The Fencemen hail from Lansing, Michigan and consist of singer Tyler Blakslee, guitarist Mike Reed, bassist Jared Nisch and drummer Dan Jaquint. Several months ago they released their debut album, Times Are Alright, which was primarily written and recorded in 2011, as well as part of this year. Members of The Fencemen have also played in bands like Small Brown Bike, LaSalle, BiddyBiddyBiddy and Ettison Clio. Traces of the aforementioned groups can be heard in The Fencemen’s sound, but what sets them apart is a variety of extra instrumentation that complements the band’s aggressive and gritty core. We recently spoke with Tyler and Mike and discussed how the band formed, what their music sounds like and where they recorded their record. We also talked about the decision to self-release the album, what some of its songs are about and more.

Bill – What events took place that led to the formation of your band?

Tyler – To be honest there isn’t any grand anecdote here, it is fairly typical I think. We were all friends for years and had lived with each other in some combination or the other, and had played/toured with each other’s bands. We had never played together though, and that was the large attractant. The idea of meeting up on a daily basis to pull pranks, discuss baseball scores and drink a few cold ones while songwriting was another plus. That sounds pretty mundane and obvious I’m sure, but we’re all getting a bit older and organizing time to connect weekly is tough, and allowing the creative process to serve a dual purpose seemed as good an idea as any. The translation of friendships that span a decade or more into working relationships, where you are creating with people you love and trust, for me, is invaluable. Kleenex, please.

Bill – How would you describe your music to someone who’s never heard The Fencemen?

Tyler – I think that The Fencemen are a rock and roll band. I don’t mean a “Rock and Roll All Night”/“Metal Health Will Drive You Mad” type party band, but these are rock songs to me. There is an organic aspect to it evoked by Reed’s guitar, but there is a bit of that post-punk art-rock vibe in there too. Wait…I don’t even think I remember what that even means. With regard to music, existing in a genre doesn’t seem so important anymore. You’ll always bring your influences to whatever you do, whether it is the stuff you heard wafting through your screen door when you were six or whatever record you listened to last week, but you might not overtly hear them in there. I’m sure there is as much of The Band, Springsteen and Tom Petty floating around in The Fencemen as there is Audubon bird sketches, rocking chairs and lake water.

Bill – Where did you record your album and what was your time in the studio like?

Tyler – We recorded all the basic tracks in “The Fort,” which is essentially the lower half of Dan’s house. It has a real rustic cabin vibe, complete with a roaring, stone-hearth fireplace. We’re even surrounded by woods there. We recorded the vocals and some organs and other assorted sounds in the makeshift arcade Dan put together, stand up classic video games and, of course, pinball. Pinball is an underlying force in practice, writing and recording; sessions begin and/or end with pinball. Needless to say, recording was relaxing and enjoyable. It allowed us to experiment; it allowed us to let things sleep for a day or two. Should I mention the Quiet Riot and Men at Work banners in our studio space? Not very rustic, but necessary.

Bill – Why did you choose to self-release the record?

Tyler – Mainly for the reason that we wanted to do everything ourselves. We’d already decided we were going to record it ourselves, at home, then mix it, then master it, etc. Putting the record out ourselves seemed logical and the fastest way to get it done and out into people’s hands. There was a notion that we’d done everything else on our own, might as well go whole hog.

Bill – Who was responsible for the album’s cover art and what would you say it represents?

Tyler – I assembled the collages for Times Are Alright as the recording and mixing was coming to a close and although I’ve been working with collage as a medium for a few years now, those images were specifically created for the record. They weren’t old pieces sitting around. The title of the record can be taken positively, that times are in fact copacetic, or negatively, in that this claim of eventual triumph is a falsehood, and I think the collages offer both those perspectives. The front collage depicts a young man summiting a small rock pile. He’s done it man, he’s made it to the top, he’s larger than the rocks and hell, times are alright. But there’s also this image of these hands engaging in some sort of, I don’t know, mesmerism? Selling you that idea, as we are continually being told as of late. The reverse side shows an immense pile of rocks, the trouble, the woe, the crisis hanging over the heads of all these city dwellers, these citizens. Times may not be alright. The collages found within the liner notes, those floating, expectant individuals, offer a far more positive projection. I don’t think either perspective is the correct one, thematically. The songs, the record; they really go both ways. Explaining that was a Herculean effort…does it even make sense? Talking about art is like what Cheever said about writing about sex, it’s like writing about how to change a tire. Something like that.

