BILLY PILGRIM: In the Time Machine

Billy Pilgrim

In the Time Machine

© 2001 Honest Harry Records (783707365527)

CD permanently out of stock. Sorry!

High above the american landscape, floating through time and space. Songs and sounds that combine the roots of america with the soul of a generation.

tracks

1 Open All Night
2 Blindspot
3 C'mon
4 Bluelight
5 Tumblelane
6 Billy In The Time Machine
7 Too Fast Comin' Down
8 Daydream
9 Call it Even
10 She Gets Away With It
11 Hard Rain
12 Epilogue (With You I'm Alive)

notes

Tunes, Technology, and Time Travel: a Billy Pilgrim Biography

Time plays a large role in the world of Atlanta folk rock duo Billy Pilgrim. The name itself was borrowed from the time traveling protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. In The Time Machine, the band's upcoming album, takes that connection even further. "We're trying to play with the unstuck in time idea," offers Kristian Bush, one half of the duo. Strangely enough, the moniker that has served them so well wasn't even adopted until midway into the band's career - prior to 1994, the duo simply billed itself as Andrew Hyra and Kristian Bush.

Andrew, the elder of the two by six years, got a relatively late start in music. A Tulane graduate, he was already in his mid-twenties before he picked up the guitar. Playing along to Dylan and Springsteen records, he soon began setting his own words to music. By the end of the eighties, he had moved to Long Island, where his sister Annie was attending college. Andrew and Annie began singing together and discovered an incredible synergy when their voices intertwined in Andrew's songs.

Upon Annie's graduation, the Hyras relocated to Knoxville. Despite possessing only three or four originals, the brother and sister team performed tirelessly at open mike nights. Their first break came when a club owner took a liking to the Hyras and allowed them to open for more established artists. Several months into their Knoxville residency, a local musician named Kristian Bush introduced himself to the Hyras.

While Andrew had only been playing for a year or two, Kristian had been immersed in music most of his life. Kristian and his brother Brandon were taught to play the violin and piano via a Suzuki method pilot program. Kristian would even play a season in a local symphony before trading his violin for the guitar. It wasn't long before he and Brandon, using a four-track recorder, would commit their own songs to tape.

Kristian had made a number of studio contacts while in his college band, Storyteller. He and the Hyras began performing together. Annie lent her voice to Kristian's Politics and Pocketchange album, and Kristian played guitar on the Hyra's Big Back Porch Songs. Andrew and Annie's partnership would end when Annie took a job in Miami. Left with a string of upcoming Hyras shows, Andrew recruited Kristian to fill in. The pair relocated to Atlanta, where Kristian attended Emory University. Their act fit into the burgeoning acoustic scene well, and within six months they were attracting a crowd. A writer's night with another duo, Ashley and Mark, led to the formation of the Wagonwheels. Wagonwheels shows became very popular, and the group recorded a still-unreleased album. Kristian noted that, for a time, the Wagonwheels became a promotional priority. The "supergroup" of sorts would fall by the wayside as the band discovered there wasn't enough room for four songwriters.

Andrew and Kristian had performed together for about a year when they decided to commit their songs to tape. The pair drove up to Knoxville, where they had booked two days of studio time. Danny Brown, who had produced their previous efforts, manned the boards. In those two days, fourteen songs were recorded and mixed. The resulting record was titled St. Christopher's Crossing, a nod to the patron saint of travelers. Soon, Andrew and Kristian were pounding the pavement, playing hundreds of shows in southeastern college towns. Their perseverance would pay off when Kristian began sending out demos to various booking agents. One fell into the hands of Jen Stark, an intern at Atlantic Records.

Sister Ruby, an indie label, became interested in the band when the Atlantic buzz began. Andrew and Kristian decided to record an album for Sister Ruby that would highlight their "lost" songs. These were songs that wouldn't make the Atlantic debut, quiet songs they couldn't perform in loud clubs. The improvement from St. Christopher's Crossing was "exponential," according to Andrew. He attributed the jump in quality to their increasing confidence. Kristian was a little more blunt: "It was our brains. With St. Christopher's we didn't think, we just did it. This time we had several weeks to think about what we were recording." Andrew came up with the title Words Like Numbers, which was a reference to the D.A. Pennebaker film Don't Look Back, a documentary of Bob Dylan's 1964 tour. In it, Dylan claimed he was a "mathematical songwriter" who used "words like numbers."

