New York-based Hard Rock band Station is building on their atmospheric Stained Glass EP with the release of new LP Perspective, released October 8th by AWAL. With it, Station delves further into aesthetic elements associated with 80s and 90s Hard Rock bands, but also doesn’t shy away from softer ballad styles while keeping up a guitar-driven ethos. You can catch them playing live in New York on October 22nd.
As the album’s title suggests, it does carry a prevailing theme of growing a little older, a little wiser, and a little more self-aware in being able to see the events in the world around us from multiple viewpoints. I spoke with guitarist, keyboardist, and songwriter Chris Lane about the band’s pandemic experience, their chosen musical aesthetic, and why they want the audience to participate in building their own meanings when it comes to songs.
Hannah Means-Shannon: Does some of your work on Perspective go back in time?
Chris Lane: We tracked basics in June of 2019. We recorded the drum tracks for our album Stained Glass and more tracks for what would become Perspective. We started working on those songs again in January 2020 and we got about 40% done, not including vocals, so when the pandemic hit, it just changed our workflow. We have our own recording abilities and can do things at our own pace. But it’s a blessing and a curse, though. There’s this joke, “How do you know when a recording is done?” It’s when you stop. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I need to find the perfect goat sound, and I go down the rabbit hole of multiple days figuring it out. But being able to record music you love in fuzzy slippers is the real benefit. I actually got very, very sick at the time the pandemic first happened. That was coupled with the fact that I had just gotten out of the hospital, having had pneumonia.
We couldn’t continue the way we’d been doing it, so we worked remotely, but by the end of the year we went into a studio and did the vocals with Pat [Kearney]. The silver lining to all of this, though I obviously don’t want to ever go through that again, was that it allowed us to realize what’s important to us on a record. We spent the time we wanted to spend doing the things we wanted to do. I would say there was a lot of self-realization in trying to pivot in the background of a crisis.
HMS: The album sounds wonderful, and very polished. I wouldn’t have known that anything was going on in the world when you made it, so you clearly transcended that.
CL: It’s funny because I’ve found that the outside world does not necessarily affect what we do with the music from that standpoint, the production standpoint. It does affect the content, like the theme and subject matter. That’s affected by our lives, experiences, and world around us. But the kind of music that seems to naturally flow out of us seems to remain pretty consistent. I feel like that’s a true mark of honesty. It’s very refreshing to us to have that.
HMS: I know that you’ve been self-producing for a while, so that also probably made it easier for you to keep a grip on things. I did hear that your first EP was produced by Michael Wagener [of Alice Cooper, Metallica, and Ozzy Ozbourne fame]. Is there anything you’d like to call out from that experience that helped you to produce your subsequent albums?
CL: Michael was incredibly influential in those decisions. It was an amazing experience, but it was our first experience. Everything was brand new and we recorded it at a studio in Nashville, which meant it was like a paradise for us. There’s something to be said for sitting next to the man who did No More Tears! Michael is a master of what he does, including mixing and his taste in production. The thing we learned from him, though, is that those things are opinions.
We loved his opinions, but he also gave us the flexibility to have opinions, too. He didn’t come to us and say, “You’re doing this.” He allowed us to be part of the process. So when we made our first record afterwards, we didn’t think, “What are we doing??” We knew that we had opinions. Instead, we thought, “How do we translate what’s in our heads sonically?” And that’s something we learned over time working with other partners like Westfall Studios.
HMS: That sounds like the tricky part, getting things out of your head and into reality.
CL: Something that can be tough to realize is that sometimes what you think makes a certain sound on a record doesn’t. It’s that knowledge that helps you figure it out.
HMS: Can you give us an example?
CL: There are a lot of examples of this. As a guitar player, I know that guitar tones are these weird mixes of lots of different sounds. Take a breath and breathe a normal breath. You took a real breath and it’s relatively insignificant on the sound scale. Now you want to record a breath on a record that conveys some emotion, like a sigh almost. What you might not realize is that to get that sound, it’s not someone breathing. It’s basically someone performing the breath, and doing it multiple times, to stack those on top of each other to get sonic impact. It’s like that with everything.
HMS: Right, naturalism is not natural.
CL: Right. A lot of vocals are tracked multiple times and squished together to get that sound.
HMS: Did you have a sense, working on Perspective, that you were building on or changing up previous work you’d done?
CL: Each time we’ve made an album we’ve learned something about ourselves. We feel like an album is kind of like a book, with chapters, so there has to be some consistency, but the chapters have to stand up by themselves. The last thing you want is for chapters one, two, and three, to be rockin’ and for chapter four to be so boring that you put down the book, right?
HMS: I think people are becoming more conscious of that these days, but it was more of a problem in the past.