Bill – What made you want to include instruments like horns and organ in your songs?

Tyler – The organ seemed like an element that the songs desired, and it is a sound that evoked an age that we wanted the songs to have, if that makes any sense. Once we had made the conscious decision to chase the guitar sound, Reed’s Hollywood hollow-body, the organs seemed like a logical fit to me. Two antiques, hanging out together. It is also a sound that I like very much and some of our past bands have flirted with, but organs hadn’t really set up shop and lived in the songs.

Mike – I bought this old guitar at a pawn shop years ago and always wanted to incorporate it into a project at some point. It sat for years in the corner, waiting…until finally The Fencemen came along. It just seemed like the right project and the right time and place to bring it back to life. It’s an old Harmony Hollywood from the ‘50s or ‘60s. The company started in the late 1800’s and was later bought by Sears Roebuck in the early 1900’s. So every kid probably got one under his Christmas tree in 1958 or something. It is, hands down, my favorite guitar to play now. I read somewhere that it’s one of Richard Buckner’s favorite guitars as well. So I’m in good company and I completely agree.

Tyler – As far as the horns, I’d been listening to a great deal of Coltrane, and when Dan and I were working on “Rented Rooms,” I told him that I heard some wild sax bleats and wails in my head, some freak-out shit, and we figured out a way to make it happen. We were put in touch with Mike Teager by a mutual friend of ours and Dan and I sent him the track. I threw a few Coltrane titles at him to get him where I was at conceptually and Teager ran with it. Dan and I used pieces of the original home recordings Teager sent and we arranged them. It is impossible for me to imagine the song without it now. As for “Call Me a Crooked Heart,” I can’t recall where the idea for trumpets came from, but I knew this cat, Matt Michaud, and had approached him with the idea. He came out with no preparation and laid down trumpet and flugelhorn, based on the arrangements that Dan and I had written. Arranging horns isn’t something I’d ever done, so that was an exciting experience. I think, all in all, we wanted to add another element to some of the songwriting. Maybe it was a subconscious influence from The Stooges’ Fun House LP. There are wild horns all over that thing.

Bill – Musically speaking, “Knives” is one of the darkest songs on the record. What were some of the things that inspired its creation?

Tyler – Well, there once was a time when you were measured, professionally, by your talents and your time put in, and it seems that those days are long gone. In my father’s time, and his father too…hell, most people our age’s fathers and grandfathers, there was that gold watch, or that ring or that hearty handshake to look forward to in response to those 25 years you put in, or those 50. There was an acknowledgement, culturally, for the hard work, sweat and talents people laid down, whether it was in a factory or an office building. You know, that archetypal pocket-watch when you worked on the railroad and were ready to hit the rocking chair. But like I said, it is pretty apparent that this is a fading concept. These days, it seems that the bigger the bastard you are, the more money you can save by cutting employees off at the knees or screwing the guy next to you, that is what gets you the acknowledgement, the pat on the back. The knife seemed a good diametric opposite to the gold watch. The chorus of “Knives” is a nod to this fairly recent ideological shift. And of course, as in all things, there exists a duality in the song that suggests another side to this “measured by knives” equation. Both Jared and I are civil servants, a firefighter and teacher respectively, and like a great many people are always experiencing cutbacks, layoffs and so on. One day you’re there busting your ass, and the next—slice!—you’re not. This is especially true in our city where the closing of three factories slowed the quality of life to a grinding, metallic halt. So, whichever way you look at it, a large percentage of the population is measured by knives. The song has been around for quite a long time and truthfully almost didn’t make the cut. It’s funny; I’ve heard that it is one of the “darker” songs on the record more than once. Musically, I think it does do something that the others don’t, but I’m not sure exactly why or how. Maybe it’s Reed’s guitar-work and his tones? Perhaps lyrically? I seldom write in strict narrative form where each line bleeds into the other to create a concrete whole, a story. I work more comfortable with ideas and imagery. I sometimes approach songwriting as I do collages, an assortment of separate ideas that are not, on their face, specifically linked but collectively work to create a unified whole. They have themes and an overall intention, but aren’t always linear equations that add up line by line. The verses of “Knives” tend to be a smattering of tangential ideas linked together by the chorus. There isn’t one particular narrative voice or view. I think the sentiment of the chorus is the thing that links it to the other songs. Although we don’t play it that often, it is the song that got us going, where we felt, after a series of false starts, that we were chumming an area that felt comfortable. It helped us to draw closer to finding our sound, that sound I couldn’t eloquently verbalize.

