Lullaby For The Working Class - Fragments of a Shattered Dream

There are dreams from which we wake too soon, dreams abruptly interrupted that leave behind the regret for sweetness barely tasted, along with the awareness that something beautiful has vanished forever. All that's left, then, is to try to close our eyes and piece together the scattered fragments of that dream, now so terribly far away. This monograph is precisely an attempt to tell the story of a shattered dream, one that lasted only four years and unfolded across the grooves of just three albums, a distant dream called Lullaby For The Working Class.

To begin this story, we need to travel back in time to 1994 and across space to Lincoln, Nebraska, USA.

The mid-90s are a kind of past/present, a period still too close to us to be fully consigned to history, yet, if you think about it, already terribly distant. The last moments of the world as we once knew it, a split second before PCs, the internet, mobile phones and digital technology stormed into our homes and our daily lives, radically changing our habits and our very way of being. A millennium ago, in the truest sense of the word.

Well, in 1994, a moment before the present definitively became the future, changing our lives forever, Ted Stevens and Mike Mogis, two twenty-somethings from Lincoln, a city of around 250,000 souls lost in the endless plains of Nebraska, decided to start making music, forming the first nucleus of a new band. Ted Stevens, in truth, hails from nearby Omaha, but that barely makes a difference.

"Somewhere in middle America", that's how the Counting Crows describe Omaha in one of their poignant songs, which captures the essence of an entire state, Nebraska, made up half of endless farmland and half of bleak, interminable empty plains frequently swept by terrifying tornadoes. Not exactly a cheerful place, nor a particularly welcoming one, whose inherent sadness had already inspired a still-young Bruce Springsteen to make one of his most introspective and intense albums.

Let's imagine (though we could be wrong) that in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1994 there wasn't much to do, and music must have seemed like a great way to escape the tedium of deep small-town America. Ted Stevens is a singer and guitarist, Mike Mogis a multi-instrumentalist who handles stringed instruments in general remarkably well: with the addition of a bassist (A.J., Mike's brother) and a drummer (Shane Aspegren), the new group's line-up is practically complete, although the band will always remain a kind of open collective welcoming the participation of various musicians, helped in this by the strong spirit of collaboration within Nebraska's surprisingly lively music scene.

The name chosen for the newborn band is truly inspired: Lullaby For The Working Class. The origin of the name was soon shrouded in legend, and over the years the band's members have enjoyed frequently changing their story, first claiming it was a quote from some unspecified essay by Leo Tolstoy, then revealing (half-jokingly) that it was actually an ironic nod to Ted Stevens's day job at a mattress store.

In Lincoln, the Mogis brothers own a recording studio called Whoopass, and it's precisely there that, without having yet found (or perhaps even sought) an interested label and, in truth, without ever having played together live, the new band takes its first steps.

The maturation process of the material that will make up the debut album of the newly formed Lullaby For The Working Class is slow and methodical, starting in 1994 and continuing for well over a year and a half, until April 1996. A demo of the songs is sent to the New York label Bar/None, which proves extremely interested, so much so that it signs the band led by Ted Stevens, arranges a tour as far as the Big Apple during which Lullaby For The Working Class can finally perform live for the first time and, despite uncertainties and technical problems, gather excellent reviews and even come close to playing a temple of rock music like New York's CBGB's, performing in the Gallery, a kind of small annex of the famous venue on the Bowery, in Greenwich Village.

On the strength of these excellent premises, in the course of 1996, the Nebraska band's debut album is finally released.

The first record by Lullaby For The Working Class, recorded for Bar/None and distributed by Rykodisc, is titled Blanket Warm, and it is an unqualified masterpiece. If we wanted to pigeonhole the album's songs into a genre, we might call it alt-country (or "Americana", as they say in the US), heavily infused with folk. Among the influences (or more simply the elective affinities) of the Lincoln band, it's natural to mention the richly orchestrated country of their contemporaries Lambchop, the introverted folk of Bonnie "Prince Billy" and his Palace Brothers, and the melodic, direct country rock of early Wilco.

