Mea culpa -- I’ve lived in the Baltimore region most of my life and have never properly been there. I’ve seen it passing by on the way to DC, from buses and Amtrak, but never have visited. My parents went back in the 90s and they loved it. I trust their word.
Splitsville are from there, and this album is all about the town, with some politics and killer pop/rock. They were kind enough to answer a few questions questions for me.
Andrea Weiss: For those who don’t know you, can you give a short history of the band?
Paul Krysiak: Matt and Brandt started the Greenberry Woods with Ira Katz, whom Matt met on his first day at University of Maryland. In the time between their first and second major label album releases, Brandt got an itch to try his hand at drums, which he’d never played before. They gave me a call and we very quickly put together a set of songs that were, as the Baltimore City Paper would later put it, “wanton & goofy... like bubblegum with a little hair stuck in it.” We dashed the first album’s lo-fi recording off in three days in my brother’s basement, then spent a whopping nine days recording the follow-up at a proper studio a couple years later. In the late 90s we released the first three albums, Splitsville U.S.A, Ultrasound and Repeater, plus an EP Pet Soul paying homage to some of our mid 60s influences, all through the now-defunct New York label Big Deal Records.
Tony Waddy joined us on lead guitar and vocals in 2001, after we’d released a full-length version of that 60s pastiche on labels based in Japan and Spain, and found we needed more hands and voices than just the three of us to perform it live. We started working together almost immediately on putting together the songs that would become Incorporated, released in 2003 on those same overseas labels. An Australian Best-Of compilation followed.
We took an extended hiatus while Matt had a stab at living out West for several years, but throughout that time we and our four wives remained a family in every important sense of that word. Once Matt moved back to the area several years ago, we regrouped to start work on Mobtown. Years of delays ensued, thanks to little trifles like a global pandemic, a couple of life-threatening health crises (mine, but I’m all better now!), and our own special blend of perfectionism and laziness. Now here we are.
AW: Who are your influences?
PK: Almost too many to name, but the deepest and earliest of them would be (probably rather obviously) The Beatles and Beach Boys. Our sense of what makes for good pop-rock/pop-punk songcraft is also strongly influenced by the Kinks, the early Who, David Bowie, The Clash, The Jam, Big Star, Elvis Costello, Prince, The Replacements, The Pixies, and on and on…
AW: Who were you listening to besides Grant Lee Buffalo while making this album?
PK: Our tastes are quite broad and eclectic. Speaking for myself: lots of classic jazz; bands like The National, boygenius, TV on the Radio, Arcade Fire, recent Tears for Fears; more intimate and confessional stuff – think Joni Mitchell, Janis Ian; and the 80s output of groups like The Cure, Echo & the Bunnymen, New Order, etc. Finally, I think I can speak for both Tony and myself when I say that, if more than a week has gone by without having heard at least a little bit of Prince, then something is very wrong.
Tony Waddy: So much has happened culturally in the last decade since we started the album, that I think all of us not only listened to new stuff, but we also all spent time getting re-educated by diving harder into the things we loved. I know for me, the COVID lockdown was a very long snow day where I got to spend time deconstructing why certain songs and parts of songs resonate so deeply with me. I realized there’s even more mojo to absorb deep beneath the B-sides of Radiohead, Bowie, David Byrne, or Queen…that is, when there was a global pandemic to slow the world down. It was a good use of my time.
AW: The music reminds me of Steely Dan, especially “Fallsway,” which sounds like “Barrytown” from Pretzel Logic. Do you like the Dan?
PK: “Fallsway”’s earliest spark was a desire to build something around a solid piano riff worthy of Tapestry-era Carol King, or Christine McVie, who sadly passed while I was still writing it. As it progressed, it started to take on more and more of a sort of “yacht rock” flavor, but with hints of other disparate influences like Elvis Costello and even Randy Newman. I knew I wanted to make room for Tony to deliver an iconic, classic rock guitar solo (boy, did he ever!) and thought, “well, we could do worse than to give him a ‘My Old School’ type of instrumental section over which to do that.” To paraphrase a clever quip I once read, anyone who doesn’t like Steely Dan is merely intimidated.
