Motorway revved up by work on new CD

10/04/02

More specifically, their songs did. Every Wednesday in July at Carrollton Station, the members of Motorway hosted a tribute to an artist they admired. They served as the house band as scores of other musicians joined in. Jeff Clemons of G. Love & Special Sauce and 007 sat in on drums one night. So did Cowboy Mouth's Fred LeBlanc and Better Than Ezra's Travis McNabb. James Hall guested on keyboards during the Beatles tribute night.

Forcing themselves to study and learn the classic recordings of Bowie, Costello, the Stones and the Beatles gave Motorway guitarists Colin Brown and Michael Blum, vocalist/bassist Pete Winkler and drummer Eric Padua new insights into what makes a pop song work. They applied those lessons while crafting their new, self-titled second CD, which they celebrate with a CD release party at The Parish of the House of Blues tonight.

"Listening to all these great artists gave us a fresh outlook in the midst of our own recording process," Brown said. "It was like a mini-camp of great songwriting. We were forced to dissect the songs and learn all these wonderful nuances and what made them great in the first place.

"A lot of times when you're recording, you don't want to listen to anything else. You're so wrapped up in the process, the last thing you want to do is put on another record. But even though (the Wednesday series) delayed the recording, it was a huge benefit in the sense that it forced us to listen to something else for a while."

Motorway formed in the fall of 1999 as Tin Star. Padua and Winkler were veterans of the local band Of Human Bondage. Brown made a record with the short-lived Blue Plate. Blum operated the vintage guitar store that bore his name. After a British band asserted a claim to their name, Tin Star became Motorway.

Motorway released an EP, followed in December 2000 by its full-length debut, "Underwater Demolition." Road work with fellow Big Easy rockers Better Than Ezra and Cowboy Mouth during 2001 and the spring of 2002 sharpened the musicians' playing and made them eager to document their new material.

"We knew we'd grown as a band a lot, and we knew we were getting better at writing songs," Brown said. "We were also complementing each other and collaborating a lot more. Before, one of us would bring a song in and the other members would maybe revise it a little bit. Now, things were developing through the recording process, which was a much different way of working for us."

Along the way they recorded song parts and rough arrangements on an 8-track reel-to-reel recorder. They soon were determined to make a full-blown album, one that would improve upon the sound of "Underwater Demolition."

" ‘Underwater Demolition' was recorded at a bunch of different times, and some of the songs were just demos," Brown said. "We knew it wasn't a very good representation of what we were capable of."

They upgraded their home recording set-up with a computerized ProTools rig, taking advantage of the possibilities of multi-tracking to painstakingly build songs one layer at a time.

"As we started getting into it, we got more and more ambitious about where we wanted it to go," Brown said. "The mix and edit possibilities are infinitely larger (with ProTools). If you have a good song, you want to be able to pay enough attention to it to put it across in its best possible state."

As the recording proceeded at Winkler's house, the band enlisted two ringers to assist with production chores: Better Than Ezra bassist Tom Drummond and former Kingsway engineer Ethan Allen. Drummond and Allen provided the objectivity needed to whip the arrangements into shape.

"They were invaluable, a huge part of the project," Brown said. "I don't think it would have been anywhere near as good without them helping. Tom has a great ear for visualizing a song as it should be. He did a lot of editing and mixing, weeding through our parts and making them fit together and make sense. Any time we work with him or Ethan, it's a huge learning experience."

The result is eight songs that bristle with a newfound sophistication. Brit-pop influences are obvious in the vocals and shimmering guitars throughout the opening track, "She," and the equally memorable second track, "Firefly." The spirit of classic Cheap Trick is alive and well in the punchy guitars and harmonies of the two-minute "Everything."

With this new project, the members of Motorway have stated their case to be considered among the city's best guitar pop bands, and found a renewed sense of purpose.

"In the last couple of years we've developed a lot more of a band mentality, a one for all, all for one mentality, as cheesy as that sounds," Brown said. "A lot of people think a rock band can't make it in New Orleans. It can be done, but it takes a ton of work. I'm willing to try, and I know we are as a band."

10/04/02