Ben Seretan recently released his great new album Allora on Tiny Engines (read our review in Notable Releases), and for a much deeper dive into the album, Ben has given us a track-by-track breakdown (and if you’d like to learn to play his songs, he also provides the guitar tunings and capo placements). Take it away, Ben…
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TRACK-BY-TRACK BREAKDOWN OF ALLORA BY BEN SERETAN
This is not a methodically labored over album. We did not spend six months in the studio, we barely had any concept that what we were burning to tape could even be considered a proper record. There are no leftover tracks that we had to scrap, no alternate takes. It was a very particular, particularly charged time abroad and these were the songs we just so happened to be ripping through as we took commuter rail across Italy in the summer of 2019. Me, Nico [Hedley], and Dan [Knishkowy] arrived at Matt’s studio with dirty clothes and secondhand smoke and with no-one around for miles in the hills of Montebelluna he let us rip in a way that felt medically cathartic and awfully, brilliantly charged, lightning in a bottle of grappa.
Though we arrived in Veneto as unknowing holy fools, themes and through lines emerged from the personal history and the grab bag of songs – ponds, partying, missing your friends, transit, mantras, gratitude for both the living and the passed, playing the guitar as hard as humanly possible, the pumping reassurance of a wooden box of bellows.
“NEW AIR”
Quite a thrown gauntlet to start off this record. If you listen closely in the first 30 seconds you can hear the spring reverb coils of the amplifiers rattling – I was playing so loud that the amps were moving like two old dryers scootin’. I first wrote this song over a decade ago and if you dig deep enough on my Bandcamp page you can find an old solo guitar and voice version that is much, much slower and is going for more of a hypnotic dirge thing than a propulsive catharsis (I very much like this better).
The song is pretty directly about cross country transit, about bidding all types of people from your life farewell, and the weird uplift that you feel when a high-gravity person is suddenly absent. It makes the air feel new. I always liked the line “when we drove to San Diego / we swam in every flooded valley” because it perfectly encapsulates the summer my buddy Asa and I drove across the southwest in his car with broken air conditioning – every time we got too hot to drive we’d jump in whatever body of water we could find on the map.
We were in a really extraordinarily manic period of transit and mourning when we recorded this. We had been on incessant planes and trains for a week, carrying our shit up steep cobblestone streets, hauling the heavy harmonium everywhere we went. And we weren’t even a month out from losing our friend and bandmate – like so many things on this record, the lyrics took on a totally different meaning in the light of that particular tragedy. We were living through it out loud, you can hear it on the record.
I have a way of playing guitar that’s just total exertion that goes back to my first deliriously joyful experiences playing in my band from high school with my friend Alex Tatusian (who absolutely freaked it twenty years later on the Allora album art) – maximum effort and index finger blood splatter, a yellow tortex pick ground down rounded blunt after a single take. This is the finest example of that. As Nico on bass would say: Big Dumb Feel Good.
Guitar tuning: CGDABE (capo 3)
“CLIMB THE LADDER”
Weird guitar tunings are really the key to this record and this is perhaps the most extreme of them all – a big fat open A power chord that no standard instrument can actually keep in anything close to in tune, so any chord played sounds chorused and shimmery. No surprise, then, that I arrived at another song discussing swimming and water, this time a very particular memory I have of being quite young and feeling totally unable to haul myself up out of the water at some kind of pond somewhere – something about the algae-covered ladder up and out of the water irrationally freaked me the hell out and I was stuck treading water accidentally defying a parent who, with increasing frustration, kept demanding I get up out of the pond. I have written about swimming and water often, most notably on the song “Holding Up the Sun” which details my memories of being megachurch baptized in the Pacific Ocean and feeling like I was going to drown.
I think like 70% of the overdubs we did on this record are on this song – there are Nico and Dan’s gang vocals, the Critter and Guitari synth going absolutely nutty in the background, the many layers of jingle bells and tambourines, the lovely descending line played on Matt Bordin’s vintage electric organ (that organ will come back later).
