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The self-titled debut from Overseas is a dreamy waltz of foreboding and reconciliation, a coin flipping head over tails in spotlight slow motion, landing briefly on its edge before accepting that it’s both sides at once if it’s anything at all.

For the first few songs, the band’s sound is wide open, immediate and full of wonder. Will Johnson warbles impressionistic, as if glancing skyward on one of those alive-awake nights where the almost-full moon seems three times its normal size.

But then a few tracks in, the record’s gaze narrows, spinning you back inside yourself. As always, David Bazan challenges us to challenge ourselves, diving fearlessly into the mundane darkness to ponder subjects and situations from which most of us would rather run. “Bank on the future, box up the past / Bury the questions you don’t want to ask,” he later harmonizes with Johnson on “Came with the Frame.” But you can’t always take Bazan deadly serious. Sometimes he’s a sardonic comic; Morrissey’s evil twin, bloody bit tongue swollen firmly in cheek.

Overseas is truly collaborative music made by old friends—Johnson of Centro-Matic and South San Gabriel, Bazan of Pedro the Lion and Headphones, and brothers Matt and Bubba Kadane of Bedhead and The New Year. In these songs, you can hear them losing themselves in the moment, grabbing hold of fleeting ideas, holed up in the studio in the sweltering Texas night.

To hear Johnson & Bazan—such distinct, singular voices—trading tunes on the same record is a powerful experience, Will all sighing yang to David’s self-reflective yin. Not to mention the latter’s understated bass playing, the former’s melodic drumming, and the subtle yet brilliant invention of bandleaders the Kadanes, who steadfastly pump the bellows that fuel the group’s creative fire, bringing its songs to life with their intuitive musicality. In collaboration, this quartet is tasteful, egoless, the collective emotional impact of their work always crater-deep. It’s a manifestation of the trust, camaraderie and mutual respect that comes with their enduring friendships.

“How long have I known Will?” Matt says. “Well I’m a year or two older, and I remember buying him drinks when he was underage. So I’ve known him at least that long.”

Back in the early ’90s, Johnson and the Kadanes were lighting up the Dallas underground in their respective bands, Funland and Bedhead. A decade later, both camps independently befriended Bazan. For Matt and Bubba, it was in 2002 when David played five solo dates opening for The New Year on a West Coast tour. Just a few years later, Will opened several shows for Bazan, and ended up joining him, Vic Chesnutt and American Music Club’s Mark Eitzel in the critically acclaimed Undertow Orchestra. Johnson also toured as The New Year’s third guitarist in 2008, and Bazan had been geeking out on Bedhead since he was a teenager. The foursome’s web of connections is vast and tangled, so when the idea of a collaboration came up, all were enthusiastic. Their beginning, though, was unexpectedly somber, cathartic and prolific.

In the last week of 2009, just days after the death of Johnson and Bazan’s friend Vic Chesnutt, Overseas met at Denton, Texas’ Echolab studios for their first recording session. “I don’t think it was any accident that we got together right after Vic passed,” Johnson says. “In some ways, it was a spiritual passing of the baton from all of the good energy of the Undertow Orchestra. It was a challenging time, but it was a cleansing experience to get back into the studio and get to work on something unknown and exciting.”

Johnson, Bazan and the Kadanes had originally hoped the sessions would yield a limited-edition 7-inch or tour EP, but when all was said and done, they walked away with the skeletons of 12 new songs. “We trusted each others’ instincts,” Bubba says. “It was all pretty effortless. Of course, there were issues to work through, but nothing was ever a big deal, conflict-wise. We were all very much of one mind.”

While another year would go by before they’d begin the three-year process of fleshing out tracks in fits and starts, Overseas was now a full-fledged band. From the beginning, collaboration was the focus, so most songs were brought in unfinished, and several were culled straight from what the group dubbed its “thin-air jams”—spontaneous studio improvisations that were mined later for song material. “It’s not an approach I use often,” Johnson says. “It was thrilling, and kind of a brain scramble at times. But in the end, I feel like the record accurately represents the varied musical colors of all four people. It aptly displays the feathers of the bird.”

Each member of Overseas can write songs, sing and play a variety of instruments, so the project could have gone in countless directions. Once they started recording, though, certain natural roles emerged. Bubba praises Bazan’s knack for spot-on gut instinct. Bazan, in turn, deftly sums up the rest of the band’s contributions: “Will does his homework most thoroughly beforehand. There’s a neanderthal energy and abandon with him behind the kit. And when it’s time for really fine, specific lyric work, he’s game for that, too. Bubba is the overseer, the taskmaster. In the moment, he won’t always come up with his final part, but if you give him some time away from the group, he always figures out a way to add that last 15 or 20 percent that pulls everything into focus. And Matt is the musical genius—he plays piano, guitar, bass, drums. There isn’t anything he can’t do well.”

