On August 7, Space Quaker celebrates its debut album, First Day, with a record release show at Off Broadway (3509 Lemp). Especially for a debut, First Day is a densely constructed work, with layers of horns and keyboards dramatizing lead singer/guitarist Robin Harvey’s songs.
It’s heady stuff for a songwriter who, by her own admission, is relatively new to writing songs and playing guitar.
Get a guide to the region’s booming music scene
Subscribe to the St. Louis Music newsletter to discover upcoming concerts, local artists to watch, and more across an eclectic playlist of genres.
“I’ve always loved music, but never fancied myself to be a musician,” Harvey says. “In the later half of the pandemic, I was living in Fort Worth, Texas, and doing my first job out of law school, and really feeling like there was something missing in my life. So I decided to just go buy the cheapest guitar I could find and start learning to play.”
Harvey started by learning songs by Bill Callahan, whose Smog and solo records are known for their carefully chosen, symbol-heavy lyrics. Once back in St. Louis, she recruited on Facebook for a Callahan cover band. That band, dubbed the Kill Billihans, played a one-time set at the Tiny Bands Fest.
That same week, Harvey saw Callahan play a show in Urbana, Illinois. “I told him that I was going to be playing some of his songs at a show,” Harvey explains. “And his response was, ‘Why aren’t you playing your own songs?’ And that got me thinking, ‘Well, I guess I could try to write songs.’ And I just sat down and wrote ‘Dream Logic,’ and kept going.” (First Day does include one Callahan cover, “Ride My Arrow” from 2013’s Dream River.)
As she continued to write originals, the Kill Billihans transformed into Space Quaker. Harvey, a practicing Quaker, says the name was inspired by a sci-fi book, and that the band itself follows Quaker principles to some extent. “The title First Day is a Quaker phrase to describe the Sunday,” she says. “In our live show, there’s a lot of somewhat repetitive space in the songs, but with the opportunity for band members to kind of say their piece when they feel led to with their instrument.”
The core band includes lead guitarist Andy Lewis, keyboardist Matt Daisy (Hilleren), drummer Jon Belsheim, and bassist Evan Geiger. Geiger also produced, mixed, and mastered the record. Live, the band can include up to eight members at a time, depending on who’s available. Describing how the songs come together, Harvey says, “I’ll bring kind of a skeleton of a song and then we all work on that arrangement together. So whoever’s there helps make the song what it is. Sometimes I’ll hear a specific part and be like, ‘OK, can you play this specific thing?’ And then they’ll do that. Some members came from a free improv background, so there’s some interest in allowing space for improvisation. But I don’t have a ton of control, and I really don’t want to, either. There is an element of not knowing what’s going to happen exactly that I think is really fun.”
Much of First Day takes place in a liminal space between past and present. The album opens with a devastating Texas flood (“98 Flood”) and ends with an escape (“Way Opens”). In between, the songs are haunted by ghosts, shadows, memories, dreams, and plans. Harvey frequently sounds as if she’s still working out her thoughts and emotions, returning to one phase for minutes at a time. The characters in these songs haven’t learned from their mistakes, necessarily, but they’re at least in the contemplative stage.
“Several of them were written right around the same time when I first started writing songs,” Harvey recalls. “I was really on a kick and had a lot of momentum. That was an amazing time of first playing with other people, first performing, all of that. So I think I just had a lot of feelings to get out that lended themselves well to songs.”
In addition to Space Quaker, Harvey is also involved with the Workers’ Choir, a recently formed group assembled to sing labor songs at rallies and protests. The group is associated with Bread and Roses, a local nonprofit. “I work for a union that represents journalists and nonprofit workers,” Harvey explains. “One of our members lives in North Carolina, and runs the labor chore in Durham. Every time I’d bring it up to someone here, they’d be like, ‘Oh, I want to do that. That sounds fun.’ Anybody can come up and sing. I think it’s serving as catharsis for a lot of people right now.”
But with First Day out into the world, and the momentum growing, Harvey’s looking toward the second and subsequent days. “We sat on these songs for a long time,” she says. “Not to anyone’s fault, but I didn’t know if I even wanted to record music for a long time. We’ve really been playing the same set for a long time now, and I’m excited for a new chapter.”
Click here for more information on Space Quaker and the new record.
