Warren piece

Hem’s debut album Rabbit Songs is a labour of love. Lush production and stark vocals present dark rural daydreams and nostalgic vignettes of lost-era Americana. Lives were risked and band members bankrupted to complete it. Those who hear it agree it’s worth it.

In 1999 New York songwriter Dan Messe and producer/engineer Gary Maurer, both veterans of various musical projects, had a dream, to make a country-style record with alternative sensibilities. And an orchestra. They placed an ad for a singer in the Village Voice, and among the many replies, both bizarre and banal, one stood out. A tape of a girl singing traditional lullabies – a soft haunting voice without musical accompaniment, singing old songs her parents used to sing to her as a kid.

“It wasn’t even a demo,” says the voice in question, Sally Ellyson. “A bunch of friends had babies that year and I had no money so I sang all these songs on to a tape to send them for Christmas. I’d never really sang in any realm outside the shower, or the church or the karaoke bar.”

“The first thing Sally said to us was ‘I’m not a singer, I just want to try out,’” says Dan. “I couldn’t believe she’d never sung before. We’d planned to have different singers for each song, but when we heard her voice, that was the end of that idea. We had to start writing songs for her voice and we went through a big productive period where song after song came out. It wasn’t necessarily what I had initially imagined, but as soon as I heard it, I couldn’t imagine anything else.”

Gary was also dumbfounded. “It was perfect. We met Sally through an ad, and she just lived two blocks around the corner from us. It was fate, too good to be true.”

Knowing that they had embarked on something special, the band wanted to get everything just right, which resulted in Dan having to sell off most of his personal possessions to finance such necessities as an 18-piece orchestra and time-consuming, painstaking arrangements. Hem eschewed any technical wizardry, in order to preserve ‘the charm of imperfection.’ “The original budget for the record was something like five grand and we ended up spending about eighty,” says Dan. “We really wanted it to sound like people playing music in a room, so even the orchestra tracks were just done live in a room with the band. We wanted to capture it, like when you listen to very old recordings, there’s a magic there, a richness that I don’t necessarily find in a lot of digital recordings that are so clean and perfect.”

Having captured that magic, Gary then had to save the master tapes from a studio blaze. The official story has him battling bravely through smoke-filled stairwells to emerge triumphant with the tapes, but he admits the tale is a little exaggerated. “There was a bad fire in the studio and the tapes were in the control room. I stood on the street at four am, helplessly watching the building burn. But as soon as the fire was out, two firemen escorted me in to the building to rescue the tapes.” Which thankfully were intact.

A fragment of Sally’s home-made tape introduces the album, which goes on to explore American musical history, with an “old-time sound and modern sensibility,” within an elaborate framework of pedal-steel and mandolin. The title Rabbit Songs comes from both the street where Dan lives and writes, Warren Street, but also, he says, because the creature is associated with “innocence as well as a wild, hunted fear” which he feels is inherent in the darkness of the lyrics. Darkness may well be a vital ingredient in Hem’s sound, but there is also light at the end of Rabbit Songs’ tunnel.