Franz Nicolay

Above all, Franz Nicolay is an Artist.

Certainly he's a musician, well known for his work with the boisterous, cabaret-punk collective World/Inferno Friendship Society; his curly mustache and fedora also became a familiar fixture beside Craig Finn and the frat-rock storytellers in the Hold Steady until he left the band abruptly in 2010. A respected session player, Nicolay has contributed accordion tracks to records by a range of artists, from Evelyn Evelyn (the siamese twin sideshow performed by Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley) to politi-punks the Star Fucking Hipsters and, recently, British troubadour Frank Turner; he even pounded the piano for Against Me! during their recent summer tour.

There are other projects, too—Anti-Social Music, for example, a cooperative of composers and chamber musicians, and the eclectic gypsy-klezmer consort Guignol—and his prolificacy only promotes the notion that Nicolay is making more than music—it's cross-cultural, and mixed-media, and convention-bending. In fact, the songs on Luck and Courage, his second full-length, feel specifically narrative in nature, like a short story set to music. This might be because Nicolay's approach to songwriting is more literary than most musicians', with characters and conflicts and themes threaded beneath the surface of each song.

The concept behind Luck and Courage came to Nicolay in a manner fitting an Artist. “This is the worst kind of cliché,” he begins, “but I had this dream in which I wrote this song named 'Felix and Adelita'. It was one of those rare occasions where I dragged myself out of bed and wrote the whole damn thing down.

“There's three ways that can go,” he continues. “You have a dream where you've written a great story or song and you roll over and say, 'Eh, I'll probably remember that' and, of course, it's gone. Or, if you actually have a notepad by your bed, you roll over and scrawl something down and, when you wake up, it's some illegible, stoned epiphany—like, 'Blue is Blue'—and you're like, 'Aw man, that wasn't good at all.' But this one was basically the song as it ended up as the first track on the record.”

Nicolay, curious about where his subconscious guided him, Googled the names “Felix” and “Adelita” and was intrigued by what he found. “'Felix' turned out the be Latin for 'luck,'” he tells, “and 'Adelita,' in Mexico, is this mystic icon of courage; she's a woman warrior. So I was like, 'Luck and Courage...that sounds like an album title!'”

Though he had already written some of what would become Luck and Courage, Nicolay was inspired by the ideas revealed during this dream. Featured in the lyrics of “Felix and Adelita”, for example, is a conflict between the safety of domesticity and the freedom of living a life untethered; Nicolay saw this as a theme that could tie some of his other songs together.

There's a another theme, what Nicolay calls a meta-narrative, that connects the songs on this release. “There's a sense in love affairs where you sort of create your own little country,” he explains. “Kurt Vonnegut calls it the 'nation of two.' It has its own language and its own customs and its own geography and history. And when that starts to go bad, it can feel like this country's coming apart, like there's something rotten at the heart of this society.”

Both themes appear in “Felix and Adelita”, which leads off Luck and Courage. Nicolay's candid, crisp voice introduces his characters within the song's first few syllables as an organ hums behind him. By the time his banjo enters, sparkling at the start of each line, it's easy to sense this crumbling “nation of two”. As song softly proceeds, driven by the steady shuffling of brushes on a snare drum, Nicolay sings, “But when you leave again leave something of you with them / Tie your fishing lines to the fence posts and do your best to reel them in / The candle flickers, you measure morals by unsturdy things / tear leaves off of the sycamore, and pin down the butterfly's wings,” and the tug towards stability against the pull of independence seems apparent.

The record closes with the title track, which seems to both parallel and oppose the opener. Propelled by a popping banjo and the bright kicks of a piano, the history between Felix and Adelita seems further revealed; unlike the chorus on “Felix and Adelita”, though, which rings with reeling in and pinning down, “Luck and Courage” seems more about casting away. Especially considering the bridge—where the snare drum stirs the song into a sudden and frantic frenzy, where these two doves are described oceans apart, where the banjo seems to spin like a pinwheel, where Nicolay concludes with the line, “and her absence at the altar”—one might imagine Felix and Adelita's little country divided at the end.

When Nicolay contemplates the “nation of two” and considers the struggles sparked when an enclosed culture starts to crumble, he isn't relying strictly on his experience in romantic relationships. “Every band is its own culture as well,” he explains. “It has its own inside jokes, it has its own ways that people adjust to being around each other for long periods of time in strenuous circumstances. With some bands, I've been a part of it as that develops; being in a band that's been around for five or ten years or longer, you're inventing from the ground up both a family and a small business, and everybody sort of figures out their own way of doing that. With other bands, though, I sort of parachute in like an anthropologist onto a Pacific island.”

