Glossary
By Ari Mazer
Photo by Jonathon Kingsbury

Though they have been playing together for the last 10 years, Glossary is headed for brand new territory this month. For the first time, these southern rockers from Murfreesboro, Tennesee have decided to debut their fifth studio album, The Better Angels of Our Nature, online for free and with limited physical distribution. Of course, for an established indie band that has been steadily pumping out strong records in their spare time for close to a decade, the decision was never motivated by their own limited finances.

“Nobody makes any money selling records anymore,” says lead vocalist Joey Kneiser, now 32 years old. “Even bands that I know who are doing fairly well are having a really hard time making money off of selling records.” But, he says, “if we put the album up on the website for free, anybody who has a computer can get it anywhere around the world. All of the sudden we’ve got the same distribution that anybody has.”

Through five albums of spaced-out country rock with intelligent, reflective lyrics, Glossary has garnered some impressive critical acclaim, most recently with 2005’s For What I Don’t Become. However, their mostly regional record sales have never allowed them to quit their day jobs for good. Now, of the group’s five founding members, only Kneiser and bassist Bingham Barnes remain. Over the course of Glossary’s last three records, the band has taken on Kneiser’s wife, Kelly, guitarist Todd Beene, as well as drummer Eric Giles.

More than ever since the band came together in 1997 in Murfreesboro, Glossary are now looking to take control of their collective destinies with an internet album release. “It’s about being able to level the playing field between a band of our size and a band that has a big push behind them, or a band that has a big distribution company behind them,” says Kneiser. “Our real ambition was never to make lots of money or get any kind of fame; it was really just to figure out some way to play music for a living.”

Looking back, he says, “Our first goal was just to put out a record. Slowly our goals got a little bit bigger- going on tour and things like that.” But the group has once again altered their original objectives to compete in an indie music industry increasingly flooded by MySpace and other new forms of mass digital distribution. “It seems like there’s more music than ever; everybody’s in a band, everybody’s putting out records, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re any better,” says Kneiser. Even after 10 years, “the best thing we could do was just get people to listen to us.”

Undoubtedly now, music fans can’t help but wonder if the internet distribution model might cause Glossary’s particular sound to lose the historic appeal of a physical record or CD. But Joey Kneiser insists that The Better Angels of Our Nature — its title inspired by a quote from Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address — is as sharp and polished as ever, if slightly unfamiliar in its overlying themes. “On this record the stories are much bigger,” he says. “We basically wanted to have positive songs for this record — just these positive, uplifting kind of stories.”

Ultimately, only time will tell if making the late jump to internet releases — and taking the risk of alienating their existing fan base — will allow Glossary to truly stay alive as a creative and distinctive Southern rock group with a rich past.

“Nowadays, it’s basically time that becomes the weeding-out process,” explains Kneiser. “It’s who can stick with it the longest, who can keep moving forward. When you’re in a band like this for 10 years, time kind of becomes this filtering-out process of whether you’re really in it for the right reasons. Either that or you’re just an idiot.”

www.glossary.us