Album Notes

Think Lucinda Williams playing a set in between Hilary Duff and Kelly Clarkson.
Think Wilco playing a set in between Dashboard Confessional and New Found Glory.

Now you’ve got a pretty good idea of what happened when Atherton’s song “California” was picked for the Interscope soundtrack to MTV’s reality series “Laguna Beach: The Real OC.”


“California” from their debut album “Pale Summer” was suddenly blaring in teenage iPods in between flavor-of-the-month pop groups and emo bands. Billboard.com noted the odd band-audience pairing, “Atherton's ‘California’ (tries) to give some widescreen atmosphere to the decidedly small-screen antics of rich kids dating and hating each other.”

Meanwhile “Pale Summer,” to those who never watched reality TV, was striking a chord with diehard alt-country fans, lauded as “charming jangle-twang pop tunes that coax that great, wistful-regretful, screw-this-town feelin’” by Randy Harward of Salt Lake WEEKLY.

Their follow-up, “Skyline Motel,” wisely makes no promises to either of the disparate sides of their fanbase. Moody, jubilant, sweet, sad. Songwriting that evokes Steve Earle and Ryan Adams. Playing that evokes comparisons to Wilco, The Band, Counting Crows, by a band that, like the best, sounds and feels more like a gang than an assembled collective of stiff virtuosos. Recorded almost entirely live in the winter of 2007 with Scott Wiley (Elliott Smith, Ryan Adams) at June Audio in Provo, Utah, “Skyline Motel” is the sound of a band coming into its own.

You hate to single out any one track, especially when you happen to be an album-minded band in a world of singles and mp3s. And especially when you make an album that spans between hushed, insomnia-drenched tunes like Lights of Boston and I Held The Roses and rowdier, backbeat singalongs like Cool Kids and Don’t Let Me Down. It’s an album of snapshots, beautifully framed, some with sunset flares, some black & white. Look through a war widow’s window in She Leaves A Light On. Witness the trading of vows on the brink of the ocean in Mexican Wedding Song. Ride in the backseat, watching a doomed relationship disintegrate in Sing You Song. A band can be about any number of things. With Atherton, the song is the story.

“Skyline Motel” was mastered by Gavin Lurssen (Lucinda Williams, Joe Henry) at Lurssen Mastering, Hollywood.