There’s a bit of magic about “Dream Within a Dream,” the three-minute coda to local duo Birdlips’ debut album, Cardboard Wings. On the morning of Birdlips’ final recording session at Monkeyclaus, the Nelson County recording studio run by Peter Agelasto and Abel Okugawa, singer/guitarist Clifford Usher got out of bed, made coffee and began to urge himself to prepare for the day’s work—“Get up, get up/ The sun is pouring over the horizon, streaming coffee in your cup.”
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Listen to "When The Last Light Goes Out" by Birdlips
Courtesy of Birdlips — Thank you! |
The nine additional songs for Cardboard Wings—from the soaring title track that launches listeners from between “yesterday’s fallen rain” and “tomorrow’s rising steam” to the fleet-footed instrumental track, “Home”—were already written, if simply in the minds of guitarist/singer Clifford Usher and keyboardist Lindsay Pitts. But for a gaggle of reasons—the themes and chronology of a densely layered, thoughtful album, not to mention its $10,000 price tag—Usher wanted one more song.
“This has been a problem with the last couple albums I’ve recorded,” explains Usher over coffee with Pitts. (Both musicians were members of the Charlottesville-based dance-rock troupe The Business of Flies.) “I knew I wanted to have a short, catchy song at the end that would make you want to listen to the album again, and something that would bring the chronology of the album full-circle.”
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Home to roost: Birdlips’ Clifford Usher and Lindsay Pitts soar on their debut album, Cardboard Wings. Pick up a copy, or catch them at Gravity Lounge on October 2. |
Yet for all of the jetstreams and debris of the rest of album—circuses, cigarettes, red wine, sharks, stitches, scarecrows and bones—“Dream Within a Dream” neatly accomplishes what Usher intended. Only seconds after Usher closes Cardboard Wings with the thought that all his travels weren’t quite what he perceived them to be, his voice warmly doubled over like an airplane blanket, we’re back in the coach class seats with him, hovering over the Atlantic between the rain and steam, certain that this next trip will lead us to where the first couldn’t.
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C-VILLE Playlist What we’re listening to… “Cornflake Girl,” by Tori Amos (from Under the Pink) “Tennessee,” by Silver Jews (from Bright Flight) “This is the Sea,” by The Waterboys (from This is the Sea) “Los Angeles,” by Frank Black (from Frank Black) “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” by Neutral Milk Hotel (from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea) |
Months after the release of Cardboard Wings and the band has landed. “I feel like right now we’re kinda getting our ducks in a row, if you will,” says Pitts. “We’re working on writing new songs, and we’re trying to play a lot of shows in the area. We’re talking to bands about booking tours because, well, it’s really hard. I don’t know how to promote or market.”
“We’re learning as we go,” agrees Usher, who shares some advice he received from Brooklyn musician Luke Temple. “He made the point of saying, ‘All the stuff in the music business—all the parts there to promote musicians—the only way you can get them to work for you is if they find you.’”
And, truthfully, it’s happened before. National Public Radio featured “Tire Chains,” a hypnotic, Indian-tinged tune and the first song that Pitts and Usher wrote together, as a “Song of the Day” in July. How did NPR find the song?
“We have no idea,” says Pitts. “Cliff got this e-mail that said, ‘Send this back [so that] we can use this.’ We were really excited about it, filled it out that day, went to Staples and faxed it.” The pair was in Mexico when NPR played the song on the air.
In a similar vein, I can’t tell you how I wound up with a copy of Cardboard Wings on my desk. I can tell you, however, that I’ve listened to the album more than any record by a local band since I first reviewed it in February of this year, that the song “When the Last Light Goes Out” has played 20 times on my computer at work and at least twice as many times in my car. And that, when I hit the end of “Dream Within a Dream,” part of me always wants to start from the beginning.
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Listen to "Some Kind of Death" by Birdlips
Courtesy of Birdlips — Thank you! |
There are a couple of chances to catch Birdlips live in the next few weeks: On September 26, the group performs at the sixth annual Spaghettifest concert at Natural Chimney Regional Park in Mount Solon, Virginia, alongside local acts including Accordion Death Squad, Trees on Fire, Barling and Collins, and The Falsies. The following week, the band opens for San Francisco-based rock act Birdmonster at Gravity Lounge.
On a recent Friday night, Birdlips played to a devout congregation of 30 to 40 listeners from the makeshift venue known as The Garage, which sits in a small brick block on First Street NW next to the Hill & Wood Funeral Home. (For a schedule of events, visit thegarage-cville.com.) As it began to rain lightly, Pitts jokingly quoted a famous passage from the Woodstock documentary in which the crowd chants to ward off bad weather: “No rain! No rain!”
And while the rain came anyways, the crowd listened with rapt attention—not the first supernatural act that Birdlips has managed, and certainly not the last.