While the Kadane brothers helped with lyrics and melodies, they were adamant that Will and David handle all vocals. “I’d played just drums or keyboard in a few bands,” says Matt, “and to me it’s much more fun when you don’t have to sing. And Will and Bazan have incredible voices, so that was covered.”

Also, coming from their various projects, each member of Overseas is a gifted producer. “And if you count [engineer and Echo Lab partner] Matt Barnhart,” Johnson says, “there were really five producers who, quite fortunately, see things in a similar way and speak the same language.”

“It should be said that Matt Barnhart is really the fifth member of Overseas,” Bazan adds. “I don’t think we’d make another record without him. And it should also be said that Tex-Mex is the sixth member of Overseas. Those Kadane brothers are waaaaay into Tex-Mex.”

While Overseas’ simple, daring new record begins outwardly with marvel at the world, a large part of its journey takes place across a single point in space. One holy, meaningless vertex. The battleground within one’s self. About two-thirds of the way through, when the gravity of Bazan’s reflection builds to a point of nearly overwhelming tension, Johnson slips back in through a crack in the dawn, acoustic strums gently closing third eye as we leave inner space. Serene. Like the first moment of clarity in the wake of a heady, cacophonous acid trip. All this now in the rearview, the record momentarily, fittingly, blasts free with “The Sound of Giving Way,” a big, symphonic, time-halting tune that would sound gorgeous cascading around an arena.

But before things get too untethered, the band lassos it all back to the quiet pondering of everyday routine. To doing the dishes, which has always been a philosopher’s job. Overseas makes the mind wander—it is an unconscious, spontaneous, understated treatise on passion, identity, love, lust, God, forgiveness, family, rock & roll and the road.

And when the last song, “All Your Own,” scrolls, there’s a taking stock, a sweeping out of ashes. There you are, soot-faced, ready for whatever’s next. Which is good. Because Overseas is already working on a new record.

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Bio

The first time Tedo Stone ever set foot in a recording studio, the experience played out like the wildest of rock & roll dreams. At 2 a.m., Stone walked through the doors of Atlanta’s Glow-In- The-Dark Studios with a loose assemblage of backing musicians in tow. The location was well beyond their means, but they were working in the middle of the night in Studio B with an intern engineer at the boards. As mics were set up, they ran through the tune they were about to cut, one of Tedo’s newest, an anthemic ’70s-glam march called “War.” Just then, Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum record producer Matt Goldman was wrapping a session in Studio A. Something unexpected caught his ear, and he followed the sounds straight down the hall to Stone and his buddies. “He thought we sounded like T. Rex,” Stone says.

Before the players realized what was happening, Goldman had sidelined the drummer, jumped behind the kit and taken over production of the session. “We’d never even considered working with Matt,” Stone says. “You couldn’t touch him—he’s part of this other world I had no idea about where he’s like God.”

By 9 the next morning, they’d recorded and mixed a powerful track that would ultimately end up on Stone’s forthcoming debut LP, Good Go Bad (out July 9 on This Is American Music)—and they forged a lasting bond in the process.

This all went down in July 2011. Not long before, though, Stone was in a bit of a limbo. He’d just finished college at Ole Miss, and wasn’t sure what he was gonna do next. To get his head together—and because it sounded like a good time—he booked a flight to Hawaii, and ended up crashing on a buddy’s couch in Maui for a couple months. After some serious pondering, he decided to put all of his effort into music. Of course, touring tiki bars playing Jimmy Buffet covers wasn’t exactly what he had in mind, so he packed his bags and headed back to the mainland.

“Being in that environment, on island time—it helps paint a clearer picture when you’re trying to evaluate something,” Stone says. “There’s nothing clouding what you’re trying to do. As soon as I got home to Atlanta, I went straight into the studio at Glow-In-The Dark.”

After co-producing “War,” Goldman had plans to record a whole album with Stone, but when scheduling became a problem, the project was temporarily shelved. Not wanting to lose momentum, in November 2011, Stone took a more fleshed-out, gig-tested lineup with him to Athens, Ga., to record with legendary producer/engineer John Keane. “Being in that room where so many classic albums were recorded—Uncle Tupelo, R.E.M.—it was an incredible experience,” Stone says. “The place had this presence. We were a little taken aback by the whole thing.”

The hyper-efficient Keane shot the band out of a cannon, and after four intense days of live tracking, they’d finished their debut EP, Happy (released on Southern indie label This Is American Music). “John moves so fast, it creates an honest sound,” Stone says. “He never got in the way of a creative moment by us having to wait for him, and he pushed us the whole time—we were trying to keep up with him.”

To support himself and help pay for all this studio time, Stone took a day job as a technician for his older brother’s durable medical equipment company. When people are discharged from the hospital, Tedo sets up their oxygen or delivers a wheelchair to their house. “It’s rewarding,” he says, “but I’m always surrounded by people who are dying.”

