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					Also this issue: Across the 'Board Local artists dish on McTear the producer. -Patrick Rapa

December 19-25, 2002

cover story

The Voices In His Head

Miner key: McTear in his home base, Miner Street studios.

Philly's top indie-rock producer Brian McTear meets yet another challenge: his first solo album.

by Brian Howard photographs by michael t. regan

In March 2001, Brian McTear's plane landed in San Francisco. The producer, who runs Manayunk's Miner Street recording studio, hadn't had a vacation, he figures, since he was a child. He was also spending the first length of time away from his studio -- two weeks -- since he started recording bands there in 1996.

Arriving at a friend's apartment, he sat down with a tiny department-store Stella guitar he'd carried with him to play when he had the chance. A riff popped into his head, a riff that would cycle through his head for the duration of his stay out West.

"It was difficult, to say the least," he recalls of the trip. McTear has played an integral role in the music that's come out of the Philadelphia independent rock scene, from Eltro to Burning Brides, from Mazarin to Matt Pond PA. He was visiting friends who were into dance and electronic music -- not exactly his bag. "By about three or four days into the trip I was losing my mind."

McTear founded Miner Street with the intent that he would eventually record his own music there; he'd been writing music for as long as he could remember, and played in several bands over the years. Yet McTear, who studied classics at West Chester University, hadn't released an album of his own since his old college band, The Marinernine, threw in the towel in the mid-1990s. He was at an impasse.

During the trip, he and two of his San Francisco friends took a drive to Point Reyes Light, a Bay Area lighthouse that had been described to McTear as one of the most beautiful places on the planet. They arrived in the middle of a torrential downpour. While sitting in a parked car on a rocky cliff overlooking the ocean as rain pounded on the roof, one of McTear's friends, a girl he calls "a serious clairvoyant," suggested they partake in an exercise called automatic writing. The process requires one to simply start writing, without pause or thought.

"This is weird stuff," admits McTear now, leaning back in a zebra-striped armchair in the Miner Street control room. "Eventually you'll read back the things you've written and you'll be like, ŒWow, that's pretty nuts, pretty crazy.' And there are people who would take it a step further and say that it's not necessarily you that's saying these things."

The next day, the friend suggested they try automatic talking.

"I wasn't very comfortable with all of this so she did most of the talking," admits McTear, plucking at a toy Sesame Street banjo bearing the smiling visage of Ernie. "She started speaking in a way that was similar [structurally] to the way I think. At one point I was looking at her saying this stuff, and I thought in my head that it sounded like when I actually start a song I'll just write a line and then a line, and just kind of go free form. And I hadn't fully developed that thought into a sentence in my head when she looks and she goes, ŒYeah, it's like poetry.' And it was like she was reading my mind.

"She was telling me that there were Œothers' out there who were instrumental in helping me write music," he explains.

McTear says that as "hokey and new-agey" as it sounds, he found his musical voice on that trip.

The next day, sitting on the plane to return to Philadelphia, McTear took out a pen and started writing. What came out, verbatim, he says, were the words to a song called "Sage," which matched up perfectly with the riff he plucked out upon his arrival in San Francisco.

Better be the sage

--"Sage"

The brooding, plucked dirge closes with the lines, "We won't let you down/ We're happy you're here now/ It's been a long time coming."

"I take it to have been a long-awaited introduction," says McTear, wary of how bizarre it all sounds. "Sort of like, ŒHi, we're the voices in your head. Glad to finally have been introduced!'"

McTear had always managed to deal with the many challenges thrown his way, among them a chronic disease, economic hardships, the loss of a close friend. Now he'd learned to trust his songs, something he'd struggled with his whole life.

"Sage" opens McTear's forthcoming album on Princeton's My Pal God record label. It's a 12-song effort called Bitter, Bitter Weeks, which is also the name McTear performs under. The disc is stripped down to bare bones. The prevalent features: McTear's acoustic guitar and raspy, emotive, not-ready-for-American-Idol voice. It's something of a surprise, given the big, booming sounds the 29-year-old has coaxed out of Mazarin, Lefty's Deceiver and Burning Brides, and the lush, layered tones he's delivered for Eltro and Matt Pond PA, and, with Thom Monahan, The Capitol Years and the Rolling Stone-lauded The Bigger Lovers.

"The last thing I ever expected was that I would be making a record that was practically just me and a guitar," explains McTear. "When I figured out this much, it all came together very easily."

He's always shuddered at the term singer/songwriter, as many performers in that sub-genre "do not speak to me in the slightest," he says. "They exude mediocrity and boringness, and I know that when I go to play [live], I am standing in front of a bunch of people whose bullshit detectors are set to Œhigh' because of this."