With the release of Words Like Numbers, the band's dreams were realized. Andrew recalls the ensuing events: "It was definitely a whirlwind. I remember Atlantic coming down when we released Words Like Numbers. The release party was packed to the walls and everyone was singing our songs. They signed us that night."

With a major label came a name change. Andrew and Kristian had wanted to give the band a proper name, but didn't want to negate the work they'd done to establish themselves. With the promotion they'd get from Atlantic, they decided it was now or never. "Andrew drew up a list of possible names. 'Billy Pilgrim' was at the top," Kristian concludes. "We didn't look any further."

Billy Pilgrim recorded their Atlantic debut at Nickel and Dime studios. Once again, Don McCollister took up bass and production duties, while ex-John Mellencamp drummer Kenny Aronoff pounded the skins. Noted producer Hugh Padgham (Sting, Phil Collins) was tapped to remix the record. He called in a group of London musicians to overdub additional instruments into the mix. The resulting twelve-song album was trimmed to ten songs and released in May 1994 to little fanfare, although "Get Me Out Of Here" and "Insomniac" received heavy airplay on AAA radio. After taking opening slots with any band that the record company could set them up with, the band's big opportunity came when they landed a gig opening for Melissa Etheridge, with whom they shared a manager. "Atlantic missed the boat promoting us. They didn't get the record to the stores. They didn't press enough. We got on a major tour. We were top five AAA. We were hitting on a lot of cylinders, but the machine wasn't geared for it." Andrew contends.

In order to continue building momentum, the band was sent back into the studio in December 1994. Little of the new material had been road tested, and the band was desperately writing two weeks before recording began. The Bloom sessions took place in Nashville, and featured a group of veteran session players who electrified Billy Pilgrim's songs. While the songs may have been Andrew and Kristian's, the sound wasn't. "Atlantic wanted a radio record, and Bloom is a fine radio record," Andrew explains. "It's not so much Kristian and I. The record took on the personality of the producer and players hired."

With Bloom, Billy Pilgrim was poised to make their breakthrough. "Sweet Louisiana Sound," the leadoff single, hit the airwaves. An accompanying video made the rotation at VH1, and Andrew and Kristian even made an appearance on that network's Crossroads show. The duo put together a full band and launched a fall tour, headlining larger venues than they had in the past. Yet in early 1996, the band was dropped by Atlantic.

Where did it all go wrong? Billy Pilgrim's albums and live shows received uniformly positive reviews. Bloom had racked up respectable, albeit unspectacular, sales. As Kristian explains it, "We were victims of Hootie circumstances." At that point, Hootie and the Blowfish were the stars of Atlantic's roster. Just as Atlantic was focused on Hootie, the band's management was focused on its rising star, Melissa Etheridge. In the end, Billy Pilgrim was lost in the shuffle.

Andrew and Kristian were left disappointed and dejected, but also relieved. Working for Atlantic had simply been a pressure cooker. "We weren't in control of what we were doing. We weren't driving the bus, and we weren't comfortable with that," Andrew explained. Kristian, however, still looks back on those days fondly. "Just by being on Atlantic I had done something that I thought was impossible."

The duo toured sporadically, and began work on a new album slated for a fall 1996 release. That date passed, and by December, rumors of a double album had surfaced. Spring arrived and Billy Pilgrim had gone bicoastal, with Andrew moving to California. "I just wanted to explore. I have the kind of life that allows for it and I'm a wandering minstrel of sorts," offers Andrew. "We created different spaces in our lives and I think our music is better for it."

Kristian too kept a low profile, playing an occasional writer's night at Eddie's attic. He began taking production jobs, working with Ellis Paul, Beth Wood, and Evan and Jaron. By this time, Brandon Bush had moved to the Atlanta area. The Bush brothers bought some vintage drum machines and began experimenting with them. Those experiments would eventually lead to Brandon playing a large role in Shawn Mullins' breakthrough album. In the summer of 1997, an Internet post by Kristian announced that he and Andrew would release solo albums. Those, however, failed to materialize.

A year-end tour stretched across the Mason-Dixon line to Columbus and Chicago. At that point, a live album was in the works, to be followed by a new studio release. Any steam that the band had built up, however, dissipated with the news of the "breakup" - an interesting subject. Despite playing a weekend's worth of farewell shows in February 1998, Kristian denies they broke up: "We never said that we wouldn't play together again," he claims. "We're not sure why we sing together, but we've reached the point where we don't believe in accidents." Andrew agrees: "We took that time and became better friends, became acquainted with what each of us needed when we played," adding, "For a long time, I don't think we had that." It became apparent that the so-called breakup was merely a hiatus as a Billy Pilgrim show was scheduled later that summer.

