Admit it—you’ve always wondered if it would be possible to live in a storage space. Set up a single mattress with a distastefully modern Ikea nightstand in the dimly lit box. Maybe a personal shag carpet rug, because if you’re living in a storage unit, you’re most likely a leftover ’70s hippie. Well, Brave Baby, the indie five-piece from Charleston, S.C. hasn’t been living in one, but they’ve been practicing in one since their inception in January, 2012. The band will be in Madison for Communion’s February show and I got to speak with them about their eclectic debut album, their lives growing up in different southern towns and their unique practice spot.
“We have a storage unit where we do our writing and recording,” Keon Masters, Brave Baby’s guitarist and lead vocalist told me. “Our drummer and recorder Wolfgang Zimmerman, that’s where he creates records and that’s where we’ve been having our stuff for a long time. It’s a special little spot. It’s a storage unit but we’ve created our own little comfortable, cozy creative space. It’s not too small. It’s not huge, but it’s about 15 by 27 feet. Half of it is studio space, half of it is live practice space.”
Maybe it was this comically small space that helped the band gel to self-producing their debut album Forty Bells. The album features 11 songs and draws on influence from across genres. At times, I could hear the psychedelic pop sounds of The Arctic Monkeys and The Killers. Other times, a folk rock sound broke through to remind me of Bruce Springsteen.
“Producing our own record was difficult sometimes because you wish you had someone with a touch to tell you what to do, but it was also very beneficial,” Masters said. “We could record whatever we wanted and we had complete creative control. It took a lot of discipline to pull out what didn’t need to be there and put in what did. Figure out the best ways to create a song without over or underdoing it.”
Forty Bells sounds like a band looking for their sound and taking the shotgun approach, firing off as many different vibes as they can muster and hoping one hits. The problem—if you can call it that—is that they actually hit on a few different genres.
“When we had an idea, we recorded it. We had about two or three albums of material before we were actually, like, ‘what do we want to do, what do we want to get rid of?’ Eventually there was a moment where we started doing these new recordings and that’s when we found the songs that were going to be on the project, which developed into Forty Bells. Having a guy like Wolfgang in the band who’s got such an ear and touch for production is a huge benefit to the band and gives us the ability to do things a lot of bands can’t do, like produce our own record. I work from a little bedroom and I’ll make a demo and bring it to the guys. It’ll be a bones version of a song and we’ll all talk about where we can take it. Eventually, people will bring in all sorts of ideas. The finished product is never anything like it was in the beginning. Total group effort.”
Though the band lists their origin in Charleston, the band members actually did not all grow up together. In fact, none of them are from the Charleston area.
“Wolfgang, Christian [Chidester, vocals/guitar] and I grew up in Charlotte and Steven [Walker, keys] is from small coastal town called Buford, South Carolina. Jordan [Hicks, bass] is from Florence, South Carolina. We’ve lived in Charleston for three to five years, depending on who you’re talking to in the band. The music scene is great, doing really well. It’s the end of the road, end of the interstate, so a lot of people, a lot of big bands don’t go there and stop in Raleigh instead. That can be a bummer as far as having popular bands around. But as far as what’s going on in the town, there’s some really special stuff. Wolfgang has had a huge hand in that lately because he’s been producing a lot of really great records with a lot of artists around town. Our friend Octopus Jones released Phantasmagoria. They’re out in Raleigh now but they’re part of our tight little Charleston community. Our buddy Johnny Delaware released a record [Secret Wave] not too long ago and Wolfgang had a large hand in that as well.”
A little more than a year after the release of Forty Bells, Brave Baby is still practicing and recording in their storage unit.
“Well, we’re a year older,” Masters joked. “We’ve gotten tighter after a year, our live shows are better. You grow and the relationships are stronger. You get annoyed a little quicker but are quicker to say sorry. We love each other more than we did a year ago. We’re excited about the next record and the stuff we’ve been recording. We’re going in at the end of the month with a new producer to see if the relationship will work and see what kind of territory we’re going to embark on for the next record that’ll hopefully be released in the next year or so.”
Catch Brave Baby at Communion at The Frequency on Wednesday, Feb. 19. They’ll be joined by Johnnyswim, sister duo Vic and Gab, as well as Milwaukee’s Hello Death.
