S.G. Carlson & The Tines Push A Record Out Of Quarantine

A disembodied head has woken up somewhere near Lake Wintergreen, beneath a low ceiling of tree trunks and carpet of loose dirt. Eyes spring open; this thing is definitely alive. When it stretches its mouth in a wide yawn, there’s a huge row of molars, then the dark cavern of a man’s throat.

The head begins to float, tilting from side to side. It feels like it couldn’t be happening any other way.

S.G. Carlson and the Tines’ “In The Morning You Will Find It” is the first track on The Enemy Is Listening, the artist’s latest release and the first non-series EP from Free As Birds Records. The album is scheduled to drop on Halloween; videos for “Crisis Shopper” and “In The Morning You Will Find It” have already made their debut online. It is the brainchild of Sam Carlson, who runs Sans Serif Recording. 

“I had skeletons of songs, and had a band play on them, and then COVID happened,” Carlson said in an interview Monday, while on the road with Free As Birds founder Alex Burnet. “During the first couple months of the virus, I sat home and played guitar for a couple months. It was the fastest record that I've made.”

The idea for The Enemy Is Listening came directly out of quarantine and isolation, although Carlson said he actively worked to avoid making an album only about the pandemic. In March, the musician went from holding part-time jobs at Cafe Nine and the Fairfield Theatre Company to having virtually no work in a 24-hour time span. He watched as jobs and performances disappeared for the musicians around him. In his words, “it was poof, gone, overnight.”

At first, it was an experiment: he found himself at home, with hours of unstructured time. His routine became waking up and making music. Carlson thought the break from work would last for two weeks, although he applied for unemployment in case it lasted longer. Then two weeks became two months. Two months turned into three, and then four, and then five, with no end in sight. He and musician Pat Dalton continued work on a new recording studio, which they are hoping to open officially in January of next year.

Without a reliable job, he kept churning out pieces, leaving what he didn’t like on the cutting room floor. As he wrote, Carlson could feel the pandemic seeping into his work, which he called “kind of inevitable” in an interview Monday. But he also tried to write around it, mining material he hadn’t had time for in months. 

Of 40 or 50 songs, only four made it onto the album; only one of those is indirectly related to the pandemic. A fifth bonus track titled “Your Guess” is available only on a number of physical CDs that Burnet has pressed under the Free As Birds label. 

When he was ready to record, Carlson called on musicians he had worked with for years—Laundry Day and Quiet Giant drummer Jared Thompson, bass player Mike Skaggs, Jr. of The Proud Flesh, and Ilya Gitelman, who has played alongside Carlson in Ports of Spain and been a longtime colleague and collaborator. Because of the pandemic, each musician learned the music, then recorded during their own session in the studio (everything is recorded, mixed, and mastered at Sans Serif). They have never played together as a full band; all of the tracks have been layered onto each other. Carlson called it a crash course in reverse engineering.

“I always wanted to do music full time, but I’m a very risk-averse person,” he said. “I was not about to quit my two jobs. And then the virus kind of quit them for me. I get to be in this kind of weird Schrödinger's cat position, where I get to be a full-time musician and see what that’s like. I’m feeling pretty good about it. And I never would have done that on my own.”

On the album, the vocals are ethereal until they are suddenly soaked in indie rock and thrumming bass, tinged with an old school sensibility Carlson keeps just beneath his sternum. After a listener steps into “In The Morning You Will Find It,” they can sink right into the music. “Rough Jazz” is propulsive, with lyrics that warrant multiple listens and tight, fuzz-flecked guitar that fades at the end.

In “White Sedan Red Earth,” the music chases its tail and wades willingly into layers of sound. Katherine von Ancken joins in on vocals, and feels instantly like she has been missing all along. The song, where instrumentals are economical but never too sparse, seems to wind through where Carlson has musically been, and where he’s going.

Whatever has happened to his brain during quarantine pays off. “Your Guess”—that fifth bonus track, and a sort of unexpected ode to the era—may be the most vulnerable and soft the musician has been in a long time. He drags on the letters, letting S sounds sit and slither on his lips and tongue. It's meditative and unbearably heavy, with guitar that is delicate enough to soften the blow.

In addition to the album, he has released two music videos, both recorded outside and at a social distance due to COVID-19. In “Crisis Shopper”—a reverb-drenched song that he said was inspired by the early months of the pandemic—he has riffed on a B-movie horror film vibe just in time for Halloween. “In The Morning You Will Find It,” he worked with the musician Brian Ember and the Black Rock-based Kicker Pictures to create a surreal montage, in which Ember’s head follows and floats among visitors to the park.

It feels right on time for a moment that has left people sleeping less and dreaming more vividly and strangely when they do. Ember’s face is the perfect fit for the music: it contorts, smiles, pouts, and catches things in its teeth. It communes with musicians, ruins a picnic and a jam session, and masters its own hallucinogenic sequence. In the end, it marvels in the strangeness of a whole body.

“I'm glad that this is kind of working out for both Alex and I,” Carlson said. “I mean, it took a pandemic for the arts to get funding. As soon as everyone was home, everyone was watching television and listening to music to get through this. How can you say that this isn't worth investing in?”

Burnet added that he is excited to be expanding the label with the EP. Earlier this year, he rolled out Free As Birds with a three-album release called Waiting On A Sunrise, a project that started with the unexpected time he had after getting laid off. Like Carlson, COVID-19 ended his job for him, and he used the extra time to record an EP and kick off a new project.

When the pandemic hit, he was working in the kitchen at Next Door, a restaurant that has since become a casualty of COVID-19. Eight months ago, he said, he couldn’t have imagined that he’d be trying to expand a record label in the middle of a plague. Now, he’s cooking up music instead: he suggested that Carlson’s album is “a sandwich with everything you like on it and nothing you don’t,” including honey mustard, avocado, red onion and melted cheese. Carlson added that the bread would be a whole-wheat sourdough, “where it's delicious but it's also whole wheat “

“We're not even a year into this, and there are some ways in which the world is unrecognizably better, and some ways in which it is unrecognizably worse,” Burnet said. “Artists who were juggling jobs they didn't like before are able to stay home and spend more time making art. The content that is coming out is really cool.”

“There are people who snap, and the people who bend,” he added. “And the people who are bending are doing incredible things.”

SG Carlson and The Tines’ The Enemy Is Listening is available for streaming and download via Bandcamp Oct. 31. Carlson will also play live at DAE Presents on Wednesday, Oct. 28 from 7 to 8 p.m. Find out more about the event, for which there is an online viewing option, here.