Bombadil

By Ben Grad; Photo by Noah Culver

Interviewing Durham’s Bombadil is difficult. Bassist Daniel Michalak and guitarist Bryan Rahija don’t seem to like boasting about their band’s recent success; they tend

to present themselves as the antithesis of the traditionally bombastic “superstar rockers.” Take, for example, Rahija’s description of the process behind A Buzz, A Buzz, the band’s debut LP. “We all had full-time jobs for most of a year, and then around the beginning of 2008, that’s when we let loose,” he says. “We quit our jobs, and then the album started coming along, so those two things merged nicely. Developing the album was basically a weekend project, we were just trying to navigate that around jobs.”

Michalak completes the story with a quick assessment of the album, saying, “It’s good. The album’s pretty good. At least, we like it.” Glancing across the table at each other, the Rahija and Michalak seem to agree that nothing more needs to be said about the album. Just a few minutes with them will convince you: Bombadil’s members have that unique ability which makes other people want to tell them why their music is amazing.

A quick history: after the Soviet Union’s “Iron Curtain” fell in 1989, the popularity of Eastern European and Balkan music exploded — at home and in the West. Over the next decade, superstars from the Soviet Union held an influence over every genre, eventually penetrating British and American indie consciousness in the late 1990s. Case in point: Neutral Milk Hotel’s extraordinarily successful In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Later bands (notably Gogol Bordello and Beirut) followed the Eastern European style more closely, adding distinctly Balkan time signatures, a wider selection of traditionally gypsy instruments, and multi-language lyrics.

Bombadil continue where this movement left off, adding another variable to the mix by combining Eastern European, Andean and American folk-rock styles into a single constantly changing blend. While the band’s Eastern European and American

musical influences are easily traced to those styles’ current popularity, Bombadil’s choice of South American instruments and Spanish language lyrics tell a more complicated story about the band. As Daniel Michalak explains it, the group’s Andean

influence developed in 2005, while Michalak and Rahija were on a study abroad trip in Bolivia. Spending their spare time listening to local music and recording their own demos, Michalak and Rahija developed what would become Bombadil’s core sound, in addition to perfecting “La Paz,” one of the best songs on the band’s Jellybean Wine EP.

Of course, many of Bombadil’s influences can’t be easily divided into neat regional “sounds.” The band’s music carries a happily anti-authoritarian message, loosely propelled by music originally composed for Disney’s Cool Runnings. Bryan Rahija

explains, “The first song I ever really liked was from the Cool Runnings soundtrack, the song that goes ‘We the bobsled team, Jamaica got a bobsled team.’ I remember it being played when one of the guys was asking his dad for a sponsorship, the dad was

immediately like, ‘No. You’re insane.’ So that’s been my rebellion song.” A very short list of Bombadil’s many other thematic influences might include Michalak’s family trip to Poland (and a few Polish nursery rhymes), jazz (especially Coltrane’s work), postcards from Malaysia, Spanish and the band’s other members. As Rahija readily admits, the idea of other bandmates as a project’s most important musical influence is an accurate cliché. “When we make songs,” Rahija begins, “we do it by getting the whole group together, a few people have ideas, and we just screw around with the ideas long enough, just over and over and over. We throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.” The process doesn’t stop after the song’s done, or even after the band’s newest record’s been pressed — Bombadil has been known to add major variations to its lyric and vocal harmony heavy songs mid-gig. Rahija describes a recent show at Atlanta’s Eddie’s Attic as an example. “The new song ‘Malaysia’ was kind of like that, we improvise harmonies and words,” he says. “These songs still change from night to night.”

And that’s what makes Bombadil great.

www.bombadilmusic.com