How Hollow Bodies made their own “Sweet Home Alabama”

By Vikram “Venom” Ramachandran

After the supernova sheen of Dear Unknown, I appealed to my editor for the fifth time to greenlight my dream assignment. Embed with Seattle-rock band Hollow Bodies as they created their fifth album. I only had one chance to catch the band at this point in their career—one shot to give an on the ground account of how these mid-career account managers wrested strum and jangle into incandescent rock.

“I don’t know,” said my skeptical editor, “Is there a there there?”

“Oh there is a there,” I replied. “If there’s a there anywhere, there’s a there right here!”

I’d loved the band since hearing their growling single “Skin and Bones” off their second record, on KEXP. But it was their most recent release that made me believe the band was on the verge of an artistic breakthrough. During the pandemic, Hollow Bodies unlocked a new dimension to their guitar interplay, producing a shimmering sound that’s catnip to any indie aficionado.

My editor relented. “Whatever. Our publisher just sold to a hedge fund, so you’ll probably get downsized in a few months anyway.”

That was all the permission I needed. Five days later, I was on a zoom call with singer Anand Balasubrahmanyan. True to his surly reputation, Balasubrahmanyan was initially hostile to the idea. Calling me a “bottom feeder” and “gossip monger” who “prostrates [myself] for clicks,” he only accepted when I asked what he would give for a first-hand account of the recording session for the Barenaked Ladies’ “Born on a Pirate Ship.” Through the screen I saw a wistful look pass over his face, “Ontario…spring of 1995…to glimpse transient magic in the Scarborough air…” He hung up, which I interpreted as tacit approval.

Tell Me Which One’s Home

I met up with the band as guitarist Chris Dewar and Balasubrahmanyan landed in St. Paul, Minnesota. Their goal: teach drummer Josh Lindgren the chords to a fresh set of songs and record drum tracks for a new album.

Balasubrahmanyan grew up in St. Paul, so he took it upon himself to provide his friends with an insider's look at the city. He brought them to the best Noodles & Company in town and told many stories about how that restaurant on Snelling used to be a tanning salon.

Dewar thought “why not use the trip to your old stomping grounds as inspiration?” The band should write a record about home.

But where is home? Was home the place you were born? Where you went to high school? The place you remember being happiest?

Because, you see, Balasubrahmanyan no longer lived in Minneapolis nor St. Paul. He went to college and then moved to Seattle and then moved Chicago. And Lindgren, who lived in St Paul, had lived in Bellevue then Iowa then London and so on.

So what is home? A feeling? A time in your life? Something that belongs to you?

The result is an album that asks the question from seven directions. Each track on The Indestructible Beat of Merriam Park lives as an examination of what home really means.

Long Wave (goodbye)

The wash of Dewar’s white noise machine (he got it to help his new son fall asleep), introduces the final track on the album. “Long Wave” finds home in a person’s desire to belong.

Balasubrahmanyan’s lyrics take place at an open-mic comedy night that he used to attend in Minneapolis. Each of the characters in the song desperately want to be seen as a person with something important to say, promoting their podcasts and asking the bar if they’ve heard this joke before. But each of their jokes fall flat, leaving their desire to connect as the strongest feeling in a night dedicated to individuals speaking in a microphone.

The final waves of guitar and white noise crash over dwindling 6/8 shuffle--it’s a gorgeous ending to a gorgeous album. One that searches for the meaning of home, only to find a collection of fellow investigators huddled around an answer’s absence.

If Merriam Park can’t be claimed as home, at least the constant beat of footsteps, songs and lives that pound its avenues will keep up the quest.

The Good Lie

Any proud Minnesotan will tell you how Bob Dylan is from there, even though Dylan himself hated living in Minnesota. Do you claim home or does home claim you?

While Balasubrahmanyan had lived there less than half of his life, he still thought of Minnesota as home. Growing up around so many good record stores basically guarantees nostalgia. And as long as he returned to his parents’ house behind an apartment for St. Thomas university students for holidays, he was pretty sure that the Merriam Park neighborhood was home.

But with great-replacement conspiracy nonsense rising on mainstream news, he wondered what it meant for him to call a place home when many neighbors would never accept the claim. The song The Good Lie looks at America from the perspective of an immigrant family and an anti-immigrant reddit user, examining the lies needed by each to call this country home. Hard work cannot overcome prejudice, and prejudice cannot overcome its circular, self-destructive logic.

Twin Lakes

While most behind the music documentaries locate a band’s breakup in scandalous tales of binges and betrayals, the truth is that thousands of bands are torn asunder by an even more sinister rockstar trap. I’m speaking, of course, of the irresistible siren song of a stable career in accounting.

The band turned to Lindgren when beloved drummer Dominic Cortese (also of Warren Dunes) left the group to secure a steady job and support his newborn child. It being early 2021, with sort-of-lock-downs in effect and COVID still producing ominously named variants every few months, Hollow Bodies built the songs over zoom calls and garage band demos. Josh bought an electronic drum set so he could practice drumming along to rough recordings without bothering his neighbors.

