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| Yep, just like he said. |
While I came a couple years late to the Blitzen Trapper party, I geeked out hard first and most to the same album that everyone else did: 2008’s Furr. In fact, that album deserves as much credit as any other for guiding me toward more rustic sounds. Which I have always resisted more than most genres…though it helped it was leavened with lots and lots of rock...
And now, a crash course on their story.
The Very Basics
“I always thought that Blitzen Trapper, the sort of classic lineup, was like a benevolent psychedelic street gang. Not a scary street gang.”
- Eric Johnson (of Fruit Bats), Talk House interview, 2020
Blitzen Trapper semi-officially formed circa 2000 under the name Garmonbozia and self-released three albums. Nearly all of the original (and surprisingly stable) line-up hailed from the “outskirts of Salem, Oregon,” and included: Eric Earley (guitar/harmonica/vocals/keys), Eric Menteer (guitar/keyboard), Brian Adrian Koch (drums/vocals/harmonica…a lot of harmonica), Michael Van Pelt (bass), Drew Laughery (keys), and Marty Marquis (guitar/keys/vocals/melodica); Marquis counts as the geographic outlier, hailing from Yakima, Washington, and the band became a five-piece when Laughery left around 2010 - e.g., after the tour supporting Destroyer of the Void. A couple songs carried over from the Garmonbozia period (~ 2000-2003; e.g., a proto-version of “Sadie,” “The All Girl Team,” and “Reno”), but the sound that made them famous hadn’t taken shape point. A quote in Wikipedia’s write-up describes Garmonbozia’s sound like so:
“Many of the Garmonbozia recordings are experimental prog-rock and psychedelic songs, more concerned with creating interesting soundscapes than the tighter rock/soul/country/pop crispness of their later albums.”
The band switched it’s name to Blitzen Trapper in 2003. When reflecting on those earliest days with Eric Johnson (see the Talk House interview), Earley agreed they were fortunate to come up in “a good time to wander your way into things,” aka, posting songs on a MySpace page and getting signed to a label. And now feels like a good time to confess that my greatest disappointment in reading about Blitzen Trapper came with learning that Earley did nearly all the songwriting and that he conceived albums as far back as American Goldwing as solo projects. Going the other way (and I lifted this from a recent Street Roots feature on (again) Earley): “Holy Smokes could have easily been billed as an Eric Earley solo record, but that’s been true of every Blitzen Trapper album, the band always functioning more as a live organism.” (Or, from the Talk House interview: “A lot of Blitzen Trapper was trying to navigate those two realities, the recordings and the band.”)
Blitzen Trapper released an eponymous debut album in 2003 - Laughery shot the photo for the album cover at a junk shop on the coast (“An Indian and a zebra. That says it all.”) - but the music world only took notice after 2004’s Field Rexx, with Pitchfork leading the way. What Pitchfork said at the time does justice to the expansive path the band chose:
“Comparing the album to artists as diverse as Beck, Willie Nelson, and Rogue Wave, Pitchfork stated, 'their sophomore effort shouldn't be dismissed as fluff -- Field Rexx is an earnest crack at bluegrass, country, and folk that's young and brazen enough to incorporate elements from multiple genres.'"
The combination of those two albums and the road grind got them signed to Sub Pop in 2007, which lead to the release of Blitzen Trapper’s breakthrough album, Wild Mountain Nation (which was also the band’s first video). That was mostly on the critical side, apparently, because Earley (and Johnson, for that matter) recalls playing shows as a headliner only to see the crowd melt away after the alleged (and local) opening act packed up their gear (that was Fleet Foxes for Blitzen Trapper). They hit the indie rock equivalent of the big time with the release of Furr in 2008, the critics swooned across multiple outlets, they debuted the title track on national TV for Late Night with Conan O’Brien, more neat videos followed (e.g., “Furr” and “Black River Killer”), they played multiple festivals, toured with everyone, their follow-ups, Destroyer of the Void (2010) and American Goldwing (2011), did nearly as well critically and commercially, etc. At this point, I’d direct anyone interested in a fuller rundown of all that, the production of still later albums (VII (2013), All Across This Land (2015), Wild and Reckless (2017), and, perhaps finally, Holy Smokes Future Jokes (2020)) to Wikipedia, because they dish-up a crap-ton of detail.