Bill – “Rented Rooms” is a very topical song, given America’s foreclosure crisis. Was there a specific event that motivated you to write these lyrics?

Tyler – I think the sentiments found within “Rented Rooms” are yes, very topical, but I’m not sure that there is any one “news-worthy” incident per say that contributed to the impetus of the song. There were (and still are) so many instances of this type of thing going on at the time that it seemed a logical focus. That song evokes so many of the thematic ideas on the entire record that it almost becomes a centerpiece of sorts. Granted, these aren’t new ideas. There is obviously a massive amount of art right now dealing with the sentiment of “the foreclosure frustration,” but Lansing, Michigan is a factory town that was hit pretty hard and once the factories went, the houses went. There are, however, two images/anecdotes that stick in my mind. When they closed the General Motors plant, Plant #3, also known as “The Jet Plant” on the west-side of Lansing where I live, someone in charge chose to do a curious thing. After all the employees and machinery and the like were all removed, they began to demolish the plant itself, of course, but almost as if they realized how integral the plant was to people’s lives and wallets, let alone the city’s skyline, they left the front façade of the plant standing. It was literally just one wall. So what you had when you drove by was this Wild-West set, this Universal Studios-esque fake factory standing there. You’d see the sunset through the windows and doors…it was all very strange, and in a way, insulting. It was like they didn’t want to upset the natural order of things too much…that maybe if they dismantled it in steps we wouldn’t notice. That thing had been standing since 1951. Hell, they built jet engines there during the Korean War, and then, nothing. It wasn’t just empty, vacant or gutted; the thing was…a prop. The other thing that led me to “Rented Rooms” would have to be this house on Saginaw (a fairly busy thoroughfare in Lansing) that was for sale at an insanely low price (I forget how much, but it was a sad number). And this was advertised on plywood planks placed all over the house, festooned with spray paint. It was sad, it was desperate; these people were probably just trying to get something so they could get the hell out…or get out from beneath the bank. The price was urgently scrawled all over the place. There were times in Lansing while working on this record that you had to wonder to yourself, “When the hell did we all start living in a Springsteen song?” You know what I mean?

Bill – “Get into the Light” concludes the album on a positive note. Why did you choose to place this song last?

Tyler – “Get into the Light” is definitely one of the songs that develops that more optimistic, confident perspective that the record’s title may connote. “Century Blues” too (which was the last song written and recorded) attempts to offer this idea of surmounting those issues that bedevil and mire the individuals on the record, in the songs. I think we consciously wanted some sort of “attainable victory” for these individuals, for our city, and these two songs try to connote that. They both have “anthem-ic” aspects to them, with the whole “Run rampant through the streets and free your hearts tonight” sentiment. “Century Blues,” with its declaration of “This ain’t no concession, this here is a hundred years of light” and “Fill the modern towers with your modern love” gives some level of control to these people, to us…at least that is the way that we see it. After wallowing in the familiar themes and incidents for most of the record, I think it was time to offer something else, some other commentary.

Bill – What do you have planned for the future of The Fencemen?

Tyler – We are working on a new batch of songs and I’d like to eventually release an EP in the near future. We spent a long time with some of these songs, working on the record. Things will slow down a bit, as Dan recently moved to Brooklyn, but he’ll be returning for shows and writing about once a month or so, so we’ll just be a bit more efficient and maximize our creative time. I am still looking forward to people hearing Times Are Alright, as I’m not ready to just ignore it now and turn our interests to something shinier. We’ve also murmured about doing a split 7” with our chums in Bars of Gold, which would be grand. We have started working on some new material and have a few shows booked so we are alive, but also realistic to the constraints that life involves. We are getting older…slow is good, right? No? Shit.