"I kinda spent a long time
on that, to be honest," says Baltimore-based musician Jon Ehrens of
Pall Mall Blues
, the fourth album by his long-running solo project Repelican. "An embarrassingly long time on it, compared to a lot of things, compared to anything."
Ehrens, 29, has a history of spending lots of time on music, but he usually spreads it around to different projects. In the nearly six years since the last Repelican album,
Don't Mumble the Manifesto
, he's released albums by the Art Department, White Life, the Sword Swallow, and last year's self-titled debut by Dungeonesse, his duo with Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner. Each of those bands has a distinct sonic identity and/or collaborative dynamic, but Repelican has survived as his longest-running project mainly because it has served as a vehicle for ideas that don't fit anywhere else.
"You'll Know When You Know" from
Pall Mall Blues
opens with blown-out distortion before settling into a bass-heavy groove with a disorienting time signature. And the rest of the album runs a similar stylistic gamut, from the ethereal "Been Plagues" to the catchy, upbeat opening track "Done." (Disclosure: I helped curate a compilation that "Done" appeared on in 2013.)
Pall Mall Blues
was self-released in April, although Ehrens, who works at WYPR as a producer, was reticent to upload the album to Bandcamp and still toys with the idea of taking it down or retooling it. "I think I might actually remix a couple of [songs], because I've gotten some complaints about the vocals not being loud enough on some of the songs," he says. "I get embarrassed about my voice." But while the vocals are sometimes low in the mix, the album features some of Ehrens' most impressive musicianship to date, including some dynamic drumming recorded in Chris Freeland's studio.
Last year, Ehrens played drums in the Spittn Images, a band with members of Sri Aurobindo and Needle Gun, but he says that band has already run its course. And while there are no immediate plans for new albums by some of his best-known projects, White Life and Dungeonesse, there may be some White Life shows this year. Jenn Wasner says that the two have continued to work together since finishing the Dungeonesse album and likely have more collaborations coming down the pike eventually.
"We're both really busy with a ton of other stuff we're doing. But if he has a song he thinks I'd work well with, he throws it over to me," says Wasner, who seems a little in awe of Ehrens' prolific creativity. "He's great. He's a crazy person, he's a total freak."
Ehrens shared a living space with Future Islands frontman Sam Herring, and seeing the creative dynamic between that long-running trio has made him question his tendency to go it alone with many of his projects.
"[Future Islands has] been working together for so long that they all have their roles and they bring their own thing to the table, and it ends up sounding like Future Islands. And I get sort of jealous like that, sort of my fault, because I've always been like, 'You play the songs I write!' in everything I've done," he says. "Sam and Gerrit [Welmers] have been friends since high school, middle school even. That actually prompted me to contact my high school band, and I was like, 'Let's get together and record,' and they were all down, so we might even do that." Whether the members of his old band, What to Do with the Children, reunite under their old name or create something completely new remains to be seen.
At one point,
Pall Mall Blues
was nearly Ehrens' solo debut. "For a while I was like, 'This record's gonna be called
Jon Ehrens
and it's gonna be like [an] old-man blues record.'" But he decided to release it as Repelican as he shifts his focus toward writing songs for other artists, and perhaps making the jump to the big time. "Now I'm like, 'OK, now Jon Ehrens is a pop-music producer, I don't necessarily want it to be tied to the weird [stuff].'"
While his more professional production work-with an even higher level of polish than his work with White Life and Dungeonesse-has yet to see the light of day, he continues putting his energies into those long-held ambitions to break out of merely being an eccentric Baltimore indie guy. "I saw some documentary about popular songs in high school, and it was these two old Jewish guys at a piano talking about how they wrote 'Like A Virgin,'" he laughs. "And I was like, 'Woah, those are the guys who wrote that? I could be one of those. I'm Jewish.'"
Download Repelican's
Pall Mall Blues
at
.