It's been easier for Nicolay to drop into some bands than others. Despite his tenure with the band, he found it difficult to fit in with the Hold Steady even though he complimented them musically. “My touring background was with World/Inferno,” he says. “I was from punk and from that kind of world. When I joined the Hold Steady, it was like, these are some guys that are into sports and Budweiser and Led Zeppelin, which was the kind of mindset that I hadn't run into in the New York punk world. It wasn't the same world, culturally.”

Like Adelita (or Felix, depending on one's interpretation of his songs), Nicolay found freedom by fleeing his permanent spot in the Hold Steady, by abandoning what was holding him back. And, though he continues to contribute his accordion to records that may require its wheeze, becoming a solo Artist has allowed him to truly stretch—to set his short stories to music, to thread his songs with meaningful and thoughtful themes, to pull characters from his subconscious and let them lead him. Because he set his own course, Luck and Courage is a record like no other; it's folky without suffering from simplicity, punk-rock without the aggression or anger, catchy without coming off as cliché, experimental without pretension. It's cross-cultural ,and mixed-media, and convention-bending, and more than mere music.

It's Art, but only because Franz Nicolay is an Artist.

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Nicolay took time off from engineering a record for Pearl and the Beard with Dan Brennan at Soundtrack Recording Studios in New York to record these songs a few days after Christmas. Brennan was able to patch a condenser microphone into the studio's landline phone so Nicolay performed these songs in the studio's sound booth, wearing headphones and a banjo, instead of directly into the telephone.

"This Is Not a Pipe" appears on Nicolay's 2010 record titled Luck and Courage. "Not Superstitious" is a Leatherface cover; the song originally appeared on the 1991 album Mush.

Visit the Nicolay's website for more music.

Sorry, but these songs were taken down due to space constraints. Please download The Switchboard Sessions, Volume Two for a track from this and other sessions recorded in 2011. If you're desperate for a copy of these tracks, please see the "About the Switchboard Sessions" page for info on how to contact the author.

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The Sainte Catherines

It may be difficult to tell, but Hugo Mudie is ready to settle down—sort of.

Consider his particularly striking appearance—his two-toned and tangled hair, the stretchers in his ears and thick frames on his face, his occasional shirtlessness and constant sleevelessness—or that his band the Sainte Catherines released Fire Works, their fifth full-length album, in the fall; this doesn’t describe someone who fits society’s definition of “adulthood.” It’s true: Mudie isn’t quite ready to retreat into this conventional and colorless existence any more than the Sainte Catherines are ready to quit touring. Despite this, Mudie and his band mates are on a course that seems a bit more mature than before.

It might be because two-thirds of the Sainte Catherines had children in the same year, including Mudie, guitarists Frederic Jacques and Louis Valiquette, and former drummer Rich Bouthiller. “We wanted to do that right,” Mudie explains. “We didn’t want to be on the road in the first year of having a new child. That’s not very intelligent.” In addition, many of the band’s members pursued new professions and/or continued to tour with Yesterday’s Ring, the punk-country project that contained many members of the Sainte Catherines. These priorities limited the band’s ability to perform, let alone record and release a new record.

It’s likely, then, that these priorities also inspired Fire Works, at least partially. Released by Anchorless Records in the fall of 2010, the record is the epitome of grown-up punk-rock.

Fire Works is the band’s first album in of new material in four years and feels somehow warmer—or fuller, or sophisticated—than 2006’s Dancing for Decadence, a record that’s not as much fast as it is ferocious, where songs gallop with the aggressive rage of raiding horsemen, swinging swords and setting fires; Mudie’s scratchy, melodic snarl rises from each distorted riff and dangling lead like he’s commanding this militia.

This fury is missing on Fire Works, replaced by heartier chords and steadier, simpler drums. “We wanted to do something less aggressive, a bit more melodic, a bit more sing-able, maybe,” Mudie says, explaining this perceived shift. “When we started, we wanted to be more of a mid-tempo punk band like Jawbreaker and Leatherface and all that, so we kind of went back to that.”

To those who were introduced to the band through Dancing for Decadence, though, the Sainte Catherine’s most recent record may feel like a departure and—despite the up-tempo pace of the record, its distorted guitars, and the return of Mudie’s coarse vocals—considerably less “punk-rock.” But Mudie isn’t interested in that old argument. “I know a lot of people that would say that the Sainte Catherines are not a punk band, but it’s not really important to me,” he says. “I don’t think the style of music you play affects it that much anyway. It depends on how you respect the history, how you grew up on it, and how you’re involved in it.”

