And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [23]
GET A DYNASTY TOGETHER
Two weeks later I met Annuals in New York, at a vegan grocery/café on the Lower East Side. They had come to the city for the CMJ Music Marathon, a sort of indie-rock hajj for hundreds of bands, some of whom play to capacity crowds while others, bleeding flagellants, must play to almost no one—as I learned firsthand earlier in the week when, at the 7:00 p.m. set of a band I had liked online (a wistful, countrified act called The Western States Motel), I found myself in an audience of perhaps a half dozen, a situation in which one finds rock bands starting to make discomforting levels of eye contact. But already it had been guaranteed that Annuals would draw a crowd. Although the band’s time slot was poor—number two on a six-band bill—their success at the festival had been essentially preordained, as everyone had seen the online blowup and modified their expectations accordingly. Even the New York Times, the day I met the band, had fingered Annuals, with their “grand, disheveled songs,” as the festival band most likely to make good.
The orchestrator of Annuals was Adam Baker, a scruffy but strikingly purposive twenty-year-old. A meld of hipster and hippie, he wore a green hoodie, rolled-up cords, and junked-out white Asics but also kept a little ponytail and a thin, messy beard, and wore a blue satin cord as a choker. He spoke in a businesslike patter, his eyes darting around, a young man residing very much inside his own capacious head. With his mouth full of some sort of health food, he talked to me about creative control and how he aimed to maintain it. “That’s been, like, our only rider throughout this whole thing,” he said. “You can’t force us to do it any other way than how we know how. We had tried recording with producers from the start, doing all the tracking with someone else and having them at the board? But it really makes us uncomfortable, and the sound doesn’t come out exactly how we want it.”
Instead, Adam recorded and produced all the songs essentially by himself. If he owed his band’s sudden popularity to the Internet, he owed his creative control to an equally revolutionary technology: PC-based sound-engineering software, particularly Pro Tools, which has become cheap (a stripped-down version is free), remarkably powerful, and now basically ubiquitous; Adam is of a generation of musicians accustomed to producing CD-quality music in their teenage bedrooms. He had wrecked one of his eardrums, but unlike rockers of yore he incurred his injury not with amps on a stage but with headphones plugged into a computer.
Lead guitar in Annuals was handled by Kenny Florence, a gregarious, almost antic nineteen-year-old with a baby face and thick black hair closely cropped. The six members of Annuals also played together as a band called Sedona, a sort of indie-bluegrass affair led by Kenny with Adam on drums. In fact, it was while on tour as Sedona, in the van, that they got the call from a record label that had discovered Adam’s Annuals songs on MySpace. Now Sedona lingered in the background while Annuals got its turn. “Annuals is our main project right now,” Kenny said, “but we plan on putting out lots of different albums with lots of different styles and lots of different ideas. . . . We’re planning on pretty much just like—I don’t know what the word is—exploding people’s brains with all of the projects that we’re doing, you know?”
“The intention