One might think it rare for a young musician these days to be directly influenced by music from 40 years ago. For twenty-somethings, a more likely touchstone might be the music of the early 2000s and bands like The White Stripes or The Strokes, whose time in the limelight coincides with their own impressionable youth. But for 22-year-old Chris Chu, musical appreciation always began with the classics, and it was the self-discovery that came from his initial exposure to these classics that ultimately led him to form his California quartet, The Morning Benders.
“I have a distinct memory regarding The Beatles,” says Chu, who grew up in Santa Monica before moving north to attend University of California, Berkley for college. “I was really into Please Please Me, and that was being played a lot all around the house. Then maybe a couple years later, when I was starting to get into stuff myself, I found The White Album, and I was astounded by how different it sounded. It just opened my ears to just how different all of these albums would be and how much I needed to get a hold of all of them.”
Realizing that he connected more with the 60s and 70s sounds of his parents’ record collection than anything on the radio at the time, Chu found himself collecting discographies of all the musicians he had come to admire, artists like The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Neil Young, and Bob Dylan. Ultimately this crash course went on to inform his recordings as The Morning Benders, but for Chu, songwriting came a bit later than discovery. In fact, he did not even pick up a guitar until his senior year in high school.
“I did some piano lessons when I was younger, and I actually played flute for a little while when I was in middle school and they made you play an instrument,” says Chu. “But I really wanted something where I could play and sing and write songs, and all the music I was listening to was very guitar-based. Actually, the day I picked up guitar, I was sick from school. I knew my neighbor had a guitar, so I went to his house—he wasn’t even home—and I took it from him and started learning.”
It wasn’t long then before Chu started writing. The self-recorded EP, Loose Change, was released less than a year after Chu began formally writing songs at 19, and 2007’s Boarded Doors EP came out just a few months after Chu assembled the band at UC Berkley, a band that now consists of Chu on vocals and guitar, Joe Ferrell on guitar and organ, Julian Harmon on drums, and Tim Or on bass.
Talking Through Tin Cans, The Morning Benders’ debut full-length album, was recorded in July of 2007 over a span of two-and-a-half weeks at San Francisco’s Different Fur Studio, where Chu was also employed as an assistant engineer. The album splits the difference between up-tempo pop in the vein of Chu’s 60s and 70s inspirations, and the slower, more moody compositions that make up the album’s latter half. Appropriately, the album is split into Sides A and B. The former features pop-rockers like “Damnit Anna,” which cribs a drum figure from The Beach Boys’ “I’m Waiting for the Day,” and “I Was Wrong,” which sounds like it was taken from the first Rooney album. The latter half changes pace, beginning with the languorous “Heavy Hearts” and ending with the calming, lullaby-paced “When We’re Apart.” And while Chu asserts that it was as much a result of his songs falling naturally into two stylistic categories, the album’s separation is also a nod to the LP format that guided his musical upbringing.
“The vinyl thing is cool, but the songs naturally came out with two feels to them, and we thought it would be cool to showcase that to some degree,” says Chu. “And I love a lot of the albums that have a similar approach. I really like the album The Beach Boys Today!. They have a very side A, side B. Side A was more like “Help Me, Rhonda” and where the hits were, and side B was all the introspective Brian Wilson slow songs. Or like Low by David Bowie, where the second half is instrumental. I like that break where there is the conscious recognition of the LP format.”
But for all this talk of retro styling, Chu makes a point to clarify that he does not want to be viewed as a one-trick pony. In an age where, with a click of the mouse, a band’s demos can be transmitted to millions across cyberspace, and where every Tom, Dick, and Harry has a blog critiquing said demos, the risk of being typecast is high, and Chu wants to be careful to avoid such a fate, even if the most exciting part about his band is that which may result in some obvious comparisons.
“Writing about music is so difficult, it’s just so hard to describe, that you need some point of reference that people understand,” says Chu. “I just hope that we’re not pigeonholed, and that people realize that there’s a lot more of a story that just a list of bands that are influences or who sort of sound like us. We’re really interested in a lot of different kinds of music and we don’t want to ever make the same album twice, so I’m just hoping that people will have an open mind with whatever we throw at them.”
--Frank Valish
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The Morning Benders’ Talking Through Tin Cans is released May 6, 2008 on +1 Records.
The Morning Benders Myspace
