By Chuck Norton, Photo By: Wes Frazer

In 1989, a motley group of teenagers played their first show at a run-down Birmingham, Alabama bar. Despite lacking a real lead singer, the band played covers of songs by the likes of Van Halen and KISS. After the show, a kid about 19 tells the band members that they need a lead singer, and he’s their guy. He joins the band for a week of practice, and after the next show the following weekend, the band agrees.

Then, in 2006, Cicada happened. With glowing reviews and a recently completed tour opening for Maria Taylor of Azure Ray, 13ghosts is building plenty of positive momentum. But to understand the band is to know why they are enjoying the events of the last year more than any other time in the band’s history.

When Buzz Russell joined Mikey Williams, Brad Armstrong and his cousin Thomas as lead singer of this teenage cover band, success meant a couple of years playing shows with bands like Vallejo at all-age clubs in Alabama. But when Armstrong left the band to move to New York City for college, Russell, Williams and Thomas shifted to punk and grunge — only to toil in relative obscurity.

Armstrong, who released a record in New York City, decided to move back to Birmingham in 1996. He had kept in touch with his friends and decided to reconnect with them upon his return. In doing so, they reformed the band. Creatively, everyone in the band had changed, especially Thomas. Thomas’s music, much like his life, had grown dark and bitter. After only a few weeks the group disbanded and Armstrong moved back to New York. During the next two years, Armstrong’s relationship with his boyhood best friend slowly faded away.

Then one night, after drinking at a bar, Armstrong came home to a message on his answering machine. It was from his mother telling him to call when he got home. It was 2AM. He called. Thomas had committed suicide.

“I drank a water glass filled with scotch and got on a plane,” remembered Armstrong. “The funeral was surreal. All the old crowd was there. I hadn’t seen most of them for years. Buzz, Mikey and I were pallbearers.”

They spent the night of the funeral at the home studio of Andrew Vernon, a friend of Armstrong, getting drunk and telling stories. The ensuing months led to conversations with Russell and a mutual realization that they were both creating work that was heavily influenced by Thomas’s suicide. They decided to make a record about Thomas, so Armstrong returned to Birmingham.

Recording at Vernon’s Otterworks Studios, the band was enjoying working together and creating music. But, they were without a name. In trying to find a name that truly fit the band, they agreed that Kathryn Tucker Windham’s book 13 Alabama Ghost Stories seemed applicable. As did the William Castle movie. And thus 13ghosts was named.

Over the next few years, 13ghosts recorded several EPs and picked up Sammy Boggan on bass. The band received some buzz for its 2001 EP, We Are the Sun, but it wasn’t until 2002 that they received interest from major labels. In the middle of recording Your Window Is Burning, the band drew serious attention from Warner Bros. and Atlantic. But with the new album almost complete, both labels passed. Rather than give up on the album, the band decided to move forward and put it out independently. They performed throughout the Southeast in support of the album and enjoyed doing it all their way.

After the tour, Armstrong got married and moved to be with his wife in New York. Despite the distance, the band began work on its next album, Cicada. After recording several songs, Williams quit as the band’s drummer. Without a drummer and because of time and distance, they worked sporadically.

“We’d write songs and then I’d fly in for a couple of days and do them,” recounts Armstrong. “That went on for a while.”

During the process of recording Cicada, which took several years to complete, the band brought in 25 musicians — including five drummers — to play on the album.

“We were forced to examine what we were doing and how we were going to do it with totally new eyes,” said Armstrong. “We have lots of musician friends and decided to make the record in this hodge-podge way — bringing in anyone who was free to work on it.”

Once completed, Cicada consisted of 21 wide-ranging songs. It was a lengthy undertaking that fed off of creative freedom within the band. “Cicada was the first record that we made thinking that no one would hear it but ourselves,” recalls Armstrong. “We were pretty dead sure that it would get zero attention. And making a record under that kind of thinking lends an incredible freedom to the process.”

Debunking notions that the record was a concept album, Armstrong says that Cicada is a concept album only in the way any good album should be. “I don’t believe you should make a record that doesn’t have a theme or some overriding concept. What justifies the collection if that’s the case? Many artists put out collections of songs and call them albums, but having 10 cuts on one disc doesn’t make an album. I try and approach a record the way a good author will approach a collection of short stories, which is to say, each of us has one thing they’re writing about at a given time. Put all of those things together, and you maybe have an album.”

