After a nearly twenty-year career spent perfecting the art of the three-minute pop song, Tommy Keene wanted to bust out of the mold he's shaped for himself. His break-out came in the form of "The Final Hour," a sixteen-plus-minute epic that serves as the centerpiece for his new album, The Merry Go-Round Broke Down, due June 4th.
"When I was writing for this record, I came up with all these beginning bits of songs," he says. "I'm a big Who fan, so I thought, 'Why don't I try something a little bit adventurous here?' I had so much fun with it. There's a little bit of a jam thing and then I reprise some stuff the way operas do, bringing back motifs from the beginning, middle and end."
"The Final Hour" is by far the longest song Keene has ever written, and thanks to some studio trickery from pal Jay Bennett -- no stranger to experimentation with his former outfit Wilco -- it may also be the most elaborate.
"If you listen closely there are a lot of the same oddball sounds on it that are on the new Wilco record," Keene says. "We used a lot of the same techniques. We rolled tape for like twelve minutes put about eighteen different sound effects on it. There's all this weird stuff, like we had a synthesizer play itself in the right key and all these weird Mellotron parts and interesting textured sounds."
"I can't remember all the things we did," adds Bennett. "The idea was to work quickly, and any idea anybody has, you do it. You see what's at your disposal -- like, 'What if I slam the lid of this piano?' It requires a certain amount of playfulness. There was an orange baseball, and we bounced it up and down on the strings of the piano. It's always fun to explore pure noise."
Keene integrates an involved narrative into the song, too. "The story is basically about two people who meet and then keep up this long-distance relationship," he says. "One is unfaithful, and the other one is sort of forgiving. Then the one who was unfaithful dies in a plane crash and the other one talks about what could have happened. The singing alternates from person to person every time the song changes."
Wrapped around "The Final Hour" are eleven songs that adhere to the power-pop sound that's won Keene a devoted critical following and led bands like the Goo Goo Dolls to cover his songs.
Joining Keene on the album were pals and former Gin Blossoms Jesse Valenzuela and Robin Wilson. "I like to try to get as much personality on records as possible," says Keene. "I'd gone in thinking I wanted to do something different and stretch out a bit, and then I totally shifted gears and wanted to write a straight-ahead rock record, like the kind of music I love. So I tried to go a few different directions."
COLIN DEVENISH
(April 2, 2002)