Thick As Thieves: Writing Concept Songs In A Singles Age

By Christopher Brook
Photos by Derek Kouyoumjian

“Songs should be like any good piece of fiction,” says Tyler Littwin, singer/guitarist of Cambridge’s Thick As Thieves. “You should have ups and downs, moments of tension and moments of release.”

Literary metaphors aside, it’s still hard to shake the fact that the four of them are hunched over vanilla frappes and cheap fries instead of poetry anthologies and atlases.

By Sunday afternoon, Boston’s Pour House is buzzing. Taps of Harpoon IPA are flowing, college students filter in and out and NCAA basketball is broadcast across flat screen TVs. Within minutes, it seems like meeting Thick as Thieves over periodicals at the local public library would be more fruitful than hunkering down with them in a corner of restaurant.

Amid the hustle and bustle, Littwin orders a greasy burger and proceeds to discuss his band’s new record with the kind of rapt attention that’s usually reserved for authors.
This is because Littwin, who plays alongside Mike Cotter, drums, Kellen Kleinfelter, bass, and Aaron Benson, guitar, is keen on drawing parallels between music and books. Littwin and company, whose songs can be likened more to chapters in a book have explored this relationship as of late, crafting longer and more fleshed out songs for their new record. The band relished the opportunity to discuss how True Believers in the Long Walk Home, their second self-released long player, came to be.
True Believers..., the band’s follow-up to 2006’s We Planted Driftwood and Nothing Happened, seems expansive in every sense of the word. Culling songs from different stages of their four-year existence, the album, follows a loose concept translated through the band’s reinvigorated sound.

For a band that counts “misleading romantic literature” among their MySpace influences and boasts an English degree-toting singer, it seems apt that Thick As Thieves’ songs flirt with prose. Yet, writing a concept record poses a challenge. Often bands must balance both ambition and discretion when whittling down songs and choosing tracks, thus possibly overstuffing the album, a common malady faced in non-conceptual pieces as well.

It only seems fitting, though, that Thick as Thieves was forged through academics. Kleinfelter and Benson grew up together in Michigan. Benson later met Cotter at Berklee and the framework for Thick as Thieves was formed. The two toyed around with an experimental guitar and drum sound at first, producing an album called Telemakos Airlines. The two ultimately realized their songs called for a fuller band sound. Kleinfelter, who had wound up in Boston, busying himself with assorted bands and music of his own, was eventually recruited by his old friend to play bass. Littwin, recently graduated from Colgate University with a bachelor’s degree in English in hand, filled in for vocal duties soon after.

While concept records are intended to convey a more thematically united series of thoughts through music, there’s a difference between books and records. Novels are rarely sold by the chapter, whereas records, especially in the burgeoning age of iTunes, can be purchased individually, on a song-by-song basis.

Therein lies a problem. If a record, especially a concept record, is intended to be a fully realized idea, how can it be consumed without listening to its tracks beginning to end?
On iTunes, some copyright holders have even mandated their CD be purchased as a whole, forbidding the sale of individual tracks. It’s from this that a question mounts: how do you sell albums in a singles-based world?

Though the idea is heavy on their minds, Thick as Thieves refuse to believe that music should be taken too seriously. “We’re not going to go to that extent,” says Littwin laughing, “We’re pretentious assholes but we’re not going to be that extreme and not let people buy it.”
“I’d rather walk away with someone having our record paying nothing,” says Littwin, in line with such practices.

Even Nine Inch Nails, certainly no strangers to the concept record (2007’s Year Zero visuliazed dystopian future), did something similar in 2008. By releasing a collection of instrumental music, Ghosts I-IV for free, NIN mastermind Trent Reznor allowed listeners to download the concept record and see the big picture, instead of restraining what they could listen to.

Concept albums do not always have to follow a central character’s plights and struggles however. Albums such as Radiohead’s OK Computer (dependence on unreliable technology) and even The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (the course of a blossoming to souring relationship) are concept albums but in a thematically exclusive fashion. Like these two landmark albums, True Believers... isn’t forcing the subject matter into a narrative structure (i.e. Tommy).

While any songwriter will claim their songs follow a certain theme if they’re written in the same span of time, the songs on True Believers... do more than just that. Littwin’s songs are influenced by poems by 18th century poet William Blake. In particular, “The Proverbs of Hell,” written in 1790, commingles the good and the bad. Taken from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the poem waxes philosophical, claiming that “reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.”

While it may sound a bit heavy-handed at first, Littwin admits the songs seem stronger when seen through the lens of Blake’s poem. Specifically, the poem’s third line spoke volumes to Littwin: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” This concept, the idea that people won’t really know what’s best in the world until they’ve done it all, echoes through the record.

“Blake is generally outlandish in his own way, but these lines struck me as being surprisingly poignant,” he says. According to Littwin, the songs tackle the idea of extremes through a larger theme of losing control. Stressing that the losses can be either good or bad (like losing the one person you loved or losing yourself in rock and roll) Littwin describes that ultimately, you’re going to be alright in the end.
Hence the record’s title, True Believers in the Long Walk Home.

