The Birth Of The Babies
+ A Demo Of MOONLIGHT MILE
Bands are sacred, beautiful and complicated - bands are a family. I was young when I played in bands, having left my two most important ones by the time I turned 25. Those were my college years - and though I never went to school, I learned more about the world and how to survive in it playing in bands than had I done anything else.
I always say that with Woods I learned the blue collar skills of being a musician; how to wrap cables, drive long distances and haul gear, etc.
But with the Babies I learned how to be a front person and to marry the songs living inside of me with the outside world. I could have never have done this on my own, and for that, the Babies remain one of the most special and pivotal experiences of my life.
But like most bands, things got complicated and exhausting, and despite our love for one another, we eventually, quietly, stopped playing and all went on to do different things with our lives.
This year, though, the world will see the return of the Babies and I couldn’t be more excited. We are playing two shows in both LA and NYC. One show in each location has sold out but there are still tickets to the second nights, so get them here.
In the spirit of the Babies return, I have decided to map out a little history of our time as a band in a few different posts along with some demos of me practicing some of the songs that we’ll be playing at our upcoming shows, beneath the pay wall. For this post, you can listen to Moonlight Mile.
I’ll do my best to remember the important landmarks on the roadmap that is The Babies, and will begin, where all things begin; the beginning.
In 2008, when I was 19 years old, I moved into a two bedroom apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn with my friend Cassie Gryzmkowski (most commonly known as Cassie Ramone), where she lived with a roommate. I was in between places and in need of a quick solution and Cassie offered that we section off a corner of her living room floor and she charge me $300 dollars rent. And so we did just that; I bought a few plastic tablecloths from the 99 cent store and we hung them like curtains from the ceiling around a small air mattress and we called it a room.
Cassie and I spent a lot of time together during that period. We’d cook food, go to parties and frequent punk shows. But more than anything we would sit around the apartment drinking beer listening to records and playing guitars while we bonded over artists like X, The Velvet Underground and Daniel Johnston. It was there that we would draft the first sketches of what would later become Babies songs.
After sleeping on the (eventually deflated) air mattress in my makeshift room for three months I jumped at the opportunity to move into a house known as Rear House - which housed my favorite band at the time, Woods - when I learned that a room had just opened up. Shortly after moving in, as fate would have it, I was asked to join Woods and began my life as a touring musician.
Around this same time Cassie formed a band called Vivian Girls who experienced overnight success almost as quickly as they were formed and unlike anything our modest scene had ever seen before. After a windfall of critical acclaim over their great self titled debut album, they - a band who had only ever played locally - were catapulted into indie stardom and began traveling the world as they found themselves on the cover of the New York Times art section and were suddenly endorsed by celebrities and rock icons. Cassie was suddenly, almost over night, the queen of the scene.
A year into Cassie and I’s new life as professional musicians we both happened to be back in New York at the same time and ran into one another at a bodega on the way to the same party. Happy to see each other; Cassie suggested we buy some “Road Sodas” and drink them on the way to the party. I told her I had never heard that phrase before and that it sounded like a good band name, mentioning we should do something with the songs we wrote while we lived together. Cassie enthusiastically agreed and just like that, the seeds for a band were planted.
Our first practice yielded great results as Cassie helped me finish a song I had been working on called Meet Me In The City, named after one of my favorite Junior Kimbrough songs. In that same session we also wrote lyrics to one of the chord progressions we had written while living together and called it All Things Come To Pass and fleshed out another instrumental we had written that later became our song Caroline.
As we finished practice, Cassie mentioned that she had just had a meeting with her friend Justin Sullivan, her ex-bandmate in Bossy, as they were compiling their old recordings for a special release in memoriam of their bandmate, and my best friend, Jamie, who had recently passed away. Cassie said that Justin was interested in playing with us if we ever needed a drummer.
Justin was an immediate and perfect fit to help flesh out our sound and together, as a trio, we quickly wrote a handful of songs and booked our first show at a friends party. Suddenly the band felt like it was becoming something real and we decided we needed a better, more serious, name than Road Sodas. Unsure of a good name but needing to call ourselves something for our gig we quickly billed ourselves as Ghost Town.
Both the audience and our set list were tiny - but our first show felt like a big success. It had been years since I had sang my own songs in front of an audience, and here I was doing it next to one of Brooklyn’s emerging stars. Co-fronting the Babies was a lot different then the solo shows I had played in Kansas City as a young teen and singing alongside Cassie gave me a huge boost of confidence and for any of my shortcomings, I knew that she was there to pick up my slack.
Justin, too, felt like a kismet fit to our songwriting and was by far the best drummer I had played with before. I could feel him paying close attention to the details of the songs, getting inside them and reacting to the lyrics as he played to me, rather than with or behind me.
Celebrating outside the show afterward, though, we decided that Ghost Town wasn’t a good fit and we needed to come up with a better band name. After throwing some ideas around for a few minutes one of us, I can’t remember who, threw out “The Babies”. We all contemplated it, agreeing that it wasn’t great, but it definitely wasn’t as goofy as Road Sodas or as generic as Ghost Town. And so we agreed on The Babies, and we also agreed that we wouldn’t change it again.
And thus, we, the Babies, were born.
below is a recording of me practicing Moonlight Mile, a song off of our second album. I’m playing it on the same guitar - my 1970s Japanese Yamaha nylon string - that I would have written it on some 13? years ago.