Be that as it may, Blanket Warm is a splendid and intricate record, rigorously acoustic, possessed of a deep and mysterious beauty, extremely varied, at times ironic, and enriched by the participation of a considerable number of additional musicians, with strings (Chris Gordon, Anil Seth), horns (Nate Walcott, Nathan Putens, Andy Strain, Jonathan Hischke) and percussion (Clint Schnaze).

The album opens with the splendid "Good Morning", just over three minutes of moving instrumental crescendo and a few seconds of poetic vocals describing the cycle of life through the metaphor of the rising sun and its greeting to the city's buildings ("Good morning, says the sun to all the buildings. You look like you've been up all night. There's no more room in heaven, so when you tumble down, your bricks will lay foundations for new structures, roads and towns"). Lively, rhythmic and extremely melodic is the collection's second track, bearing the unsettling (hopefully ironic!) title "Honey, Drop The Knife", while the following "Turpentine" is a country song with an introverted, languid gait that suddenly fills with intensity and emotional tension.

The fourth track, bearing the deeply poetic title "Spreading The Evening Sky With Crows" and sorrowful lyrics that remind us how fleeting beautiful things are ("All good things must come to an end"), is without doubt one of the collection's high points: an extremely sweet and evocative song. But Lullaby, fortunately, don't take themselves too seriously, and immediately dilute their melancholy with the lively, fun "Boar's Nest" (a reference to the eponymous bar owned by the "villainous" Boss Hogg in the goofy TV show "The Dukes Of Hazzard"), before calming the waters again with the almost entirely instrumental interlude "Eskimo Duel Song" and the bare-bones alt-country of "Three Peas In A Pod", which leads into the album's greatest masterpiece, the splendid, sweeping "Rye", whose gait alternates calm, reflective moments with thrilling crescendos, with Ted Stevens's voice, now sweet, now furious, shaping a song of rare beauty.

Just enough time to relax through the decompression chamber of the pleasant but less significant "The Queen Of The Long Legged Insects", and we arrive at the strings of the deeply intense and poignant Americana of "The Drama Of Your Life", yet another landmark on an incredible album given the consistently high quality of its songs. Horn section and atmospheres that seem to nod to contemporaries Lambchop on "February North 24th St", while only guitar and voice feature on the beautiful "The Wounded Spider".

A record that opens with a track titled "Good Morning" can only close the circle with a track titled "Good Night": a few seconds of music and several minutes full of the silence of the night, filled only by the song of crickets and, towards the end, the distant roar of a car fleeing into the darkness, accompanied by a few moments of indistinct voices. A poetic and beautiful farewell for an album made of music, but also of silences and rarefactions, of pauses and crescendos, of restrained feelings and emotional outbursts.

Unforgettable too is the album's artwork (on the cover, a boy sleeps with his face hidden in the pillow; on the back, the same boy, visibly struggling, pulls himself up to sit on the bed: in both cases his face is never visible), which seems to symbolize a kind of resigned, withdrawn approach to life — not quite nihilistic, perhaps just sorrowful and listless.

These were the years when fans of American independent music split enthusiastically between the intricate sonic geometries of so-called post-rock and the bare, essential sounds of alt-country bands like Lambchop, Willard Grant Conspiracy and 16 Horsepower. Lullaby For The Working Class were unanimously filed under this latter camp, and their debut quickly became a cult album for a small but fiercely devoted following, also earning a number of positive reviews here in Italy.

The follow-up to Blanket Warm didn't take long to arrive: it came out in 1997, just a year later, under the title I Never Even Asked For Light. The record was produced by the Mogis brothers, recorded once again at the usual Whoopass Studios, and released again by Bar/None Records, distributed by Rykodisc.

With the new record, Lullaby For The Working Class confirmed their nature as an open collective welcoming the most varied and disparate collaborations, helped along by the fertile, supportive musical underground of Lincoln, Nebraska and surroundings, and once again enlisted the usual parade of additional musicians, among them the ever-present Nate Walcott on trumpet, who by this point was less a simple session player than a de facto extra member of the band.

