The melodies keep calling him back, for better or worse Aubrey Anderson rolls on with Skating Club
No matter how hard he tried, Aubrey Anderson could not walk away from music. He quit his band (or, to be more specific, both of them), went back to school, worked forgettable jobs, wrote a novel. But, one way or another, Anderson kept coming back to the elements that sustained him: voice, guitar, lyrics, melody.
''I wanted to be a rock 'n' roll star," sang the California-born, Massachusetts-based singer-songwriter on ''Pepper Ann," a track that appeared on his first album as the sole permanent member of Skating Club, a name he plucked from his daily drives past the Skating Club of Boston in Allston.
In one graceful swoop, that song, in which the singer reminisces about an old flame he wishes would ''hold me in your heart again, say I'm smart, and you are still a fan," summed up what made Anderson's art special: snapshot memories measured out in crystalline couplets and set to luminously unhurried melodies.
The tune also doubled as an autobiography. Ten years earlier, Anderson had tried to be that rock 'n' roll star, first with his early '90s indie-rock outfit Difference Engine and then with the short-lived Westerlies. Difference Engine, once signed to the indie label Caroline, toured relentlessly, opening for bands like the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and the Fall.
''It was a cool time," recalls Anderson, who'll perform material from his sublime new album, ''The Unfound Sound" (released on Ipswich's Kimchee Records label), Thursday at ZuZu! ''I had a lot of enthusiasm, I was 20 years old, and was as jazzed as I was ever going to be." But unlike some of the headlining bands it shared stages with, Difference Engine did not break out big.
''When you're young, [record companies] want you to get in a van and tour, and if you're 20 and your only alternative is to go make steak burgers, you're going to do that," says Anderson. ''There's a lot of glamour associated with it, but actually, it's not that cool in terms of your life as a big picture. But it's not some sort of premeditated evil, it's just what happens. When [Difference Engine] wrapped up, my hopes were dashed, and so what I wanted to do was not do music."
Eventually, however, music found him again. In the late 1990s, Anderson launched the Longhouse recording studio in Porter Square in Cambridge and recast himself as an engineer. ''There isn't anything I like as well [as music], for better or worse," he says. ''That's why I wound up doing it again and trying to fit it into my life, because it doesn't seem to want to go away."
Anderson began recording local artists, among them a few bands signed to the Warren, R.I., record label Wishing Tree. ''I think he's a great engineer," says Wishing Tree co-owner David Silva. ''He has a good ear and inspires [artists]. Aubrey has a way of letting the music find itself. He knows where he should leave space in a song and puts a lot of critical thinking into his own music."
At a Bright Eyes show a few years ago, Anderson mentioned to Silva that he had an album's worth of songs he had recorded with friends. Wishing Tree released those recordings as Skating Club's self-titled debut album in 2001. ''Bugs & Flowers," the follow-up, was released two years later. Both sold roughly 4,000 copies -- not bad for a mostly unknown artist who recorded for a tiny label and didn't relish being on the road.
This time around, Anderson's planning only a handful of out-of-town shows rather than embarking on the kind of full-fledged touring he no longer likes or has time for. Still, he has high hopes for the album, on which he performs almost every instrument. And like its predecessors, the new collection is linked to a seasonal theme.
Where the first two records cast winter and spring, respectively, as a narrative backdrop, ''The Unfound Sound" is steeped in summer. Songs named ''The Long Hot July," ''Beach Tar Footsie," and ''Summer Time" roll by on a sonic undertow that pulls along parts of Galaxie 500, Red House Painters, Idaho, and one of Anderson's favorites, American Analog Set.
The guitars shimmer like heat on asphalt, and the swaying drift of Anderson's airy vocals bend and rustle like wild reeds in the wind. What it all adds up to is the most exquisite album of Skating Club's short but striking lifetime.
''This is the first record where I've had a sense of audience in mind," Anderson says.
The result is a disc that while no less introspective is perhaps less insular and more approachable, with broader-based commercial appeal.
''There's more of a traditional pop or rock structure that threads in and out of this one," he says. ''I am generally pretty anti-chorus and anti-refrain, but when I thought about summer-themed records, they're really chorus-oriented, so I ended up coming back to these structures that I normally would shy away from."
As had been the case so many times before in Anderson's life, the inexorable pull of the music he loved ultimately lured him back.
