“Did you do the planetarium yet?” asks Matt Sheehy, the
singer-songwriter behind
Lost Lander, as he squeezes his lanky frame
into my Hyundai Sonata and spots a copy of his new album sitting on the
passenger seat. I have no idea what he’s talking about. He picks up the
cardboard CD case and folds the sides together, forming a
triangle-shaped box. He then holds his cell phone up to a quarter-sized
hole on one side and turns on a flashlight app, sending light pouring
through several dozen small punctures on the other panels. In the
mid-evening darkness, it creates a miniature star map on the ceiling of
my car. Each fictional constellation represents a different song on the
record, he says.
Neat gimmick, I must admit.
But Sheehy insists
the creative packaging is not just a marketing ploy: It’s a physical
representation of the record’s overarching theme. No, DRRT is not
a concept album about the cosmos. It does, however, deal with mankind’s
relationship to the universe; specifically, the relationship between
nature and technology. Across the record’s 11 tracks, produced with
spacious warmth by Ramona Falls’ Brent Knopf, Sheehy makes references to
rain, the tides, and cold wind blowing “through your bones,” while
expressing an unease about a world overflowing with “too much
information.” The title—a vaguely computerized spelling of “dirt”—is
meant to suggest the intermingling of the organic and the electronic.
And for Sheehy, space is part of that dichotomy.
“If you think about
it, outer space is nature, too,” he says later, sipping a hot toddy
upstairs at North Portland’s Interurban. “It’s the ultimate nature.”
Nature is something
Sheehy, a native of Juneau, Alaska, knows a bit about. After the breakup
of his first band, the electro-rock duo Gravity and Henry, in 2005,
Sheehy entered his wilderness years—literally. He took a forestry job on
the Oregon coast, dividing his time between Portland—where he’d come to
jam with other musicians—and Oceanside, where he lived, worked and, in
his words, did a good deal of “existential crisising.”
It was during that
time Sheehy befriended Knopf. Gravity and Henry had played a few shows
with Knopf’s former group, Menomena, before splitting up, but the two
really got to know each other when Sheehy portrayed the Grim Reaper in
Menomena’s video for its song “Wet and Rusting.” (Sheehy had previously
dabbled in acting; his biggest role was starring in a pro-gay rights ad
produced for MTV.) “I immediately trusted anything he said, because I
respected him so much,” Sheehy says of Knopf, who helped Sheehy record
his first solo album, 2008’s Tigerphobia.
For DRRT,
Sheehy and Knopf’s partnership increased to the point of nearly a
full-on collaboration. The pair often worked back to back in tiny rooms
on the coast and along Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Knopf’s studio
proficiency grew Sheehy’s songs—simple enough at their core to be sung
around a campfire, Sheehy says—into lush, evocative creations. Even more
than in the lyrics, the “nature meets technology” theme is in the music
itself: Acoustic guitars, strings and heavily percussive drums loop and
sway around strategically placed synthesizer blips and encroachments of
digital noise. Although bigger, musically and thematically, than the
introspective Tigerphobia—something the full Lost Lander live band helps bring across—DRRT
maintains an undercurrent of intimate melancholy, particularly on the
haunting lament “Afraid of Summer” and the closing “Your Name Is a
Fire,” a love song written after a relationship had already begun to
fray.
Of course, no one
who’d make an album that can transform into a planetarium can be that
much of a downer. To fund the light boxes, Sheehy launched a Kickstarter
campaign, featuring videos parodying a PBS telethon. Appropriately, he
doesn’t think of the planetariums as a novelty to sell records but as a
gift for donors.
“Making CDs seems
weird to me. I don’t understand why people want to buy them,” Sheehy
says. “It feels so much more satisfying to think somebody might buy
something and then use it and have it around, show it to their kids or
just enjoy it, or feel a little bit of magic in their lives.”
SEE IT: Lost Lander plays Doug Fir Lounge on Saturday, Feb. 4, with Yours and Houndstooth. 9 pm. $8 advance, $10 day of show. 21+.