In that Talk House interview (a good source, especially for the earliest days), both Johnson and Earley talk about the death of the recording industry in a way that made the thought more concrete for me. I understand the business has changed, and continues to evolve, with the dawn of exploitive streaming apps, but the whole template of a band/artist making money from live shows and merch still feels, for lack of a better word, normal because most bands I love and follow never had a label to market their music, never mind an album that went gold or, God forbid, platinum. And I guess that’s where the dissonance comes from: I’ve found no indication that even Furr went gold for Blitzen Trapper, but Earley talked about the band being able to coast on the strength of that album. Which is to say, I guess I haven’t quite wrapped my head around how the music industry works - or arguably at any point in its history.
In 2018, Blitzen Trapper released a 10th anniversary edition of Furr and toured to support it. I saw that kicked around as a swan-song across a couple sources. And maybe it was. Helluva band, though.
Five Things I Liked/Learned
1) The Inspiration for the Name
“In 2003, the band changed their name to Blitzen Trapper, reportedly a reference to singer Eric Earley's seventh-grade girlfriend, who kept a Trapper Keeper binder and drew pictures of Santa Claus and his reindeer on it, her favorite reindeer being Blitzen.”
Easy enough.
2) A Campy Delight
Blitzen Trapper collaborated with Rainn Wilson to make a short film called The Blitzen Trapper Massacre, which debuted on Funny or Die, back when the Internet was more fun than terrifying (this was around the release of American Goldwing), about an obsessed fan crossing over into “standom.”
3) Record Store Day Afficionados
Blitzen Trapper participated in a healthy run of Record Store Day events from 2009 to 2013 (and maybe beyond), contributing (very) limited release 45s, which included: “War Is Placebo”/”Booksmart Baby”; 2011, “Maybe Baby”/”Soul Singer”; 2012, “Hey Joe”/”Skirts on Fire”; 2013 “Hold On”/”On a Dime Woman.”
I linked to any video of those songs I could find, a lot of which seem to show up on the 2018 Anniversary release of Furr. Related…
4) A Great Anecdote About Favorites from Furr
My two favorite tracks on Furr are “Echo/Always On/EZ Con” and “Not Your Lover.” As such, I was tickled to read this little nugget related to both:
“One of the main components of the album's sound was a barely usable out-of-tune piano discovered at the studio one day, and featuring on the tracks, ‘Not Your Lover’ and ‘Echo.’”
5) Eric Earley’s Second Life
I caught a stray snippet in the Talk House interview were Earley talks about a shelter. The Street Roots feature goes deeper into what has become a second occupation for whom, advocacy for homeless veterans and, as the feature suggests, the houseless population in general. He started with an outfit called Do Good Multnomah, working the night desk, but has since graduated to working as a case manager for Greater Good in Clackamas County. That’s super-admirable, obviously, and it both changed his perspective and influenced his later songwriting, as noted in this quote:
“In the homeless community and, I think, American society in general, we hang on to so many things: dreams and aspirations and this pride of individualism. The American Dream and all this is an illusion, but we continue to hang on to it. And so I think a lot of that made its way into the music.”
About the Sampler
For the record, I deliberately steered away from Furr, while still rating it as a fucking great album start to finish. It also doesn’t hurt that I’ve already got a couple favorites on playlists (e.g., “Echo/Always On/EZ Con”), and I’ve played the title track so much that I can barely listen to it…and yet that didn’t stop me from including “Black River Killer,” the super-fun “Saturday Nite,” the rock-kick spectacularrrr, “Gold for Bread,” and, personal, long-time favorite, “Not Your Lover.”
