Bloomington band American Pirates released nine songs off their upcoming album, “What a Friend,” on Tuesday morning. Releasing the album will be the group’s first.
Just after graduating from the IU Jacobs School of Music in 2005, Aaron Jones, who studied harpsichord, started the band with some friends from the music school. Jones said the band has consisted of different people over the years, but they have always become close friends.
The band plays everything from folk to 1920s jazz music. While it started out as a casual thing just for fun, Jones said more talented musicians have joined the group in recent years and have started working on full-fledged albums and songs .
The album includes a mix of original songs composed by members of the band and new iterations of old folk songs, hymns and poems. Jones said the recorded album tries to capture the band’s spontaneous and playful nature.
The full album will include 18 songs, but the group decided they wanted to first put out nine songs to get people interested, then release the rest by the end of March.
When they recorded the album at Echo Park Studios, a local recording space, Jones said they tried to capture the essence of live music and played each song without worrying too much about the arrangement. They would listen again and decide what needed to be added or taken away only after playing the song all the way through.
“We were very lucky to get to have that luxury to be creative in the studio,” Jones said.
Jones said he feels music in general has become stuck and much less spontaneous than it used to be. He said being spontaneous in the recording studio helped them catch the essence of live music in a recorded album. The versions listeners hear on the album may not be the definitive version, he said, because they can always perform the song differently when they play live.
Elijah Sparks, a junior at the Jacobs School of Music studying music education, does vocals, ukulele, bass, tuba and trombone. He’s also a member of Welcome to the Neighborhood, a Bloomington cover band.
Sparks said they do a lot of things in their music that they think is funny. He said they made “Big Rock Candy Mountain” sound very spooky to that end.
The sixth song on the album, titled “Little Orphant Annie,” is a new setting of an old poem. For the song, Jones was inspired by Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley and combined his 1885 poem of the same name with a melody that Jones created.
“Something that makes us American Pirates, is we’re very playful with language,” Jones said. “We don’t dress up as pirates, but pirates are known for raiding and pillaging. Well, I raid and pillage folk songs, lyrics and even some of the originals.”
Jones said the group has found a niche in creating new versions of old songs and poems. However, they do still have many originals like his song “Consequence” or Sparks’ song “Slow It Down,” both of which appear on the recent release.
Sparks said he wrote “Slow It Down” about a year ago in collaboration with his good friend Adam DeWeber, who also sings and plays some guitar on the song. However, DeWeber was just one of the many collaborators who helped make the song and the album possible.
Friendship was a big theme throughout the album because of all the people who came together to create it. From people in the recording studio to other musicians, American Pirates was able to be creative and make an album they loved.
“I’ve been overwhelmed,” Jones said. “This is beyond anything I’ve ever dreamed.”
Jones said they were amazed at the recording studio that they worked with, Echo Park Studios, a local studio where John Mellencamp once recorded at.
They were able to record there after an intern at the studio, Max Riggle, reached out and said he wanted to record them.
“Before the Pirates even got to the studio, I spent a few months trailing their shows around town, being both a live sound engineer and a fan,” Riggle said in an email. “This helped me really learn who the American Pirates are, what their sound is and their relationship together as a band.”
Once they got into the recording studio, Riggle said they decided to record the album live, meaning all the band members were performing for every take. Riggle focused a lot on microphone placement when working in the studio because he wanted to get the best sound possible while also capturing the live performance feel.
The band has scheduled several shows to celebrate their new album release that began Wednesday at the Orbit Room. They will continue their tour on Thursday and Friday at 9 p.m. at The Bishop and then 6 p.m. at Elks Lodge. They will conclude the week with a performance at 7 p.m. in the Musical Arts Center in room 066.
