Cheap Time – Wallpaper Music – New LP

Jay Reatard bought a Tascam MSR-16 to use on the Strange Boys’ debut album he was slated to produce for In The Red, but after a few songs were tracked, that version of the record was totally abandoned. I wanted to use his reel-to-reel to record Baron In The Trees, but after we started tracking some drums on it, Jay shot down the idea of using it because he didn’t want to wait around for it to rewind after every take. So he ended up recording that album on his Roland digital portastudio instead.

When Jay passed away in January 2010, the MSR-16 reel-to-reel recorder ended up in my possession. After the entire fiasco surrounding the making of the second Cheap Time album, Fantastic Explanations (And Similar Situations), Larry Hardy gave me permission to record our third album at home in my living room and bedroom on the west side of Nashville.

I was still trying to figure out better mic techniques for recording drums with a 16-track. We only ended up using three microphones on Ryan Sweeney’s drum set. The sessions were very laid-back and fun for the most part. Sweeney would come by in the early evening when he got off work. My roommate James Cathcart was always making these great pizzas that he’d share with us, and all the new songs felt right. That whole cycle of new material came to me so naturally and quickly. Almost all of the songs are about my experience living with Jay Reatard and dealing with his death.

Unfortunately, Stephen Braren had moved to Brooklyn the previous summer before our tour with Yo La Tengo. Stephen was still a member of Cheap Time, and he played bass on the fall 2010 European tour, but he did not end up playing any instruments on our third album. I had hoped that Stephen would track his bass parts for all the new songs when he came down for tour rehearsals, but that didn’t end up being the case. He did sing some backup vocals on a couple of songs, but that was it.

The Fall 2010 European Tour promoting Fantastic Explanations was an emotionally draining journey for all of us. Before we left, we had our third album fully tracked with me playing all the bass parts instead of Stephen. The studio time was already booked at The Bombshelter to mix the album the week after we got home from tour. I was in a bad place mentally and emotionally at the time. I had a pretty wild, fun time in Europe to a certain degree, but when I got back to the states I was so lonely and depressed.

I was in the middle of mixing sessions when Stephen called me from Brooklyn crying and letting me know he was quitting the band. I felt emotionless and dead inside. I had cornered Stephen weeks before after a show in Lyon, France, and asked him if he was still going to do our tour of the states in early January. Stephen said, “I want to do it,” which really worried me. Now it was December. This new album was done, but we couldn’t do our next tour. I fell into a deep depression and reluctantly canceled our winter tour of the states because we couldn’t decide on who would play bass with less than three weeks to rehearse.

Eventually, I went to a therapist and decided to draft my friend Matt Allen from St. Cloud, Minnesota, who had just moved to Memphis to be our next bassist. I wish we could have found someone local, but Matt was such a great musician. Matt was only in the band for that one year, 2011, and he asked me several times to let him re-record all the bass parts for our third album, since he had been playing all of those songs with us live. I just didn’t want to deal with having to get the album remixed, but I kind of regret not having Matt play on it since the artwork includes two photos of him.

The title Wallpaper Music comes from my former bandmate, Rat Traps guitarist Joe Simpson. We were watching VH1 Classic together one day at my parents' house and the video for David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” came on. I asked Joe what he thought about '80s Bowie, and he said that all of Bowie’s albums were good to some degree, but most of his later records were just wallpaper music. When I asked him to explain what that meant, he said it's music that is good enough to have playing in the background while you’re putting up wallpaper.

Larry Hardy told us before the first Cheap Time album was even released that if we sold over 5,000 copies, we could have a gatefold jacket for our second album. I didn’t have a strong enough concept to warrant a gatefold for Fantastic Explanations, so our third album ended up getting the deluxe treatment instead. The artwork came from two different sources. My sister Kristi took the photo of the building that’s still standing on Main Street in my hometown of Henderson, TN. I had spent months scouting locations trying to find the perfect building for the photo all over Nashville, and I almost got arrested in the process one night at Saint Bernard Academy with two members of The Paperhead. For the inside of the gatefold, we got Bekah Cope to take photos of us in front of a storage unit building on Charlotte Ave in West Nashville, that used to be known as “The Wave Wall,” until it was covered up with a barrage of tacky murals by local artists. Bekah also took the individual photos of each of us that we inserted into the building on the outside of the jacket. When Larry Hardy first saw it, he said it looked like a rip off of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti, but my original intention had been for it to look similar to the UK pressing of Fairport Convention’s Unhalfbricking.

When it comes to Cheap Time’s four studio albums, I think Wallpaper Music is by far our best. Maybe it doesn’t have the best drum sound, but I tried to make up for that on our swan song follow-up, Exit Smiles. Our record release show was booked at a scooter garage called The Zombie Shop with opener Timmy’s Organism. We learned the old KBD classic by Toxin III, “I Rock I Ran,” that we knew from Clone Defects covering it on Shapes Of Venus, so we could get Timmy V. Limpinen to sing it with us as an unrehearsed surprise encore.

We commissioned James Cathcart to direct an album advertisement instead of a normal music video for any of the songs. The arthouse-stylized short film that Cathcart produced was heavily influenced by an episode of the '70s French music program Pop Two that we had seen together. The “commercial’s” narrator, Alex Collins, gives the piece a heavy Godardian vibe unlike anything else I’ve ever seen any modern group attempt to promote themselves with.

By the time Wallpaper Music came out in 2012, Matt Allen was out of the band. We replaced him with Cole Kinnear, who had never played in any real band before, and I helped teach him how to play bass. Cole was with us for almost a full year. All of our road work got jumbled together over the last four months of 2012 as the Wallpaper Music World Tour, which included dates in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. We recorded one non-album single with this short-lived lineup, “Other Stories,” that came out on Sweet Rot Records, who had also released Cheap Time’s debut 45.

We did a short run of shows in the South in January 2013 opening for Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. After our show in New Orleans at One Eyed Jacks, Cole informed us that he was quitting Cheap Time to move to Puerto Rico and join another band. We played one more show together at The Exit/In in Nashville to finish that tour, and the Wallpaper Music era of Cheap Time abruptly ended, leaving me wondering what we were going to do next.

WALLPAPER MUSIC PROMO Video:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Y5rcRI0VA