This project was/is about exploration…even if that didn’t stop me from including a (literal) handful of favorites from Destroyer of the Void, aka, the album that pushes Furr as my favorite by them and hard. Those include the tempo-changing/epic title track, lush tracks like “Heaven and Earth,” “Below the Hurricane,” and the simply beautiful, and Alela Diane-assisted, “The Tree.” “Sadie” also made the cut. Great, great album…
Now, the actual exploration…
I’d never heard anything besides the two albums already mentioned and American Goldwing (repped here with “Astronaut” and “Love the Way You Walk Away”) and Wild Mountain Nation (repped by “Futures & Folly” and what now tracks for me as a (wonderful) throw-back to their earlier material, “Miss Spiritual Tramp”). And, so, to start from the beginning…
I included “The All-Girl Team” from the debut - and I’d call that indicative of Blitzen Trapper’s early sound - but also included “Christmas Is Coming Soon!” as a harbinger of future flexibility/tenderness.
Field Rexx got a bigger chunk of the sampler, with “Love (I Exclaim)” keeping touch with their wilder, early sound, and two (again) gentler, more melodic tunes with “Summer Twin” and the real pop swinger, “Asleep for Days.”
I’ll note without judgment that All Across This Land didn’t move me at all, and I only included “Wild and Reckless” as a kind of WTF reaction to a song that feels misplaced in the Blitzen Trapper catalog. VII worked better than either of them - which could be a function of familiarity as much as anything - and included the rootsy/folksy “Ever Loved Once” and the banging, twangy “Neck Tatts, Cadillacs” to hint at what I liked on that one.
Last, and very much not least, I rated Holy Smokes Future Jokes as the highwater mark of Earley’s latest material (they couldn’t tour to support it because COVID, so that one feels like all him, though a couple members did session work on it). Everything on there is smoother, calmer than Blitzen Trapper’s previous material, but there’s some dynamite stuff on there including, the title track, “Baptismal,” “Don’t Let Me Run,” and, personal favorite, “Masonic Temple Microdose #1.” All those sound more or less like Blitzen Trapper songs, but there's definitely a lonelier feel to them all.
And that’s it for this one, yet another example of my failure to achieve brevity. Till the next one...
And now, a crash course on their story.
The Very Basics
“I always thought that Blitzen Trapper, the sort of classic lineup, was like a benevolent psychedelic street gang. Not a scary street gang.”
- Eric Johnson (of Fruit Bats), Talk House interview, 2020
Blitzen Trapper semi-officially formed circa 2000 under the name Garmonbozia and self-released three albums. Nearly all of the original (and surprisingly stable) line-up hailed from the “outskirts of Salem, Oregon,” and included: Eric Earley (guitar/harmonica/vocals/keys), Eric Menteer (guitar/keyboard), Brian Adrian Koch (drums/vocals/harmonica…a lot of harmonica), Michael Van Pelt (bass), Drew Laughery (keys), and Marty Marquis (guitar/keys/vocals/melodica); Marquis counts as the geographic outlier, hailing from Yakima, Washington, and the band became a five-piece when Laughery left around 2010 - e.g., after the tour supporting Destroyer of the Void. A couple songs carried over from the Garmonbozia period (~ 2000-2003; e.g., a proto-version of “Sadie,” “The All Girl Team,” and “Reno”), but the sound that made them famous hadn’t taken shape point. A quote in Wikipedia’s write-up describes Garmonbozia’s sound like so:
“Many of the Garmonbozia recordings are experimental prog-rock and psychedelic songs, more concerned with creating interesting soundscapes than the tighter rock/soul/country/pop crispness of their later albums.”
