By In February, New York alt-country favorites Frog released an experiment. Songwriting can suffer from a lack of variety in theme and composition; an idea eating a writer alive might leave a listener twiddling their thumbs. Brothers Daniel and Steve Bateman set out to explore the breadth of work that desire can create, recording their investigations along the way. The outcome was 1000 VARIATIONS ON THE SAME SONG, an unadulterated look (with a tongue-in-cheek title) at intuitive songwriting that featured a Christmas song, reinventions of Irish folk songs, and the twangy earworms that originally cemented the group in the 2010s. The project was chock-full of the tight, clever pop tunes that defined the duo while underscoring what keeps so many fans loyal to them.
Why, then, did I wait over half a year to tell you this? Luckily, less than eight months later, the swashbucklers have decided to publish another set of tracks from the VARIATION series. THE COUNT picks up where its predecessor left off while refracting into a more bodily form of songwriting. Where 1000 VARIATIONS ON THE SAME SONG reveled in a variety of topics, equal parts cutesy and dour, abandon fills in the gaps on THE COUNT; songs are shaped from fragmentary phrases, glued together by gasps of yearning and bravado.
Somehow, songs on THE COUNT are far more bare in both songwriting and lyricism than their predecessor. The opener to the album, “BITTEN BY MY LOVE,” blows the doors off the thing. The track runs over six minutes in length, the second-longest in their twelve-year discography. The drums form a neutral backbeat supporting a clear-as-day organ, a soundscape that remains untouched, save a few chord changes, throughout the duration of the song.
Rarely does a song consist of more than a static-tinged recording of Bateman’s piano, with brother in tow on a rooted backbeat. The lyrical content can vary widely, but always wends its way home to desire. “SAX-A-MA-PHONE” is a braggadocious joyride of a song, where a bat signal goes out when panty drops are necessary. At times, it seems the lyrics only begin forming after they press the record button. Lines like “I got the fucking song wrong and I know,” on the late-album charmer “CHELSEA PIERS,” reinforce that giddy feeling of a backseat freestyle amongst friends. “BARUCH ATTA” takes this to towering heights, employing crashing piano chords, belted vocals and perfectly hammy buildups that segue into “MARIAH,” a sparser, more devotional variation on this spin. “SPANISH ARMADA” departs from the plucky piano that defines THE COUNT for a more classically Frog sound.
I can’t help but think of George Smallwood’s LOSER, for both the frontyard jam session qualities of the track and the ethos behind it. Smallwood, a DC-area truck driver who dedicated himself to music after going blind, had no interest in recording. Smallwood once said: “Seeing is believing, they don’t need records, trust me I did that, today they getting it live.” Both Bateman and Smallwood work in the tradition of music as a means to express and relate, not to record or perfect. We’re lucky to have the recordings and can learn more from an unpolished look at their humanity than a studio tuneup could offer.
In treating the songwriting process as such, Bateman makes clear that the original VARIATIONS weren’t some middling indulgence or practical joke on the audience, it was the beginning of a process that will (hopefully) continue to reward the artist and listener alike. Meditation is a process that breaks the mind by making it tire of its whims. In forcing himself to play without end, Bateman has found his ohm, dipping us into his mind along the way.
Comments