Drinking heavily, sorely missing his
wife, the words that saved Richard Swift’s sanity
suddenly spilled from his mouth: "The paycheck just
isn’t worth it."
Thus ended his well-compensated
career as a session player for the
contemporary-Christian-music industry, on a night
following a concert in Jacksonville, Florida, where
Swift had been performing with his friend Frank Lenz.
The utterance was a trenchant confirmation of everything
that had been bugging Lenz, too.
"If Jesus Christ were to come back
and play violin like Paganini, the church wouldn’t dig
it," says Lenz of the modern Christian-music world.
"Christian music isn’t just an industry; it’s a sound.
You can rock, but you have to rock the right way. You
can’t rock like the Velvet Underground, but you can rock
like Blink-182."
With wives and kids to support and
carrying few expectations of what unrestricted musical
freedom would bring, the pair returned to Lenz’s grimy
Huntington Beach studio and began tinkering with the
mutant pop sounds that had been thrashing and humming in
Swift’s head. More than two years after cutting their
ties to the contemporary-Christian-music crowd (though
not Christianity itself, it should be pointed out),
their plunge into career uncertainty now seems to be
paying off—at least with some decent label contacts.
The stint of record-company shopping
took Swift abroad to London, where he played showcase
concerts for various labels. A good omen arrived when he
released a single, "Buildings In America," to London
record stores. The initial run of 500 copies sold out
without the benefit of any radio play or press.
While he waits for a deal to come
through, Swift still pays bills with session work,
except now he’s able to flex more of his
boundless—sometimes warped—creativity. A recent jam
session found him and Lenz working on a children’s music
project. But the unfinished, untitled kiddie shindig
sounds more appropriate for martinis at a downbeat
Silver Lake hipster bar than recess at Romper Room,
which goes to the heart of why a guy like Swift can’t be
happy at a lucrative but dull job: he can’t keep
anything simple. The song starts with gorgeous Beach
Boys-esque piano chords, and just as it’s about to crest
into something sunnier, it suddenly swerves into a storm
of Sun Ra space noise—think Mommy and Daddy are gonna
like that? My neighborhood PTA wasn’t anything
close to this cool.
Another cut is more typical of their
work, a new version of one of Swift’s older songs, "Half
Lit"—again, a clash of perfect pop and noise. Swift’s
baritone voice often relates malady-of-love tales, in
this case, a nasty/sweet bit about co-dependence. While
many of his lyrics are clever and pointed, the music’s
more intriguing on this one, surrounded as it is by
beguiling piano chords, sleigh bells and a jazzy trumpet
that gives the tune a bittersweet, romantic ending. Then
something freaky happens: the romance is hijacked by a
riptide of ominous electronic dissonance, quietly
dragging all that perfect pop into a dense, clattering
underworld. It’s like Burt Bacharach playing at his most
soulful, and then he downs a shot of hemlock and finds
the poison tastes scandalously good.
Their sonic mesh of the gorgeous and
the unhinged could take cues from their private lives.
Swift, 26, has been married for six years to wife
Shealynn, whom he met in his tiny hometown of Cottage
Grove, Oregon, 20 miles south of Eugene. They’re raising
three daughters: Madison, Auna and Kennedy. Lenz, 35,
has also been married to wife Lori for six years. While
their prosaic home lives give them a sheen of
respectability, everything else about them seems to
point to a wonderful eccentricity, something like Phil
Spector and Brian Wilson on their best non-gun-wielding,
non-medicated days.
Swift looks like David Lynch’s
Eraserhead with a good hygiene regimen. His uniform of
black suit jackets is punctuated by a messy pile of hair
aching to grow into a refuge for errant birds. Lenz,
meanwhile, looks like the perfect ’90s slacker, with his
green cardigan and jeans marked by a novel rejection of
hygiene. His unkempt blond hair is weighted down with an
unsightly greasiness. "I haven’t showered since last
Sunday," he admits. "I don’t like the way it makes my
skin feel." Not surprisingly, he burns a lot of incense
in his studio.
While their lack of interest in
conventional fashion may not get them noticed in
looks-obsessed Huntington Beach, it’s also a sign of
their lack of interest in musical trends. Swift’s debut
EP, The Novelist, is, of all things, a concept
album, about a wannabe author searching for love in
Depression-era New York City. The music is a mix between
experimental electronic grumblings, catchy pop and
1930s-era swing, with banjos, vaudeville trumpets and
snappy percussion. If, like most of Swift’s music, it
sounds outlandish, it also masterfully cuts to the EP’s
thematic core of wistful yearning and loneliness.
Says Lenz, "It’s amazing to have this
kid write everything you’d want to say and say it
perfectly." That’s what Lenz felt when he first met
Swift in 1999 at the now-defunct Green Room studios in
Huntington Beach. Swift had been visiting some friends
of a Christian-music performer from his hometown. Lenz,
who had grown up in family of musicians, immediately
felt an aural connection with Swift, a self-taught
instrumentalist. They started hanging out and planned on
collaborating, but different session gigs often
interrupted those attempts.
All that planning and work eventually
opened up a shared line of communication between the
two, one that hardly needs words. During our interview,
Lenz excused himself to get some snacks. After Lenz
climbed a set of stairs, Swift called out his name. Lenz
stopped briefly and gave a chirpy whistle, an answer
only Harpo Marx could have delivered to Groucho. Swift
then replied, matter-of-factly, "Yeah." The message
delivered, Lenz soon returned with a water jug and a
bottle of scotch. Swift smiled. It was exactly what he
ordered.
