but it's not going to sell, there's no market for it and so on and so forth. So we couldn't find a label to put it out in the U.S. We found an indie in the U.K. to put it out and the British press fell in love with it. Once the press starts writing about it, the American people started paying attention. We put it out here in the states through Bar/None, who subsequently stole all our money. Eventually Lenny Waronker - who was always a hero of mine -- signed us to Dreamworks and gave it a life. Since then, Dreamworks went under and we went to Rounder in the U.S. and in the U.K. we went to EMI and then EMI went under -- the music business in the world right now is sort of a house of cards.
CMG: Did you decide to start your label, Waveland, after going through all that?
DM: Yeah, it was actually when Dreamworks went under. Lenny made sure, as this last, great gesture, that we got all our masters back. So we found ourselves in this position on having to be business people, which none of us are suited for, but it definitely afforded us the ability to stay alive.
CMG: You always have a lot of MP3s on your web site -- live songs, things people can't get anywhere else. Why have you embraced that?
DM: There are two things that I love about it. One is that, y'know, it's not a smart financial move in your life, being in a band as your career. It's incredibly rewarding but it's not financially the most stable thing. We feel like we're in this for the love of it and we want people to hear the music, that's our first priority. So that idea of sharing music has always appealed to us. And the other thing is that, we've tried to approach our songs from this folk tradition of songs constantly changing and evolving -- a song is never finished. A b-sides rarities record comes out once in a blue moon, but you want people to hear alternate versions, live takes, new arrangements. I want there to be a transparency in the process because our studio albums are so meticulous and polished that I like people to be able to see what goes on behind the scenes and how the evolution occurs.
CMG: Has writing songs for Sally to sing changed the way you write?
DM: It definitely crystallized my voice as a songwriter. When I write now, I hear her voice in my head. It doesn't feel like I'm giving the songs away or anything, it feels like she was always meant to sing them. What I love about Sally's voice is that it's almost stoic, she doesn't over-hype the songs or over-sing the songs, and it allows me as a songwriter to write these emotionally hyperventilating songs without it being distorted.
CMG: Was Hem always going to be a band that had a lead singer that wasn't you or Steve Curtis?
DM: We were going to originally have a different singer for every song. My voice has been described as Kermit the Frog meets Lisa Loeb, and Steve has a lovely voice but it's really more of a background vocal. So we had put out word on the street that we were looking for singers, and it wasn't until we heard Sally's voice that we realized that she encompassed everything that we wanted to do as songwriters. It just seemed like 200 years in voice.
CMG: Tell me about discovering Sally.
DM: She answered this ad in the (Village) Voice that had actually been pulled a couple weeks earlier. We'd been besieged by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tapes, it was just overwhelming. She called me up and said "I'm not a singer, I've never done this before, but my friends say I have a pretty voice, I thought I'd give it a try." And me being the asshole that I am, I was very dismissive and I just said, send me a demo tape. She didn't have a demo tape, obviously, because she'd never sung before but she had made a present for a friend of some lullabies just sung into a tape recorder. She came over, I copied it in my tape recorder and sent her out the door as soon as I possibly could. I wasn't really planning on listening to it. I went to listen to another tape later in the week and pressed the wrong play button and felt like I was struck by lightning.
CMG: Earlier, you mentioned confidence -- you're now three albums into your career, more if you count No Word from Tom and the EPs. Is your confidence level pretty set now?
DM: I'm never set because I always feel like the song that I'm writing is going to be the last song, that the well is going to run dry. I do feel at this point that I know what my voice is as a songwriter. As a community of songwriters with Steve and Gary, we feed off one another. We haven't come to the end of what we want to say yet.
*****
CMG's David Greenwald (CMG): You guys are everywhere these days.
Dan Messé (DM): It's been a remarkable sort of aligning of the planets. With Funnel Cloud and the Liberty Mutual commercial airing all the time, lots of people are finding out about us.
CMG: Funnel Cloud has a lot more songs that could be considered country or roots music -- was that intentional, or did you just find yourselves playing songs that were a little more rockin'?
