Chad Price — vocalist, songwriter, and guitarist of ALL, Drag The River, and A Vulture Wake — released a solo album via Joey Cape’s One Week Records on Aug. 21. The tree on the album’s cover gives vision to the recording. It’s a cold walk through a beautiful sonic landscape. His songs fill the air around the trunk with crisp, dark, and meaningful thoughts. His feelings float through the branches. His words and music are an early-morning rise in the country, a walk in the forest. They are distant, moving away, but how far away? To the moon or to outer space? He finds his songs in inner space, the space in his head.
“Some people will take their guitar and go hang out at the beach or the woods. I’m not really like that,” Price says. “I lock myself in a room in the basement. I like to be totally in my head, not let any outside factors get in the way. I use an acoustic even [when] writing ALL songs or A Vulture Wake songs. If you play something on an acoustic and it sounds good, then you know it’s going to sound great when you have the amp turned up. You can play anything through an amp and it’ll sound good. I try to strip shit down totally basic to make sure all the notes are there. An acoustic works better for that.”
Price is a fan of David Gilmour and Roger Waters’ work on The Dark Side of the Moon and channeled that energy into writing these songs. “I kind of had a lot of stuff mapped out,” he says. “I wanted [a] full band. I’m a huge Pink Floyd fan. I wanted to get this kind of space that Pink Floyd has a lot of the time.”
Price added some great musicians to the process of recording his One Week release. Brian Wahlstrom of Scorpios and Gods Of Mount Olympus—also a One Week Records fixture—contributed piano. Dave Barker of Pinhead Circus and Drag The River played drums and contributed pedal steel. The beauty of the album is further enhanced by Lief Sjostrom’s cello. Price says he stayed out of their creative way. “I would just as soon let these musicians do what they’re good at,” he explains. “I had an idea of what I wanted, but these guys are the pros. I let them do their thing.”
This recording is softer than Price’s work with Drag The River and further from a punk sound than anything he imagined when recording Breaking Things with ALL in 1993, yet it beats with the same soul and pounds the heart the same way. It’s his sincerity that makes this album punk. Every record he makes is sincere, and the 10 tracks on his One Week release may be some of his most honest. “Even though, for Drag [The River], I write a lot of slow, sad songs and shit, because Jon [Snodgrass] likes to inject humor into it—my Drag shit—I try not to go off the deep end,” Price says. “I try to keep that glimmer of hope in there. The solo stuff, I go in thinking cold and dark. I have a different vision when it’s just me.”
Emotionally, he’s made it to the dark side of the moon with this record. Of the eighth track, “House I Died In,” Price explains, “When I wrote that, I was pretty stoked. I thought it was a pretty powerful song of mine. I think that song—just as far as songwriting, the craft, I may have slightly stepped up my game for that song. I don’t know where it came from. I remember seeing some line I wrote down: ‘You built the house I died in.’ I had that around for a while. I like the sound. I like the feel. Lines like that are really kind of depressing.”
This One Week release was recorded with guest producer Chris Fogal at Black In Bluhm Recording Studio in Denver, rather than the usual setting of Cape’s home studio. Fogal was a great fit. He previously mastered all of the One Week Records releases, and he was close to home for Price, though the singer-songwriter has since moved to Indiana. “Probably three years ago, Drag was playing in Montréal, and Joey was playing solo. I talked to him about doing one of these at his house, and shortly after, I talked to Chris,” Price says. “I decided I’d rather do it that way. I could go home at night, and we didn’t actually have to get it done; we could take our time. Since Chris has a lot to do with One Week Records, I decided to do it that way.”
Price’s new record contrasts his previous work in ALL or the sound of A Vulture Wake’s January 2018 album, The Appropriate Level of Outrage. It comes close to the feel of a Drag The River album, but it’s just that little touch darker. He’s a deep-thinking musician whose thoughts paint different landscapes throughout his different bands, though all of his music could hang in a gallery as a perfect collection. Price’s One Week record uses a lot of blue and some black and hangs on the wall alone with plenty of space around it for consideration. It’s one of his largest pieces in the room and commands repeated returns to soak it in.
The cold sonic atmosphere on the album is as beautiful as Price’s warmer, brighter, and louder tunes, because it’s equally honest to his heart and feelings. “I’ll have the overall feeling of the song, especially lyrically—the way it sounds, the way it feels,” he elaborates. “Somebody else may not be able to differentiate. I can. It’s the way it makes me feel. Once you’re eight songs in, I had this group of tunes, [and] I can write some songs to match up to the overall vibe.”
Price has great latitude within any hemisphere of music. He’s able to articulate the distance from north to south and the feeling of the temperatures in between poles. Sometimes, his music is definitively punk, and other times, he pushes the spatial limits of the punk ethos. He’s a great commander of his ship, though he has a different landing spot than where Pink Floyd settled down 45 years ago. Make no mistake, Price is not recreating, emulating, or echoing; his record is inspired by that space. If his feelings take him off the Earth and into his deepest thinking, the chill in this release is like a trip back to the dark side of the moon to witness Price’s own vision of touchdown.
