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THE FORMULA
The title of Wedge's debut album, Heavensville, is an ode to singer-songwriter Tommy Wedge's Indiana hometown, but a sardonic one. The indie-electronica act's sole member, Wedge knew he had to get out of teensy Evansville after he spent nine months in bed, gripped by depression. "I'd get up every day around six p.m. to check the mail," says Wedge, 32, who now lives in Athens, Georgia. "Then I'd go rent five or six movies and stay up all night watching them. There was one week where I managed to watch twenty-five Cary Grant movies."
After high school -- and near the end of his nine-month bed-in -- a friend of Wedge's who had relocated to Nashville convinced him to move down there. Wedge did four years' time as the bassist in local indie rock group Duraluxe and moved to Athens, Georgia with the band in 1999. But when the rest of the guys decided to ditch town for L.A. shortly thereafter, Wedge stayed put, determined to live out his secret yearning to play guitar and pen his own compositions. "I didn't want to play jingly jangly guitar rock anymore," he says. "But I didn't know how to do anything else." He bought himself a couple keyboards and got to work on Heavensville. "I didn't know how to write beats. After about a month of fiddling around with Pro-Tools, new sounds and beats I hadn't thought of before started coming out of nowhere, and after that the songs came together pretty quickly." The album was released earlier this month on upstart New York company Harmonium Films & Music.
SOUND Gorgeous, melancholy electronica songs that traverse epic distances in even their smallest gestures. An emotionally affecting blend of organic and synthetic sounds, Heavensville reflects Wedge's affinity for downbeat shoegazer acts such as Cocteau Twins, while striking a balance between the studied ambient subtlety of Sigur Ros and loose, propulsive energy of Doves.
SILENT BUT VIOLENT Heavensville was originally intended to be an instrumental effort, but even after he'd finished recording, Wedge felt ambivalent about whether to put vocals on a few songs. For six months, he drove around Athens with the instrumental demos playing on his car stereo, humming the vocal melodies. "I was scared because I hadn't done any lead vocals since I was twenty-one," he notes. "Sometimes I'd be at home with my headphones on, screaming in the empty house, and the cats would be peaking around the corner looking at me like, 'What's happening to Daddy?'" Ultimately, though, Wedge says he's certain he made the right decision in adding vocals to about half the album's songs. "There were spots I was unhappy with here and there," he says, "but then I got really high one night and listened to it -- and it passed the high guy test."
SAY WHAT?: Don't try too hard to decipher Wedge's lyrics. "I tend to mumble a lot because I don't really want anyone to know what I'm talking about," he admits with a chuckle. "Every once in awhile I'll throw some gibberish in there -- nobody's gonna know. To me, vocal melodies are more important than the words themselves. If people listen to the songs and think they hear certain words or phrases that aren't really there, that's fine by me. I'm obviously not Bob Dylan. I just don't want to be another dumb-ass with dumb-ass lyrics."
MUST-HAVE TRACK:
"The Architect"
"The Architect" is a seven-minute piano- and falsetto-driven number
that is the album's crowning achievement.
WHERE TO HEAR IT: Heavensville is out now, and available for download at iTunes or for purchase at CDBaby.com. You can hear additional tracks for free at Heavensville.com. Wedge doesn't have any tour plans yet, but he's putting together a band and hopes to hit the road later this year. He's currently working on an instrumental EP collecting Heavensville b-sides, due out on Harmonium in the fall.
SEE HIM NOW: Watch how Wedge spends an average weeknight in Athens: Bowling, imbibing and serenading his overweight cat with Journey tunes.
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