{See Me River plays Bumbershoot on Saturday, September 4 at the EMP/SFM Sky Church at 6:45pm.}
See Me River didn’t start out with the ambitions it’s gone through today. At the time, Kerry Zettel was the leading the rock band Das Llamas. He told me over in an interview at a Capitol Hill bar, “ironically, it started out as a side project because I didn’t have to worry about scheduling conflicts with other band members and I could tour without worrying about schedules. I recorded that first record and realized I couldn’t play it on my own. I incorporated Joe (Arnone) and we started adding more people.”
The band fits in with the flourishing folk rock or alt-country scene in Seattle but differentiates itself with Zettel’s haunting harmonies and dark imagery he casts through his vocals and lyrics. It is one of the most compelling Northwest bands in that particular clique. Still, trying to resist labels, he told me “I liked that there’s a lot of room to move in this project. We get pigeonholed in different genres all the time, psychedelic, folk, goth, whatever. I think that whenever you need to put more than one tag on a genre, it’s kind of a moot point.”
While trying to resist labels myself, gothic folk might be the closest, with song titles like “Pray for Blood” and their most recent (and excellent) album is called The One that Got a Wake. Zettel said he wants to move from that direction, though, saying “I’m trying to get away from the whole goth aspect because I tend to write about darker things, not that I have a problem with that, it’s just that if that’s all you think about, it gets redundant.”
Zettel recorded the first, self-titled See Me River album in 2006 and since then the band’s lineup has been somewhat fluid. He said “at one point, I think we were an eight-piece, we strayed from the solo idea but I think we have a solid lineup right now.” Along with Zettel and Arnone, Kellie Payne, Ken Jarvey and Evan Lesure round out the lineup. The band will have to make some adjustments to accommodate a tour schedule later in the year. Earlier this year, the band released The One that Got a Wake but is almost finished with their next album, Where Did We Go Wrong?, and Zettel believes it’ll be their best work yet.
In getting inspiration for the songs he writes, Zettel said “a lot of what I like to write about is people that have touched me in one way or another. On the new record, there is a song about Yukio Aoshima, who I had been doing research on. He was a brilliant, brilliant author but also staged a coup in Tokyo. Little shit like that, sometimes it’s the first thing I think of in the morning or last thing I think about when I go to bed.”
With The One that Got a Wake and the forthcoming album, Zettel said they worked with engineer Chris Common, who he described as almost part of the band and said his input in the recording process was integral. He added that “with this project, I write the bases for all of the songs, so I can create the vocal melodies before anyone hears them. Everyone else incorporates their parts in them and everyone is super hands-on. Everyone always has suggestions for others.” He added that “every record we’ve made, save for the first one, half the songs the band hasn’t heard before we went into the studio and everyone works on them from there.”
Zettel isn’t quite sure if he wants to release the album on his own small label, Aviation Records (the label also hosts a show at the Cha Cha Lounge one Sunday a month), or try to find a larger label to put it out. He said, wondering out loud “we may shop the new record around but I’d rather not waste the time shopping it around and just get it out there. But I’d also rather have it out there a lot.”
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