Good Songs, by Busman's Holiday

Good Songs by Busman's Holiday, released 13 October 2022 1. Only Ones 2. Love Is Perfect Kindness 3. Hey Margarita 4. Future 5. Feel You 6. Good Songs 7. Hi Frequencies 8. I'm Only A Man 9. Sound Of The Name 10. Sunset Melody 11. Toco Hey, it’s here, it’s finally here! Time to pop some of that champagne that’s hanging out and have a time! This album had a real life to it before we got here. Like it went through school, and college, and maybe even some grad school. We’re really happy with it. The album started in Montreal and ended up in Bloomington, ricocheting to Brooklyn on the way. We had some of our best times making this one. Mark Lawson is back. Matt Nowlin returns. The strings soared! The horns moaned. We got a lot of our life in this one. You can see that from the porch. Thanks for being here. You enjoy it. You deserve it. Here's more about the record from the sharp writer, Stephen Deusner: A band of brothers hailing from Bloomington, Indiana, Busman’s Holiday are devoted to exploring the boundless possibilities of the human voice. On their inventive, giddily experimental third album, the aptly titled Good Songs, Lewis Rogers and Addison Rogers sculpt their lines rather than simply sing them, deploying an arsenal of techniques and tricks to deliver lyrics about loneliness and connection and joy and fulfillment. “In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, there was this revolution of people like the Beach Boys and the Beatles using their voices in the strangest ways,” says Lewis (the taller of the pair, with a John Prine style-moustache that gives him the look of a gunslinger). “We’re trying to pick up on that. You can have a million synthesizers, but the human voice can do something wilder and weirder than all that equipment.” His brother agrees. “When we were recording this album, we kept thinking, How can we sing this in a way that sounds zippy?” says Addison (voluminous beard, beautifully infectious laugh). “How can we sing this in a way that doesn’t sound boring?” While they’ve harmonized beautifully on their previous albums—2008’s Old Friends, 2014’s A Long Goodbye and 2016’s Popular Cycles—they pushed themselves to put their voices front and center on Good Songs, to foreground that most human and humane of instruments on every song. They also pushed themselves to capture the giddy freedom of listening to and creating good songs. Over a musical palette that collides gospel with country, rhumbas with r&b ballads, Nilsson with Bobby McFerrin (yes, that Bobby McFerrin, in particular his 1990 opus Medicine Music), their voices swoop up into their soulful upper register, bottom out in bass, abruptly clip syllables into staccato rhythms. They sing and yell, whoop and holler. Even as the songs chronicle great changes in their lives, that exuberant sound of two brothers blending their voices remains stable and persistent. “As long as our voices are there, as long as we’re singing together,” says Addison, “it’s always going to be Busman’s Holiday.” The Rogers brothers have been singing together longer than either of them can remember, and they’ve been singing together as a band for nearly half their lives. With Lewis usually but not always playing guitar and Addison usually but always playing drums, Busman’s Holiday has amassed an avid fanbase in the Midwest and beyond, as listeners relate to their heart-on-sleeve lyrics and bright harmonies. “When you’re younger, you really want to dwell on your angst and sadness and put it all in your songs,” says Lewis. “That’s what we were doing on our earliest records. There’s still some of that on Good Songs, but it’s more of a celebration of those things. We made an effort to make the songs sound joyous and upbeat in a way that was authentic to us.” Thinking they would record a quick follow-up to Popular Cycles, the brothers booked time at Sonovox Studios in Montreal, with their friend Mark Lawson (Peter Gabriel, Colin Stetson) engineering and with a small group of session players (including members of The Unicorns and Islands) bringing the Rogers’ songs to life. For once they showed up at the studio without completed songs, just fragments and ideas that they were prepared to follow in any direction. “We wanted this record to be very forward-thinking but also very positive about what we’re saying to people. When we recorded the vocals for ‘Future,’ we decided that we were going to smile throughout the entire track,” says Addison. “Just sing and smile. We were trying to get that joy across.” As they returned home to finish the album at Primary Sound Studios just outside of Bloomington, the songs took them further and further afield. They mutated and metamorphosed, offering glimpses of unlimited possibilities. “These songs churned for a long time,” says Lewis. “We spent a lot of time thinking about the record and paring it down to the barest essentials. The songs all started one way and ended up sounding completely different.” Their first version of opener “Only Ones” sounded like a blues-rock jam but transformed when they became obsessed with a very particular strain of Thai music. Says Addison, “That first version was not the direction we wanted to go with that song, so we kept going with it. Lew had seen a video of a wedding in Thailand where they have this kind of psychedelic marching band with electric guitar, bass, and a mishmash of percussion.” The final version has an exquisitely rambunctious, unpredictable energy, in playful contrast with the band’s careful, exacting songcraft as they deploy pots-and-pans percussion, runaway strings, a disembodied female duet, and a scribbly guitar lick against Addison’s acrobatic falsetto. Few songs mutated as completely or as organically as “Hey Margarita,” the album’s raucous first single. It opens with a verse about crashing your Toyota into a paint store and enjoying the swirls of thick color on your windshield, but the brothers struggled to devise a sound that evoked that colorful surrealism. “It started out as this weird Joe Meek rockabilly thing,” says Lewis. “It wasn’t bad, but it felt like something we’d done before. One day I was messing around with a drum machine and singing over this weird beat, and I realized, that’s where the song needed to go. The next demo ended up sounding like some kind of William Onyeabor African disco song.” Every song led them down a different winding path, but all of those disparate sounds and styles coalesce into a powerful statement simply because it’s Lewis and Addison singing together. These are songs about moving through loneliness, reaching out into the world to find joy and power in other humans, in other voices. “This record revealed itself to be much more personal than our previous records were,” says Lewis, who between Popular Cycles and Good Songs fell in love, got married, and became a father. “I’ve written character songs in the past, but this time around, it was more literally personal than anything we’d ever done.” He put more of himself in the lyrics, singing “I” instead of “he” or “you.” Case in point: the ecstatic, eccentric “Sound Of The Name,” a hymn of devotion to his wife. “It even has her name in it! I never would have put somebody’s name in a song, but it felt right. When I sang it, it just felt like it was right.” Good Songs examines a feeling akin to loneliness—what Busman’s Holiday call “only-ness,” the sense that you’re the only one suffering, the only one who’s confused and worried. Addison and Lewis understand that it’s hard to be truly only when you’re singing with someone else. Music is the ultimate cure for that kind of isolation and alienation, not only because it allows them to mix their voices together but because it makes them connect with so many others. “Everybody goes through some of these same changes—personal changes, social changes,” says Addison. “These songs were our way of saying you’re not alone in this jumble. Everybody, including Lew and me, is right there in that same jumble with you.” That’s why they called it Good Songs. They’re confident in the quality of the album, but even more than that, they envision each song as a force of good in the world. “Six years ago we thought, Let’s just go and have a good time making music,” says Lewis. “That was novel to us. Why did we decide to go down this path of peril and poverty if not to enjoy it?”