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Rich Wooten. Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
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Nick Barbieri. Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
With his recording project Memorexica, Rich Wooten moved into a role out front after years of playing in bands but not as the singer. With the release of The Endless Road, he’s taken on vocal duty while recording an album with a host of veteran musicians who never actually shared a room during the process. In fact, some of them still haven’t met.
“I just started writing songs in the little studio in my garage after my daughter was born a couple of years ago,” Wooten says. “Three of those early songs are on there. When I was having a little bit of writer’s block, I started recording old songs, done for the Falling Martins, but I’d never sung them before. I took them to Mike Martin at the Broom Factory, and he said, ‘I like these songs. Let me bring a couple drummers in.’ Then Pierce Crask came on. And it all mixed up a lot differently than with Falling Martins.”
The songs began pouring forth once the recording began, with 20 considered for the record. Believing in the classic album length of 38 to 45 minutes, he trimmed the batch with Martin to a lean nine cuts, mastered by Jack Petracek, who “warmed up the songs a lot.” The finished result is an album that harks to the 1980s, when bands like Dream Syndicate put together tuneful low-impact rock with a pinch of what came to be known as Americana. It’s a smart, mature album.
“I don’t know how to answer the question about its sound,” Wooten admits. “There’s something that ties it together through the songs, but it’s hard to pinpoint what that is, though a couple of them have a little bit of debauchery, for sure. I do know that I’m ready to go and start writing and recording more.”
Nick Barbieri’s project Poetry Scored grew from work with the local arts organization Poetry Scores, which adapts international poems into a variety of media. In time, those interpretive songs grew into original cuts. And during that process, a longtime drummer gained a new voice as a singer and songwriter.
A move to St. Louis about four years back, after Barbieri had spent much of the last two decades away from St. Louis, began the process.
“I used to drum in The Heebie Jeebies with Kip Loui, Alex Mutrux, and Dave Hilditch,” he says. “It was a really good period of time for original music in St. Louis, with The Boorays, Plaid Cattle, the Sun Sawed in ½…”
Two decades later, he wound up recording with some of the folks who shared those same stages, including Cicero’s Basement Bar. Taking the recording process very much into the now, he traded tracks with collaborators digitally, eventually working with a super-talented trio of producers: Adam Long in St. Louis, Lij Shaw in Nashville, and Meghan Gohil in LA.
“It took about a year and a half,” Barbieri remembers, “but I’m very happy with the results.” The original poems that launched the recording project, he says, “were incredible source material,” and he found it “incredibly humbling and gratifying” when the members of his producing trifecta began to encourage him to record his own new songs as well.
A longtime “singing drummer” with a career in music sales and years behind the kit in cover bands, Barbieri admits that exposing his songs to talented collaborators has allowed him to think that there’s a continuing project in his songs. In relatively short order he’s put together a live band and has “done all the right things” to keep the songs moving.
“We’re at the age where there are no great thoughts of grandiose ideas,” he figures, “but I’ve done everything properly. We’re registered them with [performing rights organization] SESAC. I’ve got vocal and instrumental versions, which we’re shopping for licensing in commercial use. I’ve done all of that work. And in town, we’ll play three gigs a year, maybe four. And we’ll try for some regional. What the hey?”
Nick Barbieri plays the Schlafly Tap Room on October 10 with The Deciders and The Charflies. Wooten’s The Endless Road, meanwhile, can be heard 24/7 on Spotify or iTunes.
