Brian Krumm on Gathering Barfly Friends and Uncovering Stories For ‘Just Fade Away’ (ALBUM PREMIERE/INTERVIEW)

Brian Krumm & His Barfly Friends is a new project from Brian Krumm of The Great Crusades that is releasing their debut album, Just Fade Away, via Pravda Records, on June 2nd in multiple formats. Today Glide is excited to offer an exclusive premiere of the album. Krumm has been an active member and songwriter for the Chicago-area band The Great Crusades for more than 20 years and found himself finally taking up the challenge of creating another project with a more personal edge to the lyrics and a more barebones sound. The results of some very focused attention to songwriting, striving for the goal of writing one song a day, and some outreach to his massive community of local fellow musicians was a highly collaborative album that preserves a very confessional tone. 

Thematically, many of the songs delve into different kinds of relationships through storytelling, and pick up the dropped threads and missing pieces of what led to distance or separation over time. Though these songs may be more stripped down than the Rock-influenced Great Crusades tracks, they still pack a punch thanks to varied collaborators and plenty of room for percussion and electric guitar alongside less expected elements, like cello. I spoke with Brian Krumm about the storytelling behind Just Fade Away and about discovering that he still had far more to say, as a songwriter, than he realized. 

Hannah Means-Shannon: Do you think that you would have written solo work if you hadn’t had so much time to yourself? Was it something you had already been thinking about doing?

Brian Krumm: No, I don’t think I would have done it, though it was something that I’d been thinking about for years. But anytime I’d start working on that sort of project, it would pretty much turn into a Great Crusades record, since that’s the band that I’ve been playing with since 1997. Because I have worked with those guys for so long, Chris Moder, and Brian Hunt, and Brian Leach, and that was the band name that people recognized. 

That being said, just the fact that I called this something different has sparked a new interest, even in longtime fans of the band. Ken Goodman from Pravda is someone I’d been in contact for years, and he helped get Great Crusades songs placed on the season finale of the show True Blood. But once I started passing him the demos for this new project, he responded in a big way. He felt they were different and a new direction, too. I think other people are having the same experience, which is great. 

HMS: I’ve heard of bands who have been together for many years, almost like family members, and some want to do solo work also, but they don’t ever release it because they feel it compromises the band relationship in some way. I’m glad that isn’t what happened here.

BK: It’s understandable because you don’t want to step on anyone’s toes or hurt anyone’s feelings who you’ve been working with for years, but the way it turned out for me, all of the Great Crusades ended up playing on this record.

HMS: [Laughs] That’s true! That’s so true.

BK: Not to compare myself to a legend, but I remember when Tom Petty did Full Moon Fever and said, “I’m doing a solo record.” I think everybody from The Hearbreakers ended up playing on it but the drummer. It was kind of the same way for me, and also I got to pull in a lot of talented people from Chicago that I normally wouldn’t get to record with.

HMS: It opened up that door.

BK: Yes. I had Jessie Hotaling on vocals, almost a co-lead vocalist on several songs. Some horn player friends of mine came in. It opened up the opportunities to work with about 25 people.

HMS: It looks like an orchestra list! It’s a lot. 

BK: The ease of sending audio files back and forth helped out in that territory. It was really fun to have people who I’ve admired for years and ask them if they would contribute.

HMS: Was there a moment when your writing was private, and no one knew you were doing this solo work, and then a moment when you spoke with the first collaborator about it?

BK: Not particularly, because I was working with Christian Moder (of Great Crusades) for most of it. The two of us started out working. He actually came up with the idea and said, “You’ve been talking about doing a solo record for years that’s more acoustic and sparse.” The news got around to the band and other musicians. I don’t know that I ever called it a solo record. It was more like “This is a Barfly Friends record.” It was almost a new band.

HMS: It’s a different project and now you have more than one project.

BK: Yes. It could be called a “side-project”.

HMS: Having established this as a project, will it be continuing?

BK: Yes, I think so. The record release is in Chicago on June 2nd. Then we’re going back to Germany again, since we have a dedicated following over there. The Crusades had booked some festival shows, so I booked a tour based on that where The Barfly Friends are going to be openers. It’s kind of a convenient thing to do that since we have this new record out. We have some more shows back in the USA in late summer and the Fall. It’s continuing on the live side for sure, and out of the 25 or so songs that I came up with initially, there’s still at least an album’s worth of songs. 

HMS: Did you find yourself writing differently knowing it was for this other project, for instance, being more personal in your lyrics, or does all your songwriting start pretty much the same?

BK: Yes, after releasing nine albums with The Great Crusades, I kind of surprised myself because I didn’t overthink what the songs should be about. I just started scribbling on paper and a lot of times, they were pretty personal stories that I hadn’t really thought about in a long time. I think that was a sort of revelation for me, “I do have more to say! I’m not done yet!” Now, seeing the way that the process worked out, it was really refreshing to involve not only my group of musician friends, but also my family, too. My daughters sang on the record and my wife even sang on one tune. 

HMS: It’s an interesting paradox in a way, because the songs go from being extremely personal in terms of storytelling, to being a kind of carnivalesque collaboration with all these other people. It’s a nice flip between the two aspects. Was it nice that it didn’t have to be all about you?

BK: Yes, though I do like a lot of records where it’s just one person singing and playing. I think a lot of those are meant to be demo versions. I know, for instance, Springsteen’s Nebraska comes to mind. Or even all the late career Johnny Cash records. I do have it in the back of my mind that I should still do that completely solo record someday. 

