Future looks fab
It isn't every day that an album gets mastered by one of Paul McCartney's engineers at the famous Abbey Road Studios in London. But Northwestern film major Sars Flannery, whose inspirational idols blur among circa-1965 rock pioneers and film director Quentin Tarantino, isn't your everyday musician.
Neither is Villa Park engineer Brian Zieske, owner of Gallery of Carpet studios, who helped Flannery pin down the Beatles-influenced sound that landed itself at Abbey Road months after recording began.
Though Flannery worked solo on his debut album last year without a backing band, he commissioned Zieske -- producer of The Hush Sound, The Academy Is … and The Audition -- as well as an ensemble of local musicians from the likes of Villains of Verona, Dorian Minor and Company of Thieves to help him record it. "When I got to Gallery of Carpet," Flannery says, "I just realized that this is the center of the (suburban) music scene."
Two songs into production, Flannery and Zieske found out that Steve Rooke, the engineer who mastered music wunderkinds The Breeders, David Bowie, The Cure and, of course, John Lennon, would work on Flannery's debut album. After hearing news like that, it seemed only right to salute a piece of Beatles trivia in the album name. Flannery decided on "Sale of the Century," for the big Beatles auction in the early '80s.
"It really just motivated us to do as good a job as possible," Flannery says now, five months after the disc's first two tracks returned from Abbey Road. "We really slaved over it. All in all, I'm definitely very satisfied."
Because Flannery happens to be the type of musician who immerses himself in the art of recorded music rather than live shows, and whose personality rivals Rivers Cuomo for the articulate examination of song construction, he likely had much of "Sale of the Century" written in his head before approaching Zieske and the tight-knit group of indie rockers that hang around Gallery of Carpet. But Flannery credits Zieske with helping him identify the '60s pop strain that's now so prevalent throughout the album and which pushed the project's hand-clapping single "Empty Gun" into sing-along local success.
Flannery cites the loud, kind of distorted guitar riffs in "Empty Gun" as one of the turning points for the album's focus. "How are we going to get that sound?" Flannery says he and Zieske contemplated during recording. Of course in theory the pair knew exactly what kind of jangle-pop chords they wanted but, in the end, didn't know how to achieve them. Per true Flannery style, they investigated other 1960s-style music for inspiration and landed smack dab on the Beatles.
The fact that the song found its way to Abbey Road is, well, nothing short of fateful - and is pure icing on the cake for Flannery, who just wanted to create a solid first album. "They'll run the songs through the same signal patches (as the Beatles')," Flannery declares of Abbey Road production. "I have no idea what the hell he's talking about, but it sounds kind of cool."
Originally from upstate New York, Flannery moved to Evanston for school, namely for a film degree that he hopes might help land him a job working on movie scores sometime down the road. Flannery says he quickly recognized the Chicago and suburban music scenes as breeding grounds for college-age musicians, so he began unloading all of his teenage music research into songwriting and recording about a year ago.
Most recently, after adding a permanent guitarist and bassist to the mix, Flannery switched his focus from writing to studying live performance, a music art form that he says must elicit emotionally compelling reactions from audiences on an entirely different level than the recorded songs.
"I was at a Hush Sound concert at Beat Kitchen," he says, also pointing to bands like the Kings of Leon for effectively moving, live-show examples. "I'd heard their album … but their live show was captivating."
"Sale of the Century" makes its debut this summer. Until then, Flannery plans to play the Chicago area as often as possible, even if it means ignoring his native New York where the scene remains saturated with the cliquey sounds of Vampire Weekend. The suburbs and city will stand in as his stomping ground until graduation, when Flannery ultimately hopes to decide whether Villa Park-grown indie pop can keep him rooted in Evanston or movie soundtracks will shift him to Los Angeles, where silver-screen scores are already proving themselves tempting.
Either way, he'll always have Abbey Road and the Beatles. At least for the time being. "That's the kind of music that we strived for, for this album," he says. "I'm not sure that's what I'm doing with the next project." When he says this, Flannery mentions something about conjuring an '80s feel for his next album. When I suggest that he try a Sufjan Stevens-esque "decades" theme, he half laughs, saying that he isn't sure he could pull off Led Zeppelin in time for the 1970s disc.
Upcoming shows:
April 22: Double Door, Chicago, 7:30 p.m.; $10 at the door. doubledoor.com.