Weinland

A Cold Breeze Offers A Warm Kiss

Oct 24, 2008

tell your friends…

Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Johnnie Cluney // Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley

When Adam Shearer and the rest of Weinland get onto a stage, they make light of the dark shadows that they conjure with their weighted down songs. The themes that they explore and the shrouded paths that they amble down are heavier than the state of Oregon, where they call home. They are heavier than the world's combined mass of all the pits in stomachs out there, falling to deep depths, where the clear water is still black to the eye. These are the situations and personal quandaries that entice people to wear out a smooth spot on a bar stool and on the wooden top where the drinks of choice slide into with sullen glass on oak scraping. They are when domestication goes awry and knocks us onto the ground spinning and bruised.

It's the quiet abuse that gets inflicted and then worked out with the band's rootsy croon, Shearer treating these disputes of the heart and the soul as spiders that might be plotting to slip down your throat or across your eyes when the evening's stretching by and you're oblivious to their movements. They take over, the stories that are as common as they come, but the Weinland offerings are dolled up with a film of psychological melancholy that just makes one feel embraced and pushed into a snow bank full of knives and downs electrical wires and packs of rabid animals with sharpened teeth. Miraculously, none of those nasty, evil pitfalls lurch out and strike. We're left in the embrace and there's a bit of a sigh of relief when we hit and we're able to unclench our balled up fists and open our eyes.

Shearer and company create a backdrop that is full of ominous sea salt and bummer, a full skyline of tightropes that are being walked across by doppelgangers and all of the other people who route themselves in and out of your life - or could, if your life was inexplicably tied together with Shearer's. It's fun to watch them all up there, against a charcoal gray sky, carrying all of their real and false burdens, with such impeccable balance, just strolling along unaware that the tightrope might not be the best place to spend their time. They do have good balance though, so the protagonists and those on the other side in all of the Weinland songs on La Lamentor they play to their strengths and keep curling and contorting their feet like hot dog buns to travel that rope and not hang by it.

The lingering hearts of former lovers still keep their sights on the one they lost or the one that decided to started to believe they were better off lost. Shearer sings of the agony of thinking about one of those people enjoying the warmth of a different bed - such an uncomfortable thought for anyone to have played in the back of their mind. The person that used to have skin that began to feel like your own is now pleasurably connecting with someone else in the same way, sharing that skin and syncopating their belongings into a nice little unison. It's this idea that plays out directly and indirectly through the length of the album and Weinland treat it like the presence that it is - vacant and untouchable, but full-bodied when it's out of direct light. The presence comes alive when the dogs come out to roam and the shirts get untucked and a cold breeze offers a kiss off.

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tell your friends…

1. first song

   Welcome to Daytrotter
2. second song

   God Here I Come

   

   - original version appears on La LamentorOooh… that's a dark title.. Not sure what to say about it. It's basically a murder ballad about two men who love the same woman. One holds the other in contempt and in the end finds peace and forgiveness in the realization that they are no different from one another. The song's words and imagery are very dark, but the sentiment is easy to relate to.. Very often in life a person will find themselves longing for the unattainable and harboring distaste for whomever has already achieved what they will not. It's an easy and unpleasant position to find yourself in. I had a hard time explaining this one to my mum. "They're just stories about feelings! They're not true stories, not all of them anyway." Basically I hope we all find peace with our own circumstances long before we accept discontent.

3. third song

   Piles of Clothes

   

   - unreleasedThis is an older song for WEINLAND. I actually wrote it sometime back in 2003 or 2004 (way before the band formed)... Its first official appearance was on our record Demersville (released under the band name: John Weinland) which we put out ourselves in 2006. I've always had a hard time accepting the fact that people in our lives, important people, won't always be a part of our lives. I'm not sure if this is a bigger deal to me than it is to other people, I doubt it, but it certainly has a serious effect on me. I actually worry about it at times when it is completely irrelevant. I've had friendships and relationships that have gone on long past being healthy simply because I have a very hard time saying goodbye. "Piles of Clothes" is about letting someone you care about go. Its first line, and title lender, directly refers to a moment when I woke up sleeping on my bed, above the sheets, next to all of my laundry (clean or otherwise), and had the realization that I was missing someone so much I had stopped taking care of myself. In this case it wasn't because I should have missed that person as much as it was me coming to realize that some times/relationships are temporary. That moment inspired the first line of the song.. when the song was finished I realized it's actually about how hard it is for me to let people exit my life in general.. I think that's why we still play this song so many years later.. the lyrics are always meaningful to me because I can constantly update their meaning to a current situation I relate to. We wouldn't play it anymore if we didn't still feel it.. and it makes about 80% of our set lists to this day. That's why we chose to play it at Daytrotter.. even though it's an old song, we still feel like it is a great representation of what we do and how we approach music.

