Dan Hillier
Fronted by multi-instrumentalists Chad Jewett and Chelsey Hahn, the trio were born and raised in central New England, just a stone’s throw from Boston, New York City, New Haven, Northampton and all the other cultural hubs that orbited their home. Understandably, such an abundance of opportunities turned the trio – completed by Wil Mulhern – into a pack of starving culture vultures. Be it the bustling local live scenes, the widespread embracing of world cinema and literature, or the promotion of fresh ideologies courtesy of their nearby liberal arts colleges, the trio rabidly consumed art, drinking deep from the untapped pool of art and progressivism that collected on their doorstep. The end result of that still ongoing eagerness for art and creativity is Perennial, a musical outlet of collected ideas that can perhaps – if loosely – be labelled as punk.
To label Perennial punk, though, is redundant almost to the point of insult. The band’s mission statement is to create punk that doesn’t sound like punk, something they’ve achieved with aplomb with their forthcoming LP In The Midnight Hour. A concept record expressed in poetry, it explores the liminal nature of the night – both the living freedom and the dead trees. The band forgo all tired, tested and trending conventions to provide something truly invigorating. Both chic and daring, the record does away with the buzzwords and dull as dishwater tropes, empty pompous swagger and sanitized bravado for great swatches of free jazz, soul and dance that force one to rapt attention in a display of meritful creative freedom. It’s contrasting, it’s daring, it’s urgently needed in times of mundanity – and furthermore – it’s a testament to a truly original band that are urgently needed in a time where punk has become a meaningless buzzword.
With the record releasing independently February 1st, we got in touch with Chad to discover their creative approach, their musical ideologies and all things In The Midnight Hour.
“Perennial is a three-piece band from New England. We make punk music you can dance to.”
“The Blood Brothers, The Sonics, Otis Redding, Le Tigre, Broadcast, Ornette Coleman, Refused, The Creation, James Brown, The Hives, The Supremes, Eric Dolphy, Stereolab, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, The Gossip, The Jam. That’s a pretty good start.”
“We’re enormously excited and incredibly happy with how the record came out. It’s far and away the best thing we’ve ever done. We worked on the album for almost three years, so it’s a relief and a thrill to see it finally land on folks’ turntables.”
“Growing up within a short drive of all these cultural hubs, both big and small — Boston, Amherst, New Haven, Brattleboro, Northampton, New York City — that had plenty of resonance for us. The fact that we could see a jazz quartet at a small liberal arts college on Friday, check out a post-hardcore band in a city rec center on a Saturday and then have four record stores and five book stores to choose from Sunday afternoon in the university town 10 miles from our houses certainly affected who we are and how we sound.”
“I think it’s often a matter of capturing the heart of something that we find affecting. It’s a sort of impressionism: how to turn a certain evocative bit of a film or a turn of phrase in a novel into the kind of poetry that you can light up with an electric organ and a guitar. The album is full of moments that came from visual art or literature, wherein the fun became figuring out how to make it translate into sound. The idea being if that shot or that sentence or that stanza resonated with us, we can find our own angle from which to share it and make it into something new.”
“Thank you! I think that because we set out with an ethos of “Everything is on the table sonically for this album” to the point where we were actively searching for ways to make a punk album that drew on all the stuff we listen to and are in love with as fans of music, that it was quite organic. When any given sound or approach could possibly come up for us to work on and try out as we were writing, it was a really exciting way to make a record. We were always on the lookout for how we could expand what we do, always keeping our eyes and ears open as we flipped through our records and talked about songs that excited us. Everything was a potential direction.”
“The music always comes first for us as writers. We’ll figured out the guitar and drum and organ parts and then we’ll see where the groove is, where the rhythm of a voice might lie, and then we begin to see what words sound natural to us. We might have a phrase written down that ends up fitting, or it might be a bit more of a surrealist thing, where we’re letting the poetry announce itself. The question becomes “What will I want to be shouting in some sweaty basement two years from now?””
“Ultimately, the whole album is about nighttime. It was the right combination of specific and broad for us. Nighttime as a wonderfully evocative space full of possibility and poetry. But also, nighttime as a haunted house. A streetlamp in the dark can either be a bit of playful impressionistic colour, or it can remind you of a ghost. We were really interested in seeing all the different ways we could think and write about the premise of midnight, when things are so quiet and so loud.”
“I would credit Wil, our drummer, first and foremost with that, both as a writer and a performer. Wil approaches writing his parts with such craft, with such classical instinct for how a song works, that the songs always have these wonderful, cinematic peaks and valleys, all thanks to him. It might not sound like it all the time, but we really love pop music, and a lot of that gets channeled via the storytelling Wil is able to do as a drummer. And as a drummer, there’s so much energy and impact to his playing that the rhythms and changes of the songs just end up so effervescent thanks to him. At the end of the day, we wanted something dynamic and compelling.”
“Working with Chris was absolutely wonderful. We all begin with the same premise and goal: to make a punk record with as much depth and sonic imagination and conceptual layers as possible. Something that would reward a lot of time spent with headphones. Chris was so patient as we would try Option A, Option B, Option C, Option D, etc… till we all felt we had found the right idea. It was an absolute blessing to have someone who could help make those ideas work and was always willing to take the time to try things out, and had the same adventurousness at heart when it came to making In The Midnight Hour.“
“A lot of the writing for the album was informed by our live set. Playing as often as we do, and with as much attention as we do to putting on a live set that’s worth watching, a live set that you’ll remember and want to see again, we learned a lot about what makes a song work, and what makes a song compelling, even if it’s only 90 seconds long. So the live set certainly helped us build the songs. When it came to recording them, we really wanted the album to be rich and compelling as a listening experience, where you could sit down for 20 minutes and absorb the surprises. Live, it becomes about making these songs as kinetic and dynamic as possible; often they’re the sharp, minimalistic version of something that on record is more layered and lush. So we’re happy to have there be the version of In The Midnight Hour you can see when we play in our city, and the version you can listen to later on your turntable once your ears stop ringing.”