A high, haunting voice wafts lazily over subdued guitars, drums and bass, melding to form a sound wholly different from the norm. At times, it feels a bit like listening to a dewy Sunday morning. Just as you grow comfortable with that, the tone shifts. The drums grow sharper, static clings to the guitar riffs and the voice is more direct. As you move from song to song, you find it difficult to peg them, to pigeonhole them into one particular sound.
This is what it’s like listening to the Tenderhooks, a Knoxville band of four riding high on the release of their sophomore offering, New Ways to Butcher English. The band is scheduled to bring their amorphous sound to Murfreesboro’s Tomato Tomato on March 20 with Roanoke, Virginia’s The Wading Girl.
Made up of vocalist and guitarist Jake Winstrom, guitarist and vocalist Ben Oyler, bassist and vocalist Emily Robinson, and drummer and percussionist Matt Honkonen, the current incarnation of the band picked up its members as Oyler and Winstrom made their way through school.
“Jake and I were writing songs together in a Catholic high school years ago. It was a whole process to get to where we were any good at that. We’ve gone through a bunch of line up changes, but the band was sort of established when Emily joined . . . We had two drummers leading up to Matt. When he joined I think that was when we were sure that was our lineup. We felt like it was a lot more conducive to making the kind of music we want to make,” Oyler said.
The current incarnation of the band is about two years old. Honkonen joined the band just after the release of their first CD, Vidalia, “and just really hit it off with them,” the drummer said. “We decided to start writing some new tunes and we were on tour to support their previous album, Vidalia. That went really well, and we just connected,” Honkonen said.
While Vidalia was a major step for the band, their next record would open whole new opportunities for them. New Ways to Butcher English was the unusual result of a New York University student who happened to find the Tenderhooks online.
“This guy, Dan Chertoff, found us on MySpace and brought us up to New York to record. He was actually a student in the NYU program where they teach record producing from a creative standpoint, and we were sort of his final project,” Winstrom said.
Chertoff also managed to connect the Tenderhooks with manager Rick Dobbis, who is helping the band “figure out what to do with the record beyond selling it online and at our shows.”
Despite the odd circumstances, the band seems quite pleased with the product.
“Probably 80 percent of the album was recorded live. We had the ability, for the first time, up in New York to have a studio that was large enough to really perform as a band. All of the rhythm tracks and the bulk of every song was recorded on the fly, which I think really comes through on the album,” Honkonen said.
“Its pretty much four people playing in a room with a few overdubs. It’s a really raw record, I think,” Winstrom said.
Their current tour schedule has the band making runs to Virginia, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York and Georgia, with a show in their hometown of Knoxville to wrap things up. Though NWTBE has only been available since November, the band says a new round in the studio isn’t far off.
“Jake and I have already started writing, but we haven’t started on that as a band. Really, we tend to kind of section that off until we have a bulk of material. We’re not really starting that process again because the CD is still pretty recent, but that’s going to come together pretty soon,” Oyler said.
What comes next for the Tenderhooks? With some luck, the band plans to take it as far as they can.
“We’ve kind of all put our eggs in this music basket, and we’re trying. None of us really have fallback plans. Just making the right decisions and getting with the right people. That’s what we have to keep doing,” Honkonen said.
