On Jan. 13, beloved local-rock heroes JEFF the Brotherhood announced that Wasted on the Dream — their ninth album and sophomore effort for Warner Bros. Records — would come out March 10. The band also unveiled the album's first single, "Coat Check Girl."
"In the context of the record, it works great," singer-guitarist Jake Orrall says. "But," his brother, drummer Jamin Orrall, chimes in, "when you compare it to, like, Heavy Days, which is what all our fans do, they're like, 'What is this?' " The brothers tend to finish each other's sentences as they talk to the Scene at the Wedgewood-Houston home that serves as headquarters for Infinity Cat, the bellwether local indie label the DIY band has run with their father, singer-songwriter Robert Ellis Orrall, for 13 years and counting. Jamin sits on a couch while Jake paces and fidgets.
The Scene posted "Coat Check Girl" on its music blog, Nashville Cream. The response was less than stellar.
"They went full on Disney Channel with this song. Hey, money talks right?" wrote one commenter. "I've decided it sounds like an American Hi-Fi B-side," wrote another. Jake and Jamin expected such reactions from the local fan base that celebrated JEFF the Brotherhood as one of Nashville rock's flagship bands, years before the rest of the world recognized that Nashville rock bands exist.
Jake says he told the label, "If you're going to [release 'Coat Check Girl' as a single], then you're going to freak all the fans that we already have out." Warner Bros. simply chose to release the record's most commercial-sounding song, rather than the one that best distills the scope and vision of the band's most ambitious album to date. That distinction belongs to the bizarrely anthemic psych-prog cocktail "Black Cherry Pie." Perhaps the suits at the label got freaked out by a pair of flute solos Jethro Tull legend Ian Anderson contributed to the song. "That was almost, like, a joke [idea]," Jamin recalls. Anderson's son and manager told the band via email that if his father liked the song, he would do it. He liked it so much that he did it for free.
"Coat Check Girl" vs. "Black Cherry Pie" is just one example of how JEFF maybe knew a little bit more than Warner Bros., which signed the band in 2012, about building and satisfying the kind of audience that likes their music. On Feb. 17, only three weeks before Warner Bros. was to release Wasted, the band announced that they'd been dropped from the label.
"We, JEFF The Brotherhood, are SO FUCKING PLEASED to announce that we have been DROPPED from the clutches of the demented vulture that is Warner Bros!" the aggressively unambiguous statement read. "We feel as though a heavy weight has been lifted from our shoulders, and could not be more excited.
"As for our album ... it is finally coming out March 24 on Infinity Cat Recordings — our spiritual, as well as literal home."
"Black Cherry Pie" is now the single.
On Tuesday, the day Warner Bros. would've released Wasted, the band played a record-release show at Grimey's. Fans bought a limited-edition blue-and-white vinyl version of the record. That makes those copies collectors' items for two reasons — the first pressing of the album still bears a Warner Bros. logo. But every copy ever pressed will bear signs of the thousands upon thousands of dollars Warner Bros. spent on the album — money the band never has to pay back.
"I think our main goal was, honestly, to make two albums and get dropped," Jake says with a smirk. "We didn't think we'd ever recoup or anything, so we figured, 'OK, we'll just pocket two advances and by then they'll see that we're not making them any money.' "
"We could just do it," Jamin interjects, "make some money; make two big records. Either we'll get dropped and we won't owe them shit, or we'll get big," Jamin says. "It was kind of a win-win for us, because if we get dropped we won't have any debt, we'll have made some money and we'll just go back to doing what we were doing in the first place."
"So, mission accomplished I guess," Jake says.
Even if Warner Bros. hadn't let the band walk away with the album, the Orralls say they would have just gone and re-recorded it, but it probably wouldn't have sounded the same. On Wasted tracks like stoner-metal album-opener "Voyage Into Dreams," guitarmony-awash album-closing Weezer homage "Prairie Song" and the Black Sabbath-worshipping "Melting Place," the band shreds bigger and tighter than ever. That gargantuan sound — towering tidal waves of guitar and pounding drums that boom like cannons — comes courtesy of Joe Chiccarelli, a Grammy-winning producer and engineer whose credits include The Strokes, Spoon, The White Stripes and Journey. "He's made a lot of huge [sounding] rock records," Jake says.
Size isn't the only thing matters, though. Wasted is far and away JEFF's most decidedly accessible album to date. Radio-friendly bone jams like "Karaoke, TN" and "In My Dreams" (a jaunty grunge-pop duet with Best Coast singer Bethany Cosentino) will be a shock to the system for Heavy Days faithful, but this is how the band wants to evolve. Plus, Jake says, "[the label] was looking for hits." And the band wanted just as badly to deliver. As for that Cosentino collaboration, the label originally suggested they record it with Zooey Deschanel or Lana Del Rey.
"We wanted to make a record that was going to reach the amount of people that it had the potential to, being on a [major] label," Jake explains. "But also," Jamin chimes in, "if you look at all our albums, every album gets poppier. ... We've always wanted our band to sound huge like the Smashing Pumpkins. ... On tour we'd be listening to Siamese Dream and Rage Against the Machine records to get psyched up about recording. ... We've always wanted to make a record that sounds like that, but we didn't really know how. It was, like, we didn't have the money to go into a nice studio."
Warner Bros. not only footed the bill at Nashville's renowned Blackbird Studio, the label pressured the Orralls to fine-tune their songwriting. "I'd submit five demos a week or something," Jake recalls, "and they'd be like, 'Nope, these are all throwaways.' ... [It was] frustrating, but it pushed me to write better songs." The band demoed 35 songs before arriving at 11 that made the cut, then spent long days intensively shedding the songs with Raconteurs and Dead Weather bassist "Little" Jack Lawrence before cutting the record live as a trio.
"There is not a single note of anything on that album that I'm not in love with," Jake says. Musical compromises didn't inspire that "demented vultures" line — it was the fact that Warner Bros. delayed the album's release for nearly a year and told the Orralls to stay off the road and out of the marketplace. The label took a hard-touring, prolific band that built a grass-roots following and maintained an ever-growing buzz on their own and shackled them to glacial major-label timetables. "We weren't able to continue [our] trajectory because we couldn't go and cut another record and keep touring," Jake explains. "[Now] it feels like we can actually get shit done all of the sudden."
That said, the brothers agree that all the bullshit was worth it. "We got two awesome records out of it and made some really good money," Jamin says. Jake finishes the thought: "We got in, we collected, and we got out."
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