The band switched it’s name to Blitzen Trapper in 2003. When reflecting on those earliest days with Eric Johnson (see the Talk House interview), Earley agreed they were fortunate to come up in “a good time to wander your way into things,” aka, posting songs on a MySpace page and getting signed to a label. And now feels like a good time to confess that my greatest disappointment in reading about Blitzen Trapper came with learning that Earley did nearly all the songwriting and that he conceived albums as far back as American Goldwing as solo projects. Going the other way (and I lifted this from a recent Street Roots feature on (again) Earley): “Holy Smokes could have easily been billed as an Eric Earley solo record, but that’s been true of every Blitzen Trapper album, the band always functioning more as a live organism.” (Or, from the Talk House interview: “A lot of Blitzen Trapper was trying to navigate those two realities, the recordings and the band.”)
Blitzen Trapper released an eponymous debut album in 2003 - Laughery shot the photo for the album cover at a junk shop on the coast (“An Indian and a zebra. That says it all.”) - but the music world only took notice after 2004’s Field Rexx, with Pitchfork leading the way. What Pitchfork said at the time does justice to the expansive path the band chose:
“Comparing the album to artists as diverse as Beck, Willie Nelson, and Rogue Wave, Pitchfork stated, 'their sophomore effort shouldn't be dismissed as fluff -- Field Rexx is an earnest crack at bluegrass, country, and folk that's young and brazen enough to incorporate elements from multiple genres.'"
The combination of those two albums and the road grind got them signed to Sub Pop in 2007, which lead to the release of Blitzen Trapper’s breakthrough album, Wild Mountain Nation (which was also the band’s first video). That was mostly on the critical side, apparently, because Earley (and Johnson, for that matter) recalls playing shows as a headliner only to see the crowd melt away after the alleged (and local) opening act packed up their gear (that was Fleet Foxes for Blitzen Trapper). They hit the indie rock equivalent of the big time with the release of Furr in 2008, the critics swooned across multiple outlets, they debuted the title track on national TV for Late Night with Conan O’Brien, more neat videos followed (e.g., “Furr” and “Black River Killer”), they played multiple festivals, toured with everyone, their follow-ups, Destroyer of the Void (2010) and American Goldwing (2011), did nearly as well critically and commercially, etc. At this point, I’d direct anyone interested in a fuller rundown of all that, the production of still later albums (VII (2013), All Across This Land (2015), Wild and Reckless (2017), and, perhaps finally, Holy Smokes Future Jokes (2020)) to Wikipedia, because they dish-up a crap-ton of detail.
In that Talk House interview (a good source, especially for the earliest days), both Johnson and Earley talk about the death of the recording industry in a way that made the thought more concrete for me. I understand the business has changed, and continues to evolve, with the dawn of exploitive streaming apps, but the whole template of a band/artist making money from live shows and merch still feels, for lack of a better word, normal because most bands I love and follow never had a label to market their music, never mind an album that went gold or, God forbid, platinum. And I guess that’s where the dissonance comes from: I’ve found no indication that even Furr went gold for Blitzen Trapper, but Earley talked about the band being able to coast on the strength of that album. Which is to say, I guess I haven’t quite wrapped my head around how the music industry works - or arguably at any point in its history.
In 2018, Blitzen Trapper released a 10th anniversary edition of Furr and toured to support it. I saw that kicked around as a swan-song across a couple sources. And maybe it was. Helluva band, though.
Five Things I Liked/Learned
1) The Inspiration for the Name
“In 2003, the band changed their name to Blitzen Trapper, reportedly a reference to singer Eric Earley's seventh-grade girlfriend, who kept a Trapper Keeper binder and drew pictures of Santa Claus and his reindeer on it, her favorite reindeer being Blitzen.”
Easy enough.
2) A Campy Delight
Blitzen Trapper collaborated with Rainn Wilson to make a short film called The Blitzen Trapper Massacre, which debuted on Funny or Die, back when the Internet was more fun than terrifying (this was around the release of American Goldwing), about an obsessed fan crossing over into “standom.”
3) Record Store Day Afficionados
Blitzen Trapper participated in a healthy run of Record Store Day events from 2009 to 2013 (and maybe beyond), contributing (very) limited release 45s, which included: “War Is Placebo”/”Booksmart Baby”; 2011, “Maybe Baby”/”Soul Singer”; 2012, “Hey Joe”/”Skirts on Fire”; 2013 “Hold On”/”On a Dime Woman.”
