Live Music Alert: Enchanted Ape  Friday, Oct 23, Crosstown Lounge, Grand Forks ND, 10 pm, $5 cover, 21+ show and a free beer AND Saturday, Oct 24, Side Street Grille and Pub, Fargo, ND, at 9:30 pm, no cover, 21+ show.

This week, I caught up with Chris O’Brien, frontman and principal songwriter for the Minneapolis band, Enchanted Ape. I’ve covered Enchanted Ape since they first formed back in 2005 and seen them live at 10KLF several times, but most especially at the Crosstown Lounge here in Grand Forks. This week, the band will make it’s sixth appearance at the club before it debuts at the Side Street Grille in Fargo. If you want background on this band, please go to: http://www.gratefulweb.com/interviews/interviews/enchanted-ape-digs-deeper-with-off-the-ground.html

Though many of you know what I think of Q&A—lazyman journalism–, I couldn’t help but put our conversation up here for all of you folks to read.

Enchanted Ape is:

Rob Bruce (bass, vocals)

Adam Kuchelmeister (drums)

Chris O’Brien (acoustic/slide guitar, vocals)

Pat Riddle (electric guitar, vocals)

Discography

Three Ring Symphony (2005)

Off The Ground (2008)

Refrain: Hey, Chris. It’s always my pleasure to talk with you. Enchanted Ape is really developing. You’ve got a great band backing you up.

Chris O’Brien: Yeah, it’s really coming together. We’re getting to the point where the live performances are really happening the way we want. It’s been good.

Refrain: I have always been struck by the depth of your writing and being able to take some unusual ideas. This is a far cry from when I first heard you several years ago. As good as that music was, you were a bar band. You aren’t a bar band any more because what you’re saying is something very accessible. It isn’t just something for people to get up and get drunk and dance. They’ll do that. You’ve got something to say. The last album was absolutely wonderful.

Chris O’Brien: I think you really hit the nail on the head. Our goal I think is just try to reach people on a lot of different levels. There’s a lot of bands with good musicianship who can make it a party at the bar, which is great. That’s part of what we want to do, but we also want to kind of make people think in some way or try to reach people on a deeper level

Refrain: I think the four songs that you pointed me toward–”Carry Me,” “Sacred Ground,” “From the Ground Up,” and “Park Avenue” are definitely not your party songs. All four of them are spiritual songs.

Chris O’Brien: Yeah, definitely.

Refrain: Even when you think about “Park Avenue,” it’s one trying to rise above everything that’s there and somehow be comfortable even though you’re there.

Chris O’Brien: It’s kind of a funny story about that. That’s the newest song that we’ve started to do live. It was very much of a collaboration between myself and Pat Riddle, our guitar player. He’d come up with this whole melody and a chord progression for the song. Then we just sat down and put some lyrics to it. I’d heard this story on NPR the other day about a guy who wrote a book from a very old story about the Collier Brothers. They were a couple of brothers in New York City who had inherited a bunch of wealth and they hoarded different kinds of stuff. Junk, stacks of newspapers, anything that they could find out on the street—they brought into this big mansion they had in New York. They just kind of locked themselves in and isolated themselves from society. It was kind of interesting and I started thinking about that kind of concept. The song was by no means a biographical song but it was more about this idea of people isolating themselves.

Refrain: And isolating themselves around their things. Even if you have things, even if it’s your junk or even your rich junk, you’re still isolating yourselves. That can’t be good for human growth. We need to interact with folks.

Chris O’Brien: Definitely.

Refrain: What about the other three songs? “Carry Me” is almost a hymn, an anthem. I really found stirring.

Chris O’Brien: It’s interesting that you take that from the lyrics. It absolutely is. It is kind of a gospel-inspired song. It’s interesting that you can hear that without even hearing the song. In fact, I just uploaded it to our website. It’s a fairly decent recording of it. We haven’t been doing it in the band that very long. But I actually wrote it around Christmas time. It was one of these songs that when I started writing it I didn’t know what it was about. I didn’t set out to write about anything in particular, but as I got into it, it was going to be from the perspective of somebody at war, a soldier or something. I don’t think the song has to be taken at that way. That’s kind of the mindset I had when I wrote the song. I asked myself, what are people most fearful of, other than the obvious, when you’re at war. I think there’s a fear of losing yourself, losing your identity, certainly losing your time and things that you could have done.

Refrain: That also applies to people facing serious illness or people going through tough economic times and maybe away from family trying to find work. It has a bearing on lots of things. It could even be someone who is working but who is so consumed with working that he or she loses track of what is important, who you are, being with your family, and that spiritual connection….I think that’s what is great about what you do is that it can have many levels and be applied to many different situations.

Chris O’Brien: I think so. A lot of the music that I’ve always loved has been that kind of way. The writer may have had one thing in mind when they were writing it, but it’s written in such a way that it can be applied to a lot of people’s lives and a lot of different situations. I think that that’s important with good music.

Refrain: And that is what will stand the test of time because it’s not only the mood that the song creates but it’s what it has to say. You take John Lennon’s “Imagine.” It states some very startling things: Imagine there’s no heaven, imagine there’s no God. But also imagine all of these other things when people get reduced to just being human beings. It gets beyond the initial concept might have been for writing the song but the song remains not because it was a big hit but because it had some value….Tell me about the other two songs.

Chris O’Brien: “From the Ground Up” is probably the most rockish of these songs. It’s kind of got a funky sort of thing going on. At one time, I had a live version of that on our website. I’ll put that up there, too. The idea behind that song was just thinking about building something from the grassroots, kind of like what we’re doing with the band. I’m sure that could be applied to a political movement or anything where you’re trying to gather community….That song is kind of a party song, but I think it has some depth to it as well. It’s not all fun.

Refrain: I think there’s something to be said about building something from the ground up. We don’t think about that in our disposable society, of actually building something. When I first saw the words, I though of Enchanted Ape but then I thought that the song was talking about something more. Like you said, what did we have in the last election but a great grassroots movement building on values and things we haven’t seen in a long time….And your other song, “Sacred Ground.”

Chris O’Brien: I started thinking about this song when I went to Thailand at the beginning of this year for a couple of weeks. I’d never been anywhere remotely close to that part of the world before. I went with my girlfriend Kim. We’ve been together about three years. I guess this is about the closest thing to a love song that I’ve written in recent times. There’s some of that in there. I guess this is sort of a spiritual song in general. I guess this is kind of the thought of finding someplace sacred. It can be someplace to travel to, but it can also be a place closer to home.

Refrain: I do remember your reference to Kim at the beginning, but it was walking together. Even that image with the title “Sacred Ground” says something about a life path. It could be some place to travel to. It could be your life journey and becomes a sacred ground because of the companionship together. As my husband and I enter our Sunset Years, I begin to value having a life companion….This is exciting to see how you’re developing as a songwriter and how the band is coming in to help complete what you’re beginning with your lyrics and present it as a package…..These are going to be great shows coming up. You’ll be a the Crosstown in Grand Forks on Friday, October 23 and at the Side Street Grille on Saturday, October 24.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Issues, October 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.