Seattle-based band Sweet Water will be releasing their first full-length album in over ten years, Shine On, on September 18th via Golden City Records. It marks their seventh full-length studio album so far, and ninth release overall, and was recorded in Stone Gossard’s Litho Studio, as well as in home studios, and mixed by Phil Ek. The band, made up of vocalist Adam Czeisler, guitarist Rich Credo, bassist Cole Peterson, and drummer Chris Friel have all known each other for many years, even going back to elementary school, and it was Rich Credo who pushed them to start recording a new album despite the early pandemic conditions at the time.
That’s in keeping with the attitude the band took on the album, to try new things, learn new skills, and really let their songwriting off the leash to find new directions. The result is a multi-genre influenced album that nevertheless has a very specific mood of exploration and personal discovery, landing on an overall sense of enlightenment or liberation from things that don’t serve us well in life. I spoke with Adam Czeisler and Rich Credo about this very personal journey the band took together in making a challenging new body of work.
Given that it’s been some time since you all released a record, I can see putting a lot of intentionality into Shine On, and it shows. Do you think things you’ve learned over the years helped you with this self-motivated approach?
Rich Credo: Adam is probably a virtuoso with his voice, but none of us are virtuosos with our instruments. But when you think about the people that we love, the David Bowies, Nick Ronsons, they have something. Even though there might be thousand better guitar players, they might not be authentically themselves, they might be robots who have learned to play something. So, there’s that with being a guitarist or a vocalist.
Now, that’s a little bit of a different thing than songwriting, which is a craft that requires some artistry, and so does Production require some artistry. I feel like we’re balancing all those things with Shine On, that it’s a balancing act.
Adam Czeisler: That made me think of two things—one that there’s AI now. This is why humans are always going to have a place in music, because people care about their connection with performers, and they also care about the emotion that they feel when the music connects with them. The other thing was that when you mentioned the craft, Rich, it made me think of this documentary I was watching, about Motown. It’s called Hitsville, and it’s fantastic. The main thing in the beginning is the concept that music recording can be a craft, where you can have arrangers. With that approach, they were able to have high quality for every single song, which was amazing. Arranging is that different skill. I think on our past records, we’ve had some great moments, but arrangement is one of those things that we weren’t as up on. It could’ve been better.
Rich: Yes, we were learning, always learning.
Adam: And if you don’t get the arrangement right, the song doesn’t pay off the way that it could. A lot of great Pop song have pro arrangers who make everything come together.
Lately, when I talk to bands, it’s often the very experienced producer who has done the arrangements behind the scenes. Certainly, it’s an important part of really bringing the songs fully to life.
Adam: Exactly, it takes a lot of experience. That also relates to songwriting. The verse doesn’t have to hang by itself, it’s there to set up the chorus. These things are working with each other. You want to make the song like a journey, not made up of individual parts.
Stepping back a little bit, it was Rich who really made this album happen. It was during the pandemic, and we had been practicing prior, jamming on a few different song ideas. That’s usually how we work on things. We were going down that road, which is a typical Rock band approach.
It’s sort of writing through doing?
Rich: Yes, exactly.
Adam: Especially with the music part. When the pandemic came down the road, and we couldn’t practice together, I just figured we’d sit this out for a while, and Rich said, “Let’s go and make a record.” I said, “What??” We had some ideas, but we didn’t really have any songs. But he booked, Litho, which is a great studio around here, which Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam owns. I want to give a shout out to him, since it’s really a gift to the community.
Rich: It’s got some of the best microphones in the world, too.
Adam: Well, we went into Litho, and we had sixteen ideas, not really songs.
Rich: It was just to get us moving forward! Forward motion! You show up every day and make some progress. And eventually, at the end of the day, you have a record.
Adam: If it was just me, I would never have started like that. But Rich started it, and you need that spark in any group of people, especially in a band. We laid down a bunch of stuff, and it was really fun. That started the journey, and then we started working on stuff at home. We just went song by song.
Was that a lot of stuff that you laid down? What proportion of the tracks were from that original session?
Adam: There were a couple songs where we went back in the studio and had Chris play on top of some fake drums that I had done, like for “Shine On”. Another song, “State of Grace” is not one that we’d done in the original session, but Rich just came over to my house one Saturday, and said, “I’ve got a song idea, I’m coming over right now!” [Laughs] So Saturday morning, he came over, and I put up a mic, and we laid down the acoustic track, which we kept. It was the same track. Really quickly, since I was loving it, and it inspired me, I came up with the lyrics and the melody that day. But we didn’t have any drums, in that case, so that’s another one that we took back to Litho afterwards.
Rich: It was mostly some drums, and some bass, and guitar added at Litho. But I have to give Adam so much credit, because we recorded guitar in Adam’s studio. We did some bass in there, some keyboards, some synthesizer, some cello, some violin.
Yes, you have a string section on a few of these songs!
Adam: Those are actual real people playing strings, yes.
They came to your house, your studio right?
Adam: Oh, yes!
Rich: Being close to a bunch of people playing strings is so different from an electric guitar.
Adam: It’s intense. It was in this small space. Everyone in the family came to watch, since it took place over several hours. Everyone quietly listened. It was really magical. I loved that. That was kind of a highlight. I was really nervous, though, because I’d never recorded strings, and I was afraid I’d mess up!
You’re really the producer on this album, Adam, right, and it was mixed by Phil Ek?
Adam: Yes!