I remember when this song started – stoned out of my mind sitting on the edge of a hotel bed in Vienna, watching the Prater Ferris Wheel go around and around. But this song would be nothing without Nico and Dan kicking in so beautifully hard at the end – I started it, they finished it!
I hear some distinct influences here – Glenn Branca and James Blood Ulmer are present in the tuning and the energy, Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane gave us the ecstatic jingle bell freakout section in the middle, and I was trying to get Dan and Nico to go along with my best attempt and peak upper use Hüsker Dü at the end.
Here’s what I have yet to decide – is the repeated phrase a mantra? Or is it a command? And does the singer of the song ever climb the ladder?
Guitar tuning: low A A E A A E
“BEND”
Somewhere out there is a voice memo recording I sent to my friend Rose the day I wrote this song, nearly fatally hungover and stumbling through the chords in 2018. I have never written many lyrics – I’m more interested in economy, how phrases change as they’re repeated ad nauseam, and how a lack of specifics can make a song shift its resonance with each listener or with time. Strictly speaking, this song is about – or at least came from – the last time I remember sharing a nice moment with someone who went on to totally dismantle my life and my sense of self. They nearly broke me!
I do still hear that vestigial defiance, but the “about” of the song shifted so violently given the circumstances of the recording – how could the line “I heard you singing for the last time” be about anything other than our beautiful harmony-singing friend, now no longer with us? It was Nico who pointed this out to me during the sessions – I was not yet in a deep enough place of knowing.
Credit due: the snare drum sound that cracks in 1:20 is so unbelievably perfect, no idea how Matt accomplished that and I applaud Dan for whacking the hell outta that thing.
This track is also a textbook example of an approach to songwriting I’ve been fixated on for, oh, like 20 years at this point: set a mood in the first half of a song in a slower, more controlled way, with perhaps a more traditional approach to lyrics and choruses, then in the second half of the song, pursue total, repetitive phrase catharsis that is ultimately impossible to bottle. If you listen to enough of my songs you will inevitably recognize this – at least half the songs on “Youth Pastoral” follow this model with “Am I Doing Right by You?” being a really obvious example. On this song, though, we’re going for more of a disco / dance floor thing and less of an all out wall of guitars – there’s plenty of that elsewhere.
Guitar tuning: C G C G C E
“SMALL TIMES”
Both sides of this LP end with songs performed on a harmonium, a cumbersome wooden box we snuck into the overheard compartment on our flights to and from Italy. We were quite literally burdened and bringing baggage to these recording sessions. I thank Nico for bringing the harmonium into my life and I thank Dan and Nico for literally helping me heft it that summer. The harmonium is all over Youth Pastoral, too, and it’s still with me – it’s been at every release show we’ve done so far.
Many of the songs on this album are older, some of them very old by now. In Italy, we didn’t necessarily set out to make a cohesive record, we simply recorded everything we were playing on tour that we hadn’t yet put on an album. But this song was the one thing I was freshly working on at the time, which is interesting to me – it’s the only song that is directly about my headspace at the time, which is easy to explain. I needed people around me and I missed our friend who was always laughing and whose aura was undeniably neon yellow. But I was still very much working through things, which I think is why this song is so unfinished feeling – it’s the sound of unfinished business. At first we sought a rhyme for “hold me in the cold hours” – I remember trying to fit the phrase “crying in the shower” in there – but ultimately I like that we decided simply to repeat it.
This is the first (subtle) appearance of Matt Bordin’s saxophone which was such a delightful and unexpected addition to our arsenal of sounds. Nico’s low backing vocals on this are so lovely, as is his weird skittering tapping bass thing that he’s doing – never in a million years would I have made that arrangement choice but he just went ahead and freaked it! There’s also a sick guitar take by Dan in there – he’s playing those lovely major seven chords, no surprise there.
I’m very proud of the fact that this album has such violently cathartic highs and such lovely, quiet moments of reflection – every high has its comedown, your loudest ripping only counts if you’ve got something subtle to compare it to.
