Best westerns

Joe Pernice's Chappaquiddick Skyline

by Jonathan Perry

The Pernice Brothers

During wintertime, there's a certain stillness that falls on the Western Massachusetts countryside that's both comforting and a little desolate. The snow-swept hills and lamp-lit farmhouses hold their own quiet history, and, if you're in the right frame of mind, the sigh of pines can sound like half-remembered voices. Joe Pernice's songs, which he mostly sings in a hushed whisper -- not much more than a rustle of a voice, really -- are a lot like those sighing pines. The Northampton-based songwriter's tunes can sound intimate and at your shoulder one moment, then distant and out of reach the next.

"Oh, I need some time to make sense of something I lost along the ride," Pernice sings in "Crestfallen," the ravishingly melancholy track that opens the Pernice Brothers' 1998 debut, Overcome by Happiness (Sub Pop). But it wasn't so much Pernice's characteristically downcast words that took listeners by surprise; it was the ornate array of strings, horns, and piano that underpinned his narratives -- a dramatic departure from the rustic minimalism that marked the work of Pernice's previous band, the country-tinged Scud Mountain Boys. The lush, orchestral pop vibe of Overcome was way closer to Zombies singer Colin Blunstone and the Bacharach-inspired orch-pop of Cardinal than to anything found in the pages of No Depression magazine, even though the songs carried as much bitter despair as ever.

Chappaquiddick Skyline (Sub Pop), named for Pernice's new one-off side project, contains his latest batch of cheery observations about such things as seeing a would-be lover asleep in the arms of another after a party ("The Two of You Sleep") and the lingering threat of emotional, if not physical, desertion ("Nobody's Watching"). Once again, the first line of the first track, "Everyone Else Is Evolving," sets the darkened stage for what follows. "I hate my life," Pernice confides with a strange, almost carnal tenderness. "Don't be alarmed if someday soon you hear I've gone away." Before the song's over, he'll change the "if" to "when," and as the tune dissolves into the distance, Pernice sounds more certain of his fate than ever. Meanwhile, the starker acoustic shadings of the songs make Chappaquiddick Skyline's sound a closer cousin to the Scuds' unadorned melancholy than to the Pernice Brothers' carefully arranged gloom.

Pernice, on the phone from his Northampton home, concurs. "The songs that were on the record just didn't fit the Pernice Brothers," he says, adding that the title began as a joke when he and Sub Pop co-owner Jonathan Poneman were brainstorming ideas for a "grim Massachusetts reference"; they thought the phrase made a good goof on Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline. "It's hard to explain why, but some songs just get parceled out and go different ways. I knew I had enough songs for a record, and I wanted to make one. And on certain songs, I hear strings. But for Chappaquiddick Skyline, I wanted it to be a bit more stripped down, like a Scud Mountain Boys record. I wanted it to be more of an American record -- I'm not sure what that means."

For Skyline, Pernice enlisted bassist Thom Monahan and guitarist Peyton Pinkerton (both of the Pernice Brothers), as well as pianist Laura Stein and drummer Mike Belitsky. Then there were the friends and folks who stopped by to add a vocal here or a guitar strum there. The recording sessions, done at home on eight-track, were "very, very relaxed," Pernice recounts. "We recorded it at my house so we could just chip away at it when we wanted to. Some days, we'd get up and do a vocal track and then leave it alone for a while. We kind of joked about this being a record that never happened. It was kind of like a shadow passing."

Chappaquiddick Skyline also marks a passage of another sort: the end of Pernice's affiliation with Sub Pop, the label that was also home to the Scud Mountain Boys. "Sub Pop was good while it lasted," Pernice reflects, "but it just wasn't working out the way I wanted it to, so it was time to move on." Pernice has nearly finished recording a solo project and has written material for the next Pernice Brothers record. "The record I'm making right now is mine, and I'm licensing it out to a couple of labels in Germany. I'm not sure if I'm even going to put it out in the States yet. For the next Pernice Brothers record, I know I want it to be really full with lush arrangements, but to be frank about it, I can't afford to put it out myself, so we'll see."

Wherever he ends up, it's unlikely Pernice will stop writing lovely, disconsolate ballads about suicide, alcoholism, and betrayal. "They're pretty much all autobiographical -- even the New Order song (`Leave Me Alone') that I didn't write," Pernice says with a laugh. "It all starts with me. I mean, who doesn't have days where they wake up and they hate themselves? I think most everybody goes through that at some point." Pernice says there's a simple explanation for why he's so drawn to writing about folks who asphyxiate themselves in suburban garages or languish in lives they've stopped trying to salvage: "Fear of death, probably."