Arizona

Ethereal Creation Through The Wall Method

Aug 22, 2009

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Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Johnnie Cluney // Sound engineering by Mike Gentry

Arizona lead singer Ben Wigler was here back in February and it was frozen piss cold outside, just a few days prior to Valentine's Day. It was not a pretty sight around here, the ground layered with dusty snow and everything that hardness is in the middle of a winter. Wigler came into the studio looking like one of the Lawn Wranglers from the Wes Anderson film "Bottle Rocket," decked out in an all-mint-green jumpsuit, the likes of which were the best sellers in 1970s janitorial warehouse and supply catalogs, the hot new looks from Sears Roebuck department stores in the early 1920s, targeted toward retirees with an interest in botany. It was the mint green of hospital scrubs, of surgery and bad news, but on the diminutive Wigler, they were appropriately fitting, the clothing that he was seemingly suited and measured for at birth. It allowed for distraction and as a kind of spectacular allure, the set up for a joke that doesn't exist at all. Wigler is a serious songwriter and with his chums in the Asheville, N.C., band that goes by the name of a hot state or a naval battleship, depending upon your preference, he's given himself three other walls and contributors to bounce ideas off of and to ultimately settle on a creation that they all added DNA to. They throw the spaghetti and meatballs against the papered walls and watch as it walks down, studying its movements and getting inspired by the initial slap and all that transpires afterward. There's a video on the band's site that is meant to be a snapshot of the creative process as the band uses and works with. It's not alarmingly different from what most bands probably are used to, but it does show Arizona to be as whimsically attentive and daffy as the music on their long-players might suggest. They're off in the woods, at a secluded lodge and Wigler has a near-disastrous tumble amongst the trees. He recounts a traffic accident that he'd recently had in which he was sliding into the side of an 18-wheeler and he said that he was overjoyed in those moments before impact because it dawned on him - in pristine clarity - that he already knew that he wasn't going to die, that he wouldn't be hurt at all by this. How he could know such a thing, or believe that he knew such a thing seems to, in a weird way, help us hear the band's quirky and well put together songs - all of which spiral off into beautiful places of unheralded escape and mystery. Arizona music is full of these loose-flowing drafts of languishing concerns and pleasing ribbons of ethereal majesty that all tumbles with sugar cubes and rose bushes, while still going to the gentlest corridors of psychedelia. The band lets its boundaries be pushed until they're purple and it never shies away from seeing that purple get red before letting up and traveling back into the terrains that feel like those tumbles that don't hurt you, just leave you to stand back up with crud in your hair and dirt stains happily ground into your knees and elbows - unhurt and smiling once again.

Arizona Official Site
Echo Mountain Records

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1. first song

   Welcome to Daytrotter

   
2. second song

   Sunset

   

   - unreleasedA tune written about a bedroom in an apartment at 5th and B in the East Village that I spent a lot of time in.  It faced partially west so that the sun would light the room up each evening.  This song hasn't been released on an album.  (Nick)

3. third song

   Through the Soot

   

   - original version appears on Welcome Back Dear ChildrenThis song was written for my friend's hot cousin Nicole, who I had fallen madly for at the time.  She was my Valentine's date that year and we planned on a night of drinking wine at my apartment, but her friend Josh showed up to cock block me.  I woke up the next morning alone, miserable, and drank the remainder of one of our wine bottles and wrote this song instead of going to class.  This was the first song recorded for our debut album Welcome Back Dear Children - it was recorded by the band a week after Nick moved to NYC from Atlanta.  We recorded it the night before Nicole was about to leave the country to live in Nicaragua for an indeterminate amount of time.  I thought that if I recorded a truly classic ballad for her before she left she would have to listen to it over and over again and come to the inevitable conclusion that I was a suitable person to make reality-bending love with multiple times.   She loved the song but never slept with me.  Even though it was the first song recorded for WBDC, it is the second to last song on the album. (Ben)
   

4. fourth song

   Whiskey or Wine

   

   - original version appears on Glowing BirdWritten early one morning in Atlanta, about the inability to decide whether to take more of a psychotropic substance or allow sobriety.  Is it better to go all out, or take things easy? (Nick)

5. fifth song

   Ghost

   

   - original version appears on Glowing BirdBefore Glowing Bird was recorded, I was really suffering from a writer's drought.  I was convinced that I had lost my ability to write music.  We had previously been on the road with Band of Horses, and their song "Is There A Ghost?" was just starting to hit.  i thought that song was hilarious.  I decided to write a song from the perspective of the ghost in Ben Bridwell's house.  I thought it was a funny picture, my crazy self in spectral form, singing millimeters away from Ben Bridwell's ears while he was singing in the shower or making coffee in his kitchen.  I wasn't sure if a cross-concept-song had ever really been done in indie rock.  When it came time to do Glowing Bird I played this song for the guys, despite thinking it was one of the stupidest songs I ever wrote.  It was supposed to be called "There Is A Ghost!", but I didn't proofread the track listings on the back of the album before we printed it, so it is just called "Ghost" now.  A dream is to perform the BoH song and this one back to back with Ben Bridwell. (Ben)

6. sixth song

   The Glowing Bird

   

   - original version appears on Glowing BirdThis is one of the last songs influenced by my decade-long obsession with progressive metal.  My original demo was even more prog-tacular than the song turned out to be.  The lyrics were inspired by a young scientist I met in Hawaii.  He is a true genius and designed a piece of technology that if adapted would solve the climate crisis.  We spent 24 hours together in Hawaii while he was dropping off his young daugher to spend time with her mother.  I chose the Russian folkloric creature Glowing Bird as an analogy for the technology that he created, which would have been a solar glider that never lands and spends its entire time above the visible sightline of the clouds, scrubbing greenhouse gasses and releasing ozone.  Many thousands of these would be required to actually make a difference, but "Glowing Birds" is not as good a title as "Glowing Bird". (Ben)