I linked to any video of those songs I could find, a lot of which seem to show up on the 2018 Anniversary release of Furr. Related…
4) A Great Anecdote About Favorites from Furr
My two favorite tracks on Furr are “Echo/Always On/EZ Con” and “Not Your Lover.” As such, I was tickled to read this little nugget related to both:
“One of the main components of the album's sound was a barely usable out-of-tune piano discovered at the studio one day, and featuring on the tracks, ‘Not Your Lover’ and ‘Echo.’”
5) Eric Earley’s Second Life
I caught a stray snippet in the Talk House interview were Earley talks about a shelter. The Street Roots feature goes deeper into what has become a second occupation for whom, advocacy for homeless veterans and, as the feature suggests, the houseless population in general. He started with an outfit called Do Good Multnomah, working the night desk, but has since graduated to working as a case manager for Greater Good in Clackamas County. That’s super-admirable, obviously, and it both changed his perspective and influenced his later songwriting, as noted in this quote:
“In the homeless community and, I think, American society in general, we hang on to so many things: dreams and aspirations and this pride of individualism. The American Dream and all this is an illusion, but we continue to hang on to it. And so I think a lot of that made its way into the music.”
About the Sampler
For the record, I deliberately steered away from Furr, while still rating it as a fucking great album start to finish. It also doesn’t hurt that I’ve already got a couple favorites on playlists (e.g., “Echo/Always On/EZ Con”), and I’ve played the title track so much that I can barely listen to it…and yet that didn’t stop me from including “Black River Killer,” the super-fun “Saturday Nite,” the rock-kick spectacularrrr, “Gold for Bread,” and, personal, long-time favorite, “Not Your Lover.”
This project was/is about exploration…even if that didn’t stop me from including a (literal) handful of favorites from Destroyer of the Void, aka, the album that pushes Furr as my favorite by them and hard. Those include the tempo-changing/epic title track, lush tracks like “Heaven and Earth,” “Below the Hurricane,” and the simply beautiful, and Alela Diane-assisted, “The Tree.” “Sadie” also made the cut. Great, great album…
Now, the actual exploration…
I’d never heard anything besides the two albums already mentioned and American Goldwing (repped here with “Astronaut” and “Love the Way You Walk Away”) and Wild Mountain Nation (repped by “Futures & Folly” and what now tracks for me as a (wonderful) throw-back to their earlier material, “Miss Spiritual Tramp”). And, so, to start from the beginning…
I included “The All-Girl Team” from the debut - and I’d call that indicative of Blitzen Trapper’s early sound - but also included “Christmas Is Coming Soon!” as a harbinger of future flexibility/tenderness.
Field Rexx got a bigger chunk of the sampler, with “Love (I Exclaim)” keeping touch with their wilder, early sound, and two (again) gentler, more melodic tunes with “Summer Twin” and the real pop swinger, “Asleep for Days.”
I’ll note without judgment that All Across This Land didn’t move me at all, and I only included “Wild and Reckless” as a kind of WTF reaction to a song that feels misplaced in the Blitzen Trapper catalog. VII worked better than either of them - which could be a function of familiarity as much as anything - and included the rootsy/folksy “Ever Loved Once” and the banging, twangy “Neck Tatts, Cadillacs” to hint at what I liked on that one.
Last, and very much not least, I rated Holy Smokes Future Jokes as the highwater mark of Earley’s latest material (they couldn’t tour to support it because COVID, so that one feels like all him, though a couple members did session work on it). Everything on there is smoother, calmer than Blitzen Trapper’s previous material, but there’s some dynamite stuff on there including, the title track, “Baptismal,” “Don’t Let Me Run,” and, personal favorite, “Masonic Temple Microdose #1.” All those sound more or less like Blitzen Trapper songs, but there's definitely a lonelier feel to them all.
And that’s it for this one, yet another example of my failure to achieve brevity. Till the next one...
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