It’s the classic tale told in seemingly endless biographies,
rock ‘n’ roll screenplays, and just about every episode of Behind
the Music: Musician is confronted by adversity, overcomes said
adversity, makes their finest recording, and finally tastes the sweet
and glorious world of fame as the credits roll.
For the Helio Sequence, adversity sprang from within the throat of
singer/guitarist Brandon Summers, who, after a 2004 tour, lost his
voice. Seemingly for good. “It was at the end of ’04, we were doing two
solid months of touring, and I had already pretty much completely lost
my voice,” says Summers. “I wasn’t really able to talk during the day,
and was pretty miserable, my voice was completely gone. I was worried
that I had damaged it, so I decided I was just going to wait around for
a month assuming I’d get it back. I wasn’t able to, and I finally went
to the doctor.”
Lucky for Summers the result wasn’t anything permanent, just a blunt
reminder that he needed to take care of both himself and his
band—which he formed with drummer and childhood friend Benjamin
Weikel in 1999. “I was terrified,” he says. “If I’m not able to sing,
what am I going to do? What are we going to do? Benjamin and I
have been doing this since we were kids and it was a really unsure
time. Getting back to singing was a really slow, shaky process.”
In retrospect, the health scare proved to be a mixed blessing for
Summers and the band. The years leading up to the vocal loss were
stressful times for the duo, who were overbooked with nonstop touring,
recording demands, and the double-duty drumming of Weikel, who was
filling in behind the kit for Modest Mouse as well. The Helio Sequence
were exhausted. So for album number four, they scrapped what was
expected of them—the mountains of atmospheric guitar noise, the
mid-tempo vocals, the thumping drums—and, starting with the
songwriting, the duo retooled the way they write music.
“We wanted to do something with a little more depth. We were more
interested in ‘songs’ rather than jamming on something and creating
music out of that,” Summers says. “We wanted to be really conscious of
structure and function, and that came down to a bigger focus on lyrics.
In the past, vocals would come last.”
That changed with their 2008 album, Keep Your Eyes Ahead. “I
found myself setting vocals around what was going on musically,”
Summers adds. “‘This song kind of has this tone, so this is what the
lyrics should be.’ There was a lot more synthesis to this record, and
everything came together at the same time.” The change in songwriting
direction is clearly evident on Keep Your Eyes Ahead, which
resonates as a cohesive, and massive, rock record that is painstakingly
polished with a loving sheen that radiates with radio-friendly hooks,
but refuses to dumb down the finished product in all its shimmering
glory.
The tectonic shift in direction allows the band to branch out,
especially on the Blood on the Tracks-esque woeful ballad of
“Shed Your Love.” A straightforward song they would never have released
in their reckless early days, Summers describes it as, “One of the
songs that just had to be written, but I didn’t think it would be a
Helio Sequence song. I recorded it as I was getting my voice back, in
the summer of ’05, and it’s just acoustic guitar and voice.”
And while the lyrics tell the all-too-familiar tale of missed
connections (“Home again to find that you were gone/on a subway train
before the dawn/Said that you couldn’t stay and wait for me/Shed your
love, shed your love”), upon first listen it’s the most noticeable
track on Keep Your Eyes Ahead—it’s just so quiet—and the more time you spend with the record, it’s the one
song that you keep coming back to. Maybe it’s the starkness, the soft
wave of noises that coat the delicate strumming, or the frail rasp of
Summers’ voice, but regardless, it’s a song that feels impossible to
ignore.
So if everything we’ve learned from Behind the Music is
correct, this is the part of the story where the Helio Sequence bask in
the fruits of their labor. The past few weeks have found the band
wrapping production on a fantastic video for their first single (the
album’s title track), performing on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and, for
the first time in their career, getting significant radio airplay.
Adversity has been triumphed over, so it’s time to roll those credits
now.