Sometimes a singer just wants to sing.
Even though Harem Scarem’s Harry Hess has carved out a career us as a well-respected producer and recording engineer, as well as an in-demand songwriting collaborator, there are times when all he wants to do is exercise his well-honed vocal instrument as an interpreter of someone else’s songs.
That’s what he has been able to do, to stunning and memorable effect with the First Signal project. Originally conceived during a hiatus for Harem Scarem by Frontiers Music, First Signal’s second album One Step Over The Line was released on June 3, and features Hess’s unmistakably powerful and emotive vocal work.
“The president of the label asked if I would be interested in singing on this project that he was putting together. I said sure. He sent me the material and I liked it. It was a way of staying in the game as far as singing on rock records. We did that [self-titled album] and it was received really well. I was pleasantly surprised that so many people liked it. And I guess it was about a year ago when he approached me about being involved in a second one. I said yes right away. It was a very positive experience the first time and this one was no different. It was a different producer but I view these kinds of projects as situations where I am being hired to sing and that’s what I am concentrating on. So all I have to do is just get down to the business of singing, which is different for me,” Hess explained.
“They offered right from the beginning the chance for me to change and tweak stuff but to be honest I wasn’t really interested in doing that. I thought if I am going to be involved in the writing and production as well as singing, I might as well just make a solo record or do another Harem Scarem record. It kind of defeated the purpose of just being a part of something if I was going to jump in and try to take control. And as with the first album, I understood what the premise of First Signal was and I liked that idea and I wanted to stay within the confines of just worrying about singing. It was different and refreshing and I enjoyed that role.
“I assumed that they put this group of specific people together because they knew they were good at what they do. And, again, it was in keeping with the notion that everyone had a role and you then come together to make something that otherwise wouldn’t have been made. I like that idea. It makes a lot of sense to me. If I am going to come in and start doing too much of other people’s jobs then it turns into too much of what I already do. I have those outlets already to express myself that way. I just embraced what my role in First Signal was.”
The debut First Signal album was released in 2010 and was produced by Dennis Ward. One Step Over the Line sees Hess performing under the direction of Swedish producer Daniel Flores, who also plays keyboards and drums on the album, while guitars and bass are handled by Michael Palace. Fellow Harem Scarem bandmate Darren Smith also makes a guest appearance on background vocals for a few tunes.
“I met Daniel when I was on a writing trip to Sweden and he was one of the writers I worked with and we hit it off. We actually wrote a song that ended up on my solo record about four years ago. We only worked together for a couple of days, but it was a good experience. And it was nice to work with him again,” Hess said.
The album was put together using the most up to date file sharing, production and mixing technology and while Hess said it worked out great in the First Signal context where it was an assemblage of talent put together for a specific project, he feels a band should be together in studio as much as possible during the recording process, especially a new or inexperienced band.
“I do that high-tech stuff a lot even with Pete Lesperance, who writes all the Harem Scarem stuff with me. I live in Oakville and he lives not far away in Toronto, but nine times out of 10 we’ll just send each other files because, for us, we don’t need to be in the same room to kind of understand what’s going on and know what the job is – especially after so many years of making records and working together. We can work separately and know what the other person is going to do to add to the song and move forward without the time constraints of having to schedule studio time together. So it’s an interesting evolution to recording not only for us, but for everybody,” he said, but still admitted that there is nothing like all the guys being in the studio together when songs are being tracked.
“There is absolutely no doubt that hands down the best records we ever made were the ones where we were in a room together, because of the back and forth that happens. It’s having someone who may not even be part of that session chiming in with a comment or some advice, acting as the voice of reason that can take things in a different, better direction. Based on my experience of when I am in a room with people that are talented and who know what they are doing, we always come to a shared conclusion of what a part should be. It’s very rare when nobody chimes in and nobody tries to make it better.
“Pete and I have written entire albums together sitting in a room and even though we might do our parts separately we would still come together and discuss them and move forward from there. And today with the technology and Skype you can actually see and hear and talk to the person in real time you can do some of that, but that doesn’t happen if you don’t already have a rapport with the other musicians. For something like First Signal, they hired musicians who are experienced enough to know what to do, but it’s interesting to still see what would happen if we were all in a room together.”
He said many forms of modern music, the ones more dependent on computer technology, sampling and other forms of non-organic creation, can perhaps be done without face to face contact, but Hess believes rock and roll records, especially from bands that are still working on their sound, need to be done collectively as much as possible.