Something had changed, though, in the "Little Lullaby Orchestra": the surging music of the debut had grown sparser, shyer, more introverted, the melodies far less inclined to "come out" than on the first album, the moods turning more autumnal, dark and overcast — as is easy enough to guess from the bleak artwork, with four small images (three blurred night shots and a chest X-ray) set against a funereal black background.

If Blanket Warm had closed with the chirping of crickets, the new collection opens with the faint twittering of birds underscoring a short, melancholy, untitled folk ballad ("Untitled") for guitar and voice. Far livelier and more eventful is the second track, "Show Me How The Robots Dance", probably one of the album's high points, while "Irish Wake" pleasantly surprises and disorients with its constant shifts and intricate sonic textures.

Melancholy and introverted is the delicate "Jester's Siren", which sets up perfectly the album's masterpiece, the propulsive "Hypnotist (Song For Daniel H.)", a magnificent country-rock sweep that wouldn't be out of place in the most epic Willard Grant Conspiracy songbook (think "Flying Low") or on the soundtrack of some modern western. Americana surfaces again in the pauses and sudden surges of "In Honor Of My Stumbling", while the mood turns impetuous once more on "The Sunset & The Electric Bill" and "Descent".

Decidedly calmer, more reflective and, perhaps, less compelling are the folk songs "This Is As Close As We Get" and "Bread Crumbs". The album closes with a mournful, introverted three-part suite titled "The Man vs. The Tide" which, much as happened on Blanket Warm and on "Untitled", the opener of this second collection, enriches the music and vocals with "ambient" sound effects (in this case a rushing sound, whether waves or rain it's hard to tell, and the final rumble of a small plane passing overhead).

Ultimately, I Never Even Asked For Light is a good record, but not an easy one to approach, often introverted and melancholy, only occasionally managing to match the heights reached by its predecessor.

Lullaby For The Working Class once again prove their considerable ability to build complex melodic structures that never feel trite, but this time the alchemical miracle, the philosopher's stone that had turned their debut into a stunning masterpiece, doesn't quite find the right measure to turn lead into gold — and even the small cult following the Lincoln band had carved out for itself began looking elsewhere, hungrily chasing the next big thing.

The third album by Ted Stevens and co., once again recorded for Bar/None at Whoopass Studios (which had meanwhile been renamed Dead Space), arrived in 1999, two years after its predecessor. Simply titled Song, the record went almost completely unnoticed, which is truly a shame, because it's an interesting (if quite demanding) work that deserved far greater attention from both audience and critics.

By now the Lincoln band was a genuine "extended family", and once again the list of musicians involved in the project was a long one. Following in the footsteps of bands like Lambchop, the group's music had evolved more and more toward an extremely complex and varied orchestral pop, to which Ted Stevens's subdued, pained vocals lend tremendous emotional weight. The manifesto of Song is arguably the touching crescendo of the opening track "Expand, Contract", which starts out bare and stripped-down before taking on the myriad shadings of vibraphone, pedal steel and dulcimer played by the versatile multi-instrumentalist Mike Mogis, the string section of Tiffany Kowalski, Erin Wright, Liz Schuller and Becky Hamilton, and the horns of Eric Medley and Jeff Poindexter. Sacred music for committed skeptics is the paradox that comes to mind reading the lyrics ("I can't even tell you what is real/ …/ Can you tell me what's important?"), which, for once, enrich an artwork that is otherwise as bare and minimal as usual, with tiny stamp-sized photos set against a cream-colored background.

No additional musicians, on the other hand, for "Inherent Song", yet the blend of sounds generated by the band's four "official" members is so varied and multifaceted as to leave one stunned, while the stripped-down moods of "Asleep On The Subway", underscored by Josh Rouse's trombone and Nate Walcott's flugelhorn, seem to evoke Tindersticks and lend a further spectral tone to a track with anguished, desperate lyrics that are nonetheless not without a disarming streak of self-irony ("Asleep on the subway/ I've been dreaming of Venice/ Having never been there./ Once, I saw a postcard").

