From the first cabin stories of Bon Iver — in which Sean Carey drums — to Carey’s current solo work, a Midwestern sense of quiet, relative solitude and grace has been in the air.
Under the moniker S. Carey, he draped traces of snow and memory all over his second album, Range of Light, showing a mid-2000s Sufjan Stevens-esque taste for arrangement, but often fixated around one man percussively playing the piano.
S. Carey and his four-piece band come to The Waiting Room on Sunday night with The Pines, touring inland from the West Coast, back toward the home in Eau Claire, Wisconsin that Carey has always found so paramount to his work.
“I don’t get inspired by cities,” Carey said on the phone last Wednesday. “Part of that has to do with being able to tour and seeing a lot of places. In a way, it makes me want to stay in Wisconsin even more. My music just goes hand-in-hand with the natural world.”
It does appear to be both new and old journeys, not myopia, that softly kindle Carey’s homebody preferences. Range of Light hosts several songs which chronicle his childhood memories of California and Arizona: visiting family, camping, being in nature. It was all close to the forefront when Carey toured through those states this past week.
“Even today,” Carey said, “driving from LA to San Diego, I was like, ‘Oh this is the exit you take to get to my cousin’s house.’ There’s this place called Dana Point. We camped there when I was a kid. A big part of my upbringing was being out here in the summer and just exploring.”
In turn, the artist felt compelled during the band’s live shows this week to try and explain the importance of songs, like “Fleeting Light,” while touring in their locale. It doesn’t always happen.
The stage is overflowing with auxiliary percussion — Carey is a classically trained drummer — and the band is hustling about, doing their best to recreate a record that, at its busiest moments, would take a suite of a dozen chamber musicians to play entirely live. And then there’s Carey’s soft-spokenness, too.
“Every night when we’re playing, I’m thinking about [being in California/Arizona] or trying to think about some way to communicate that to the audience,” he said. “Sometimes, I fail and just don’t say anything. I’m not the best at banter. I don’t really explain.”
On stage on a given night, Carey is also surrounded by guitar, piano, synth, pedal steel and a mini-vibraphone, which the band built. Carey’s first record, 2011’s All We Grow, was a basement-made, mostly solitary endeavor — a little more akin to Bon Iver in terms of the synthesized wash of instrumentation. And Range of Light, recorded at Justin Vernon’s April Base studio, didn’t necessarily mark a commitment to more naturalistic sounds, Carey says, even if it sounds like it.
“I think I just improved as an arranger and producer,” he said. “So those different textures that come in, like woodwinds or violin or the harp, it’s a lot clearer. I like a lot of balance in my music, maybe one song that there’s a lot of stuff going on, and that song followed by a song that’s really simple and almost bare in some places.”
A few tracks on Range of Light hail from past lives for Carey. “Fire-scene,” for instance, preceded the conception of S. Carey the act — a six-year-old song from before he spent years on the road with Bon Iver, the place where he began writing All We Grow.
Chronologically, the song could’ve been included on All We Grow. Personally, it couldn’t.
“It’s about a relationship, not a good experience, kind of just a fling,” Carey said. ”Right after that kind of bombed is when I met my wife. All We Grow is really kind of celebrating that. ‘Fire-scene’ didn’t fit that group of songs.”
The time gap makes sense. To now, it seems comfort has been a lynchpin feeling in most of what the artist has done. It took six years for Carey to let “Fire-scene” stand on its own, for its presence as a song to overcome its subject matter. The feeling of what’s right at a certain moment had guided Carey back into his own memories, into adding an orchestra of instruments to his second album and to recording from his creative center: Wisconsin.
“It’s my home,” he said, “so it seemed like the thing to do.”
Photos by Kayla Roth of S. Carey on July 13, 2014 at The Waiting Room