The irony, of course, is that many singer/songwriters are shitty singers and bad songwriters; McTear has neither problem. His trebly voice and guitar strings pop and creak over some of the most inconspicuously brilliant lyrics you'll hear 'round these parts. There's the lump-in-the-throat emotion of "You Paralyze My Heart," the high lonesome of "Taking Pills" and the biting, nearly rocking "The Best Days of My Life."

For someone who's dedicated the last six years to helping other musicians fine-tune their sonics, it turns out McTear's got a penchant for wordsmithing.

But while this is a "solo" recording, Bitter, Bitter Weeks certainly has lots of guests.

Members of several of the bands McTear has recorded over the years lent helping hands with the recording of the album. The extended Miner Street family -- including Eltro's Jorge Sandrini and Diana Prescott, Mazarin's Quentin Stoltzfus, Matt Pond, Audible/Lefty's Deceiver's Mike Kennedy and McTear's brother, Brendan -- is amply represented in the liner notes. Artist/girlfriend Amy Morrissey provides the album's artwork, a subdued image of a girl with a white dress and red umbrella, taken from her series of paintings "Wish You Were Here " Recently, Morrissey has assumed the full-time position of Miner Street's manager.

"In all these years, all my best friends were people I recorded," says McTear, an enthusiastic, unassuming guy with a slight build, floppy brown hair and often a bit of scruff on the chin. "That's how I got to know people."

The most touching guest appearance, though, is that of Sara Weaver, McTear's longtime friend, former roommate and leader of the band Swisher. Weaver died this June after a long battle with leukemia. McTear says the song "TN" was written in 2000 for Weaver and her boyfriend/bandmate Jonathan Vital (the album is dedicated to them). The couple had just returned from a vacation at Graceland when they discovered her illness. "And right now I wish/ I could hold my breath/ and that would cure/ this great unrest," sings McTear plaintively. "Where's the girl/ and her bad TV?/ The doorstep's bare/ Where's Jonny V/ thinking, I'm sure, of Tennessee."

McTear was having a hard time recording a version of the song he was happy with. He was working on it with Brendan in the studio when Weaver called from the hospital.

"I told [Brendan] to hold up the phone, and I sang ŒTN' to her as she listened in her hospital room and the tape machine was running," remembers McTear. "I had never sung a song directly to somebody The first thing I heard Brendan choke out was, ŒWell, we got that one now!'"

While Weaver plays the role of muse on "TN," she was actually able to contribute harmony vocals to the album's closing track, "Water in the Basement." McTear had written the song in 1994 while with The Marinernine as "a loud, Ride-inspired rock song"; he and Weaver had reworked it with The Weather (a way-station band on their routes to, respectively, Bitter, Bitter Weeks and Swisher); and it sees its official release here.

"When Sara got sick, we were always trying to figure out new ways to Œinspire' a recovery for her," he remembers.

While Weaver was home for a few days over the summer, McTear sent recording equipment to her house. "I sent three sets of headphones: one for Sara, one for Jonathan and one for the telephone receiver. I listened and put in my two cents every now and then as she recorded. It was amazing. She was very sick, in truth, and I think you can hear that in her voice. But I love hearing her voice there. It is the last recording Sara ever made, and I think to myself that even if I never knew what that song was actually about, I know that it has a very important purpose in my life as well as Sara's."

q

A fear like a thousand trucks

--"You Paralyze My Heart"

Two songs on the album, written very close to one another, represent -- much like "Sage" -- a marked change in McTear's songwriting approach. The first was "TN."

The second was "You Paralyze My Heart," written, says McTear -- a guy with an uncanny memory for dates -- on Aug. 28, 2000.

"Until then I had always written songs with these soaring melodies," he explains. "Those were the first two songs that were little songs where I had a shape that I knew I wanted to fit some simple words into."

"That song So here it goes, this is embarrassing," says McTear, leaning back in his control room chair. He'd met Morrissey briefly in passing and had carried something of a torch for her since. "I always thought she was cute, and she had this huge smile."

"I wrote that song about [Amy], and then I saw her out at the Upstage, and, really drunk, I passed her and said, ŒHey I wrote a song about you,'" remembers McTear as if recalling a dentist's visit. "And she just went, ŒOh, no.' And I was like [smacking himself on the forehead], ŒOh man, why did I say this?'

"Ten minutes later, I walked back up and was like, ŒI'm not a stalker, I don't even know you, I just wrote this song and you were kind of part of it it's a good song, I'll send you a copy,' and I was like, ŒWhat am I saying?' I just kept digging myself further in a hole."

In the ensuing months, during which McTear had been struggling to record an acceptable version of "You Paralyze My Heart" for a girl he figured he'd already seriously freaked out anyway, he finished the song and sent it off to her. They ran into each other a couple of times afterward, but found it difficult to get together for a date.

"I know it's weird. This is a big, big thing to have to get around," smiles McTear. "Could you imagine, if you wrote this song called ŒYou Paralyze My Heart' and then had to try to get to know that person?"