HMS: When you mentioned that Christian thought this would be the acoustic album, that did make me smile, because even though the vocals and lyrics are very important on this album, there’s still a lot of energy going on from the instrumentation. Maybe it’s stripped down compared to The Great Crusades, but it’s a pretty punchy record.

BK: Christian Moder is really talented at taking a barebones song and taking in a direction that just sounds super unique and super engaging. He’s at a sweet spot in his Production work. He’s recorded a bunch of different artists. There are some songs where there’s a lot going on, but in general, the lyrics and vocals are sparser than I’ve done in the past. In the past, I’ve tried to write the great American novel for each song. [Laughs] Then the problem is, you have to perform those songs!

HMS: I think there’s some really careful work on these songs, Production-wise because the lyrics and the vocals are very important, but everything is situated around that so that they are not compromised. But they are not overbearing, either, which keeps that confessional tone.

BK: I think that was in our mind, to keep the lyrics and vocals in focus because there are usually stories to tell in these songs.

HMS: Starting at the beginning with the song “Barfly Friends”, I’m not sure what inspired the album title and project name, or if that was the song. But the song itself really pinned down an idea for me that I hadn’t really revisited in my life, that some relationships end up feeling like “runner-up relationships” in life. That may sound really callous, but what I mean is that something keeps them from developing further, but they had some degree of potential. They hold a really weird territory in one’s memory.

BK: [Laughs] That sound is strange, but you hit the nail on the head. It’s kind of about relationships in general that a person might have. Maybe one person wants it to be at a different level and the other person is not trying to avoid the person, but is maybe thrown off a bit by this interest. Yet, at the same time, the song is also about having a great deal of respect or admiration for a person even if you might not be 100% interested in pursuing a love relationship.

HMS: That makes perfect sense because there’s a feeling in the song that the characters are not simply strangers who met in a bar, that they have more of a connection in wider life, and have a regard for each other. That’s an extra layer to things, since it’s not someone either person wants to be rude to. 

BK: The characters in the song are definitely not strangers. They’ve probably known each other for years.

HMS: How do you think the music goes with this theme? The song opens with melodic picking, which makes it feel emotive, but there’s also a sense of distance and time, so this is not a sudden emotional incident.

BK: I think as the song develops, it starts out in that very simple finger-picking guitar. Chris does this amazing percussion work here, as well, with a kick drum that feels almost like a heartbeat. It’s a great idea to explore that feeling. I know that my longtime cellist friend, Jake Brookman, who I played with in the band Suede Chain, did some really amazing work on that. Any time you introduce cello into a Pop song or Rock song, it has a more dramatic feel. 

HMS: A lot of these songs, including this one, raise the question of why the speaker needs to tell the story. A lot of these songs revisit various kinds of relationship situations that were left kind of open-ended. There’s something unresolved.

BK: Yes, absolutely. I’m so glad that you picked up on that. It’s challenging because, as a writer, I think to have engaging and relatable songs, you have to reveal a part of yourself that you might not be 100% comfortable putting out there. But it really affects the authenticity and feeling of a song when a person is at least basing the idea on something that happened in their own lives. That’s at least what my favorite artists and writers do. I think that’s the years of influence from The Jayhawks, Warren Zevon, and Tom Waits. Some of those songs may not be based on real things, but it sure as hell feels like they are.

HMS: Regarding the song “Just Fade Away”, should I think about Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” in relationship to it, or not? 

BK: I was thinking about that, wondering if anyone would connect that. It occurred to me long after I came up with the song title, did all the final lyrics, and the album was done. I had forgotten about “Not Fade Away”! I am a huge Buddy Holly fan, but it really has nothing to do with that classic tune.

HMS: Even though they are totally separate, it’s interesting because Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” is about wanting love to endure, at a certain fever pitch, even. Your song is radically different in a kind of opposite way. Since it’s about the dissolution of things. 

BK: “Just Fade Away” is about a relationship that’s breaking apart, not due to anyone’s fault really, but their lives are just going in opposite directions. I’ve always been a fan of airports and watching planes take off and land, and that’s in the song. My old house in Chicago was right on the path of O’Hare airport. It makes me wonder what’s going through peoples’ heads traveling.

HMS: This song might also hit people in a certain way around the idea of “ghosting”, where people check out of each other’s lives. It really breaks down a sense of continuity in life. 

BK: It’s a strange thing. I have a lot of instances where I’ll think of past love interests, but also just about the relationships I’ve had with friends over the years and what the current status of those relationships are. I think that’s all touched upon in the song in some way, though it doesn’t have a ton of words.

HMS: Kind of like with “Barfly Friends” idea, these two people have some big differences between them that are hinted at. Timing doesn’t seem to line up right for them in this case, either. The song feels like a kind of lament or last word about what happened. 

BK: Absolutely. That’s exactly right. And there’s lots of transitional imagery in there. What was different about this song, and several of the other songs for me, was that I really did not think too much before I wrote these lyrics. So it was kind of amazing that they came out the way they did. I don’t know if that was because I was writing them so quickly, only having an hour to write the basic structure of the song, or the fact that I didn’t over-think it. It somehow helped to create very succinct lines and potentially engaging lines.  

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One Response

  1. Great interview BK. Looking forward to getting the new music, I love the storytelling aspect of what the music will offer and how personal the lyrics are

    Amy Wetterlin
    FVH, IL

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