Photos courtesy of Molly Stilley
Musician Craig Stilley, a Homewood native.
Long before the release of his first album through his band Slim Shadow, Homewood native Craig Stilley was busy writing lyrics.
Many of those lyrics focus on the same themes in his newly-released “in/out of town” indie rock album.
“Having children and having several jobs and keeping busy, it can be easy to lose track of myself ... [and] if I’m happy, if I’m actually processing all the beauty and the pain that I’m interacting with in my life, or am I just passing it by?” Stilley said.
For Stilley, writing music and making it into art has always served that purpose: to help him be present. The album title, he said, speaks to the lyrics he wrote for it, which includes reminding himself to have “the ability to step out of the current space or current time” to talk about memory, love and meaning.
“There is some sort of thing that I enjoy about performing and allowing friends, family, coworkers and acquaintances to listen to you. It is something that has helped me in life,” he added.
Previously, Stilley released an EP solo project in 2013 of more acoustic, folk-driven music. Even though he liked playing by himself, he felt like collaborative music could better inspire and combine multiple musical tastes and opinions. So, he made a band with musicians Joel Madison Blount, Luke Sides, Daniel Elliot and Kyle Carpenter.
“I wanted everyone’s input on music to come out through these songs. … I think everyone’s got a different take on music and what they like, so that kind of informed [me] a little bit more in being a little bit more unique than just me pumping out another album under my name,” Stilley said.
When he gathered the band and they begin to play around downtown and in favorite places in Homewood like Seeds Coffee — which Stilley called “one of their most supporting systems” — people were baffled and even upset to find out the band had no albums out and nowhere fans could go to listen to more of their music. After playing a dozen or so shows, Stilley realized they needed to go on a hiatus and get an album out to share.
The album, released mid-November, is a collection of nine songs created during the past several years.
At first, Stilley said the band needed time to experiment and figure out what they wanted to do differently than the bands they liked, as well as make sure they didn’t fall into a typical “indie rock and roll stereotype,” especially with the setup of two guitar players, a bass player, a keyboardist and a drummer.
“I won’t speak for everyone, just myself, but I think it’s really important for me to express myself in an artistic way. I’ve never been a visual artist or a photographer, I’ve always had this infatuation with music,” Stilley said. “I was able to say something on a deeper level than words could say, and words can also add something deeper to what music could say.”
For Stilley, going on hiatus for years wasn’t ideal, but he and his other bandmates all have other obligations like work and family. Stilley has two baby girls, two jobs and a myriad of other responsibilities.
Plus, he and his bandmates decided not to hire anyone to work on the album, but instead do all the work themselves, which elongated the process.
Photos courtesy of Molly Stilley
Slim Shadow performs at Seeds Coffee in one of their last shows there in 2016.
“Two years feels like a really, really long time when you start a project, but for me, it was more of a learning process than some other people since we were doing everything pretty much ourselves,” Stilley said. “… It was invaluable because of what I learned from taking my time and understanding more what mixing is, what mastering is, because it all kind of is like a dark art.”
By not hiring someone, Stilley said, they also saved a lot of money and knew exactly what the product was going to sound like. They spent the extra time tweaking the album and re-recording songs until it had the exact sound they imagined. Carpenter acted as the mixing engineer, Stilley said, blending the songs together and doing other post-production work. It was hisfirst full project.
“He knocked it out of the park. He blew me away, especially since this was a new thing for him,” Stilley said.
Although Stilley describes the album as “indie rock, maybe even alternative rock,” he said he’s not terribly concerned what category it falls under, since music has such a wide spectrum these days. Even though he hesitated to name bands that influence or are similar to Slim Shadow’s sound, he said people often said that collectively the band resonates with Radiohead, due to its experimental influence, in addition to the early sounds of Coldplay.
There have also been multiple instances where people have come up to Stilley and told him that his voice sounds similar to Jeff Buckley. Even though Stilley didn’t originally know who the now-deceased artist was, he agreed once he began listeningto Buckley’s work.
“To me, what Jeff Buckley did so well is take a song that’s just fun to listen to and add soul to it, not like James Brown soul, but some sort of very by-the-melody-driven emphasis,” Stilley said. “… I feel like if I’m being compared to him a lot, and he’s no longer alive, I think it’s a cool thing to try to take something that he left behind and try to embody it in some way.”
Slim Shadow’s album “in/out of town” will be released on Bandcamp, Spotify and iTunes. Stilley also hopes to get back to performing now that he has an album to offer fans.
“I think music is just a really good advocate of conversation, and in [and] of itself, the conversation with individual people has influenced me greatly. … Hopefully [this album] gives someone a little pep in their step or a tactile information to process their lives,” he said.
