Growing Popularity
Young and ambitious local quartet aim to take their wide-ranging, hooky pop music to a much bigger stage
by Noel Murray
Popular Genius
Playing May 10 at NXT Generation Performance Hall
The best moments on Popular Genius’ second LP Glittering Generalities are as shiny as the first word of the title implies. The youthful quartet—all in their late teens or early 20s—pull generously from punk, pop and show tunes, switching merrily from one genre to another with the restlessness of kids pushing buttons on their parents’ car stereo. And they do it all with polish and panache, piling up kicky melodies and smart lyrics like pop music pack rats. Where does it come from, this casual wunderkindery? Do young men who write hooky, cleverly arranged pop songs spend all their time studying the craft? Do they know history, theory, philosophy?
In the case of Popular Genius co-founder Andrew Bissell, he comes from a musical family. His maternal grandfather Danny Dill co-wrote “Long Black Veil.” His father Robert E. Bissell plays with the Disneyland Band. The younger Bissell grew up in Southern California, and has lived in Middle Tennessee since he was 12. Now 22 years old, he’s in his last semester at MTSU, where he’s been working on his Audio Engineering BA degree. Yet, as a boy, Bissell admits he had little to no interest in music; in his teenage years, his creative outlet came from the visual arts.
Then angst-ridden modern-rock hit, just when Bissell was at the height of his own angst-y adolescence. “Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins...all of that shaped my attitude,” Bissell says. And then came Weezer. “They’re ingenious,” Bissell enthuses. “They made sloppiness charming, just like Smashing Pumpkins made distortion into a symphony. No one else sounds like them.”
Bissell is wrong, of course. Smashing Pumpkins may have a had a sound all their own, but it was derived from ’70s rock and My Bloody Valentine. For all Weezer’s cleverness, their core sound has been equaled by a dozen brat-punk bands before and since. Not that it matters. It’s not necessary for an artist to trace his or her influences back to their sources, so long as they know how to build on what’s gone before. Indeed, Bissell confesses that he’s far from obsessive when it comes to keeping track of rock trends. “I honestly don’t listen to a lot of modern music,” he acknowledges. “Whether it’s about time or money, I don’t know. I’d rather write new songs. And I’m still trying to digest Irving Berlin.”
That explains the giddy, offbeat orchestrations of the band’s songs, which often detour through the brass, string and woodwind sections. Bissell wrote the material on Glittering Generalities with his bandmates, guitarist Scott Van Dusen and bassist Luke Easterling, but Bissell—who sings lead, and plays guitars, keyboards and drums—is most responsible for the eclectic, entertaining presentation. “I can’t really explain all the wacky instruments,” he says. “My dad led the Disneyland Band, and I grew up with cartoons and musicals—all these colors in my head. I was raised on Stevie Wonder, Brian Wilson, Chicago, Stephen Sondheim and Rodgers & Hammerstein.”
The album was recorded at Betalab, with the aid of Pro Tools software. “The songs are all done on computer,” Bissell explains. “The only things miked are the vocals and the drums.” The efficiency of working with the latest technology facilitates the perpetual development of new material for Popular Genius. “We’re ready to record again,” Bissell laughs. “We’ve learned a lot. And we constantly, constantly write. Not just to write...we’re just prolific. The last record was written as we recorded. The songs really do write themselves in a lot of cases. We recorded 25 or 30 songs for the new album.”
The sheer volume of songs that Popular Genius has stockpiled results in the band working harder to give each a fresh setting. As Bissell puts it, “If I hear something in my head, like a horn section, I shouldn’t be afraid to do it. Because if I hear the same four instruments all the time, I get bored. The songs will speak to us and tell us they’re not finished.” Still, he asserts that the songs aren’t all about their production and arrangements. “Scott and I come from quasi-metal bands that depended on licks and riffs, and when you strip it down, there’s no song there. We wanted to write songs that could be played any way.”
Bissell met Van Dusen while hanging out at Indienet Record Shop, and the two of them joined together in the modern-rock band Ichabod. They soon realized that their talents matched well—“I pick up a guitar and write, he picks up a guitar and practices, so he can play circles around me,” Bissell says—and they quickly knocked out 25 songs in collaboration, 12 of which became the first Popular Genius album. They started playing out at coffee shops, and attracted Easterling and drummer Ryan Stout to fill out the band.
“We’re not necessarily a democratic band,” Bissell acknowledges. “It’s like Sting says, 'There’s no democracy in art.’ ” But given the attention that the band is starting to draw, no one is complaining. They’ve been sounded out by a label or two, and have been told repeatedly that they need to get out more. “We don’t have a very good record-to-show ratio. We hope to play constantly this summer.” They’ve also heard something else repeatedly: “A lot of people are telling us that it’s not going to work out in Nashville,” Bissell says, “but I’m going to give it a shot. I believe in Nashville. But the candy jar is always full here. People can get whatever they want whenever they want. If we were in Iowa we might have a better shot because people could discover us and [we’d] be heroes.”
Bissell proceeds to insist that no one’s really broken out from Nashville in a long time, which is a point that might well be disputed by the members of Lambchop, Swan Dive, The Shazam, Llama, or other Music City acts that have had international exposure in the past five years. But Bissell’s not talking about cult success; he means the full-page-ads-in-the-trades, videos-on-MTV kind of success. He has the dreams that make the most sense to the young, who can still construct a new world before having to contemplate the existing one.
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