TW: I think that 70s AM radio holds a special place in our hearts--and probably everyone who reads this. The good stuff of that era had a clear, confident opinion, musical self-indulgence, unapologetic fashion, and major-7 chords that made you want to cheer. The first time Paul played “Fallsway,” I immediately knew where things needed to go, so we leaned in hard. I saw Steely Dan for the first time three or four years ago in Philly and probably treated it more like a recon mission than a night out. I remember hearing those iconic leads for decades and really never thought I’d drive through that neighborhood, but this solo and harmony came out easily and was more playful than I expected. This song has so much character you can smell the iron-on corduroy elbow patches.
AW: Who’s the great piano player in your band?
PK: Why, thank you! That would be me. Though, as the high school band conductor often cautioned, “a jack of all trades is a master of none.”
AW: This is a concept album about Baltimore. For those who don’t know the city, what is it like?
Brandt Huseman: It's called “Charm City” for a reason. Neighborhood by neighborhood, Baltimore is a city to be explored. Great food, deep history, and a quirkiness that's unique to the first big city south of the Mason Dixon.
PK: Quite true, and all that quirkiness has produced quite an array of artists with distinct, singular voices, from Cab Calloway to Bille Holliday and Eubie Blake to Joan Jett and Frank Zappa, from Poe and Mencken to John Waters, Anne Tyler, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Oh, and it’s called “Mobtown” for a reason, too, namely its centuries-long propensity for political violence.
AW: There is a lot of social and political commentary on this album, which is great. Did you feel the political situation in this country lent itself to lyrics, or was the politics of today just something you wanted to comment on?
PK: No one has ever thought of Splitsville as a “political band,” and they still shouldn’t. But we always knew from this album’s inception that there would be a certain degree of social commentary on it. I mean, here we are, this multiracial band singing about a majority Black city whose past and present are intricately interwoven with the Civil War, a litany of discriminatory public policies, “redlining,” the Civil Rights struggle, the drug war and crack epidemic, “white flight,” and on and on. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on other topics alluded to on the record, for example, the effects of globalization and supply-side economics on Rust Belt towns like ours. But I think some lyrics which early on may have been rooted in local affairs -- the Freddie Gray tragedy and subsequent riots, for instance -- had little choice but to expand over the many years we took to complete this thing into referencing more national affairs -- Confederate monument controversies, Charlottesville, January 6.
All of that said, we write observations and confessions, not slogans and diatribes. We don’t have any desire to make preachy, self-righteous, downer, protest records. If our audience can’t relax and enjoy listening to us, then we have utterly failed at our primary mission.
AW: What’s the music scene like in Baltimore?
PK: [shrug] I mean, there are plenty bands I really like, but it’d be difficult for me to try to pin down just what the “scene” here actually is. If there are throughlines between great bands to come from the area in the last decade or two, including Wye Oak, Future Islands, Super City, and Turnstile, I’m not sure I could put my finger on just what they are. In the 90s though, we were quite the hotbed of top-notch power pop bands, most of whom are still at it. In addition to Splitsville/Greenberry Woods, we have Starbelly, Love Nut, Myracle Brah (of which I was a member for a few years), and plenty more.
TW: To me, Baltimore has always been a small town. The music scene in the early 90s was varied and competitive and the carryover from late-80s bands like The Pixies, Fugazi, Jane’s Addiction, and Soundgarden made the local alt/rock/garage scene pretty intense. I was on more of that side of things while the other guys pulled more from something harmony heavy. But the scene was still small and everyone knew one another. By the time I had joined Splitsville in 2001, the local scene was already changing with more clubs opening and the musical menu broadening. Over the last 20 years, Baltimore has grown considerably, and the scene is at a diversity and talent level that I’m so proud to see. As connected as I felt years ago, it’s comforting to know that there’s so much here that I still haven’t seen or heard. You want that from your town.
AW: Are there any political statements you’d like to make now that go along with the album?
PK: I think the songs largely speak for themselves, but I doubt anyone in the band would disagree with some basic assertions that are somehow becoming radical notions in America, such as:
Empathy, fairness, and common f*cking decency are not weakness.
Authoritarianism, self-dealing, and kakistocracy are wholly incompatible with patriotism or adherence to the US Constitution.
You are entitled to your own opinion. We’re all supposed to share the same facts.
TW: That’s easy -- “There's never enough love.”
