Adan Martinez-Kee, Casey Golden, Connor Gallaher and Grant Beyschau hang out on Hamaker’s porch Monday. (Photo by: Zoe McDonald)
For the members of Casey Golden, the first leg of their tour has gone well. They caught Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans after a show over the weekend, and now they’ve made it to Graham Hamaker’s porch in Oxford, where it’s sunny and warm, and the smell of the cooking tacos wafts into the early spring air.
Golden and his three-man band — Connor Gallaher on guitar and pedal steel, drummer Adan Martinez-Kee and flutist and bassist Grant Beyschau — are touring Texas and the Southeast, and Golden’s first self-titled is set to drop next Friday by way of local record label Muscle Beach Records. For the label, it’s an important first: a physical, full-length, vinyl release.
Golden and Kieran Danielson of Muscle Beach have been friends, bandmates and musical confidantes since they were teens.
“Kieran and I are best buddies forever, so we just always kind of send each other our music — what we’re doing — so I sent him stuff, and he ended up being like, ‘Hey, I just started a new record label, and we want to put out a vinyl. Can we make your dreams come true?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, uh, thank you Kieran. You can do that for me.’”
“Casey Golden” will release March 10 via Muscle Beach Records. Album cover courtesy: Muscle Beach Records.
For four months, Golden began building the album, thinking about arrangements (it features flute, violin and steel pedal) and planning vocal harmonies at Midtown Island Studio in Tucson, Arizona, with Matt Rendon of The Resonars.
For Golden and Rendon, the process “was a creative endeavor too, not just a production,” Golden said.
In between, there were the email threads. Golden and the Muscle Beach boys stayed in contact extensively, from creating the album cover to getting the vinyl pressed.
“We had a whole misadventure of just trying to figure out the album cover,” Golden said. “We had a really long email thread, brainstorming. There’s a picture of bird, which I thought worked really well, but it ended up being exactly the same cover as Wilco’s ‘Sky Blue Sky.’”
After trying to craft a cover himself, Golden outsourced the job to Tuscon artist Gabriella Molina, who created Golden’s cover collage based on what she heard in the self-titled.
When “Casey Golden” finally got put together, the feel was timeless for Hamaker and Danielson. They both agreed on its potential to reach a wider audience.
“It is an interesting take on folk music. It’s a little more somber,” Hamaker said. “Well, I guess a lot of folk music is somber, but it definitely has some interesting elements in there. Fresh. Like fresh-squeezed orange juice.”
Indeed, its intricacies and layered sounds make for a record that can envelop a listener. It skates a line between an indie-rock record and something else entirely — sometimes bleeding into the realm of Americana (with the help of the steel pedal) or adopting an island-style tempo. Golden began to describe some images the album evokes for him — jungles, wind, oceans with choppy waves — before pausing.
“I think sometimes images in the songs exist only within itself,” Golden said. “Maybe not anywhere else in real life. I think that’s probably why I wrote (the album) description. Because that doesn’t really exist. It doesn’t make that much sense. But it kind of happens in a song, maybe?”
After working on the album for around two years, Golden’s ready to take on a new project. He said he’s interested in including more strings, cello and violin. For now, he’ll be touring with music from his melancholy self-titled, one that, with more and more listens, is bound to grow on listeners like gentle but wild jungle plants.
Catch Golden with Kyle Kimbrell and Bonus at Proud Larry’s tonight. Before the show, head to The End of All Music for Golden’s in-store record release show and celebration of The End of All Music’s fifth year in business starting at 5 p.m.
