Brother

This is a par­tic­u­larly biased post, but it’s long overdue. For the past ten years, my brother Paul has been per­forming under the name Quiet River High. I have had his music in my head for the better part of my life; I remember his first guitar, a rusted Stra­to­caster my dad found in a pile of dis­carded items on his way home from work. I remember Paul going through sev­eral sets of strings on this thing, even though we had no amp. I remember his first “real” guitar, a Hohner, which he brought to his first per­for­mance. And I remember the Ibanez hol­low­body that came next, and the Dean after that. I remember lis­tening to Paul play long into the night, after our par­ents went to bed. I remember his four-track, and the end­less array of cas­settes he pro­duced on that thing, pieces of songs, lyrics, thoughts, mem­o­ries. I remember each iter­a­tion of lineup, style, and sound. I still have the sketch­book filled with ideas for the cover of his first album. I have the screen­printed wood case he designed for the album on my desk. I still listen to Lazuli a lot (I want to see this released, it’s too good to leave behind). I follow his tum­blelog, we talk everyday on the phone, we watch bad movies together. I know this is mushy, but he means the world to me.

So I imagine this post is a reac­tion to recent news about the band: after cut­ting the name down to “Quiet River” about a year ago, Paul has recently announced his deci­sion to retire the project alto­gether. He is now starting to uncover a bunch of unfin­ished and semi-finished work res­cued from past machines. His last show as Quiet River High will be on his birthday, April 3^rd, at a cur­rently undis­closed loca­tion. Though I know he’s moving on to bigger and better stuff, I will miss this.

I now find that this post is untimely; I should have written it much, much ear­lier (I never thought I had the words to tell him or anyone else what his work meant to me), and yet it might seem pre­ma­ture now to aggran­dize music that has osten­sibly been kept inti­mate in a circle of friends and hasn’t truly run its course just yet. But before it’s gone, before it becomes just another thing kept between family and friends, I wanted to write about it. I’ll give the warning that what fol­lows isn’t the type of stuff I nor­mally exhibit here – it’s bare, and it’s tough to write.

Paul has been recording for a long time. Accord­ingly, there are a lot of songs that never make it to final­iza­tion, songs that see recon­struc­tion and recre­ation in later works, songs that have been played for years and years before they are set down. It often seems to me that he’s got a piece of the song fig­ured out before any­thing else, a line of writing, a melody or pro­gres­sion, that inevitably becomes struc­tural to the final product. For me, his songs are remark­able because they seem to reveal the process of writing and recording itself. They’re earnest, and that’s what makes them so enjoy­able; every piece that con­tributed to the devel­op­ment of the song is there if you listen closely. Some­times the songs are absolutely bare for that same reason; the pieces seem to work simply because they’re unfin­ished, and acknowl­edged as such. Yet for every­thing that Paul doesn’t finish, he’s got two com­plete albums that have come from this process.

A little bit about Paul’s direct inspi­ra­tions: as a singer-songwriterly type, Paul totally sounds like Townes Van Zandt and (of course) Jeff Buckley. As his brother, I can tell you that we spent the better parts of middle and high school lis­tening to nei­ther musi­cian. We were big on The Get Up Kids, Saves the Day (for a time, vir­tu­ally any­thing on Vagrant), At the Drive-In, Pedro the Lion, and Jimmy Eat World, amidst some offer­ings from Dad of the Mahav­ishnu Orchestra and Jeff Beck. Eclectic as those tastes may seem (see I’m being funny here), I find it strange that none of Paul’s music really sounds like any of the afore­men­tioned groups. I don’t think it was ever Paul’s inten­tion to emu­late any of his favorite bands/musicians, and I don’t think that he does on any con­scious level. Paul’s music is way too per­sonal for that. Maybe that’s why I can draw com­par­isons to two of the late-greats and still feel like I’ve left some­thing out entirely. On his best tracks his voice man­ages to bal­ance vul­ner­a­bility and force (it would seem that these are oth­er­wise oppo­si­tional reg­is­ters, right?), as even in his quiet moments his voice is strong.

Per­haps what really comes from Paul’s back­ground in music is his appre­ci­a­tion of the album format. Theme and sequence are cru­cial for Paul, as his albums are structurally-founded on the cor­re­spon­dence between tracks. These are *albums* in every sense of the word; I listen to them from start to finish, and I get the impres­sion that they’re meant to be lis­tened to that way.

Below I’ve given a reading of his two albums, Loki Grimm and Lazuli. The albums appeared within a year of each other; Loki Grimm was the result of a long process, while Lazuli seemed to be almost instan­ta­neous. I think this comes across in how both albums play out: Loki Grimm is slow-paced and brooding, while Lazuli is fast-paced and imme­diate. Of course there are moments on both records that defy this cat­e­go­riza­tion, but it’s easy to hear the influ­ence of either process in each recording. I’ve also pro­vided some tracks from both records (thanks Paul) as well as infor­ma­tion per­taining to their creation.