“The rock records that I see being made that I think are good, and the ones that I am personally involved with as a producer, they are still done that way. There’s an engineer, there’s a producer, all the band members are there and even the drummer hangs out until the record is done even though he was done in week one. Those records sound like there was some thought put into them and a bunch of people that had specialized talents all worked together to make it. So my personal thought on it is that it would be the preferable way to go, especially when you are making rock records with live musicians. You still want to get into a room and play the music with all the players present and bang it out, figure out what works and what doesn’t and capture that,” he explained.
In the promotional material for One Step Over the Line, Frontiers officials said they were looking to replicate the incredible melodic nature of Harem Scarem’s early work, which Hess took as the highest of compliments.
“We didn’t know at the time that we would have a lasting impact on people and that 20 years or so down the road people would be using it as a reference for a style of music. That second record, Mood Swings, more than any other record that we’ve done has always been held up as the flagship record for Harem Scarem. From an international perspective it opened the door for us and a lot of people around the world heard us for the first time through Mood Swings. The first album was more melodic so I guess First Signal is a throwback to those types of records and that style and it just so happens that I was the guy to sing on those albums too,” Hess said.
Harem Scarem is a unique story of band that managed to weather one of the most destructive seismic shifts in the music business – the Grunge movement of the early 1990s. The electro-pop and hair metal era which held dominion over the music business throughout the 1980s, especially with the advent of MTV, ended with a blunt thud the moment Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit began hitting the airwaves. Harem Scarem came in at the tail end of the Bon Jovi-dominated scene and could have ended up being tossed on the music scrap heap like so many other bands. But they adapted, persevered, went underground and realized that the world was a big place, with millions of fans who still appreciated their kind of melodic hard rock.
“If our first record came out three to five years earlier than 1991, it would have been a completely different career, because once Grunge hit, it was completely over for our style of music commercially. The only reason we survived as an underground band is people were still selling that style of music, but in different parts of the world. For us, it was Japan and other parts of the Far East. Back here, you weren’t going to hear it on the radio, you weren’t going to see the videos, you weren’t going to get front racking at all the music stores, and you were ignored by the print media. Grunge ended a lot of careers of a lot of bands,” Hess said.
“On one hand, I consider it extremely unlucky as far as the timing goes, but on the other hand I guess we should consider ourselves lucky that we had any career at all because I know so many great musicians who put out records that went nowhere and we have been going strong for nearly 30 years, putting out records and doing what we do for a living and not having to have day jobs. We were 19 years old when we signed our record deal, so it just couldn’t have happened quicker for us. We were a product of our age and the music we grew up listening to and that why we were doing what we were doing when that first album came out in 1991. And it was also 1991 when Nevermind came out.
“Darren once posted an ad or something once for The Opera House in Toronto and on Friday night it was the Harem Scarem album release party for the first record. Saturday night was Nirvana. How funny is it to look back now and see something like that because if you would have known what was going to happen you would have said, ‘well, we’ve got 24 hours of a career. Because tomorrow night someone’s coming who is going to end it.’ A lot of bands weren’t as lucky as we were. We were so new that we didn’t have far to fall and kind of existed under the radar. Foreigner was dropped by Atlantic Records while we were touring with them. If they’re dropping a band that’s sold all those millions of albums, what’s going to happen to us? It was a crazy, crazy time, but we survived it.”
Harem Scarem continued until 2008, when it seemed as though they were calling it quits. But after the initial First Signal project, it became obvious to Hess and his former bandmates, as well as Frontiers Music, that there was still great demand for the band. So they reformed and released the critically acclaimed Mood Swings II in 2013, followed by the rollicking hit album Thirteen in 2014.
Hess said there will be a new Harem Scarem album coming in the near future, as he and guitarist/co-songwriter Lesperance are already working on material. The band is also comprised of Smith and bassist Stan Miczek.
“We’re writing another record right now. We were going to start in January but we got off to a really slow start because Pete and I have been working on records for other people and that’s kind of continued and is snowballing, which is great. We both love being busy. Every once in a while we have been getting together and going over songs. We want to do something we think is great as well, but trying to top the last record is hard – trying to top anything where we’ve got a history of like 160 or 170 songs without kind of rehashing old shit is not easy. We don’t want to write the same song over and over again and do some different things, but we also understand that we need to remain within that confined space of what people like and expect from us. It’s a tall order the more your career goes on,” Hess said.
“We basically have about seven or eight songs that we really like and we’re trying to hit that 10 song mark. I feel like we’re going to get close to 10 songs that we love and then we’ve got to literally record the whole thing from top to bottom. So I really can’t see us being finished until the end of the year just because of all of our schedules. Then once we’re done, we will hand it off to the record company and they will give us a release date. We’d probably go out and do some dates and play live a bit and see what people think of it too.”
For more information on First Signal, visit http://www.frontiers.it/album/5311 For more information on Harem Scarem, visit http://www.haremscarem.net/
* Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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