Rich: Adam had to learn how to do that. The whole point is that it has been a process, but also an adventure, and a kind of a quest. That’s why we love doing this. Adam had the spark to add strings on that. I might have had the spark to make a record, but we start bouncing off each other. Then Cole will come in with this spark of a cool song, with all the lyrics, and say, “Let’s go!” It’s really a collaboration.
Adam: One-hundred percent. Adding those strings was really because of Motown, because on their second or third verse, they’d bring in the strings. On “Shine On”, it felt a little bit flat, and I wondered what we should do. We’d usually do guitar, but I thought of Motown, and I thought, “Let’s put some strings on.” We also don’t filter things ahead of time, like ideas, and rule things out.
Rich: That’s right. I like that, Adam. We didn’t do that at Litho, and we made 16 songs, and we only put ten on this record, so now we have to figure out what to do with those other six songs.
Adam: We had our first set of four songs, that we were working on, then I’d go one by one, working on the lyrics. Some of them turned out to be more rocking, and this album wasn’t really Rock, so we took those out, and now we have a set of other songs that are really rocking.
Did the sound DNA of the songs themselves help you decide what would work best together on this album?
Adam: Yes, that was very helpful. We did “Kick in the Head”, which is obviously rocking, so we did use a couple of those. Also, since we did things in batches, I was really full-steam through the first six, and that helped me with the other ones. On the last few, I was getting a little burned out, so Rich and Cole came in and helped out. “Kick in the Head” is all Cole’s lyrics, which he wrote in a day or two. Then Rich wrote “Out of Control.”
Rich: Yes. I have never thought of myself as someone who could write lyrics, but I went through some life-stuff in the last three years, with a divorce from a long-time marriage. They say that pain is a great source of poetry and music, and it was. It became an inspiration to get some of that stuff on paper, and to get it out, rather than leaving it inside. There’s a cathartic experience in doing that.
Adam: Rich came over, and I was playing some of the chords for that song on the acoustic guitar, and he just started riffing, and I pressed “record” on my phone. Rich was just making the lyrics up, seemingly on the spot. All I did was write them down and edit them. It was fantastic, I think.
Rich: Thank you, Adam. It’s all based on a life experience. I don’t know if this happens with you, Adam, but it’s same thing that sometimes happens to me on guitar. When you’re trying to be great, it’s not as good! It’s the same for me with lyrics. I’ve always tried to write lyrics. I think, “I’m going to write this thing.” And it’s always been lame. But this was much more natural. I was just saying what I was feeling.
Adam: Right, and that song’s lyrics hit you because they are just very straight.
It’s very direct. I think the sound of the song is really interesting, too. When I was first listening to it, it felt like almost like a Western ballad, leading in.
Adam: Yes! And he was sort of doing that cowboy guitar, finger-picking thing. And we used this old upright piano, that’s kind of out of tune, in my studio.
I love out-of-tune pianos on records, actually.
Adam: It’s kind of a Stooges thing, the piano thing. We just hit the one note over and over. We had a few different version of the front of the song, with a more Pink Floyd keyboard feel, but we ended up stripping it down even more.
There are a few places where it feels almost like an underwater sound.
Adam: Yes! That’s exactly what I was trying to do. Because the lyrics say, “Come in the ocean, wash yourself clean.”
You really draw on a lot of influences on this album, whether it’s Rock ‘n Roll, Psych Rock, or Americana. But there’s also some thematic connections, I think, a kind of journey towards enlightenment.
Adam: “Kids” is part of a story, a desert cult story. In a way, “Shine On” comes before that, and since it was during the pandemic, there was a feeling of isolation, sending a message from light years away, almost, looking outside of yourself and trying to make some kind of connection. It happened during the summer, when there were wildfires, and there was this red sun, scarlet red, that kind of got me going down that road. That feeling of isolation was the beginning of it.
Then the character goes to these protests in “Kids”, since there were a bunch of protests in Seattle, and Portland, and beyond. The character goes to the protests, and even though it’s scary, and intense, and there are police with riot gear, there’s the idea of taking control of yourself and calming down. But then there’s also this feeling of being in a crowd, and getting all this strength from being in a crowd, and being connected to something bigger than yourself. I think that’s something that really happened. It has its downsides, if you look at politics today, with these two sides, but the positive aspect of that is that people feel like part of a big collective. It’s a powerful thing that happens.
Then the character meets some folks who say that they know of a place that’s like this, where they can go, and basically shed all these unwanted aspects of yourself, and all the bad things that have ever happened to you. They invite the person to come and follow them. That’s kind of the beginning of the story. There’s more to come on the album! That’s the teaser!
Is it kind of an invitation to reinvent your life, to start over?
Adam: Exactly, and to kind of join this group. They are saying, “Come really be part of a group.” It’s the opposite of isolation. “Kick in the Head” is a little bit like that, too, because you’re feeling the daily grind of the world, crushing you down, and you’re thinking, “There’s got to be more to life than this.” The kids are saying, “There is another way, come on.
Rich: The way that I interpreted that, which is probably not exactly what Adam intended, is that when you get there, to that place, you realize, through a “State of Grace”, like you see in that song, that it’s actually all within you. It’s not about the group.
I was going to mention that there seemed to be a connection to the song “State of Grace.” Because that’s all about personal transformation, I think. There’s a meditative aspect in the video for “State of Grace”, too.
Adam: “State of Grace” is about finding this within yourself, for sure. If you really get into the here and now, you just experience the present, which is not easy. That got me thinking, and it was on my mind, so that’s the idea. I don’t think people realize that they are in the driver’s seat. You have to really work at it, but you can do this. You don’t need external forces.
One Response
awesome!