He figured he'd blown it.

After returning from San Francisco, he was asked to play at the record release party for the band Shellito at the Mask and Wig Club.

With newfound wherewithal to perform his music all by his lonesome, McTear, on April 28, 2001, in his first outing as Bitter, Bitter Weeks, opened for Shellito. It was, as McTear recalls, the best show of his life.

"[Amy] showed up to the show," recalls McTear, feigning terror. "If I had known she was at the show, there's no way in hell I would have sang ŒYou Paralyze My Heart.' But I saw her afterward and I just thought, ŒOh my god.' But I sort of eked out, ŒDo you want to go to the Locust Bar?' and we did, and then we started making dates that held. And she's awesome."

McTear points to a painted cast of a truck that hangs on the wall of the control room. It was made from pouring plaster into the plastic packaging of a Matchbox tractor-trailer. It's Morrissey's gift to McTear in return for the song.

They are, as you can imagine, the cutest couple imaginable: McTear the ebullient, unassuming musician/producer with the boyish good looks, and Morrissey, the shy artist with the huge smile. "Sickeningly sweet," sighs McTear. "It's just sickening."

q

There's always room to feel

--"Happiness"

Not all the songs on Bitter, Bitter Weeks are as upbeat (used relatively here) as "Happiness." As its title suggests, Bitter has -- as many acoustic albums are wont to -- something of a somber feel.

On "Taking Pills" McTear sings: "Now I don't believe/ a river's banks can be redefined/ the engineers have tried/ but they've all learned in time/ water goes its own way."

On "Trouble": "Trouble, have your way you always do/ Doubt, you'll have your say if I know you/ Every fight you start is one I lose/ Every chance I get you take back two."

On "The Best Days of My Life": "'Cause the truth is I'm old at 25/ But I always hear/ these are the best days of my life."

It's difficult at times to talk to McTear and believe you're speaking with the same guy on the album.

McTear is a happy guy. He's the last person to offer excuses or sob stories, yet he admits that his music is somewhat therapeutic. His life has been far from simple. McTear has cystic fibrosis, a condition which causes his body to produce excess mucous in the lungs and stomach. The excess mucous in the stomach impedes the processing of nutrients. As a result, many afflicted with CF tend to be, like McTear, small of frame.

"The key signs are physical structure," says McTear, "but also coming from such a small person you'll often hear a roaring cough. They're struggling to get the energy up to get stuff out of their lungs. I do it. People don't notice at first, but they put two and two together."

McTear says that his is a mild case -- he takes medication three times a day that allows his body to process nutrients -- and that when he was growing up his family helped him make the best of it.

"When I was a little kid, the words Œcystic fibrosis' had positive connotations to me," he remembers. "It was the thing that made me special. I got a day off from school every two months to go in for a doctor's visit. And that visit, since I have such a mild case, was just a bunch of people showering me with praise and pats on the back. Then when I was on the swim team, when I was 8 or 10, they had a swim-a-thon for cancer. So I did this swim-a-thon, and there was a local newspaper, like, ŒBoy with CF!' I got to sit on [Phillies pitcher] Jim Lonborg's lap in 1977."

As a child, McTear's family also endured financial hardship, going from "very, very rich" to "very, very, very poor." McTear's father was one of the first real estate developers in Exton, Pa. But when the recession of the early 1980s hit, the real estate market in the area completely bottomed out. "Out of nowhere, he went from selling probably a couple hundred houses a year to selling three," he estimates. The family, which had just welcomed its seventh child (Brian is the fourth), lost everything when the mortgages on the in-development properties could not be paid.

"All the very nice people at Whitford Country Club [to which the family belonged] showed up in our driveway to bid on our house," he remembers. "At the country club they would post the names of members who were late on their dues, so our name was up on the board."

His father was able to reserve enough money to build a new house for the family, to start over. McTear grew up as the buffer between three older siblings who grew up with excess and three younger siblings who grew up with scarcity.

"It affects the way I live and the way I conduct my relationships and my work ethic," he says. "But it's not something I sit around and moan about. The sense throughout our entire family revolves around knowing what's important. And the important thing is that everybody's happy and healthy and doing all right."

McTear and Morrissey (whose father was one of 14 children) make do with relatively little. A musician/producer and artist team, without a traditional day job between them, they both manage to make ends meet.

"I learned early on how to be happy with very little," says McTear of his childhood experiences. "Somehow my parents figured out how to minimize the limitations of poverty. I guess I have been working on that model ever since."

Bitter, Bitter Weeks performs a record release party on Fri., Dec. 20, 8 p.m., $8, with Picastro, She-Haw and Sola, The Parlor, 1170 S. Broad St. To order Bitter, Bitter Weeks, visit www.mypalgodrecords.com.

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