You’d never know that Owlbiter—the latest project from Brooklyn-based musician Matt Cascella—is the product of a guy who grew up playing the drums. After all, Owlbiter’s new album, Stud Farm, is full of gently plucked acoustic guitars and ukuleles, drowsy brass and the occasional keyboard atmospherics, but very little percussion. As Cascella explains, that was a result of the keep-it-simple approach he sought when Owlbiter was in its nascent stages.
“The band that I’d been playing in for five, six years crumbled fast,” Cascella explains. “There were a lot of unfinished ideas still kicking around in my head. I didn’t want to go into a studio and make it a big ordeal. I didn’t really have a band, I just had some oddball ideas, and I wanted to keep things scrappy. Get a good buddy of mine to come over and not think too much—just have at it, keep it really bare bones. There’s a trombone but, other than that, it’s pretty much bare minimum, which is how I wanted to do it.”
The good buddy he mentions is James Downes, who engineered and produced Stud Farm, and played guitar. Cascella wrote and sung the songs, which were embellished at times by Jeff Doyle (keyboards), Jimmy O’Donnell (trombone) and Cascella’s fiancé Jen Cordery (backing vocals).
The ramshackle but intimate environment in which the album was recorded became an essential part of its charm. “Most of Stud Farm was tracked in my apartment in Brooklyn and the rest in James’ apartment,” Cascella says. “We dealt with construction going on in both apartments at the time, which was pretty comical. There’s a playground outside, so occasionally you’ll hear children cheering and crying. There are a lot of accidental, horrendous sounds most producers would frown upon—fortunately, we weren’t aiming for sterile perfection because the record is definitely far from that. People are always like, ‘I did this bedroom recording,’ and it sounds like Mark Ronson produced it. It’s like ‘Where’s the bedroom?’ So we wanted to stick to our guns and not overdo it, just keep the songs really simple.”
Stud Farm (out Aug. 10) was influenced by artists like John Prine, Ivor Cutler & Harry Nilsson, who often tell stories that lead with sense of humor first and then sneak the pathos in there without the listener even realizing. “It’s probably a defense mechanism, but I have a hard time with being too serious and melodramatic about things,” Cascella says. “And I think my favorite stuff, whether it’s film, books or music, is straddling the line between comedy and sadness.”
Glide is proud to premiere “Bug Eyed Lately”(below) Owlbiter, a self-consciously luminescent acoustic romp that showcases Cascella’s unique brand of story-telling. Like Iron & Wine (Sam Beam) and Ben Howard, Owlbiter offers its own one of a kind spin on small scale atmospheres that remain purely accessible and memorable.
