Brothers in rock
April 3: Darkroom, Chicago, with Brighton, MA and Cameron McGill. $8 at the door. www.darkroombar.com.
Band relationships are tumultuous enough. Throw a few siblings into the mix, and it's no wonder why Oasis' Gallagher brothers famously fought so much. But with Needers & Givers, an indie-rock trio of siblings who grew up in Lombard, the part about how well they "get along" feels cliche, an inquiry they expect to hear often and for which they've already developed an agreed-upon response: "We all leave our weapons at the door."
Ian Hoffman, singer and principle songwriter for Needers & Givers, laughs when his brother, cellist/bassist Christophe delivers the line.
He cracks a joke about the hard-fought battles they've waged over which brother receives the best Christmas presents, and then he gets to the meat of his own serious response: "We're really close," Ian says, running through the reasons why it's better to play music with brothers than anyone else.
He closes his argument, and there's a pause. "I totally disagree with you, Ian," Chris announces in his best tone of diplomatic sarcasm. Ian busts out laughing.
It's after 9 p.m., and Ian is sharing a conference call with Chris, who lives and teaches music in New York. Chris just returned from South By Southwest ("He's the rock-star of the group," Ian says. "Much cooler than us."), and Needers & Givers are only a few weeks away from releasing their first eight-song offering, called "The Other."
Despite the hundreds of miles separating them from Lombard and New York City, they sound like they're chatting from adjoining rooms. When I confess to them that I mistook their album's first song, "Digging," as a Shins track, they cheer.
"That's what's great about Chris and Dylan!" Ian says. Turns out the song, one of the album's standout tracks, was a late add that sort of broke a "no extra songs" rule, put in place to prevent any last-minute changes to the track list once recording began. Turns out keeping it was a bang-up decision. (And yes, I really did clamber around for two days trying to figure out when The Shins recorded this delicately sung, start-stop drum/cello intro that I couldn't get out of my head, and which, of course, turned out to be from Needers & Givers.)
"Ian is always, always writing new music," Chris says, "and it's always good."
In fact, Ian likely had the whole of "The Other" either written or hummed out when he called Chris almost a year ago to propose starting a band. Maybe even material for a sophomore effort, too. To say that Ian is a song-writing machine is no understatement. One day, when a student didn't show up for Ian's private lessons, he sat down at the piano, penned "track 5" on the album and called his brother Dylan immediately to get it scratch-recorded. "I'm trying to take a break right now," he laughs.
The Hoffman brothers (Ian, Chris and drummer Dylan) all have experience playing in bands together at one time or another, usually in pairs. They all inherited their own expertise, which they each transformed into personal niches, i.e. Ian and Chris teach lessons, Ian and Dylan played in a local group called Plaid Penmanship and Chris, a former sound engineer at Chicago Recording Company, has played with and engineers for an illustrious resume of musicians. ("Again, much cooler," Ian chimes in.) Chris' online profile lists Ryan Adams, Teddy Thompson and Umphrey's McGee among his engineering credits.
They grew up in a musical family where cello was introduced to Chris by age 5. Ian began writing songs and piano-led movie scores by age 7, and Dylan also picked up an instrument -- the violin -- early on, only to transition into drums in his 20s. It makes sense. The Hoffman brothers' dad, who makes a cameo on "The Other," is a jazz drummer, and their uncle played trumpet in the Baltimore Symphony. Their older brother, Bill, who plays percussion, helped out on the album as well, perhaps making Needers &Givers more of a family effort than any of the brothers anticipated at the outset.
The distance between Chris's N.Y. residence and Ian and Dylan, who still call suburbia their home, presents an interesting touring scenario. Though the brothers' primary intent when they started Needers & Givers was to record an album together, shows indeed have become part of the equation. In Chris' absence, a rotating band of friends perform in his place, and so far -- during a recent Empty Bottle show with the Roaring Twenties and Unique Chique, for example -- it does the job. They plan to release their album together on April 3 at the Darkroom in Chicago with Brighton, MA, and Cameron McGill.
Even more exciting for the trio is a music video they plan to record soon for "Digging." Shot and directed by local up-and-coming band photographer Lenny Gilmore, Ian says they hope to release it to fans by the summer. Curt Swank, Needers & Givers' label rep, who signed the band in January, already has plans to issue the video to MTVU.
Until that happens, Needers & Givers plan to stay the proverbial course -- as bandmates, songwriters, teachers and, you know, brothers. More recording time, given the trio's background, is inevitable, and though Ian says he strives to take it easy on the songwriting en masse, he confesses that he's always writing. Writing and editing, he says. After all, quality needs to come before quantity.
"I don't feel like there's a lot of (achievement) in writing a lot of songs that aren't good."