“The trip might leave us exhausted, confused, hung-over, or lovesick, but we’ll make it back,” says Littwin.

Each track on True Believers... is rooted in this concept of excess. It’s a record about dealing with transition and the start and end of things. Whether it’s excess happiness or misery, Littwin hopes each song serves as a documentation of experiences that people go through.

“You look back and realize that this was the greatest day or this was the worst day of my life,” says Littwin about some tracks.

Writing concept records isn’t exactly new territory for Thick as Thieves. We Planted Driftwood and Nothing Happened was loosely based around the idea of change and how easily small towns can lose their character.

Unlike Driftwood, though, where songs shared a geographically defined element, songs on True Believers... resonate fuller. Tracks are held together by a more cohesive strain of ideas, which in turn creates a more satisfying listen.
While a common songwriting bond fortifies True Believers..., the record is complemented musically by a more realized sound as well.

The band cites one song, “Mars Vigila,” as serving as the template for the new record. Released a few months previously as a preview of things to come, everything about “Mars Viglia,” from its arrangement to its production, sparked the recording sessions that eventually led to True Believers....
As added encouragement, friends heaped praise on the song, which the band released as a mini-single of sorts at the tail end of last year. It was a “we can do this record” mentality, according to Benson, that inspired them to move forward with the album.

For Littwin, “Mars” was a way to test the band’s waters. Having not put out a record since 2006, by offering the song to fans, Thick as Thieves were able to gauge how people would receive their new fuller sound and push forward.

Marked by lush atmospherics and a hooky refrain (“They’re out of the bars and into the streets”), “Mars Viglia” isn’t just the centerpiece of True Believers...; it serves as a dramatic watermark - even an audible turning point for the four piece. After laying the groundwork for the album at Allston’s Mad Oak recording studio last December, Benson produced the remainder of the album in bedrooms across Boston.
Much like Littwin, Benson speaks with an unnerved sense of diligence, describing even the littlest things the band would do to tweak their sound.

Benson describes how a lot of the band’s music is influenced by elements taken from the room they’re in at the time. Recording their first album at Berklee, there was no shortage of instruments. Logically, the band used what was available, accenting songs with timpani drums, a piano and a “huge concert bass drum.” At one point in a recent recording session, Cotter even played percussion on a cow-print ottoman. According to a blog chronicling the recording, the ottoman, named “Bessie,” has been an endless source of inspiration for the band.

Overall however, the instrumentation on True Believers... is much more diverse. Roping in friends from Boston’s The Shills to play horns and peppering in bits of Rhodes piano, the songs sound deeper than previous efforts.

“We were definitely more willing on this record to branch out from the guitars-vox-drums format,” Littwin says of the songs’ cushioned sound.

By being able to incorporate more instrumentation, it’s only natural that the band felt more comfortable writing longer songs. With more room to stretch their proverbial wings, the band aimed to give their new songs more room to develop and breath without, as Littwin described, “prog-rock wanking.”

Songs like “Goodnight Danny-Boy” press the five-minute mark while songs from the last record would clock in around the more conservative 3:30 minute mark.
Clearly, for Thick as Thieves, writing longer songs complements the concept record’s form of storytelling.

“Mars Viglia,” another song of five-plus minutes, features gauzy electronic dirges, which segue from one song to another.

Having longer songs also allowed the band to gussy up arrangements. While the band’s previous output may have treaded poppier ground, their new material is entirely conscious of where it’s going. “I Heard A Pin Snap Loose” eases subtly into “Goodnight Danny-Boy” while a horn section from the first track resurfaces in the last track.

“We were very conscious of the pacing and mood of the track listing when working on this record,” Littwin says.

True Believers..., however, has been better sequenced than past efforts. For instance, the anthemic “First News From the Zephyr,” easily transcends into “Weak End with No End,” a cool, electronic number. Elsewhere, “There Were Sparrows,” a plaintive, acoustic guitar-driven piece about Littwin’s deceased father is the perfect closer. While the songs’ subject matter may be about transition, the music fits this mold as well,

giving the half-hour album a better pace and flow.

By using literary prowess and musical know-how, Thick as Thieves have plotted the release of True Believers... to a T.

When asked about how the record will look, the Thieves know how to respond.
Benson thrusts an iPhone across the table and pulls up a .PDF file of the record’s cover, complete with an intricately drawn red octopus sprawling across light blue panels.

The band plans to offer the file as a download from iTunes when True Believers... is uploaded to the internet this summer.

While questioning skeptics isn’t something the band should have to worry about, one has to wonder if there’s anything this band hasn’t though of.

It makes sense though. With a fine anthology of poetry or 500-page novel, the order of the pages has been predetermined for months. Why should a CD be any different? A lot of Thick as Thieves music plays through like a book, and like any good listening experience, the songs unravel like slow spools of thread over the course of the disc.
Surely, just as the band intended to.

www.musicforthieves.com