His experiences on the job helped create a mindset that inspired many of the songs on Good Go Bad. “It’s really where the concept for the new album came from,” he says. “Life and death, in a broad sense—trying to avoid death and getting old. And it’s not just a physical thing; it’s a mental thing. People can be old at a young age, or young in their later years.”

After a while, Stone was much closer to seeing things from the perspective of all the elderly folks he’d been assisting. “I can’t help but think about where they are, and where I am,” he says. “At that point in your life, there’s not a lot of doing left, not a lot to look ahead to, so you start reflecting on time spent. Realizing that while you’re still in your 20s makes you more proactive about what you really want. It motivates you to start creating something you’ll be proud of when you look back.”

You can hear this carpe-diem passion in Stone’s new record, which he recorded with Goldman and longtime bassist Billy Lyons. It’s in everything from the anthemic rockers to the little whispered ukulele ballad Tedo recorded on his cellphone back in Hawaii and ended up using as-is. It ripples through the pensive, psych-tinged bedroom pop numbers, awash in shimmering modern synths, tied in a bow with precise little mathematical guitar & keyboard hooks. The production on Good Go Bad recalls post-R&B Brian Jones-era Stones in that every track has at least one completely unique sound to set it apart. And throughout, Tedo drops cryptic little couplets—lines that boil T.S. Eliott down to the simple essence. Any English major worth their salt should see the parallel between the former’s “You gotta be awake to get the covers off / You gotta be awake to make a miracle” and the latter’s “Do I dare disturb the universe? … Do I dare to eat a peach?”

Most of all, though, the passion is in Stone’s expressive, instantly recognizable voice. Not many indie rockers can pull off his soul-inspired approach, repeating lines over and over, varying the melody and phrasing slightly each time, so as to juice every last ounce of meaning from them before moving on.

“I think this album has a lot more personality and depth than anything I’ve done before,” Stone says of Good Go Bad. “For me, recording has a lot to do with documenting my time here on Earth. I don’t keep a diary or anything like that. But building a catalog and being able to look back and see where I’ve been in life and as a songwriter, that’s important to me.”

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L-R: Frank Keith IV, Tedo Stone, Jeremy Wheatley & Drew Beskin. Photo by Brian Manley.

To set up an interview with Party Dolls, or get your hands on press passes, advance music, hi-res photos, album art or videos, contact stevelabate@babyrobotmedia.com

Bio

While The District Attorneys took their time, casually working on a new album (due out in late 2014), frontman/songwriter Drew Beskin amassed dozens of new songs he wasn’t sure could—or even should—fit The District Attorneys’ sound. “Everything I was writing at the time,” Beskin says, “was dark, honest, therapeutic and true.” During this prolific period, Beskin began to bottle lightning—writing disarmingly intimate, emotionally direct tunes in an attempt to transcend the pain he was feeling in the wake of a bad breakup.

“These songs had to be written,” Beskin says. “At first, they were just for me, and for a long while I did not care if anyone else ever heard them. They poured out of me. They were about turning a negative into a positive.”

Some time after the heart-wrenching period that birthed these songs faded into the rearview, The District Attorneys were invited to play a Valentine’s Day show with Southern rockers Ponderosa at Athens, Ga.’s Caledonia Lounge. Only half of the District Attorneys were available, but instead of declining, Beskin approached musician friends Tedo Stone and Jeremy Wheatley (Crooked Fingers), who joined him alongside District Attorneys bandmates’ Frank Keith IV and Walker Beard. Together, they learned Beskin’s newer, more personal songs, and Party Dolls was born.

With this simpatico group of players, the arrangements came instantly, effortlessly. Within a month’s time, the band made its live debut on Valentine’s Day 2013. The show was so well-received that Party Dolls decided to record an album, working on it in spurts over the course of a year whenever the band was able to gather for a session at bassist/engineer Frank Keith’s home studio in Athens.

Party Dolls’ debut, Love Wars Baby, is slated to drop on Valentine’s Day 2014, exactly one year to the day from the band’s first show. Though still peppered with top-notch rockers, the new album emphasizes acoustic-guitar ballads backed by a big drum sound and sweetened with a healthy dose of cello and piano. Beautiful and haunting, Love Wars Baby captures the more reserved, thoughtful side of The District Attorneys and Tedo Stone. It’s a vehicle for the prolific Beskin’s honest, inventive songwriting, showcased ably by Keith’s skillful engineering. With the anthemic title track and the driving female-harmony-anchored “Indigo,” listening to heartbreaker “A Firecracker” and epically catchy sea-chantey singalong “Sweetheart Moon,” this album is an impressive and revelatory debut from start to finish.

“These songs, and now this album, are and will always be about turning a negative into a positive,” Beskin reaffirms. “It timestamps a very specific point in my life and, for better or worse, I have a record I’m very proud of.”

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