Joining the long list of bands stretching from the Doors and the Velvet Underground to Belle & Sebastian and Modest Mouse that have taken their name from a work of literature, the Swimmers go one step further. Not only is their name derived from John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” but their debut full-length release was initially designed as a concept album to explore the themes of disillusionment and meaninglessness in that surreal 1964 short story. And while the final version of that album is hardly a point-by-point recreation of Cheever’s definitive work, hidden inside its immediately engaging indie pop melodies are startlingly dark echoes of that existential tome. Listen closely, and Fighting Trees is a metaphor for finding yourself in a place that isn’t exactly what you wanted or expected.
“It’s a surrealistic journey,” explains vocalist and main songwriter Steve Yutzy-Burkey, discussing the text that inspired his writing. “It’s about a guy that wakes up after a party away from his home, and he’s an upper crust New York suburbanite guy. And he decides to swim home through all of his friends’ swimming pools. So, as he goes, the seasons change, and his friends start to not be his friends anymore, and he’s aging. By the time he gets to his house, it’s all boarded up and his family’s gone, and it’s storming. It’s entirely different than when he left, when it was sunny and he was young and optimistic. When I read that story, I felt I’d had that feeling a lot. I’d walk home from work across the city as it got dark and colder.”
In this story, the city is Philadelphia, the town where Yutzy-Burkey landed after college with the dream of establishing an audience for his first legitimate band, One Star Hotel. Two albums and hundreds of Wilco comparisons later, the band had reached that goal, but by 2005 (after a tour opening for Wilco, incidentally) things were unraveling. Alternative country music was fading in popularity and Yutzy-Burkey had been writing a series of pianobased songs that simply couldn’t fi t into the twangy template that band had developed. He needed to start over, and the only way to do that was to break up the band with whom he had invested years of work.
“The end of One Star Hotel was a little awkward,” he admits. “The idea [for the Swimmers] was to bring together friends and have fun with it, and if we felt like we were having fun with it, we thought it would translate to other people, too,” he explains. “That was the intention from the beginning, to have a more indie pop-based project. That’s why my wife, Krista, got involved. Scott [French, drummer] has been a friend for a long time. I used to tune pipe organs with him, and we’d go on pipe organ-tuning trips and record songs in hotels and talk about starting a band. This seemed like a good opportunity for that. It came together organically. The idea was just to do what felt right and hope for the best.”
With former One Star Hotel bassist Rick Sieber recruited as the band’s fourth member, the newly christened Swimmers set their sights on making an album that would combine Yutzy-Burkey’s growing interest in the classic British Invasion rock and psych-pop of the 1960s. With three songs (“Heaven,” “Pocket Full of Gold,” and “All the New Sounds”) ready to go, the band headed to Brian McTear’s Miner Street Studios, recording most of the rhythm tracks live and saving the overdubs for Yutzy-Burkey’s home studio. But as soon as the album began taking shape, it started to unravel.
“Originally, I had a whole other album written around those three songs that was based much less loosely on ‘The Swimmer,’” he says. “As we were playing as a band, it became more evident that those weren’t going to be the songs that sounded best with this band. Some of the songs went through five or six demos that were totally different genres. As we’d talk about things, we’d say, ‘Ok, we’re going to do the Fleetwood Mac version’ or ‘the Kinks version’– just to give ourselves little directions. Some of those songs made it in very different incarnations.”
Six months passed before the band was able to finish the album, during which time the band argued over the merits of Arcade Fire’s Funeral and the perfect ways to capture a Beatles bass sound. By the time they reconvened to finish the album, Yutzy-Burkey had re-imagined the songs that didn’t seem to fit, and he had an entirely new album. Now, the album ranged from the clanging bells of “Pocket Full of Gold” to the marching power pop of “Your Escape,” making stops in prancing piano pop of “St. Cecilia” and the bittersweet balladry of “Heaven.” But despite thsweet pop melodies and breezy tempos, Fighting Trees is a deeply conflicted release, one informed by the trauma of growing up and leaving behind the certainty of youth, left only with the unsettling questions of meaning and value that accompany adulthood. No song is more emblematic of those sentiments than “Miles from Our Fears.”
“It was sort of that and imagining if you knew how you were going to die if you would be scared about things along the way,” Yutzy-Burkey explains. “It gives away the ending of this couple. ‘Someday they’ll fi nd us in the mud below the bay in a car,'” he says, quoting the song’s most ghastly line. “But then [it’s] saying that that’s years from now that all these things are happening, and [asking] would you be afraid if that was the end of the story. So it’s comforting,” he laughs, “but in a scary kind of way.”
Even more heart wrenching is “Heaven,” a track whose melody comes across as a combination of the Beatles’ “Penny Lane” and Crosby, Still, Nash, & Young’s “Our House,” with Yutzy-Burkey recounting a return visit to his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he discovered that the place he knew as a child no longer exists. There is no welcoming party; all his friends are gone; and his old haunts are closed. Really, it’s the thematic opposite of Paul McCartney’s idyllic “Penny Lane,” the place where everything stays locked in perfect whimsical harmony for perpetuity. In Yutzy-Burkey’s mind, “Heaven” is a place that only lives in memories– if it ever existed at all. Yet, if you just listen to the swooning harmonies and bouncy piano hooks, you’d think it was a tribute, a reassuring celebration of a man’s hometown.
“I think that when the songs are too light and the treatment is too light, it comes off as fluff,” Yutzy-Burkey says. “I do like that contrast between the tone and the lyrics. I really enjoy the fact that people could listen to the songs for awhile and not know how dark they are or how if they really start thinking about the song, it might shift the idea behind the song for them. I think that songs that do that, that reveal more, with each listen, are the best songs. There are very few songs that I write that aren’t fairly directly related to my experience or the people around me. It’s the way that I think through some things. In reshaping them and rephrasing them for the people around me, it makes me process them differently.”
To that extent, Yutzy-Burkey has created a concept album of sorts, one not based on Cheever’s short story, but one that encompasses many of those same uneasy examinations of meaning and purpose. Like all good song cycles, it’s a snapshot of a specific moment in time, one that captures a man waking up in his 30s and looking back on his youth with nostalgia and toward his future with doubt. But despite his admitted fascination with narrative structures, Yutzy-Burkey admits to not really knowing if he has a concept album in him.
“I’m definitely drawn to those grand ideas and narratives that do really say a lot of things on a lot of levels,” he says. “[This album] is about the journey of the band and how we got to where we are and where we’ll be going in the future. It’s just the idea of a journey,” he says, repeating the word for emphasis. “I guess I haven’t really made that concept album yet, but I wouldn’t rule it out.”
-Matt Fink
The Swimmers: www.theswimmers.com
MySpace: www.myspace.com/helloswimmers