Grey Does Matter

Grey
Does
Matter

by E.J. Iannelli

"Pointless but still poignant." It's a phrase straight out of "Unlimited Fun Shine," one of the catchiest tracks on Grey Does Matter's second full-length, Your Job Will Kill You. And it's a phrase that GDM frontman and founder Jason Crawford liked so much he reused it as the subtitle of his band's website. Those words sit alongside the band name like the Latin motto on the undulating ribbon of a family crest.

It may not be as dignified as mottos go, but it's apt. Ever since Crawford's single-handed debut, How to Make Millions in Real Estate, appeared in 2004, Grey Does Matter has appealed to listeners through the whimsical pointlessness and the occasionally resonant poignancy of its music, a combination Crawford achieves by crossing sunny bubblegum pop with sinister or tongue-in-cheek lyrics. "Zero" from How to Make Millions is a new wave-meets-bedroom baroque singalong, for example, but Crawford's emphasis is on his partner's complete lack of effort, driven home with the refrain, "Anything times zero is zero." On the opener from Your Job Will Kill You, "Irregular Embraces," Crawford is still at it, singing, "You come to me with your arms open / but it's only one 'cause the other's broken" atop punchy guitar hooks and effervescent keyboards.

"That's the whole point behind the name Grey Does Matter," says Crawford. "It's supposed to suggest that things aren't always what they seem, aren't always black and white." (Fitting, then, that the band members themselves aren't books to be judged by their covers. A lifetime native of New York, Crawford sounds like he just stepped off a California beach. And sound wizard Amos has a prolific solo career as Aimee Norwich.) "Grey Does Matter's music is pretty consistent lyrically, pretty dark and depressing, but the sound, the shell, is shiny and happy. Dig a bit deeper and you find something darker." He refers back to "Unlimited Fun Shine," the bright, springy song he pillaged for the band's self-deprecatory motto. "If you look at the lyrics, it's all about fighting with someone while it’s sunny outside. The music is upbeat, but it's all just about arguing in the sun."

Over the course of our conversation, we settle on a term for this mismatch: ironic disconnect. And because irony requires some understanding of its context to imbue it with meaning, from time to time whatever poignant substance is to be found in Grey Does Matter gets mistaken for the pointless frivolity the band also enjoys. When this happens, GDM tends to get filed under light entertainment or dismissed altogether, and for a mix of economic and artistic reasons, Crawford harbors a mild resentment toward what he sees as a failure to be taken seriously.

" I don't consciously write music that's going to appeal [but] I think the catchiness in songs is disappearing in music. There's not a lot out there that I get excited about. It's hard to find catchy, hooky music that doesn't suck. You have pop music that has big hooks, but it's crap because it's nothing but hooks. That's why I like it when I hear indie bands with songs that have nice melodies and also have some depth and content. You don't hear that so much anymore. Sometimes people hear [our music], and they hear its catchiness and poppiness, and they write it off as bubblegum. Our first record is more bubblegummy. A couple of songs are goofy and disposable. But there's weight and depth there too. Sometimes I feel it's unfair," he says, since they seem to be passing judgment too quickly.

As a kind of negative example, Crawford mentions the song "So Easy" from the latest album, one instance where the grim mood evoked by the music and the dark lyrics weren't guilty of ironic disconnect. They were in perfect harmony, making the point, so to speak, impossible to miss. "It's so easy to snap your neck," Crawford sings, "or drown you in a pool," and to him, the morbid humor in these lines is glaringly self-evident. But to some listeners he comes across as a bit too sincere, obscuring the joke.

" That one gets a lot of attention from some people," he says wearily. "I like horror movies, creepy movies, and the creepy music in those movies. I watched Silence of the Lambs and I was inspired to write a creepy song. It got a lot of strong reactions, but it's really not meant to be like I want to murder people. It was supposed to be fun like a horror movie's fun. I guess I kind of missed my mark." Even Amos – who, along with drummer John Webber, forms the current trio following the band's brief one- and five-member incarnations – takes the song more literally than it merits. "Amos refuses to play that song live," laughs Crawford. "He believes it could incite violence, connect with psychos. It creeps him out, so we don't play it live for that very reason."

Although Crawford's irony can even escape his own bandmates at times, it's still found a welcoming crowd in a growing number of critics and listeners well outside the immediate New York area. The band's MySpace page is teeming with requests for a tour on the West Coast and all points between, and reviewers and tastemakers have been singing GDM's praises since How to Make Millions first surfaced three years ago. In Music We Trust's Alex Steininger, who's been handling the band's publicity since the debut, even worked pro bono for a time because his advocacy stems from a deeper personal commitment to the music. "There's nothing better than having your publicist be a fan," says Crawford.

" We have a very strange fanbase. Most bands can say, 'Our crowd is this or this.' They associate with a scene and a clique. Grey Does Matter, on the other hand, has the weirdest and best crowd. We get little indie rock kids, goth kids, a fifty- or sixty-year-old salesman from New Jersey… it's just the weirdest cross-section. We're not trying to be part of a specific scene. Whoever shows up is whoever shows up. But that can be detrimental to fast track success."

Grey Does Matter has certainly had more rapid success than some of its struggling counterparts, but Crawford admits that album sales haven't reached the same heights as the critical and casual praise. "At the end of the day, it's a matter of making a record you can be happy about. I think I achieved that. Every Grey Does Matter record should be different than the last. The first was much more poppy, a more power pop record than the second. I was going for a specific vibe on this one. I wanted to take what I did on the first record and make it darker and more ambient, make a more cinematic vibe. More moody. What I was kind of going for was way more serious than the first record, not as fun and funny. People that were fans didn't really like the vibe because it was too serious, but it met its artistic goals for me. It's like Beck in the way – and I'm not comparing myself to him, but this is what I'd love to be able to do – he gets to do whatever he wants, and that's what everyone expects from him. We might be losing some people from the first record to the second, but the point is that each record is supposed to be a different thing."

