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The Lost Days Interview: 8-Track Document

Sarah Rose Janko & Tony Molina; Photo by Alicia Vanden Heuvel 

BY JORDAN MAINZER

The combination of lo-fi power pop and warm-hearted Americana is not one I would have chalked up to work on paper, but The Lost Days are pretty perfect. Tony Molina and Dawn Riding’s Sarah Rose Janko met at a memorial, quickly hitting it off and turning their mutual musical admiration into a full-blown home recording project. They released the Lost Demos EP in 2021, and afterwards, Molina, still wanting to churn out bursting, cassette-recorded pop songs a la Bill Fox’s first three records, started to write with Sarah’s voice in mind. The two eventually recorded these songs at Nick Bassett’s basement studio on his Yamaha MT8X 8 track; the result is The Lost Days’ debut album In The Store, out today via Speakeasy Studios SF.

Molina and Janko’s musical relationship early on was defined by all-night singing sessions and empty wine bottles; In The Store, in contrast, is a 13-minute document of alcoholism, being subsumed by it, the self-involvement of it, and ultimate recovery from it. Alongside shimmery guitar, keyboard, and organ, jangly percussion, and Janko’s sweet coo are fatalistic lyrics. “I think I’m gonna have to tell you that the present don’t look too good,” they sing on the album’s opening song. On the chugging, wiry “For Today”, they sing, in a duet of dependency, “The hardest part of staying sober is any time that you come over.” On the layered and melancholy “Long Before You Know”, Molina realizes that “Everyone will talk about when you have fallen,” toeing the line between self-awareness and egocentrism. If on Molina’s solo records he jam packs a thousand musical ideas into a runtime in the teens, on In The Store, he and Janko tell a whole story, too, at once personal and universal.

Last month, I sent Molina some questions over email about The Lost Days, working with Sarah, In The Store, and his favorite Guided By Voices record. Read his responses below, edited for clarity.

Since I Left You: How would you compare writing for another person's voice versus your own? What are the similarities and differences?

Tony Molina: For this record, the only difference was that I had to change the key of certain songs for Sarah to sing them because I have a lower register with my voice. So it wasn’t an issue as long as I had a capo on me.

SILY: A lot of the influences on this record (Bill Fox, Guided By Voices, The Beatles) are named influences in your solo records, too. Were there any newfound touchpoints for this specific project?

TM: Mainly, The Lost Days are a home recording project and not a studio entity. I had been on a Bill Fox bender for about three and a half years when I made this one, so the concept was to make the record on cassette. Bill uses a 4-track; we used a cassette 8-track. Besides Bill and the Tobin [Sprout]-era GBV classics, I’ve been wanting to make a record on cassette since my mentors and older brothers from the West Bay, Los Rabbis, Tommy Lasorda, and Broken Strings were on that tip when I was a youngster. It took me about 20 years to get the guts to do it, but it finally happened.

SILY: How do you achieve the contrast of bright, sunny melodies and harmonies with melancholy or dark lyrics?

TM: I don’t know, melodies are melodies, I’m not someone who can write a song about surfing or having pizza parties or whatever other fools do.

SILY: Many of the songs on In The Store reference alcoholism. This project was also born out of a time when you and Sarah were "singing to an audience of empty wine bottles" and frequenting a liquor store you frequented in a formative time in your career. What's your relationship with alcohol these days, especially as it pertains to music? I've read that you often don't pull from your personal life in your songwriting, but I'm wondering if this record is an exception.

TM: Yo shout out Jacksons Liquors!!! The whole album is about alcoholism and from the perspective of someone who sees the world through an alcoholic lens. The thing about alcoholics is that we have a lot in common and share similar stories and experiences. So I was touching on some things from my personal life that I think are super common among others who live a similar life. From the darkest points of addiction, struggling with recovery, and chronic relapse, to the paranoia and anxiety that comes from withdrawal. As a person in recovery, I felt like I needed to document these things at the time when I was going through it.

SILY: Songs like "Long Before You Know" and "Pass The Time" make references to other people's perception of you, and how it may or may not affect you. How often are you thinking about these outward feelings in your songwriting?

TM: These songs are also about the life of a fader, specifically the self-centeredness that comes with addiction.  

SILY: The title track is the longest song on here, with two verses and comparatively complex arrangements. What compels you to write shorter songs? Do you think you'll ever play around with more non-traditional pop song structures?

TM: I think I just do what feels right. The first time Ovens were ever on wax in ‘04 we had an 8-minute song on the compilation Letters From The Landfill. That song was long as fuck! So it kinda just depends.

SILY: What's the story behind the album art?

TM: I didn’t know what to use, so I think Sarah and I decided a liquor store and a fool getting faded in a graveyard would look sick. Sarah was down to do it, so there you go.

SILY: What's your favorite GBV album, and why?

TM: Same Place the Fly Got Smashed, hands down!!! Its a concept record about an alcoholic fool who turns into a murderer! Its got some super dark moments, and it sounds like a gloomy rainy day in Dayton. On some true Midwest darkness. There’s also some great upbeat feel good songs on it, too. But you know, “Drinker’s Peace”, “Club Molluska”, those are heavy. That is easily my favorite GBV ever and has been for a long time.

SILY: What else is next for you in the short and long term future?

TM: Some reissues of old stuff, and I still record all the time.

SILY: What have you been listening to, watching, and reading lately?

TM: I���ve been listening to Heron's self-titled and Duncan Browne’s self-titled (with bonus tracks) religiously.

