The improvement was obvious to Curtis. A few years earlier, he recalls, “we actually recorded a whole incarnation of many of these songs with Dan singing lead and me singing harmony behind that,” he says. “And we all agreed that that didn’t work terribly well. Dan would be the first to characterize his voice in all sorts of disparaging ways.”
Indeed, in the course of our interview, Messe refers to his singing as “grotesque” and “like a cross between Kermit The Frog and Lisa Loeb.” Maurer, separately, says simply, “You know, Dan’s not the best singer in the world, he’d be the first to admit it.”
The lone dissenter is Ellyson. “I actually really enjoy Dan’s singing,” she insists. “It’s certainly not a traditionally attractive voice, but I think it’s beautiful. In fact, I would buy the CD if he had sung.”
Messe ultimately suggests a different method of evaluation. “The problem is that it’s too emotional when I sing it,” he explains. “With Sally, there’s a step removed from it. She approaches these dark lyrics the way a child would; there’s this innocence about it. And, as a result, there’s room, emotionally, for someone listening to come in. Whereas I think if I’m doing it, all overblown and wearing my heart on my sleeve, it’s just sordid, you know?”
And yet…seeing Hem perform onstage is to realize that it’s impossible for Messe to disconnect from his passion for the music. Seated at the piano to Ellyson’s right, with no microphone in front of him, Messe mouths along the words that she sings, the words that he wrote, with such obvious investment of emotion that it becomes clear: He couldn’t NOT sing even if he tried.
“He can’t. He honestly can’t, you’re absolutely right,” Ellyson agrees. “He’s so in his own world, absolutely. If I was in the audience, that’s who I’d be watching the whole time.”
Hem finished recording Rabbit Songs in 1999 and initially issued it independently in 2000. “I think we printed up like maybe 500 or 1,000 copies,” Messe recalls. “We were just handing them out to friends, and it was sort of circulating around.”
A turning point came when they finally decided to play their first show, shortly after they had christened themselves Hem (which was the original title of the Rabbit Songs track “Lazy Eye”). They booked a gig at the Manhattan nightclub Fez, “and there was like a line around the block,” Messe recalls. “That was the first moment we realized, wait a minute, people are actually listening to this.”
The transition to performing also necessitated some decisions as to the band’s lineup — specifically, who was actually in the band? The Rabbit Songs credits listed four core members — Ellyson, Curtis, Maurer and Messe — as well as four apparently auxiliary participants (drummer Mark Brotter, bassist Catherine Popper, violinist Ronit Kirchman, and backing vocalist Sarah Faulkner). The full credits, meanwhile, included nineteen other musicians, playing everything from viola to cello to clarinet to french horn to glockenspiel.
An extended crew of eight eventually settled into place, with the four principals supported by Brotter, Popper, violinist Heather Zimmerman and pedal steel guitarist Bob Hoffnar. Shows in the New York area usually feature that lineup, though touring incarnations of the band generally have been slightly smaller because of logistical and budget concerns.
One might expect, given the inverted nature of Hem’s evolution, that the band might be more at home in the studio than onstage. “I felt that way once; I don’t anymore,” Maurer says. “One of my favorite things about being a part of Hem is that we really don’t ever worry about trying to duplicate onstage what we did in the studio.”
The release of Rabbit Songs on Setanta in 2001 afforded Hem the opportunity to play some dates in the U.K. and build a following overseas. That, combined with attention and airplay from National Public Radio in the States, led to a licensing deal with New Jersey indie label Bar/None, which issued the disc in mid-2002. An EP of covers, I’m Talking With My Mouth, followed on Setanta in late 2002; it included a gorgeous rendition of Bruce Springsteen’s “Valentine’s Day” and a vastly rearranged version of the Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash duet “Jackson”. (They ended up including the latter tune on Eveningland as well.)
An outtake from the sessions for the covers disc, an excellent Messe original titled “St. Charlene”, is available on a split EP with the Autumn Defense recently released on the indie label Arena Rock. (Both bands contributed three numbers to the six-track disc; the other two Hem cuts are BBC Radio recordings of the Rabbit Songs track “Half Acre” and the Eveningland tune “Pacific Street”.)
The next opportunity knocking at Hem’s door came from one of Messe’s idols. On a section of Hem’s website in which the band members discuss their favorite albums, Messe had cited Rickie Lee Jones’ 1979 Pirates as a record he’d listened to relentlessly for years and years. It was produced by Lenny Waronker, who had gone on to become one of the most successful and respected executives in the music industry.
Waronker was at DreamWorks Records — he was one of three founding partners of the label, which was a Universal-distributed offshoot of entertainment conglomerate DreamWorks SKG — when he came across Rabbit Songs a couple years ago. “An artist friend, E of the Eels, sent it to me, saying, ‘I don’t usually do this, but you should hear this,'” Waronker recalls. “He was right, it was just great. When you hear something that’s that beautiful and that smart, with that kind of instrumentation, which is so unique — it was, for me anyway, a big deal.”
For Messe, it was an almost surreal turn of events. “Basically, I never thought that we’d sign with a major,” he confesses. “I just didn’t imagine that we would ever find a major that would give us what we wanted, in terms of both money and also, more importantly, creative control. But Lenny Waronker has always been a hero of mine, since I was a little kid. I’ve always wanted to meet him, let alone work with him.”
DreamWorks re-released Rabbit Songs in July 2003, and Hem began working on Eveningland. Their ascendance to the major-label ranks afforded the band some opportunities they could not have previously entertained on their own. Foremost among those was the opportunity to record with the Slovak National Radio Orchestra in the Slovak Republic capital of Bratislava.
