What took so long?

The Beagle Ranch's debut album proves to be worth the wait

Michael White, Calgary Straight, May 30 2002

In terms of prolonged gestation, it may not rival Guns'n'Roses long-promised comeback, or the anti-climax that is the Breeders' return, but the Beagle Ranch's debut CD, Starcrossed, is certainly the result of an artist having taken the scenic route. Calgary singer-songwriter Stephen Bandola - who, for all intents and purposes, is the Beagle Ranch - wrote and recorded the disc's scant 26 minutes of music throughout two years, from 1997 to '99. A further two years was spent designing artwork and scrounging up the cash to release it.

Sitting in a Kensington coffee shop, the genial, soft-spoken Bandola makes no apologies for what might be perceived as a slacker's initiative. There was no pressure," he quietly enthuses, "so it was nice to be able to say, 'OK, when are we going to get together next?' 'Well, I've gotta go to a movie tomorrow night with some friends, and next week I'll be doing thisÉ' It was a slow process."

As well, Bandola is, at 35, wisely past the age when a musician is willing to live in bohemian poverty in order to devote all of his time and energy to his "art." Paying the bills at a day job in stock transfer, Bandola says making his album "saved my life. I definitely needed to exercise the left side of my brain."

Fortunately for everyone, Starcrossed is worth the months and days that produced its disproportionately short length. Released amid little fanfare two months ago, it rates as one of the city's recent unsung musical gems. Melodic, bittersweet, and evocative of the wide-open landscapes that feature on its cover, it recalls the meticulously layered jingle-jangle of early Byrds and their '80s progeny like R.E.M. (circa Reckoning) or California neo-psychsters the Rain Parade. It also drives home how many CDs pad themselves out with substandard filler: Rubber Soul and It's a Shame About Ray also needed less than half an hour to make their point.

For his part, Bandola cites a little-known, defunct British band as the yardstick against which he measured his music - a band that, like the Beagle Ranch, served as the alter ego of one man's vision. "I guess one of the big influences to me through the '90s was the Lightning Seeds," he says. "I always thought what [band mastermind] Ian Broudie did was great; he had a heavy hand in producing a lot of people's music, but, as well, his own songs were great, especially those early albums. I'm sure that 75 percent of people out there don't know that it's one guy behind the band.

"I was never really drawn to 'The band is me' sort of thing. 'The Steve Bandola Band' would have been terrible. I just think there's more mystery, and you can have more fun, with a band name. It seemed like an easier way to ease into it rather than thrust myself into the limelight under my own name."

Bandola also shrouds his identity in his songs. Rather than take the received singer-songwriter path of heart-on-sleeve confessionals, the nine songs that make up Starcrossed deal in vaguely detailed character sketches: "he," "she," "Mary," "Mr. Ordinary World." "I don't really tell a story, per se, about me or about someone I know," he explains. "Even when I write the lyrics, a lot of the time I'll read it at the end and - not that I think 'Oh wow, this is super-deep' - but 'What do I mean by this?" Hopefully, somebody will try and make their own interpretation out of it."

My interpretation, I tell him, is that the album as a whole - its title, its artwork, the lyrics, is about a longing to escape, the unshakeable feeling of being landlocked. A perfect theme, in fact, for an Alberta-based artist who spent a good chunk of the previous decade living in Vancouver. "It's not something that I intended, but hearing you say that, I think you're bang-on," he responds. "The lyrics that I wrote on this album are sort of somebody who's not where they want to be quite yet.

"My friend Jon (Parker, who designed the cover) and I felt that the cover art fit the mood of the music: it wasn't really happy, it wasn't really dark, it was sort of somewhere in the middle, trying to get to somewhere else."

If that implies an incurable case of wanderlust in Bandola, it won't be remedied anytime soon by touring. For the moment, the man is happy to deliver simple, stripped-back solo acoustic appearances at area venues - whether proper music clubs or, as was the case a few weeks ago, a chain coffeehouse. But that, he explains without bitterness, is more a matter of practicality than desire.

"A lot of my friends - people that I would approach to play with me - they've got families. So it just makes it tougher than when you were 21 and nobody had jobs and you could jam all day long; you could pull a band together in two weeks. Not it takes two years to record 26 minutes of music."

Bandola then laughs, perhaps out of knowing that those two years were time well spent.

 

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