"Seizures" is a macabre, apocalyptic folk song with bitter, disillusioned lyrics ("What good is one's toil underneath the sun?"), while the following "Non Serviam" is even more derelict, with Ted Stevens's shaky, trembling voice lending it a further heartbroken tone. After three such intense, harrowing songs, the following "Sketchings On A Bar Room Napkin" and "Kitchen Song", livelier and closer to the moods of the first two albums, arrive like rays of light breaking through thick clouds heavy with rain — even if, without giving up their melancholy, depressive lyrics ("Where have the good times gone?"), those clouds immediately close back in with the leaden folk song "Ghosts", whose lyrics are once again bleak and hopeless ("Pull down the shades/ Unplug the telephone/ Let's disappear/ …/ No one remembers a face or a name/ These struggles are vain/ My love let us fade").

The final farewell of Song — and indeed of the entire Lullaby For The Working Class adventure — is entrusted to the closing "Still Life", by far the most ambitious track the Lincoln band ever recorded: seventeen minutes of an unbroken, demanding orchestral stream of consciousness that definitively tears down the barriers between alternative country and classical music.

Song is certainly not an easy record - rather, it's a tortuous and often almost unreachable work, with a cold, distant beauty, like the light of the farthest stars. Blanket Warm had been made only a few years earlier, yet it already feels as though decades have passed: Song is the classic point of no return, beyond which it becomes objectively hard to imagine a future for a band that, in just three years, seems to have compressed an evolutionary process that would normally take a much longer span of time to unfold. The four musicians from Lincoln evidently realize this too, and the group disbands. In an interview given some time later, Ted Stevens would recount just how difficult the gestation of Song had been, made even more fraught by his own voice problems, substance abuse, and his uncertainty about the validity of the final result.

It's the end of the 90s, a millennium ago, in the truest sense of the phrase. Reconstructing what happened next to the band's founding members (not to mention the many additional musicians) is a fairly daunting task, since, as the saying goes, none of the four has any intention of sitting still, and all of them plunge into the lively, varied Nebraska music scene, giving rise to assorted crossovers and collaborations that are frankly hard to untangle.

Ted Stevens joins Cursive, the Omaha indie-rock band led by frontman Tim Kasher, with whom he records four albums (the last one in 2009), while at the same time, between 2002 and 2005, he runs a more personal project called Mayday (named after the working-class lullaby, May Day, the workers' holiday, clearly underlining the continuity/overlap between the two projects), which produces three albums featuring Tiffany Kowalski, the violinist who had actively contributed, as an additional musician, to the Lullaby For The Working Class trilogy.

Both Cursive and Mayday record for Saddle Creek Records, the Omaha label founded by none other than Mike Mogis, who, having become a sought-after producer and sound engineer, builds a dense web of relationships and connections that lead him to work literally with dozens of bands, to join Bright Eyes - led by Conor Oberst and Nate Walcott, himself a former additional member of Lullaby - as a full-time member, and to become, alongside Oberst himself, one of the members of the supergroup Monsters Of Folk.

No less intense is the activity of A.J. Mogis, who, besides running the Presto! Recording Studios in Lincoln together with his brother (formerly Dead Space, and before that Whoopass) and racking up numerous collaborations with Nebraska bands, plays bass in Criteria, the band led by ex-Cursive member Steve Pedersen, with whom he records two albums, naturally for Saddle Creek. Shane Aspegren, finally, besides collaborating with Bright Eyes on their 2007 album "Cassadaga", forms a band with Frenchman Lori Sean Berg called The Berg Sans Nipple, which records three albums (the last in 2011), oddly not for Saddle Creek but for the New York-based Team Love, founded by Conor Oberst (yet another crossover!).

With all these crossings and overlaps, we're fairly certain we'll have to periodically update an artistic story so complex and far-reaching that it would genuinely deserve a separate feature of its own. And yet, even though various new bands have sprung from their ashes, Lullaby For The Working Class is no more, and those three albums remain there on the shelf - a small, minimal but sturdy cult object for the few who lived and loved them, and for the very few who, not many years later but a millennium removed, perhaps prompted by this very feature, might want to try to gather the fragments of that shattered dream and piece them back together. To dream again, and again.

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