It helped that this time around Crawford had Amos and Webber by his side. While How to Make Millions was entirely a one-man show, Your Job was an album shaped by multiple forces. "I write all the songs, but there's no question that my bandmates add their own elements, though they never detract from the spirit. They augment what I'm doing. They have some creative input, for sure, and the way they approach the material is very much their own. It's definitely a joint effort."

During the recording of Your Job, Amos' and Webber's presence in the studio – actually, just being in a proper studio and not backed by a drum machine in his bedroom – was "a little bit" disconcerting at first, Crawford says, "but I have the best bandmates on the planet. We have no drama. We're the most drama-less band in the world. We don't fight, we don't have drug problems, we're embarrassingly stable. One of us needs to turn into a massive junkie or stab somebody or get in a fight with Courtney Love. So recording was actually quite pleasant." If any one of them has an unconventional streak, it's Amos, whose creative surplus manifests itself as musical instruments he dreams up and constructs. In addition to programming most of the electronic beeps and whirrs that fill out Your Job, Amos is responsible for devising a guitar/bass hybrid that effectively makes him two musicians in one. Crawford explains it with the same pride as if it were his own invention. "It's his original design. It was custom built, and it has a bass string at the very bottom with a bass pickup that runs parallel with it, and there are three piccolo bass strings at the top that ring out as guitar strings. Amos is able to play with a different tuning technique – we usually have to have Amos tune the instrument differently before each song for better finger stretching – and he can make it sound like there's a guitar player and a bass player coming out because there are two jacks on the instrument. Basically, Amos can play guitar and bass at the same time."

With both guitar and bass spots filled by the same person and the lineup now stabilized, GDM has already begun work on the follow-up. "This next record is going to be a mix between the first and second records. We're recording some at home and some in the studio" in an attempt to recapture the intimacy of How to Make Millions while retaining the sheen of Your Job, says Crawford. "I love what we did with the second record. It's exactly what it should have been. It misses some of the smallness of the first record, which comes off as more honest, I think. You sacrifice sonic quality for honesty. The polished feel works like a charm on some tracks, but certain tracks you don't want to be so polished. I miss that [intimacy]. Some people didn't like that about the second record and I understand where they were coming from. I really liked the big sound – obviously for an artist to hear their music produced so beautifully is great, like a filmmaker shooting in 16mm and then shooting in 35 or 70mm for an IMAX screen. I never had my music sound so polished and big, and it was like, wow, but now we have to try not to get lost in that."

" Anyone who's a fan will pick it up, because they'll know that every Grey Does Matter album is always supported by a different idea. It's not a concept album, but the vibe will change. It will have the same sentiments, the same energy, but it will be different on the presentation layer. There will be eleven or twelve songs; we have sixteen songs written, mostly acoustic, and the percussion is light – we use brushes on the drums. It will be the opposite of the last record, getting closer to the core of the songs themselves, soft and toned-down with an acoustic vibe, which is how all the material is written in the first place. So it will still be Grey Does Matter but much more quiet and to the point."

Recording has already entered the preliminary stages, and Crawford intends to have the disc out in the autumn. As for labels, he's still not sure whether GDM will release their third album on their own Pop Rally! imprint or shop around for full label support. "Now we definitely understand what labels need to do for a band, so I think if someone came along and we felt they were competent – small or big, it doesn't matter – we would definitely be more than interested in entertaining that. We've never once sent our demos around to labels, so we might end up doing that this time."

The band has already taken the indie route, and Crawford has been debating whether or not the thanklessness is worth the noble effort. "We're pretty damn indie," he says. "Every aspect of putting out that record (Your Job) came out of our own pockets, and we were fortunate enough to find distribution through Fontana. Now that we're dealing with Universal, though, people are saying, 'Now they're not keeping it real.' It's like, are you joking?" This is clearly a point of contention for Crawford, another matter where he feels something good and genuine has been misunderstood, but he's far too laid back to sound angry or indignant. "It's ironic for people to think that. We're not teenagers who just learned how to play our instruments. We put our own imprint together and ran it ourselves. We all went broke doing this! We're not this signed band with a nice per diem and an advance. This is about as indie as it gets. It's a total DIY project. We even told them, instead of signing us, why don't you distribute our record through your channels? We could have signed with a tiny label, but I don't know if they could have done more than what we did on our own."

He laughs, caught up in his mock outrage. "We don't have anything! We don't have money or success or anything! We did it on our own and made it happen. And we own everything. We might own one hundred percent of nothing, but we own it all."

" We busted so much ass to get that record out. It kicked our ass financially, emotionally, physically," he says, which in retrospect makes "Your job will kill you" as apposite a band motto as "Pointless but still poignant." Yet Crawford says the album's title is a case of his pointlessness getting mistaken for poignancy. "I meant it to be more of a funny line, but maybe that's another case of me not being very good at expressing myself. The title for the first [record] was absurd. I figured I'm going to keep naming the records stupid names, just something funny to make someone chuckle. So some people took it seriously. I'm not making a huge social statement. Obviously your job will kill you if you do it too much. Even when you're doing something supposedly as glamorous as putting out records it kills you."

" It doesn't matter. It's completely about the music in the end. I think we're doing good stuff, but many times for a struggling little indie band it seems pointless. These days, just to get someone to put your CD in the player is a miracle. And yet we keep on doing it. I don't know why, but we must think there's something in it."