Sella
Biography
What does an artist do when the distance from the bedroom to the arena starts to feel like a bridge too far? How to amuse the muse, to re-find the fun and deliver something personal to the listener? In response to those questions, Brian Sella the lead singer and songwriter for the Front Bottoms has made Well I Mean, a new album under his own name constituting his first solo album.
Sella has been tossing words and melodies out of his head and into the wider world since he was a kid. In the beginning it was something he did just for fun but then it grew into something bigger. His songs have been played in front of thousands of people who hang on and sing along to every word. Songs that started as DIY bedroom recordings and were pushed out into the world on myspace and Tumblr along with CDR burns. Now his music is delivered to audiences with state of the art sound and lighting gear by a support team working diligently behind the monitors and computers to keep everything humming in technicolor and sensurround sound. Songs that have now traveled all the way to giant stadiums with close to a billion streams and counting.
Sometimes you have to go back to the beginning to find a way forward. Well I Mean hearkens back to the messy feelings Brian managed to get down when he was starting out, as part of the Front Bottoms. But now Sella is a grown up. He’s still battling some devils and demons but with more tools and expertise at his disposal.
One area of of expertise he didn’t have this time around was Mat Uychich, Brian’s childhood pal and partner in crime who has provided drums, inspiration and logistics for the Front Bottoms since they were teenagers. In a strange way you can hear the absence of his trusted friend and sounding board. The lack of his drums on the album are a hole to climb out of or a portal to move through, either way Sella has some new sonic space to work with.
Well I Mean was recorded in home studios, a DIY jazz venue in Berlin, and on computers in various apartments. It started after conversations Sella had with Emmy Black the current owner/operator of Bar None Records. She suggested he try working on some songs with Chad Matheny aka Emperor X who just happened to be in the area doing some shows away from his current home in Germany.
Emperor X had known Sella since they toured together along with Mat in the TFB’s original ramshackle Econoline van in 2013. Chad is a one man DIY band, a post-anti folk Woody Guthrie punk. He is a fearless performer unafraid to hack into new musical technologies and bend them to his will. He also often tours and records in Ukraine supporting artists there that can’t cross borders so easily. Ukrainian musicians often appear on Emperor X albums.
The recording process started with Sella thinking about ways to make a solo performance more interesting. He thought about loop pedals and drone effects to run alongside his acoustic guitar. Emperor X had a suggestion that Sella took to heart:
Open yourself up to the possibilities and then get out of the way and let the process take it’s course.
Many of the songs feature ambient rivers of sound that run parallel to the voice and guitar rivers of blended instruments; repeated piano and guitar melodies play off each other, horn sections ebb and flow, there’s even a flugelhorn that bends around the edges of jazz. Perhaps that is fitting since much of the record was recorded in off hours at Donau 115, the Berlin experimental jazz club that EmperorX co-owns.
Lyrically the album moves around geographically with references to an American shark in an Australian river, along with songs titled after South Dakota and Wichita, Kansas.Sella has titled songs after places in the past (Rhode Island, Santa Monica and West Virginia all come to mind) but these new songs feel more like internal landscapes, metaphoric places for what’s going on inside Sella’s head. The lyrics are naked and searing as Sella looks harshly at himself through his very own funhouse mirror. Swallowed by a shark he becomes the shark.
Does he also feel like he’s a Jersey devil? In “Damage Control” he questions his success and the burdens it has placed on him.
I don’t deserve anything that I have now
I take it all and I bury it all underneath the ground
Hiding spots all over jersey
Now I can never leave
On the seemingly whimsical sounding “Skipping Out “he finds a way to modify his health regimen with some self-medicating.
‘Falling into a nice routine
I’m drunk every time you see me
I’m skipping out on the therapy
And doubling up on the medication
While the Front Bottoms continue to record and tour and are more popular than ever, Sella has also struck out on his own in an effort to keep things fresh.
“I’ve tried different hobbies over the years ,” he explains. “But ultimately the thing I always come back to is songwriting and story telling. It’s just something I have to do and I have to find new ways to do it.”
So Sella stays out there searching for new currents and inlets in that river of sound, the shark out on the prowl with a devil clutching his fin. Prepare to be enveloped.