Great Northern
By Susan Brooks
Photo by Jason Odell

Sailors of old used the North Star to guide them home after long and arduous sea journeys. Great Northern, a fledgling band from Los Angeles, found true north and experienced a homecoming in the process of creating their full-length debut, Trading Twilight for Daylight, released last month on Eenie Meenie Records.

Great Northern was formed by longtime friends Solon Bixler (vocals/guitar) and Rachel Stolte (vocals/keyboard) around material composed by Bixler. Once they solidified the songs over months of first four-track and then more formal recording, Ashley Dzerigian (bass) and Davey Latter (drums) were culled serendipitously from the core duo’s greater round of acquaintances. The album’s theme is indeed “home” in the sense of finding a place of belonging and having everything fall into place within the band.
It is the alternation of Bixler and Stolte on lead vocals and the blending of their highly compatible voices that really define Great Northern’s sound. The band’s music is subtle and lovely, coalescing around contrasting essences. Producer Mathias Schneeberger (of Donner & Blitzen Studios in Arcadia, California) was the final ingredient for this powerful musical alchemy. Bixler says of him, “He was the perfect person. He figures you out; he knows how to talk to you.” Schneeberger was the secret weapon, making a monumental effort to capture all of Great Northern’s nuances in the recording. Like the way the band’s line-up and support system fell together, their sound just works.

Bixler and Stolte have an enviable creative relationship. Like-minded, they’re so well-matched that they finish each other’s sentences, and Stolte says of Bixler’s first overtures, “I loved all his ideas. They were amazing to me.” The pair confirms that this kind of connection typifies the interaction with all of the people around them, from management to fellow musicians. This sort of relationship is undeniably a major factor in their aesthetic success — another is the good old-fashioned hard work that polished the material. As Stolte recounts it, “We were in a studio for like eight months, just [Bixler] and I, just recording the record and a bunch of other songs. Since then they’ve evolved and been reworked and now the record that’s coming out is some of those songs that we first did, but they’re definitely more realized and layered.” The hard work cemented a consensus on their musical direction. Stolte concludes, “It was just us figuring out what we wanted to do, what we wanted to sound like.”

Musical connoisseurs with a wide swath of influences (including Trent Reznor, Elliott Smith, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, P.J. Harvey, Depeche Mode, bluesman Robert Johnson and Bob Dylan), Great Northern sounds developed and self-assured. They definitely fit in the current SoCal music climate with a requisite long-term Silver Lake residence, but something else infuses their approach with additional California sunlight. A slight but discernible classic rock effect affixes a unique note to some of the songs on Trading Twilight for Daylight, from the Xanadu-esque chord changes on “Just a Dream” to the swinging ‘60s pop sound on “The Middle.” Bixler and Stolte share similar tastes in music, but bring enough differences to the table to create some interesting juxtapositions. As Bixler says, “I like a lot of really grand, kind of epic-sounding songs, and Rachel likes a lot of minimal-sounding songs ... We wanted to try to capture both of those, try to meet in the middle or go to extreme opposites.”
Stolte also speaks affectingly about how the band’s songs hold dualities of light and dark: “Music speaks to everyone. It can bring you to your knees instantly, like nothing else.”

Bixler holds an equally intense view: “A song will tell you what it wants to be. It’ll kind of say, ‘This is what I am.’” He neatly condenses Great Northern’s philosophy with one final comment: “Music should be beautiful.” Trading Twilight for Daylight undeniably is.

www.greatnorthernmusic.com