Funnel Cloud by Hem

However, they conjure up such vivid, often pastoral settings and restless, lonesome characters in their songs, you may suspect that they long ago discovered some fantastic, secret portal in an old borough building that instantly transports them from their urban environs to a wide open prairie far, far away. Although Messé, Maurer and Curtis individually and jointly contribute material to Hem’s repertoire, their vision is remarkably unified. As Ellyson, who channels all their imagery, explains, “Each song is its own world. They really show an amazing ability, that I don’t think everyone has, to create a world in song after song that you can become so connected to, that brings you such deep feelings -- pain, joy, sorrow.”

Funnel Cloud is Hem’s most lushly orchestrated work, yet it’s also the group’s most pop-oriented effort. The immediate standout is “Not California,” a compelling tale of displaced lovers that was already featured earlier this year on NPR’s All Songs Considered. Heart-tugging verses glide into an instantly memorable chorus, and it all builds to a gorgeous, string-laden finale. “Too Late To Turn Back Now” has an early-seventies country-rock feel; its background strings recall the brilliant charts that legendary arranger Paul Buckmaster created for Tumbleweed Connection-period Elton John. “The Pills Stopped Working” is a mid-album showstopper, a rollicking number featuring honky-tonk piano, wailing harmonica, gospel-like vocal harmonies from guest singers Amy Helm of Ollabelle and former Smashing Pumpkin James Iha, and a soaring horn section. Says Ellyson, “We’re experimenting and having fun and you can hear that on the record.”

The majority of material on Funnel Cloud moves at an elegant slow-dance tempo, all of it held together by Ellyson’s miraculous voice. She has the pristine, comforting quality of a singer from a classic animated Disney movie, yet the stories she tells can be as disquieting as David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, in which unimaginable dangers lurk behind a bright, primary-color faÁade. For example, over the subtly portentous arrangement of the title track, Ellyson gently describes the moment before a pastoral scene is obliterated by a tornado: “Over the horizon, the same thing every day/Until a painted backdrop rises up and blows a world away.”

That one lyric serves as a central metaphor for the album -- a transfixing moment of stillness before romantic or physical disaster strikes – but it came straight out of real life, when Messe was on his way to Ellyson’s wedding in Virginia: “The day before, I stopped at a state fair with my wife, who was pregnant, and our child. It was the most perfect day you could ever imagine, the most perfect country fair on the most perfect summer day. Then all of sudden, there was one cloud in the sky and it got bigger and bigger and bigger until they were evacuating the entire park. Five tornados touched down in that area. There were funnel clouds all around us.”

Earlier this year, Hem collected cover songs, outtakes, live cuts and demos from the last five years – including an inspired version of the Fountains Of Wayne’s “Radiation Vibe” -- on a compilation disc, No Word From Tom. They decided to add a few new tracks, but had little time to do it, so they went into the studio with a sense of spontaneity that informed the subsequent sessions for Funnel Cloud. As Curtis recalls, “We approached No Word For Tom thinking we were going to get together and make something quick and dirty, keep our fans happy, get in and out of the studio, have some fun making music. We’d get everybody in to play at the same time and see what happens when the tape starts rolling. That not only proved to be efficient, it was a great deal of fun and musically exciting. Three or four months later, when it came time to make this record, we felt very comfortable with each other in the studio, very comfortable with the recording process. We began with fewer known goal posts; it was very much a record that happened in the studio. A lot of the writing happened there, a lot of the arrangement ideas came together as we were playing together, eighteen musicians at the same time. I never had so much fun in the studio; there was just magic happening.”

The seven-year old group has never enjoyed the luxury of a Hollywood soundstage, but did manage to squeeze their longtime arranger Greg Pliska and all eighteen pieces of the Gowanus Radio Orchestra – strings, brass, wood winds -- into a studio on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to record Funnel Cloud. Says Messé, who co-produces Hem with Maurer, “It’s not a giant live room. We had people playing on the balcony; Gary just stuck people everywhere. The first two songs we did were ‘Hotel Fire’ and ‘Reservoir.’ As soon as those two were done, it was like this incredible uncorking of a bottle and all these other songs started finishing themselves, one after another.”

“One of the big differences in getting the tracks on this record,” adds Maurer, “is that Dan and I did a lot less directing. We just know what each other is going to do. We played a million shows with each other, and as when we were making No Word From Tom, you really don’t have to say much. There were at least eight songs that we hadn’t even rehearsed before.”

Since its inception, Hem hasn’t employed any technological shortcuts to achieve its sound; it has been perhaps the most truly independent-minded of indie bands. Co-founder Dan Messé was so committed to a made-by-human-hands approach that he began selling off his possessions to finance the recording of Rabbit Songs, the band’s 2001 debut. Messé’s act of faith did not go unrewarded; the reviews of Rabbit Songs were nothing short of rapturous. Rolling Stone called it a “a passionate and beautiful folk-pop record”; Time Out London described it as “fragile pastoral Americana...it is rare, rich, sad and innocent, yet warm to the touch and wet with desire.” The Associated Press simply declared it “an exquisite album.” After Rabbit Songs was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, Hem steadily built a passionate national following.

Messé and Maurer – working musicians, composers and producers -- had long wanted, in Messé’s words, “to do this dream project that combined all of our favorite influences, from the Carter Family to Aaron Copland to the Rolling Stones.” They enlisted Messé’s college buddy Curtis to join this quixotic adventure and the trio, likeminded songwriters but not lead singers, decided to place an ad in the Village Voice for vocalists to help them realize their vision. That seemed to yield nothing. Then, well after the listing had expired, MessÈ got a call from Ellyson, who was a television producer at the time. She’d never sung professionally, but did have a cassette of lullabies she’d recorded for a friend’s child. As Messé, skeptical of her talents until he put on her tape, told the Boston Globe, “I couldn't believe that voice existed... We all sort of feel like it was The Wizard of Oz. Like the exact right person showed up at the exact right time to get us home." Snippets from that tape are included at the beginning of Rabbit Songs and at the end of 2004’s Eveningland.

“It was so pretty,” says Ellyson of the material her new band-mates were writing, “so not like what was in vogue at the time, it was something we liked and something we were personally attached to, but didn’t know if anybody else would be. We weren’t really making an album to become a band. We were making something for ourselves. At least that’s what I was told – otherwise I never would have done it. Then, because we’d given friends copies of Rabbit Songs, we had a show, our first real show – and it sold out. Then we had another show – and that sold out too. It turned out that people loved this little thing we had given to them and made copies for their friends. It was a grassroots movement and that spurred us on to start playing regularly, then people started talking to us about actually releasing the album.”

Since then, Hem has developed a large and loyal international audience, playing shows with artists such as Elvis Costello, Beth Orton and Wilco, and at venues ranging from alternative rock mainstays like Schuba’s Tavern in Chicago to the stunning glass-walled concert hall of Jazz At Lincoln Center, overlooking Central Park (where they had enough room to bring along an entire orchestra.) Yet their sensibility has changed little since the days when Messé’s “dream project” just existed in his head.

“The themes that have captured our imagination since Rabbit Songs and Eveningland still seem to capture us, “Messé admits, “even though we’re at a different part of our journey – like the idea of taking comfort where you can find it, the pull of the past and how you can get stuck in it, the fear of going forward, and the way life has a way of moving you forward no matter what. This album is very much about that. Funnel Cloud is really kicking us forward. I feel like we go back to the same themes, just with different perspectives.”

You’ll want to go back there as well, to the big, beautiful, sometimes scary world that Hem has found and continues to intrepidly explore. Funnel Cloud, you’ll discover, can be literally transporting. – Michael Hill

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