It’s also depends, Mudie argues, on age. “When I was seventeen or eighteen,” he says, “if a band would sign to a major label, I would be like, ‘Fuck, they’re not punk anymore.’ Now I know that it has nothing to do with that.”

Punk or not, there’s something else stylistically different about Fire Works, something less tangible that several critics have sensed. Perhaps it’s the sporatic presence of gooey slide guitars, of a clean-plucked acoustic and a harmonica’s bright chords; perhaps it’s the trebly guitar tone, or the rhythm with which these Telecasters shuffle, but there’s a clear country influence on the band’s most recent record. “A lot of people say that, but we don’t understand it,” Mudie admits. “We’re kind of happy about it because we like country a lot, but it was never our intention to put any kind of country influence in the Sainte Catherines. I think it’s funny because, in a lot reviews, people have said, ‘It seems like they’ve spent too much time in Yesterday’s Ring.’”

These elements—Mudie’s evolved perception of “punk” and the Sainte Catherine’s more melodic, folk-influenced musical approach—may be one reason why Fire Works feels like a musically “grown-up” punk-rock record. Mudie’s lyrics seem to reinforce this aura as well. “Chub-E & Hank III / Vimont Stories Part II” is one song in which Mudie’s lyrics lament the stresses associated with the unconventional lifestyle (and look) of a musician. “If only I could get minimum wage,” he sings while “woahs” hang in the air above him, “I’d play your town and I’d sing your name / But I can’t afford the price of fame / - You’ve got tattoos on your hands…”

The same goes for “The Great Somewhere Else”, which begins like slow, lonely walk home after a long night; here, Mudie sings in metaphor—the ocean is the open road calling him to begin yet another odyssey—before the song tumbles into its faster first chorus (which echoes the record’s second track). When the song slows back down, Mudie muses on what he will miss while on the road. “I’ll be back on the boat,” he sings, “but I’ll be counting the days and the dogs are all dead but the fire still works / I thought I needed more, but I was doing okay / […] I spent my whole life in the Great Somewhere Else”.

“A lot of the lyrics before used to be about other people,” Mudie explains, “like ‘You live like this and I don’t like it,’ or ‘You live like that and it’s not the way you should,’ but I don’t think the anger is there anymore; I used to be a lot angrier at people and everything, but now I’m happy. For this record, we decided to look at ourselves and what we do—what’s good about it and what’s not. I think that’s why it seems a bit more personal.”

This introspection is just another sign that Mudie is settling down. Here, it’s important to clarify that “settling down” means finding what one is looking for; it means feeling satisfied—finally—with what one has become.

A cynical listener might say that the Sainte Catherines have softened, that they’ve stepped away from punk-rock and politics and finger-pointing. This sentiment seems misguided, though, since Fire Works exhibits a settled, satisfied group of guys that has decided and developed itself into exactly what it wants to become: a mid-tempo, country-toasted punk-rock band with introspective and personal lyrics.

Settling down, though, doesn’t mean stopping mid-stride. Despite the occasionally conflicted lyrics on Fire Works, Mudie describes what he’ll miss most when the band breaks up on the song “I’ll Miss the Boys”. “I won’t miss stressing out,” he sings, “Talking to bands I don’t know / Not even the goddamn music / But I know I’ll miss the boys.”

“At some point,” he explains, “I realized what I really like about being in a band and touring is not necessarily the part where you play music, or the part where you see new things or the places you visit, but mostly the part where you hang out with your friends around the world and have a bunch of inside jokes and a stories to tell. The song is about, when the band is going to end, what I’m going to miss the most is the boys in the band.”

Maybe it’s not so difficult to tell, then, that Mudie and the Sainte Catherines have finally settled down.

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Singer Hugo Mudie and guitarist Marc-Andre Beaudet recorded these songs in the late fall at the Café Culturel La Chasse-Galerie in Lavaltrie, Quebec. Being that the band was on tour, these songs (along with the interview) were recorded using the venue's landline phone in the relatively short amount of time before their set started.

"Better Like This" appears on the Sainte Catherines' 2010 record titled Fire Works. "Come Pick Me Up" is a Ryan Adams cover; the song originally appeared on the 2000 album Heartbreaker.

Sorry, but these songs were taken down due to space constraints. Please download The Switchboard Sessions, Volume One for a track from this and other sessions recorded in 2010. If you're desperate for a copy of these tracks, please see the "About the Switchboard Sessions"page for info on how to contact the author.

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