What led to the flame “burning out” when the group split ways? How much of a beating were you guys taking trying to make it?
The best way to answer that question is to just refer to the previous one. There was just no way for us to sustain the kind of level of full-on intensity we had set up for ourselves between 1995 and 1998. Because we were playing anywhere and everywhere and giving no thought about long-term finances we were all very quickly going broke.
And there were very difficult personality issues that were getting in the way of our progress; mainly between myself and Stacey Evans because we were both songwriters and we’re both very stubborn and competitive by nature. We were both trying to take the reins of the group and we each considered ourselves as the sole de facto leader of the band. But mainly I think we were all just burned out and tired both physically and mentally.
It had started to become a grind, all the travel and the heavy lifting and playing 4-hour sets until 2 a.m. The last show we played together was at Liberty Lunch in Austin, Texas. We even had an A&R rep from Elektra Records in the audience that night. That was May 28, 1998.
Steve had already moved out of the band house at that point, Stacey moved out shortly after that and for some bizarre reason ended up in Boise, Idaho, for several years before moving on to Los Angeles to continue her own solo music career. Juliet immediately enrolled herself back into the music department at the University of Texas to continue to pursue her master’s degree and I just kind of sat on the couch and watched baseball for about a year not really knowing what the future held for me.
You are obviously still making music… How long did it take before the flames of passion flared back up?
Juliet finished her degree program in the spring of 1999 and sometime right after that I think I had a dream that we were living in Montana and I was studying to be some kind of a botanist or an ecologist. I told her the next morning that I wanted us to move to Missoula, Montana, and I was going to enroll at the University of Montana in order to get a master’s degree in Forestry. She just looked at me and said “Uhm… okay”. I sometimes wonder if I was just jealous of Juliet’s advanced degree and I felt like I needed to compete with her. But it wasn’t going to be in music, that was for sure.
Whatever it was we pulled into Missoula on January 1, 2000 in a blizzard snowstorm and we stayed there for over seven years and loved it. We actually tried (briefly) to start another band while we were there in Missoula but we just couldn’t find anyone that wanted to match the commitment level that we were looking for. I think we finally found a drummer and he lasted about a week and lost interest. The same thing happened with a singer and a bass player.
Missoula is a fantastic place to live but it is not Austin, Texas, when it comes to a vibrant local music scene. The population is just too small compared to Austin. So I focused on my studies and then got a job in Utah with the Forest Service. Our passion for writing and making music never really went away completely it just got turned down from high heat to simmer for many years.
It was probably around the middle of 2009 when I began to discover the various social media sites (MySpace, facebook, Twitter, etc.) and I began to see how bands were attempting to market themselves in this very new and different way. I had resisted those social media sites for quite a while, thinking they were just a waste of time and a passing fad that would last a couple of years and then go away. But I saw the potential for marketing music and for publicity. Of course, so did everyone else. So I was no genius in that sense. Actually, I think I caught onto all of that rather late compared to everyone else.
By 2010 I was determined that we were going to record again and this time around, things were going to be different. Juliet resisted at first because it had taken us that long just to get ourselves back out from under that mountain of debt we had created for ourselves in the 90’s. I found Steven Oakes again (in Dallas) thru social media and I even decided to bury the hatchet with Stacey Evans and contacted her again after not having spoken with her in almost twelve years. Things went well with her for a couple of months and we talked about plans and then very suddenly and without warning it all just went right back down the drain again. She was out of the project completely but Steven was still in.
The three of us decided to record again at the Congress House Studio in Austin just like we did back in 1996/1997 but we needed a drummer and we needed a vocalist. We’ve known Wiley Koepp for a long time and we used to play shows with his band Three Penny Opera in Austin and we had always admired his easy-going personality and his excellent drumming skills. Mark Hallman, owner of Congress House, had lots of musical contacts from several decades of working in Austin. He very quickly helped us find a replacement vocalist, Ashley Glover, from the band D’nA and she did a superb job with very little time to prepare. Heroes for Ghosts was a 5-song ep that marked our immediate jump back into the world of recording.
It wasn’t perfect but I think it showed that we were serious about what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go with all of it after a very long hiatus.
