Music

Unexpected Success

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After Graham and Hardwick played the Live Set show on Austin public radio station KUT, fellow musician Matt Eskey, a.k.a. bassist Earl B. Freedom in Mojo Nixon's Toadliquors, offered to put the show out on CD on his tiny-yet-tastemaking Freedom Records label, just as he had earlier with a Derailers Live Set taping. "At that point it had never even occurred to me," admits Graham. "We told Matt, 'Give us the money you would spend to have this mastered and redone, and we'll give you a real record.' He goes, like, 'I don't think that can be done.' We were like, 'We can do it.' Less than $5,000. Cut in three days. Mixed in three days. On the seventh day we rested.

"When we finished mixing, I remember thinking, If I see this on the shelves somewhere, I'll be happy. But we ended up getting pretty substantial radio play. With '$100 Bill,' we were on 51 stations at one point. And we're still getting play. I'm still getting publishing money on that. We ended up selling close to 5,000 copies, and when you spend $5,000 on a record, that's pretty good odds. I wasn't even thinking in terms of a second record, much less having any kind of success with the first one. It's all this unexpected stuff."

His recently released follow-up, Summerland, finds Graham now on the far-larger New West indie label and presents an upbeat flip side to Monster Island's dour meditations (just compare and contrast the titles). "I think that a lot of people are saying, 'Oh, well, they're radically different. The first one was one thing, and the second is something completely different.' I think it's like two halves of the same sword. But sonically I think the second one has more to offer. There's more color to it, more variety, more breadth. Some could argue that there isn't the focus on the second one that there is on the first one. But I find the second one easier to listen to, you know," he says with a laugh.

"On [Monster Island], with the songs, there was this linear, sequential story that was told," Graham explains. "On Summerland, there's still a story that's told, but it's more about the pieces in the whole story. You can put any three of those songs together and they will tell an essential aspect of the whole story. Also, it's just, I think, on [Monster Island], I got to do one thing I do really well, but on Summerland, I got to do everything I like to do. There's the acoustic songs, there's the badass rocking songs, there's the kind of quasi-pop songs, so the story is a little more complicated. This is the story about what happened when we left Monster Island, I guess.

"I think that record kind of made itself. And [on] this record I got to actually make the record, instead of the record making me," he says, even though Summerland still took a mere 13 days to record and mix. "There's something to be said for both processes. I think the second way made for a more colorful album." The differences in spirit between both albums are also reflected in their cover art, "which goes from this sort of duo-tone, real low-chromatic kind of thing to cover art with all this color exploding," he says. "That's kind of how I view the music, too. This is more colorful and warm."

On both records, Graham has eschewed the big-picture rock and pop focus for something more subtle and personal. It's a style that embraces most all of his experiences yet doesn't quite comfortably rest in the Americana bag it gets stuffed into.

And just as Graham has learned how giving up career goals enables him to achieve ones he never imagined, a similar epiphany has happened with his songwriting. "I went through a thing when I was younger of trying to write songs, and it just never worked for me. The harder that I tried to write songs, the worse they were." Now, instead of trying to write, he just lets the writing happen. "The songs announce themselves," he says. "I'll be driving or I'll be sitting at home or wake up in the middle of the night, and there it will be. Not the whole song, but there will be..." Graham pauses and thinks. "It's like a visitor that just shows up at the house, and you go, 'Oh, this song is gonna be about this' or 'this song is gonna be called this.'

"It sounds so gay, but it's like -- I don't know who said this -- the songs are out there. We're just catching them. It's all we're doing. That's not to say that I don't spend a lot of time working on them, or chasing 'em. But when they're ready to be caught, they're there. It's that Michelangelo thing about chipping away everything that doesn't look like the horse."

To complete the cycle, Graham is now happily remarried and just days away from the birth of his second child. No wonder he has gone from catching songs with such titles as "Faithless" and "Wave Good-bye" to tunes called "A Place in the Shade" and "Big Sweet Life." His life, career and even music have all gone from sad and defeated to joyful and contented.

"My ideas for where I was going and what was gonna be happening were pretty limited," says Graham. "And what ended up happening is way better than anything I could have dreamed up. So I'm just trying to enjoy it.

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