By Sean Moeller
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin might still be the third-best band on Springfield, Mo.’s Weller Street, as it famously promotes on its website, but it’s the only one with a recording contract. This is the kind of thing that tears a street apart and brews up the kinds of turf wars that bring knife fights to the six o’clock news. The first band to don the chaps and Stetson that’s required of all when they stop by the Daytrotter studio (all accessories are airbrushed out of all photographic evidence) announced that they had signed a three-record deal with Champaign, Ill.-based label Polyvinyl Records Thursday. Polyvinyl will re-release the gooey goodness that is “Broom” sometime this fall – oddsmakers point to October – and the band hopes to follow it up with a new full-length already in the spring.

Out on the West Coast, in the youthful part of a tour with Sound Team, singer/guitarist/bassist John Robert Cardwell checked in with Daytrotter to discuss the big development.

“It’s very cool. I’m pretty excited about it,” Cardwell said. “It makes it more like a job and there’s definitely a chance that the record will get out in front of more people. We’ll have a record that will be in record stores all over the country and you won’t have to have PayPal to get one. (Drummer/guitarist/singer) Phillip Dickey still has to mail everything out himself. He was going to the post office almost every day and if not every day, every other day. Sometimes he let it back up. But there was always something going in the mail.

“Umm, no (it won’t relieve his stress). He’s always the same degree of stressed out.”

Polyvinyl “wined and dined” the group, with whatever records they wanted to take and a dinner at an unmemorable smorgasbord type of restaurant, when they played in nearby Bloomington, Ill., on its last tour.

“We didn’t really have loads of options, but they all just seemed like really cool people who would be there for us down the road,” Cardwell said. “They all seemed really enthusiastic about our band and ‘Broom’”

Re-releasing the album is the one sticky point. It’s already been out for over a year and the band will have to tour behind it again before putting anything new out there.

“That’s the part about it that kind of sucks,” he said. “On one level, it feels like the record’s already run its course. It’s been reviewed a lot of places and it’s been…blogged…about. We’re all kind of sick of playing ‘Broom’ songs. Someone said that ‘Broom’ is too mopey, which I don’t agree with. At our shows, we tend to play all the ‘Broom’ songs at the beginning of the set to get it over with. We’re much more excited about the new songs we have.”

Cardwell said that he isn’t all that familiar with the Polyvinyl galaxy of stars (read:roster), but Dickey was smitten by American Football’s debut LP and the group’s found the newly gifted Joan of Arc album to its liking.

“Phillip accidentally ran into Tim Kinsella. He went to a bar in Chicago with Catfish Haven and Tim Kinsella was the bartender. Phillip was a little nervous because Tim Kinsella’s kind of one of his heroes,” Cardwell said. “He tried ordering his favorite beer. It’s Woodchuck Ale and it’s kind of a girl beer. He told his order to Tim Kinsella and he said, ‘No.’”

Welcome to the family indeed.

(To hear the insanely delightful Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin Daytrotter session – which includes new versions of “Oregon Girl,” “Travel Song,” “Modern Mystery” and “Yr Broom” – follow the link below. To read the band’s feature story check the link below that one. Easy as pie.)
Daytrotter Session: www.daytrotter.com/daytrotterSessions/6/free-songs-someone-still-loves-you-boris-yeltsin
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin feature story: www.daytrotter.com/article/1/first-post