CL: Right, due to the marketplace, people are aware that they can’t release filler. With us, we really like atmosphere, and one of the reasons why our production sounds retro, with a 70s and 80s feel, is because at that time, there was a lot of atmosphere in recordings. It wasn’t as “dry” in a lot of ways. It’s not good or bad, just different, but that’s what we like. With Perspective, each song has its own vibe going on, but we try to create that general sense of atmosphere so that when you listen to it, you’re lost in the album’s world. I think the atmosphere changes all the time, though. It will be different on the next record we make because it’s different Chris Lanes and Pat Kearneys making it.
HMS: I actually really agree with you on that. I feel like I’m a different person this year than last year, for instance.
CL: Think about it kind of like a newborn baby who has no information. There’s a time when she grows up and tries chocolate ice cream and after that, she can’t view the world the same because she now views the world through the lens of chocolate ice cream. It means something different to everybody. But it informs who you are. For us, every time we sit down to try something new, we are influenced by the minute we got there. That changes things for us.
HMS: How would you describe the atmosphere and world of this album, as a whole?
CL: I think this album is “bigger”, but by that I really mean “more spacious”. I’m a fan of deep listening. I’ll listen to an album, close my eyes, and get immersed in it. If you were deep listening to this album, there’d be more room and space to explore. Another thing about this album, though it has less to do with intention, is that there are interesting artefacts in the album. They aren’t necessarily the most important thing, but they are interesting easter eggs. It’s like, “Did you notice the goat noise in track two at thirty seconds?” Things like that. We like doing that because it entertains us and tells a story that’s meaningful to us.
HMS: Do you like to leave a kind of time stamp on your work in that way?
CL: My philosophy on music is that I, personally, and as a songwriter, do not believe that my music should tell the entire story. I think about songs that are important to me because of when and why I heard them. It has less to do with a certain chord or performance, but a lot of meaning that I find in songs is personal. Like, Paul McCartney did not write this song for Chris Lane, but Chris Lane made his song personal.
HMS: At a particular moment, in a particular mindset?
CL: Exactly. The song becomes a kind of mirror. The song might mean one thing to somebody and another thing to someone else, and that’s okay. They are filling in the gaps and music has to encounter you. I think that’s important for any music listener, because you kind of find yourself. As a music maker, it’s the same thing, because you’re putting yourself in there, and I would never expect anyone to understand what a song means to me unless they were me. So let them be them with the song.
HMS: How did you come to work in this Harder Rock zone?
CL: It just kind of comes out of us. It’s not a conscious decision. I’m sure we’re influenced by our childhoods. But I think you’d be surprised who some of my favorite bands are, because none of them really matches our aesthetic in music.
HMS: What are some examples?
CL: The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Toto, Steely Dan.
HMS: How did this happen to you?? That is not at all what your music sounds like.
CL: I know, it’s crazy. I grew my hair out and suddenly everything has reverb on it. People say that our music sounds 80s, but it’s really not that. It’s just that it’s polished in a way that was popular in the 80s. Also, Rock ‘n Roll was popular in the 80s. For us, it’s more about polishing something and creating that really in-depth atmosphere.
HMS: Let’s talk about “Believe”. What made this a good song to put out ahead of the album?
CL: That song is relatively short compared to the other songs and we thought it was a good teaser for the album. As Hard Rock-y as the song is, it helps push along the idea that this is a Hard Rock album. Some of the other songs on the album are not as rooted in Hard Rock and would not be the best choice setting up the record.
HMS: The softer songs are definitely there on the album, though they are atmospheric like the Harder Rock songs. “Do You Really Want To Fall In Love Again” and “Spanish Steps” are much softer in their approach.
CL: “Spanish Steps” is definitely an atmospheric thing trying to do something odd. The song is a poem and is actually referencing me walking through a parking lot in Valencia, Spain, in the pouring rain. The reason it’s called “Spanish Steps” is because of the steps in Rome, of course, but the feeling and the perspective, if you will, are really not unique to me walking in Spain. It was similar to a time on my honeymoon in Italy. There are different experiences that translate as a universal feeling.
HMS: What were some of your goals filming the “Believe” video?
CL: I think the video is cool, but it did turn out very differently than what we were expecting. There’s a lot of fog in the video. Apparently, you don’t need much fog to create a fog effect. I’m just happy that no one from the band died from fog inhalation. I’ll put it that way. What happened was, it was logistically difficult to plan everything because of the pandemic. So we ended up filming a lot of “storyline” with a girl in it, and we were supposed to be ghosts who appeared and disappeared with the fog. We filmed a lot of footage.
Unfortunately, because some of the fog and the place that we were in filming, we couldn’t get it to look cohesive. So our director was basically able to take the footage and edit it to reconstruct a video out of what we’d originally shot. Some parts of the video look a little like they are going in and out of focus because our director was using a special lens to do that. Had we known this video was going to be just performance, we wouldn’t have shot it like that. In the end, we only had a limited amount of footage to choose from.
HMS: I think it looks cool like that, giving it an almost psychological feel.
CL: We were happy with the happy accident, or we would have scrapped it. We felt like, “We guess this is what it was meant to be.”
