Brian Straw Photo credit: Matthew Chasney
Cleveland-based songwriter Brian Straw has teamed with Wax Mage Records for the double LP, The Hidden Years 2000-2007, which offers a retrospective of the artist’s creative evolution during his early years with selections from his out-of-print CDs Once You’re Lost You’re Encouraged To Stay Lost (2000), Backfeed Pools (2001), and Bleeding Sun (EP 2004 and LP 2006), and more. The double LP saw release on February 14.
In the video premiere for “Wreck of Dreams,” a simple strummed figure underpins Straw’s lived-in baritone, a voice that can soar as well as brood. A noir-ish interlude soon shuffles into a guitar and vibraphone dust-up that would anticipate The National and other indie powerhouses.
Brian Straw was born in the mid ’70s in small town Indiana. Music started to drive and inspire Straw’s creative pursuits and aspirations at an early age. That fire in his belly, was, and still is, his calling card – as a continually evolving artist with a deep thirst for expression and discovery.
As a teenager in Indiana, Straw began writing/composing music, playing in bands, and plotting his artistic path. Straw attended Oberlin Conservatory for composition, but dropped out after a couple semesters and moved to NYC with his band. The band broke up in short order and Straw then made the decision to change directions drastically, and start over in Cleveland. Straw found his people and his new home at Speak In Tongues (the DIY punk venue). There, Straw forged new musical ideas based around noise, improvisation, and experimentation.
At his first few shows at Speak In Tongues you would hear Straw screaming in his acoustic guitar soundhole, bowing layers of drone with a homemade gas can cello and utilizing various other inventive sonic techniques for added texture and confusion. This new sound came in stark contrast to his humble songwriting beginnings. Straw saw an opening there though and fiercely accepted the challenge of morphing between these two opposite extremes.
On Straw’s solo debut from 2000, Once You’re Lost You’re Encouraged To Stay Lost, these musical dichotomies are on full display. Presenting a forward thinking artist unbound by convention or the boundaries of expression.
In 2003 Straw began collaborating with seminal instrumental band, The Six Parts Seven. It was a beautiful marriage that helped foster Straw’s songwriting chops to a new level. This collaboration came to fruition on the 2004 release, Bleeding Sun EP, and in 2006, a full-length LP version.
Straw made the rounds in the early 2000s touring nationally with The Six Parts Seven and solo tours throughout Europe. Life got in the way though. Straw found himself saddled with addiction issues and put everything away for nearly 15 years. Through years of therapy, personal growth, and eventual sobriety, Straw made a loud and meaningful return in 2022 with the new double album, Baby Stars/Dead Languages. Revealing a “lived in”, emotionally raw, and musically cultivated Straw. The artist is currently in the studio and very close to finishing a new record.
It’s been nearly three years since Brian Straw released his masterful vinyl debut, Baby Stars/Dead Languages, having previously set aside his singer-songwriter pursuits for a good decade-and-a-half to attend to his struggles with alcohol.
Fans of that double LP—and concertgoers who have enjoyed Straw’s spellbinding performances over the years—have much to celebrate with this new compilation of recordings pressed to vinyl (and available digitally) for the first time. The Hidden Years 2000-2007 offers a retrospective of Straws’s creative evolution during his early years in Cleveland (he’s originally from Indiana), with selections from his out-of-print CDs.
“Morphing between opposite extremes of tension and release” is how Straw describes this assemblage of tracks from studio, demo, and live recordings. “Especially in those early years you hear a bent toward experimentalism, noise, and improv.”
“Veins” announces the album with heavy drum downbeats, vibraphone, slide guitar, and a clean, naturalistic production style. “Cuyahoga” is a haunted Appalachian drone on a homemade washtub/sitar-type instrument that Straw and his late friend Ted Flynn built while decamped at Cleveland’s storied Speak in Tongues DIY space.
“My songwriting took a big step forward when I started collaborating with Akron’s Six Parts Seven,” Straw says. The fruits of that partnership, first heard on Bleeding Sun, melded a certain expansive, “midwestern” guitar sound with Straw’s dusky ruminations. Album standouts “Absentee” and “Bleeding Sun” sound monumental. I especially love “Absentee,” the steady roll of its verses and the crash of its chorus, its guitar drama finally settling into a serene piano, vibraphone, and lap-steel afterparty. There is a seriousness to this music. One imagines Straw’s slow-burn narratives and trance-inducing fingerstyle would make for a fine soundtrack to any number of film adaptations of Russell Banks novels.
The Hidden Years also features stripped-down demos and improvised feedback squalls, like the maelstrom “Black Noise.” Pulled from a live set, this is a terrifying shriek from beyond—or a mic’ed up washing machine. A forgotten board recording from a 2007 set in Switzerland rewards with “Don’t Know Why.” This one put me “in the room” again, watching Straw strike his wide-bodied guitar, fingers splayed like a talon.
A never-released studio gem, the waltz-y “Sweet Miranda” further shows the breadth of his meanderings, here in a Tom Waits-ian direction, complete with accordion and piano. The guitar dirge “Respond” recalls Cat Power’s raw, early recordings and use of negative space.
Adventurous listeners who brave Side Four of this double-LP set will confront “Eve at Hand,” a metronomic guitar figure grown distorted and anguished, and the 13-minute noise piece “Backfeed Pools.”
Along with his addiction struggles that swallowed up those long years preceding Baby Stars/Dead Languages, Straw might also consider himself a recovering perfectionist who has managed to accept the always-shifting limitations of creative practice, when performances and recordings inevitably fall shy of one’s aspirations and short of perfection.
“I tried to move on from these early works, feeling that nothing met my expectations,” he says. “I was still learning how to write songs, record music, and navigate my artistic path. These recordings represent an honest reflection of who I was at that point in my life . . . my younger self finding his way.”
Order the record here. The Wax Mage artist signature variant pressing is limited to 100 copies and every record has a unique hand-poured vinyl design.
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