DM: It wasn't intentional in that we didn't say, start writing up-tempo songs. But we were listening to a lot of the Band and more current bands like Wilco and it informs the sound and the writing. In some ways, those influences have always been there and I think that now we have the confidence to tackle it. When we did the outtakes and covers record earlier this year, there was a moment when we did "Rainy Night In Georgia," at the end of that song when Sally's voice just burst forward like a dam bursting, and all of a sudden I realized what power she had in her voice. She's grown so much as a singer -- when we started with Rabbit Songs in 2000, she had never sung before.
CMG: It seems likeRabbit Songs has been picked up and reissued a million times over the last few years.
DM: Eight labels.
CMG: Is that the official count?
DM: Including overseas, yeah.
CMG: Could you give us the Cliffs Notes version of what's happened with that album since recording it?
DM: When the A&R people in America heard it, the kind ones were like, this is pretty but it's not going to sell, there's no market for it and so on and so forth. So we couldn't find a label to put it out in the U.S. We found an indie in the U.K. to put it out and the British press fell in love with it. Once the press starts writing about it, the American people started paying attention. We put it out here in the states through Bar/None, who subsequently stole all our money. Eventually Lenny Waronker - who was always a hero of mine -- signed us to Dreamworks and gave it a life. Since then, Dreamworks went under and we went to Rounder in the U.S. and in the U.K. we went to EMI and then EMI went under -- the music business in the world right now is sort of a house of cards.
CMG: Did you decide to start your label, Waveland, after going through all that?
DM: Yeah, it was actually when Dreamworks went under. Lenny made sure, as this last, great gesture, that we got all our masters back. So we found ourselves in this position on having to be business people, which none of us are suited for, but it definitely afforded us the ability to stay alive.
CMG: You always have a lot of MP3s on your web site -- live songs, things people can't get anywhere else. Why have you embraced that?
DM: There are two things that I love about it. One is that, y'know, it's not a smart financial move in your life, being in a band as your career. It's incredibly rewarding but it's not financially the most stable thing. We feel like we're in this for the love of it and we want people to hear the music, that's our first priority. So that idea of sharing music has always appealed to us. And the other thing is that, we've tried to approach our songs from this folk tradition of songs constantly changing and evolving -- a song is never finished. A b-sides rarities record comes out once in a blue moon, but you want people to hear alternate versions, live takes, new arrangements. I want there to be a transparency in the process because our studio albums are so meticulous and polished that I like people to be able to see what goes on behind the scenes and how the evolution occurs.
CMG: Has writing songs for Sally to sing changed the way you write?
DM: It definitely crystallized my voice as a songwriter. When I write now, I hear her voice in my head. It doesn't feel like I'm giving the songs away or anything, it feels like she was always meant to sing them. What I love about Sally's voice is that it's almost stoic, she doesn't over-hype the songs or over-sing the songs, and it allows me as a songwriter to write these emotionally hyperventilating songs without it being distorted.
CMG: Was Hem always going to be a band that had a lead singer that wasn't you or Steve Curtis?
DM: We were going to originally have a different singer for every song. My voice has been described as Kermit the Frog meets Lisa Loeb, and Steve has a lovely voice but it's really more of a background vocal. So we had put out word on the street that we were looking for singers, and it wasn't until we heard Sally's voice that we realized that she encompassed everything that we wanted to do as songwriters. It just seemed like 200 years in voice.
CMG: Tell me about discovering Sally.
DM: She answered this ad in the (Village) Voice that had actually been pulled a couple weeks earlier. We'd been besieged by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tapes, it was just overwhelming. She called me up and said "I'm not a singer, I've never done this before, but my friends say I have a pretty voice, I thought I'd give it a try." And me being the asshole that I am, I was very dismissive and I just said, send me a demo tape. She didn't have a demo tape, obviously, because she'd never sung before but she had made a present for a friend of some lullabies just sung into a tape recorder. She came over, I copied it in my tape recorder and sent her out the door as soon as I possibly could. I wasn't really planning on listening to it. I went to listen to another tape later in the week and pressed the wrong play button and felt like I was struck by lightning.
CMG: Earlier, you mentioned confidence -- you're now three albums into your career, more if you count No Word from Tom and the EPs. Is your confidence level pretty set now?
DM: I'm never set because I always feel like the song that I'm writing is going to be the last song, that the well is going to run dry. I do feel at this point that I know what my voice is as a songwriter. As a community of songwriters with Steve and Gary, we feed off one another. We haven't come to the end of what we want to say yet.