This configuration marked a return to the band’s original line up, where Lindgren supplied classic rock beats on Hollow Bodies’ first record, Night After Night. In the Twin Cities, the group was determined to fuse the hi-fi guitar sound of Dear Unknown with the organic drums of their earliest records.

The first song they recorded at Minnehaha studios, “Twin Lakes,” shows the reunited trio in top form. With a shoegaze sheen, the track skewers the irony that those who preach doing your own research always find that someone else is to blame. Ripping through high energy riffs and open-prairie breakdowns, you’d never guess it was the first time the three had played together since 2017.

Above all, I want to impress how much fun it is to spend time with this band. Dewar fires off jokes that cut takes short with laughter. I even saw one of his goofs rouse a smile from their taciturn, Rush-loving studio engineer. Lindgren plans the perfect backyard grill playlist and deepens the breeziest conversations with understated theories of the universe (his answer to the prompt of what is home? “A poem.”) Even if none of the members can define home beyond a doubt, I can at least say that right here, in Minnehaha Studios all playing to the same click track, they certainly seem at home.

One of Us Writes

The other secret ingredient for the Indestructible Beat of Merriam Park is vocalist Molly Michal. Previously featured on standout tracks “Born in Kentucky” and “Ellie’s Daydream,” Michal got involved in the creation of songs early, brightening each with sublime vocal harmonies.

The high-point of her contributions is found on single One of Us Writes. The song uses a tight harmony to look at a family as the sum of each member’s activities throughout a day. Based on a repeating opening line, each phrase highlights the action of a single family member to show it as a piece of a larger whole. “One of us waits, one of us won’t be long. One of us dreams, one of us sleeps instead.” Maybe home can only belong to a community.

Snow Melt

2021 stands as an awkward year to personify. It was a year of aftershocks and retribution, still lingering with plague and bitter election aftertaste. Most of all, 2021 unleashed pent up frustration. People who felt trapped inside reached for people to blame for their predicament. Half claimed anti-vaxxers kept the world from re-opening, while the other half argued that fear of disease paralyzed society. When a state voted for a Republican, Democrats blamed gerrymandering for suppressing the vote. When a state voted for a Democrat, Republicans blamed voter fraud. No one could believe that those they disagreed with could wield legitimate power.

When I ask Balasubrahmanyan about the meaning of the songs he bristles. He tells me that he improvises most of the lyrics, that I’m finding reason in nothing to get attention, like a crypto currency influencer. He tells me, bottle of Costco margarita mix swaying in his hands, that the only song in history of music with meaningful lyrics is Chumbawamba’s “Tub Thumping.” But, if I’m allowed to play armchair psychologist for a moment, and I am, I think this is all deflection.

Take the fourth track, Snow Melt, which uses liminal guitars and dream-state harmonies to conjure the upheaval of 2021 in few words. The narrator in the song speaks to all bitter shut-ins who would rather be right alone, then explore solutions with others. If home is a place of comfort, it is also a place of regression. Some people use the perceived safety of home to cordon off dissent. Some people use the concept of home as a cudgel to exclude and deny others the dignity of calling a place their own.

The song ends in soaring harmony, a call for each of us to emerge from our 2021 of the soul. Dewar’s scorching solo a cry to seek connection and joy in the face of a fracturing country. It feels especially poignant after watching the band re-unite to record in person for the time in far too long.

Which is all to say that if the pandemic knocked Hollow Bodies down, they got back up again.

Reminder

After the last night of recording, I join the band on the edge of the Mississippi river. We stand right behind a monument to soldiers from World War One and a family playing Dungeons and Dragons on a picnic blanket.

We’re here for a photoshoot to provide promotional materials for the album’s press kit. This is the second attempt at a photoshoot. The previous night’s attempt was called off after a visibly inebriated Balasubrahmanyan showed up in eye-liner and pirate garb, telling anyone who will listen that he was the “Jack Sparrow of jangle-pop.”

Snapping photos is Lindgren’s partner, Natalie Roman, who positions the band in front of the lush green slopes and graffitied bridges that tie the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul together. We debate which artists are most representative of their hometowns. Is Seattle more encapsulated by Fleet Foxes or Macklemore? Is Detroit more Motown or Danny Brown?

It’s an interesting exercise that shows the ever-changing personalities of a city. Is it possible to say home was St. Paul in 2003 but not St Paul in 2018? And ultimately, is a city only home if we can ascribe a narrative to other residents, that we all feel a part of?

 In the end, the only thing the band could agree on was that Las Vegas is 100 percent represented by Imagine Dragons.

The song “Reminder” picks up this debate, following an aging couple as they chart what has changed around them, and what has stayed the same inside their relationship.

Doctor Evan Lyon, who worked with Balasubrahmanyan to set up COVID vaccine clinics across Chicago, plays electric piano on the track. His limber lines create forward momentum over guitars that are played in reverse, an interesting metaphor for how our relationship to a place evolves--the present turns to nostalgia and past into hope for future change.