Quiet River High – Loki Grimm

There’s a par­tic­ular mythos to this album that I don’t think anyone out­side of my family knows. I don’t mean that to seem even remotely insulting, it’s just some­thing very oblique, even to the people for whom this album mat­ters most. “Loki Grimm” was the name of one of my dad’s var­ious bands in the 70s. During this time, Dad ran a paper route in the Bronx on his bike and used that money to pay for a studio room to prac­tice in. I guess you can call him a studio musi­cian here, given that he prac­ticed for eight hours a day, playing var­ious gigs as they came up. The name “Loki Grimm” is itself bor­rowed, and I think this is a reoc­cur­ring theme in Paul’s work; later on in the decade, Dad and co. would take the name “Train Wreck” from a head­lining band after said band didn’t show for their first gig. I can see the deci­sion made in an instant that night at the Emelin The­atre, although I know that there’s more to it than mere hap­pen­stance. For Paul, I think that the title for his first album is, of course, in direct ref­er­ence to this exchange, but it’s also about the spectre of this figure on our lives: Loki Grimm sug­gests a trick­ster, a devil in pan­tomime, an acknowl­edg­ment of some­thing (or someone) beyond death. Death is an impor­tant theme (for Paul and me alike), and there’s no lis­tening to this record without encoun­tering just that: “Loki Grimm is always waiting / to take you back with him,” Paul con­cludes on the title track. With his intro­duc­tion in “The Devil’s in the Fog,” the pale shadow arrives early in the record, yet Paul always seems to wel­come it: “Lead the way / through the dark­ness, / I am not afraid,” cau­tioning to the lis­tener to “please take your time with him, / he killed me once, / he’ll do it again.” Imme­di­ately there­after is Paul’s rumi­na­tion on death and dreaming in “Sleep­walker,” a song I’ve seen take stage over the past few years in many dif­ferent for­ma­tions, and the search for lost love in “My New Dynamic.”

That’s not to say that every track is depressing – “My New Dynamic” and “No Home” are prob­ably the cheeriest songs I’ve heard Paul write. Yet by the end of the record, “Wilt,” the theme has com­pleted its med­i­ta­tion, in lines that seem resigned to its work on life: “just ‘cause / we were young / doesn’t mean that we were wrong,” Paul announces in ret­ro­spect. In a sense, the theme that sur­vives the record is not death, but love: in my favorite line on the album, Paul sings “love is a rogue wave, / it had been there all our lives, / just to sweep us away.” This empha­sizes the impor­tance of sev­eral pair­ings on the album, most notably the pairing between “Alba­tross (Sink)” and “Sink (Reprise)”; the oppo­sites are placed in direct dia­logue, and are forced to take on each other as com­pli­men­tary pairs rather than antin­o­mies.  

It’s plain to see this invo­ca­tion of love and death in the “Sister/Brother” suite, which I’ve uploaded below. It’s the most intense cou­pling on the record, and easily my favorite.  Don’t let the length deter you, both tracks are (really) fast-paced.

Quiet River High — “Sister”

Quiet River High — “Brother”

Paul also employs tons of col­lab­o­ra­tion on this record. While most of the songs are just Paul – “The Devil’s in the Fog,” “Alba­tross (Sink),” “Lark,” “Loki Grimm,” and “Wilt” – he’s got great musi­cians throughout. On “Sleep­walker,” “Sister” and “Brother” he’s got our good friend Jeff Rose, easily one of the best drum­mers I’ve heard, as well as Kilian Duarte, who’s cur­rently fin­ishing up at Berklee and plays bass like nobody’s busi­ness. 

Quiet River — Lazuli

Paul imme­di­ately went to work after Loki Grimm on a new batch of songs that soon became Lazuli. I remember that the title had been picked out long before any tracks were recorded. It’s a com­pletely dif­ferent album than the last, which I think is a response to com­ments from friends that the first is a slow and sad; it’s heavy, it’s fast, and a bit more opti­mistic. But for sev­eral rea­sons, Paul never did any­thing with this album. There’s no true album cover for it either. In many ways, this album is a product of the first *true* Quiet River line-up, with Nate on guitar, Matt on bass, and Jack Beal on per­cus­sion. For that reason I’ve less to spec­u­late about this record – it’s not Paul’s album in the same sense as Loki Grimm, although in many ways it’s much more con­sis­tent in tone and pacing – and simply that much more to praise about the music itself.

I think this album demon­strates a huge accom­plish­ment for Paul, and for that reason alone I want to see it prop­erly released. It’s the product of a lot of hard work, of strong friend­ships, of out­standing pro­duc­tion and musi­cian­ship, and (most impor­tantly of all) it’s absolutely enjoy­able. From the grand opening sequence “1948, 1949” to closer “Jamie,” Lazuli is truly exciting work. It also hosts a proper ver­sion of “Asleep at the Sea,” one of Paul’s ear­liest and best-known songs finally get­ting the full-band treatment.

“Lapis-Lazuli” is prob­ably the most accom­plished track here: Paul’s approach is inti­mate, his lyrics matching his soft reg­ister and bright com­po­si­tion (it’s the only truly acoustic track here, and def­i­nitely the most charged). “Wise Blood” has got to be one of my favorite songs of all time (seri­ously), although on any given day “Anchor” com­petes with that. I’ve pro­vided both below.

Quiet River — “Wise Blood”

Quiet River — “Anchor”

You can listen to and/or pur­chase Paul’s music here. Check out his cur­rent projects A Hunter’s Pace and Goolsby, and if you’re inter­ested, he’s got a bunch of videos up on his youtube channel.

Thanks for reading – for friends and family, this might seem sparse, but know that it’s dif­fi­cult to put this into words. I know many people prob­ably have sib­lings that they feel this way about. I think that, for me, Paul’s music rep­re­sents much more than I am cur­rently capable of expressing. I think of him as a true friend, which is more than many can say of a brother, but that’s not my point here: he is someone I feel is some­times older than me, someone much more rooted in the ways of the world, and cer­tainly someone I will for­ever idolize and always respect. I wish him luck and much love in his next project.