In 2005, after being picked up by Skybucket Records, 100 copies of Cicada were pressed for a limited run. Jason Lucia joined the band as its drummer and his addition rounded out the band’s current line-up of vocalist/guitarist Armstrong, bassist Boggan, vocalist/guitarist Russell and Vernon providing sounds and loops. With help from Team Clermont, the record went to radio. By early 2006, 13ghosts were getting airplay at more than 100 radio stations and receiving positive reviews from various national publications, websites and blogs. But the band took the attention in stride. “We’ve had these feelings before, but certainly this is the first time we’ve gotten this much national attention,” says Russell.

More than the press, the tour with long-time friend Maria Taylor shifted the band’s momentum into a higher gear. “We hadn’t been able to get a protracted, national tour happening before that,” recalls Armstrong. “We’d just banged around the Southeast sporadically for a number of years. Once the tour happened — along with the attention from the press and the great radio play — it became easier to make the decision to quit my job and move back to Birmingham.”

And once again, Armstrong left New York and came back to his Alabama roots and to 13ghosts. The backbone of 13ghosts is the singing and songwriting tandem of Armstrong and Russell. Working and writing independently away from the studio, the duo records, arranges and produces its songs with Vernon. “Andrew is a big part of this; and all the sounds and production ideas come from the interplay and reactivity the three of us share,” Armstrong asserts. “That’s not to say it’s just the three of us; everyone writes their own parts and everything. I would never want to tell Sammy or Jason what to play. But, the overall shape and sound of a recorded track is decided by the three of us.”

Armstrong and Russell’s relationship, combined with the band’s breed of Americana, has caused many people to compare the band to Uncle Tupelo and Wilco. But the band has mixed reactions to such comparisons.

“Comparisons to Uncle Tupelo I think are kind of obvious and easy because they were another band with two singer/songwriters trading off lead vocals but ultimately going after a similar type of album and song,” says Vernon. “Comparisons to Wilco are a lot more exciting because that band manages to go after a much broader and more interesting musical terrain with each album.”

Armstrong has some reservations. “Sure, I’m enamored of Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar. Who in their right mind wouldn’t be? Tweedy is a genius. What I get worried about is that comparisons of that nature inevitably give you a preconception about a sound. Either it is off-base, in which case it’s giving people a false impression, or it’s not off-base, in which case we have to ask ourselves if what we’re doing is too derivative. Of course, without comparison, no one would have any frame of reference, so I guess it’s a necessary evil with so many bands around.”

Not everyone in the band has an opinion though. Russell is unfazed: “I guess I’d be flattered if I became familiar with their music. Unfortunately, my listening preference rarely goes past the year 1978.”

The band continues to work on its live performances. Formed as a studio act, the band initially tried to reproduce live the studio sound of its records. Now they focus more on interacting with the audience and diversifying their performance by playing some shows acoustic and some with a “full-on rock line-up” as Armstrong describes it. Vernon takes it further: “[We try to] give the audience the full treatment and not have to scale back the ideas to fit into a really good rock show format.”

With the band planning a fall tour, there may be no better place to have close friendships than on the road. “Being friends for so long, there’s evenness to the whole thing — a balance,” says Armstrong. “You pretty much know what the other guys are going to be like in the morning, so it’s not such a shock to the system.”

For 13ghosts, the long-standing friendship among its members is indispensable. According to Russell, “The main benefit is that we have complete honesty amongst us. We can share our thoughts, whatever they may be. We can hate each other, love each other and always find our way home.”

13ghosts are currently recording songs for a new album. With a more focused effort, the band hopes to have a new album out by 2007. “We’re going into it with a solid line-up — no plans to have crazy amounts of guest musicians or anything,” says Armstrong. “And all of these songs have been written in roughly the same time frame, so they fit together on a more obvious level. Also, they share a production sensibility. This should lend cohesion to the production that perhaps wasn’t immediately apparent on the last one. I have no idea if that will kill what folks liked about Cicada or not. I just hope it gets enough attention to find out.”

Not lost in the process of recording a new album is the hope of a major label signing. While it isn’t something the band is obsessed with, it is something they continue to work toward. As Russell puts it, the band is “aggressively pursuing our pursuits.” But at this point in their lives, the members of 13ghosts are confident in who they are. They won’t sacrifice artistic conviction for a record deal. And they won’t wear make-up in a photo shoot.

But what if a major label offered 100% control over production, content, touring, lots of money and no changes to the band’s personal life — but the band had to wear eyeliner?

“I’d probably be able to get behind it,” theorizes Armstrong. “Probably.”

www.13ghostsmusic.com