Guitar tuning: D A D F# A D (I think)
“JUBILATION BLUES”
In the summer of 2018 I had a chance to spend every dawn for a few weeks playing guitar and singing in a small storefront stage on Elm Street in Greensboro, North Carolina – this was the boneheadedly ambitious project proposal that landed me a spot at the artist residency and I stuck to it with gusto, waking up at 5am that whole July to sing to very few people (there were a few people, though!).
On my first night in town the director of the program surreptitiously invited me to a summer solstice party in a barn at a local farm a couple of towns over, although I didn’t really understand what I was getting myself into – I thought it was gonna be more of an art opening dinner party vibe but instead it was a horny high summer bacchanal with skinny dipping, slip and slides, the smell of body odor and DEET-free bug spray in the air, carne asada stewed from a cow they slaughtered that morning, grease and foamy beer running down everyone’s chins, plus some ridiculously talented and surprisingly well-known musicians, including the Nathan Bowles Trio (who coincidentally released an album the same day mine came out!). It was the North Carolina party of my dreams and though I tried valiantly to lose myself in the spirit of it, I couldn’t help but remain self-conscious and out of the flow – something in my heart hurt regretfully when my ride finally took me back to Greensboro, call it the spirit of the slip ‘n’ slide.
Later on I got pretty obsessed with a guitar player by the name of Etta Baker who is a legend of the Piedmont-style blues – she was local to the area and there are some really excellent videos of her playing guitar on the Internet. I spent some of my time trying to get a handle on her distinctive thumb-and-index-finger playing (I fingerpick about half the time, but I tend to do more of a three finger banjo picking thing, so her style was fun to attempt).
It was one of those pre-dawn mornings when that phrase “Jubilation Blues” bubbled up into my mouth, which so succinctly summarized the wishing-I-could-party-even-harder energy of that wild evening in the barn. Following Ms. Baker’s example, I plopped it down on a fingerpicking pattern with a washtub bass line, then I brought the song to Montebelluna.
Guitar tuning: Standard (capo 3)
“FREE”
This is another older song – the version we played live on WFMU in 2013 was apparently over 12 minutes long, and as I recall that was the one and only time we played it live until it snuck back into the setlist six years later. Seeing what Dan and Nico did to “New Air” I felt like they might be able to handle this old chestnut – and handle it they did.
Ultimately it’s a sweet song – lyrically it’s about poignantly, painfully wanting to have even more fun with your friends, a distinct theme running through really everything I do. Woe! Love! Regret! Yearning! What I want truly could fill the world up. Are the extended instrumental sections an attempt to convey an impossible-to-put-into-words love for your comrades? An attempt to simulate the feeling of laughing so hard you fall seated into the dirt? I’m not sure which, but I do know that this song is fun as hell to play – the text and the recording are one.
The other day I introduced this song as the song “most influenced by Godsmack” on the record which is an undeniable truism.
Recently Nico told me he saw me play this the night we met which would have been at an upstairs show at Silent Barn 2 in 2013 where my duo with Alex Lewis opened for Franz Nicolay (also memorably that was the night that Jordan Michael paid me my cut of the door by shoving a wad of cash in my mouth, does that count as indie sleaze?).
Matt Bordin’s saxophone is truly great on this track – just the right amount of skronk. Guitar tuning: C G C G C C
“EVERY MORNING IS A”
Ending this album that’s so full to bursting the only way I know how – with a droning mantra acknowledging that each morning we wake up is nothing short of a miracle. We lived through the night, boys, let’s turn the amps up all the way again.
At a time I was really going through it I once took a laughter healing workshop with New Age Zaddy Laraaji – a formative experience in many ways, but one of the things that really stuck with me was his description of his morning routine. Every morning, before he even allows himself to open his eyes, he allows a cosmic chuckle to rumble through his body as it wakes from slumber. Always thought that was cool as hell and in some ways this was a reminder to myself to lead with laughing and gratitude, what a compass!
You can really hear the bellows of the harmonium on this track – the reeds swell and swell, breathing. Contrast: your album can only seem truly insane if there’s a moment of serenity or two.
Guitar tuning : D G D G B D (capo 3)