Back on the patio, Jeff Oakes wants to discuss Mosquito Spiral, track by track. But when he excuses himself for a moment and disappears inside, the rest of the guys decide they’ve had enough talking. There’s a batch of as-yet unrecorded songs they want to play, and soon they’re off to the basement.
Michalski sits at his drum kit in the corner, beneath a string of plastic owls that glow in several garish colors when lit from within. A grinning cow’s head is painted on one wall; past gig posters dot the others.
Smith perches on a stool, tuning his guitar, a 1972 Gibson Les Paul gold top. Overhead, a fairly impressive beer can collection lines a ledge that runs the length of an exposed air duct. A couple old Christmas wreaths are piled nearby. Everywhere there are battered instrument cases.
“Every time we play, we leave our stuff out, and every time when we come back, Jeff has put it all away,” Smith says. “I can’t understand it, man.”
Apparently still, after 15 years, oblivious to the fact that this room serves a dual purpose as both Volebeats practice space and the laundry room of Oakes’ parents’ house, Smith reclines on his stool. Leaning against the washing machine, he inadvertently kicks another stool. This one had been propping the dryer door shut, and the door falls open with a metallic clang.
Nash, the band’s newest member and — with his sunglasses perched atop a vaguely mod haircut — its most fashion-conscious, is seated in front of a plywood cactus that seems swiped from the prop closet of a junior high drama club. He absently strums his Guild acoustic.
Oakes is busy rigging a makeshift shade over the single bare bulb that illumines the room. The shade appears to be fashioned from string, manila cardstock, and a speaker cone.
Oakes and Smith bicker briefly over what song to play. Smith wins, and the Volebeats slide into a tune called “World’s Looking Lonely”. Stoop-shouldered at the microphone, hands jammed in his pockets, Oakes sings the lead vocal. It’s about a girl — what else?
Next up is a song Oakes and Smith wrote with Ryan Adams. With Smith’s harmony vocals shadowing Oakes’ lead, they beg an unseen heartbreaker: “Am I the only one that sold out at your invitation?”
“We’re probably going to do more writing with Ryan,” Smith says. “We wrote in motel rooms and soundchecks when we were on the road with them. We’ll get together with him at some point and bang out some tunes.”
The Volebeats play eight more songs in rapid succession. The least remarkable of these are modest but pleasurable pop songs. Several are much more than that, though, especially “This Girl”, a riff-rocker that Oakes sings in falsetto, and “Time Travel”: “I don’t mean to travel through time/It just happens when I open my eyes,” Smith sighs with palpable ache. Even without bassist Ledford, who is absent on this day, the band builds a measured but relentless groove; the tension is finally released with Smith’s cathartic closing solo.
Outside, the long wait for spring has ended and Michigan has exploded in green. The air buzzes and echoes with kids shouting, birds chirping, and dogs barking: the sounds of a neighborhood finally released from winter.
But the Volebeats hear the call of that dank basement, and after that, the recording studio. They’re so eager to get to work on this material, their next album, that they don’t want to tour behind the one they’ve just released.
“We’ve got the new record [written],” Smith says. “We’re ready to go in and record it as soon as the money and who’s putting it out [are determined]. We’re ready to go in tomorrow.”
A Minneapolis native now residing in Chicago, Anders Smith-Lindall cheers his beloved Twins and Cubs with equal passion. Last summer the two teams combined to reward his blind devotion with nearly 200 losses.
