#switchboardsessions

On Friday, October 25th, The Switchboard Sessions closed down for good. Here's why this is a big deal:

In 2010, Dane Erbach, a a lifelong fan of punk/emo, was settling into life as a married high school English teacher in suburban Chicago. Like many of us, he felt disconnected from the music he built his identity around as a young adult. And like many of us, he contemplated ways to keep that connection to the scene without turning the rest of his life upside down. Here's what he came up with:

Dane began conducting interviews with and recording minimally arranged (often but not always acoustic) performances by members of bands he liked. Here's the catch though: All performances had to be recorded over a telephone landline, with virtually no production on either end. 

Okay, first of all, why a landline? Glad you asked! The answer is simple. The audio signal that comes out of your cell phone is far more compressed than the one coming out of the landline at your work, or your parents' house, or wherever you still have access to one. The purpose of voice audio compression on old landlines is basically just to eliminate frequencies that just carry noise, or are too low for your ear to actually hear. On cell phones, however, where the carriers have incentive to conserve as much bandwidth as possible, compression is more aggressive. For the purpose of the Switchboard Sessions, a song recorded over a person-to-person cell conversation would sound like gibberish. 

So trying to transmit and record the performances over cell phones on either end wouldn't have worked. But why a telephone at all? Why not just get an M-Box and a Shure 58 and Pro-Tools, like everyone else? To understand that you'll need to take a moment to sink in to Dane's unique way of looking at music, and art, and the world. His words:

The purpose, though, is to capture a song in its rawest, most spontaneous form. In its imperfection, I hope that you can perceive the intimacy and honesty in each offering; I also hope that you can hear, even when the quality of recording is intentionally reduced, that the quality of songwriting cuts through.

Armed with that philosophy, Dane recorded and interviewed over 50 bands/artists between 2010 and 2013, before packing it in due to exhaustion (duh), job and family responsibilities, a desire to pursue new projects, and a sense that he'd accomplished what he set out to do. One of the things that will strike you about the Switchboard Sessions roster is that it included plenty of subjects for whom a gritty acoustic performance is all in a day's work - like Murder By Death, Laura Stevenson and Restorations - and plenty who had to temporarily reinvent themselves and their songs for to pull it off, like Samiam, Small Brown Bike and The Promise Ring. 

And then there are the interviews.

If you've played in punk bands in both the 1990s and now, then you'll know what I mean when I say that interviews ain't what they used to be. They tend to be conducted via email with little or no follow-up, and thrown up on the web with minimal editing and a brief introduction full of misspelled names and factual errors. 

Dane is a very striking exception. Conducting the interviews via phone, immediately after the performance, Dane goes deep. After being interviewed by him for over an hour last January I walked away with the impression that he begins by formulating a thesis about band and the songs - like a unifying idea that connects them all, something they all have in common - and then uses the interview as a means to test the thesis. I've been writing punk songs since I was 17 years old, one or two of which seem to be kind of a big deal, at least to some people), and this was literally the first time anyone ever asked me a serious question about how songs get written. It was almost disconcerting. 

But it's not just a vanity thing. Read Dane's piece on Brendan Kelly of the Lawrence Arms and you start to get a sense of what he was trying to do. Kelly has to sing extra quietly because he has just just put his kids down for a nap. 

And - and I think this is the important part - by tethering the performer to a landline, what he is actually doing nine times out of 10, is tethering them to some physical location that, more times than not, is part of their non-musical life and non-musical persona. That, I think, is where Dane suspects the real stuff is hidden. And if you talk long enough, you end up revealing stuff you didn't necessarily mean to, or weren't necessarily aware of. Dane thinks maybe somewhere in that stuff lies the key to whatever it is he finds interesting about the songs themselves. 

The Switchboard Sessions captured a brief but not unimportant moment in the history of this kind of music. Tom Gabel did a Switchboard Session shortly before Laura Jane Grace. Tony Sly did one shortly before his death in 2012. Punk music will go on without the Switchboard Sessions, but it will go on with a small piece missing.

Hosting capabilities mean that all 50+ sessions can't just live online perpetually, but Dane has thoughtfully arranged highlights of the sessions into four volumes, all of which can be downloaded for free here. If you want something from a specific session you can always ask.

- Joel 

a collection of songs and conversations collected over the phone