4. fourth song

   Piles of Clothes

   

   - unreleasedThis is an older song for WEINLAND. I actually wrote it sometime back in 2003 or 2004 (way before the band formed)... Its first official appearance was on our record Demersville (released under the band name: John Weinland) which we put out ourselves in 2006. I've always had a hard time accepting the fact that people in our lives, important people, won't always be a part of our lives. I'm not sure if this is a bigger deal to me than it is to other people, I doubt it, but it certainly has a serious effect on me. I actually worry about it at times when it is completely irrelevant. I've had friendships and relationships that have gone on long past being healthy simply because I have a very hard time saying goodbye. "Piles of Clothes" is about letting someone you care about go. Its first line, and title lender, directly refers to a moment when I woke up sleeping on my bed, above the sheets, next to all of my laundry (clean or otherwise), and had the realization that I was missing someone so much I had stopped taking care of myself. In this case it wasn't because I should have missed that person as much as it was me coming to realize that some times/relationships are temporary. That moment inspired the first line of the song.. when the song was finished I realized it's actually about how hard it is for me to let people exit my life in general.. I think that's why we still play this song so many years later.. the lyrics are always meaningful to me because I can constantly update their meaning to a current situation I relate to. We wouldn't play it anymore if we didn't still feel it.. and it makes about 80% of our set lists to this day. That's why we chose to play it at Daytrotter.. even though it's an old song, we still feel like it is a great representation of what we do and how we approach music.

5. fifth song

   Sick is a Gun

   

   - original version appears on La LamentorThis song was written only partially before we entered the studio to record it for La Lamentor. I already had the lyrics for the chorus but that was it. The words for the verses were written moments before we recorded them. At the time I was in the process of leaving my career as a mental health worker. I had worked serving mentally disturbed children for six years and at the time I started, thought I would spend my life doing that work. It wouldn't feel right for me to go into depth about what the lyrics mean or exactly what I was feeling that inspired those words, but I will say this: because of the spontaneous way they came and the moment in time they capture, this is my favorite song from La Lamentor. The song is basically about how I was feeling and what I was experiencing on one particular day. It wasn't the easiest time for me and putting "Sick As A Gun" to tape was very therapeutic and hopefully listeners will experience some relief from it as well. I think what all of us in WEINLAND appreciated about music growing up was, and still is, how lyrics we relate to make us feel like we're not alone in our difficult experiences. Well-crafted words can give you a sense of hope and community and we hope we have returned the karmic favor in some of our music.

6. sixth song

   With You Without You

   

   - original version appears on La LamentorOn our record, La Lamentor, this song only has voice and piano. It's a very naked track considering the size of our band (instrumentation wise). I actually wrote this song while playing piano (sometimes when I have writer's block I'll try writing on an instrument I'm not proficient at to encourage new directions). Then when we recorded the song we did the smart thing and had Paul (our piano player) play the song while I sang. I do like to tease him about how it sounds like I'm an awesome piano player and how no one reads CD liner notes and everyone MUST think it's me playing the piano. In your face Thunder! (Thunder is Paul's nickname). On the record I think it has a fragile and intimate sound which demonstrates our restraint for the sake of the song. However, we've been playing it live as a full band almost exclusively and I think the live version, although still fragile due to lyrical content and the vocal style, has a lot power behind it. When the band comes in, live, the song goes to a new place it doesn't go to on the record. We thought it would be really cool to capture this version of the song, especially because we decided not to on the official record. That's why we chose it for Daytrotter.