The BP camp grew active again in the spring of 1999. Kristian had discussed Internet music distribution as far back as 1997, long before mp3 or Napster had entered the American vernacular. His nascent plans took shape as he began offering demos, outtakes, and live material via amp3.com and later, mp3.com. "The Internet is allowing the hope that the music business can be consolidated into one online place. Mp3.com allowed us to release a record without anyone first having a say in it," says Kristian.

In June of 1999, Andrew released Spill, his long-awaited solo debut. "Spill was meant to be a catalog of things I'd done over the past four years without having a chance to release it," Andrew divulged. "It's a snapshot, really." Spill was a low-key and highly personal effort split evenly between spare acoustic songs and high-energy rock performances. Originally envisioned as a double album, with acoustic and electric sides, it was cut to one long player due to financial constraints. Spill found Andrew examining still-open wounds ("Great Expectations"), belting out sing-along anthems ("I Believe in Heaven"), and penning Dylanesque social commentary ("Ellie Nestler"). Kristian played on two tracks; surprisingly, Annie didn't make an appearance. Elissa Hadley filled in nicely, though. "Elissa channeled Annie in a way," explains Andrew. "Those were Hyras moments to me."

The fall brought Live from Wildhack, MT via a nontraditional route. This "authorized bootleg" was released through a partnership with mp3.com. Says Kristian, "Wildhack was an experiment, although in retrospect it acts as a bridge because it's very acoustic and the next album isn't." The recording was taken from a December 1998 show at Eddie's Attic and includes many previously unreleased songs. The mp3.com discs were available exclusively online, although the band later made them available to "brick and mortar" stores. Snow Globe, a holiday themed collection, followed in November, and with the release of BeSides, the band came full circle. BeSides bears a certain resemblance to Words Like Numbers: both have a patchwork quality, and contain songs that had previously slipped through the cracks. A second Eddie's show, 9/23/00, was released by year's end. "The synergy we have onstage, and how Brandon has worked into it so beautifully, is really special. I think that really comes across on the 9/23/00 album," Andrew says.

The beauty of the mp3 records was that they not only satiated fans that had been hungry for new Billy Pilgrim music, but also financed new recordings. Over the course of a year, fans bought discs and downloaded songs, resulting in ten thousand dollars in earnings for the band. In a letter to the fans, Kristian wrote, "That was as much your money as it was ours, so we marched right down to the studio and spent every last penny finishing the long overdue Billy in the Time Machine CD."

Billy In the Time Machine will finally see release on May 12, 2001, but it was a long road getting there: the first sessions were underway while the Olympics were staged in Atlanta. In all, it took four sessions, each separated by eight months. The new album has a more collaborative feel, with multi-instrumentalists Brandon Bush and Don McCollister working with Andrew and Kristian on song arrangements. Andrew calls Time Machine "mature" and Kristian calls it "very anthemic." Both agree it is their best work to date. Given the time constraints of their Atlantic albums, Andrew was thankful for Time Machine's prolonged birth, as it allowed him to "interpret songs rather than regurgitate them."

Kristian cited The Joshua Tree as an inspiration for the new record, and while U2's influence has always been apparent in Billy Pilgrim's soaring melodies, a new twist to their sound comes courtesy of Radiohead's Thom Yorke, who has influenced Andrew's vocal delivery. "I'm using more comfortable parts of my range. The record itself is in a richer, more sensuous space," he explains. Despite their newly layered sonic approach, Andrew and Kristian end Time Machine with a stripped-down performance not unlike "Mama Says," "Closed Down," or "Born Again": "With You I'm Alive" is a quiet song, just Andrew singing and Kristian playing guitar. Keeping the album's literary motif in mind, they call it the epilogue.

Billy Pilgrim is a band bursting with grand plans - almost all of which run behind schedule. Such is the case with Billy in the Time Machine, now a year behind its original release date. Fortunately, like all things in the world of Billy Pilgrim, it was just a matter of time.

Matthew V. Zimmerman
Trafalmadore
April 2001

reviews

Please log in to review this album.

email

Please log in to email this artist.