As a musician, Milwaukee's Andy Brawner has played various roles: He's been the bass player for Madison's Pitchfork-approved Pale Young Gentlemen, the drummer / singer more times than he'd like to admit and has taken the stage solo with nothing but his acoustic guitar.
These days his talents fuel Time Since Western, a musical alter ego marked by the poetry of dusty roads and imaginative wanderlust. His lyrics reflect the rich, revealing honesty of Rocky Votolato, while his presentation channels the passionate quiver of Okkervil River's Will Sheff.
With catching, wistful songs that seem bigger than their intimate appeal, he comes across as a local guy with a national-reaching sound. Still, he has a special reverence for his home turf.
"I like Milwaukee, and I want this city to succeed," he says. "I want all the musicians here to have secret meetings in some secret Hall of Justice underneath Lake Michigan. I want us to form a master plan where we all start to support each other and we all make records together and Milwaukee in 2008 becomes Seattle in 1992. (Without all the flannel, maybe.)"
He released his debut album, "A Sun Goes Down," on June 10, and plays Summerfest on July 4 at the Cascio Interstate Music Groove Garage stage. OnMilwaukee.com caught up with Brawner to chat about the Milwaukee scene and how his music fits into it.
OnMilwaukee.com: The first time we talked, you mentioned that half the point of the band is to wonder about what places sound like, and "Why, even though I'm here in Milwaukee, my imagination is planted somewhere out west." Was that in response to my blog about the "Sound of Milwaukee" (which was in response to All Songs Considered's "Sound of a Generation" piece)?
Andy Brawner: A big part of what I'm trying to do in Time Since Western (is) question and explore notions of time and place. (It) sounds kind of academic and impersonal, but it's not, because what I'm really doing is trying to extract stuff from my own imagination.
When I was a kid, our family drove out to Yellowstone for a traditional family vacation. Even though I didn't know it at the time, watching the landscape become western changed everything for me. As for being here in Milwaukee, I have the strange feeling that if I actually lived out west, I might ruin all the magic and mythology that surrounds the west in my head. I mean, something as grand as what's in my head can't actually exist, right? It's this thing I've cobbled together from books and movies and dreams and landscapes that I've watched out of car windows. It's not real. I can't really put my finger on it. I can't say it's an exact place or time.
OMC: If we can talk it a step further, if Milwaukee does have a "sound," how, if at all, does Time Since Western reflect it?
AB: I know very little about Milwaukee music. Kind of like what I said about the west, all I really know of things is the version I create in my head. I've seen some great bands here, like Decibully. I saw them open for Califone and thought they were really great. But what do any of us really have to do with Milwaukee, you know? We may be from here, we may live here, but is there some cultural or geographic truth about this place that's embedded in our music? I really don't know. If I had to talk about big themes in my music -- this will sound so pretentious, and I'm sorry for that -- one of them is transcendence. Transcending the reality of your surroundings. With this record, I tried to find ways to reach that unreachable place in my imagination, to transcend the fact that I was making a record in a spare bedroom in an industrial city in the Midwest. The music became it's own destination. I guess that makes it escapist. Is that a bad thing? I don't know?
I think this music aspires to some other place, some other state of mind. One of my big goals in the whole process was to not feel "local." I don't mean that as a knock on Milwaukee, I mean it as a knock on anything that feels small and half-hearted. You know how when your friend is in a band and he gives you his record, you feel obligated to check it out, but in the end you don't really love it? Like, you don't play it just because you're in the mood to play it? I wanted to avoid that. I wanted to make a record big enough that it could have been from anywhere in the world.
My friend Andy Thiele lives in Milwaukee, but I play his record because I love it. It's the best thing I've heard in a long time. If he were just my friend, I would have listened once and then politely put the CD on a shelf. But he's my friend who happened to make an amazing record. I listen to it because I want to hear those songs. They make me feel better. He played a short set before my CD release gig, and hearing him play totally calmed me down at a very stressful moment. My point is that local doesn't have to feel "local."
OMC: Can you tell me a little bit about your musical background?
AB: I've been playing forever. Grew up playing drums, banging on ice cream buckets when I was4 , started playing other instruments, started singing, blah blah blah. Started playing gigs in bands when I was about 17. I was always writing songs, though not always with a clear plan of how they might make it out into the world.
Played in bar bands, cover bands, wedding bands, even a "blues" band in which I was the drummer / singer. I was drummer / singer more than I care to remember. I owned one of those Phil Collins headset mics so that I could drum and sing at the same time. I was in a cover band where I drummed and sang (Rush's) "Tom Sawyer." I think I want that on my grave when I die because it's probably my greatest accomplishment. I've been solo guy with an acoustic guitar a lot over the last eight or nine years, but I've always cringed just a little bit at the "singer-songwriter" tag.
OMC: Do you consider Time Since Western a solo project? Would you consider bandmates?
AB: It's an interesting question. I've never wanted it to feel like a solo project, but that's kind of ridiculous because I did almost everything on the record. It comes down to the songs, though, and the songs are not really solo songs. Most of them have bass, drums, keys, guitars. They need people.
For the gigs, I have a band. Which is amazing. I'm tired of standing up there by myself with an acoustic guitar. For future records, it would be nice to track some things with other humans. I like music where you can feel that interaction, and it's hard to get that feeling when you're sitting in a bedroom making countless overdubs. Still, if you listen to the Elliott Smith records, he played a lot of those parts by himself, but would you call it a solo project? I honestly don't know. I think giving myself a band name instead of a person's name is part of what raises these questions.
OMC: Do you have any plans to take Time Since Western out west? Or will Milwaukee keep you for a while yet?
AB: It's Wisconsin for now. I'm good at being a dreamer, and if I could look at the Pacific every day, it would be hard to dream about it, you know? If you bring something to life in reality, you might kill it in your imagination. Besides, I feel like something good could happen in Milwaukee. I want it to happen. I want Milwaukee to care. Do you think it's possible?
OnMilwaukee.com staff writer Julie Lawrence grew up in Wauwatosa and has lived her whole life in the Milwaukee area.
As any “word nerd” can attest, you never know when inspiration will strike, so from a very early age Julie has rarely been seen sans pen and little notebook. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee it seemed only natural that she major in journalism. When OnMilwaukee.com offered her an avenue to combine her writing and the city she knows and loves in late 2004, she knew it was meant to be. Around the office, she answers to a plethora of nicknames, including “Lar,” (short for “Larry,” which is short for “Lawrence”) as well as the mysteriously-sourced “Bill Murray.”
