Trying to identify The Story Of’s sound on their third full length album, Until the Autumn, is like playing pin the tail on the soap bubble. After you’ve isolated the band’s prog direction by its Pink Floyd and Genesis elements, chased down their indie pop affection through their proximity to the Shins, Eric Matthews and My Morning Jacket, and smiled at the Beatlesque classicism and Wilcoesque contemporary Americana explorations, you’re left with a band that makes a tumultuously gorgeous racket that ultimately doesn’t really sound like the things it initially sounded like. In fact, the only concrete fact that hovers in one’s frontal lobe after the first spin of Until the Autumn is the absolute necessity of more spins.
The Austin-based quintet actually has a fairly long history, originally coming together seven years ago in a completely different but equally cool college town, Athens, Ohio, home of Ohio University.
“I got my degree in audio production, but I really went to college to find some people to play with, some intelligent minds, and indeed I did,” says The Story Of’s frontman Christman Hersha. “We did some touring in the Midwest, all DIY, and it wasn’t wonderful but toward the end we started getting some good shows.”
Sensing that there might be more opportunities in a broader scene, the band - vocalist/keyboardist Hersha, vocalist/guitarist Alexander Huff, guitarist David McCully, bassist Michael Brennan, drummer Jonathan Gibbs - began searching for locales that would accommodate their expansive parameters. Austin won The Story Of's relocation derby in 2004.
“It kind of boiled down to the climate, not just the sunshine climate but how the people are down there,” says Hersha. “It was kind of rough going at first. 200 music venues x 100 bands...it was rocky. We slowly started to poke through because some of the bands are short lived, and down there it seems a lot of the bands are more image based than music based. We just do what we like to do, which is songwriting and composition.”
After a couple of EPs and a pair of well-received full lengths (2005’s Foothill Highway Appalachian Road, 2007’s The World’s Affair), The Story Of decided on a sonic and scenic change of pace. Sequestering themselves in a cabin owned by local music legend Maryann Price, they conceived and executed the almost epic scope of the self-released Until the Autumn.
“The cabin is right on the Colorado River and you’re only about ten minutes from downtown, but you can’t see a house, a building or anything in sight. It has a real cool vibe; rope swings, boats, docks. Dave and I lived there from August until mid-November, and that‘s when we recorded, finished writing and mixed it. It’s a real good document of a personal experience that we had down there.”
In a lot of ways, Until the Autumn’s expansive sound is a reflection of the cabin’s single room studio and the countryside that surrounds it.
“I think the natural atmosphere rubbed off on us, and we definitely did things au natural, as opposed to canned, and we tried to make the mix more roomy,” says Hersha. “We had real instruments come in and play instead of keyboard horns. We’ve tried that in the past, but this time we just let it be. That was another cool thing, that we were a little more flexible as far as not being perfectionists. A lot of that has to do with what Austin did to us. It’s a very au natural place as far as production, and I think that was cool for us to try, especially with these songs that were more organic and chilled down.”
The Story Of’s last studio experience on the electronic rock-flecked The World’s Affair definitely left them with the impression that things would have to be done very differently on their next album. They were clearly not looking forward to another grueling six month album gestation.
“We had a sit down pow wow and talked about the breaking point we inevitably reached recording the previous album,” says Hersha. “We were down each other’s throats. We do our own production, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. You definitely want a different set of ears in there who isn’t so familiar with the songs. But I think the bottom line is that we were a little more willing to give on personal things we liked about the songs and the album on this one, so it came out a lot faster and things were fresher and more exciting for us because of that.”
As much as the difference in Until the Autumn’s sound is an issue, so too is the shift in the actual structure and arrangement of the songs themselves. In much the same manner that Paul McCartney and John Lennon brought very disparate creative personalities to their unique collaboration, Hersha and Huff dip their songwriting pens into distinctly different inkwells. While those differences have always been a hallmark of The Story Of’s material, they were in exceptionally clear relief on the songs that the pair crafted for Until the Autumn.
“Alex tried to write songs that I would like and I tried to do the same for him,” says Hersha. “Honestly, the songs I would write for myself, Alex would probably hate them. I tend to err on the side of too poppy or cheesy, and he errs on the side of quirkiness. We finally reached that equilibrium where we were writing songs that the other enjoyed and for that reason, the rest of the band fed off that energy.”
--Brian Baker
