When most bands talk about the genesis of their first albums, the highest drama they might experience is generally expanded by the fevered imagination of a creative publicist. “We had so many songs to choose from...how would we ever make the perfect album?” “We only had two days left in the studio...how would we ever finish on time?” “The guitarist and drummer came down with stomach flu...things were looking bleak.”
When Robert Harrison talks about the arduous journey that resulted in his new band, Future Clouds & Radar, and his first release with the project, a sprawling self-titled psych pop double album masterpiece, he doesn’t need to manufacture any drama. It’s all real, beginning with a teenage car accident that left Harrison with a largely untreated spinal injury that was slowly exacerbated by his given profession of humping equipment from venue to venue and standing on stages performing tightly structured, loose limbed indie rock night after night.
Harrison’s original claim to fame was Austin indie sensation Cotton Mather, a band that was hailed as “the American Squeeze” and “the greatest new guitar pop band since Supergrass.” Although the quartet never attained commercial success to match their critical acclaim, they always seemed on the brink of a big break. Finally, after nine years together, following the tour for 2001’s The Big Picture, Harrison and the band decided mutually they had taken Cotton Mather to its logical conclusion.
“We didn’t really have consensus within the group as to continuing,” says Harrison from his Austin, TX studio. “I think for the most part people agreed that it was a good time to set it down and say, ‘That was good but it wasn’t made really to go beyond this.’ It seemed that it had run its course.”
The stress of the Cotton Mather dissolution and a series of personal upheavals all combined to aggravate Harrison’s spinal condition to a critical point, and he began experiencing pain severe enough to keep him off his feet and bedridden for nearly two years. Although he downplays the seriousness of the situation, it was clearly a debilitating and emotionally troubling period as Harrison had lost both his mobility and his physical capacity to create music, unable to sit at a piano or even sit up enough to play guitar. He had become trapped in something of a creative limbo.
“As the spine thing became worse, I just had to stop doing anything with music for a couple of years,” says Harrison. “It sounds so dramatic, but it really wasn’t. It was a time of rejuvenation and change and ultimately healing; I would say a lot of mystical healing. My family and I moved out to the country and we had a remarkable change of lifestyle orientation.”
In the midst of Harrison’s spiritual self-healing, his 5-year-old daughter gave him an unusual birthday present: a ukulele, small enough to be played in his confined position but musical enough to spark the creative process. After having been denied the ability to express them, songs began to pour out of Harrison.
“I began calling people and finding out that there was a great deal of love for the Cotton Mather catalog in the community, and people were eager to help,” says Harrison. “In a very tenuous fashion, the process of Future Clouds & Radar began with me somewhat still dysfunctional physically in the first month of work, but I have a small team, a core group of people around me, and I began to make all this music. And the ukulele threw me into a different mode of creating because it left so much to the imagination.”
Before Harrison conceived the expansive psychedelic Elvis Costello-conducts-the-Beatles/ELO-tribute pop sound of Future Clouds & Radar, he first had to exorcise an album’s worth of latent Cotton Mather material left in his system after the band’s demise. Once he had gotten those out of his creative system, Harrison began working on Future Clouds & Radar in earnest.
As Harrison continued to explore the power of physical healing in the metaphysical realm, the intersection between the material he was conceiving and the means to actualize it expanded exponentially.
“I think there’s always another answer,” says Harrison. “I think once I began opening up to not just physical healing but a lot of possibilities of hope and spirituality in my life, the songs came in bringing these sparkly little messages. It really was like a love-in over here. I’m continually amazed by the generosity of music. We tend to think in terms of finitude and limitation...‘I’ve got this song, I’d better wait and record it the perfect way, and make sure I demo it.’ I think those kinds of thoughts tend to close things down a great deal.” In a lot of ways, the most difficult aspect of the debut Future Clouds & Radar album was not in Harrison’s recovery and the subsequent writing and recording of the legitimate double album’s worth of material. It was in trying to find someone to mix it all down.“It took some time to find some group of people unhinged enough to agree to mix all this, because I’m not a mix engineer,” says Harrison. “I kept calling around and saying, ‘Hey, man, I’ve got a new record.’ ‘Oh, great. Where’ve you been?’ ‘Well, I’m here now and I’ve got 27 tracks for you.’ And then there’d be a long pause followed by a dial tone. That was the hard part, finishing. I knew I had, with some great musicians helping, created something that could actually sound good. I knew I had tracked it well, and I believed in the recorded material.”
Eventually, Harrison realized the only way to get a double album mixed was to farm it out in pieces.
“I hit upon the formula of using three different mix engineers whose lives not be bankrupted by associating with me,” says Harrison with a laugh. “They all agreed to this cockamamie scheme, so we got Dave Fridmann, Paul Stacey and Lars Goranssen.” The result of Harrison’s amazing creative rejuvenation, the collaborative efforts of a team of gifted musicians and an Impossible Missions Force assemblage of mixing talent is an album of astonishing depth and beauty and power, a great pop album that also happens to operate as a concept album about the power of the mind and the capacity to heal oneself without outside intervention. With an album of this scope and size, the wisdom of including so much material in one package is always questioned, but Harrison was absolutely confident in his decision to release all of the songs in a double album format because there was no way to separate the songs from the tale they were telling.
“I knew the songs were sort of revealing a story and that there was a connection between them, but there was never a conscious moment when I thought, ‘I’m going to write a song cycle documenting my healing,’” says Harrison. “I often don’t quite know what I’m doing. I just go with what has been handed to me. Some of the songs came out of dreams, some out of meditation.”
In fact, the stage for Future Clouds & Radar may well have been set into motion long before any of Harrison’s physical difficulties began, dating back to a conversation he had with Cotton Mather guitarist Whit Williams.
“I remember Whit telling me a few times, ‘I really think you ought to open this up and expand your palette,’” recalls Harrison. “I think he was the first one to give voice to what seemed a little obvious that we were working within some confining walls in the last year of Cotton Mather. He and I agreed that it was time for things to change a bit; we never really took the conversation further than that but it was on my mind that I felt that that group of people, terrific as it was, wasn’t the best vehicle for where my imagination wanted to go musically. I love records that are band records; I just don’t think it’s what I do best. I think that I’m best when I’m turned loose in the studio like a gerbil.”
--Brian Baker
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FUTURE CLOUDS AND RADAR's FUTURE CLOUDS AND RADAR is available now on Star Apple Kingdom Records.
http://www.futurecloudsandradar.com
http://www.myspace.com/futurecloudsandradartx
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