[dustedmagazine]

The Lost Days — In the Store (Speakeasy Studios)

Photo by Alicia Vanden Heuvel

In The Store by The Lost Days

Tony Molina is the West Coast’s reigning king of concise, devastating power pop, with a string of sub-30-minute albums that approach Teenage Fanclub levels of hook-and-feedback alchemy. Sara Rose Janko’s Dawn Riding inhabits a more shadowy, folk-centric space, all intricate finger-picking and looming, Gothic doom. The pair made one album, Lost Demos, together in 2021, then Janko moved to New Orleans. When a mutual friend passed away, they reconnected and began working together remotely, recording songs in their respective homes and passing them to one another online for further embellishment.

The two shared a love for Bill Fox, the brash power pop auteur behind Cleveland cult band The Mice, an early influence on Guided by Voices, and a band that like Molina (and many others), sought the sweet spot between rock ‘n roll clatter and irresistible tunefulness. Here, Molina and Janko meld wistful jangle with rainbow-after-the-thunderstorm radiance but never linger. The whole album—ten songs—plays from start to finish in 14 minutes.

The two singers take turns on lead vocals. Janko wraps “What’s On Your Mind?” in dreaming softness, her voice lingering like morning fog, while Molina spins out twining guitar parts braced by a boom-ba-boom-chick backbeat imported direct from the 1960s. Molina moves to the front for rueful “Pass the Time,” a ringer for the softer side of Teenage Fanclub.

What’s remarkable about these songs, though, is how much they do with so little time. In “For Today,” Janko metes out a small, contained parcel of real life, confiding “Seems to me the hardest part of staying sober, is any time that you come over today.” Two guitars cross each other, one climbing a steep melodic line, the other tangled in reassuring chords. The song is just about perfect — wistful, wry, instantly memorable — and it lingers only just over a minute.

The title cut comes late in the album, but it’s the clear centerpiece, with swirling harmonies and chiming guitar tones and brief rambunctious eruptions of drums. Both Janko and Molina sing this one, and there’s a bit of organ in addition to guitar, so it’s got a full, enveloping sound that’s almost what you’d call epic. Even if it does last just a couple of minutes.

Lesser bands might belabor hooks this strong, throwing in a dilutive middle eight or 16, and coming back to the well for one more chorus. In the Store strikes a pose, raises a question and makes an exit. Song after song feels like a match flame, struck suddenly, burning bright, then flicking out into smoke, every second beautiful until it’s over.

Jennifer Kelly  

[daggerzine]

Seablite- HIGH-RISE MANNEQUINS (EMOTIONAL RESPONSE/MERITORO)

This Bay Area band took the indie pop world by storm last year with their terrific debut Grass Stains and Novocaine and now they’re back with four more songs and the pick up right where they left off with four more blasts of sugary pop goodness. The title track starts things off with crashing guitars and a soaring melody while “Skipping Stones” is a bit more melancholy but no less powerful (or enjoyable). Side B starts with the fabulous “Skeleton Couch” which is a perfect mix of sweet and sour and just might be my favorite song by this band (really saying something) and it ends with the more nimble, “Pretend” (reminding me a little bit of Lush). The band is really at the top of their game and the production by Aislers Set’s Alicia Vanden Heuvel really brings out the band’s shine and strengths. I really hope they make it to Denver this year for a show and in the meantime this one will be spinning constantly.   www.emotionalresponserecords.com    www.meritoriorec.com

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EXCLUSIVE WORLD PREMIERE: seablite, "High-Rise Mannequins"

We fell 100% in love with the Grass Stains And Novocaine, the debut album from Bay Area dream-pop band seablite. With its blissed-out rock that sounds both contemporary and retro, ours was an almost immediate love connection. We weren’t the only ones who fell in love, either; the album appeared on many year-end best-of lists. Most surprisingly, it wound up on perhaps one of the most mainstream…

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Dawn Riding edita «You´re Still Here»

[nwdsc]

(▶︎ You're Still Here | Dawn Ridingから)

You're Still Here by Dawn Riding

n San Francisco’s Mission District, there’s a Victorian house with a garden full of towering tobacco flowers and rose vines so thick they’re pulling down the fence. Every Sunday, for a great span of 2021, songwriter Sarah Rose Janko (Dawn Riding) would join producer & engineer Alicia Vanden Heuvel (Aislers Set, Magic Trick) there, to play guitar, sing harmonies, and hum lines for other instruments, before retreating to Alicia’s basement recording studio (Speakeasy Studios SF), to roll tape on her Otari half-inch 8-track. This is how, week by week, Dawn Riding’s new record You’re Still Here, was chipped out of the ethereal and into an expansive album of meticulously crafted and deeply captivating songs. It’s an album steeped in intimacy and warmth, each song built with a level of restraint that leaves room for Sarah Rose’s quietly fierce vocals and her powerful songwriting to sit front and center. Nothing is rushed and each song is presented almost as a vignette: some with so much stillness you can feel the relationships, some that build from the heart’s interior solitude into swells of emotional catharsis. You’re Still Here is a songwriter’s album and Sarah Rose Janko, in the tradition of great American folk musicians, is laying most of her cards on the table - endearing you to her portraits of American life, and leaving you thirsty for the stories that haven’t yet been told.クレジット2022年11月11日リリース All songs written by Sarah Rose Janko You’re Still Here marks Dawn Riding’s third full-length album, and is a co-release by The Long Road Society and Speakeasy Studios SF, two women-owned Bay Area record labels. The credits reveal a wealth of Bay Area musicians lending their talents, with multi-instrumentalist Vanden Heuvel acting as producer and musical arranger: Sarah Rose Janko - vocals, guitar, piano Hall McCann - electric guitar, vocals Jasmyn Wong - drums Alicia Vanden Heuvel - bass, organ, drums Keenah Silver Fassett - drums Jessie Leigh Smith - harmonica Jacob Aranda - pedal steel, violin Anna Hillburg - trumpet

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Aisler's Set - Been Hiding