Deadline yields new approach for the Helio Sequence
When the two members of Portland alt-rock band the Helio Sequence entered the studio to record their sixth album, they took it as a challenge. Songwriters Brandon Summers and Benjamin Weikel gave themselves only two months to produce as many songs as they could, an approach they had never tried in their two decades of working together.
“We knew we wanted to work quickly,” Summers said. “We didn’t want to get bogged down in writing a record over 2 1/2 years, like we’ve done in the past.”
The process went something like this: The duo, which performs at the Bartlett on Saturday, would start a session with a single musical element – a pre-programmed keyboard loop, for instance, or an individual bass line – and they’d jam over the top of it and record themselves. Whatever ended up on tape, they’d shelve.
The band ended up with nearly 50 song sketches, and after revisiting and tinkering with those experimental tracks, Summers and Weikel settled on the 10 songs that appear on their new self-titled album.
“Sometimes it was a trainwreck,” Summers said. “Other times, something amazing happened in that five or 10 minutes. … That kept things fresh, but we didn’t think twice about it.”
It’s an unusual process, but Summers and Weikel are natural collaborators, having played in bands together since they were suburban teenagers in the late ’90s.
“The Portland music scene was more tied in with the grunge movement” when the band started, Summers said. “We were using sequences and keyboards and doing this shoegaze, spacey, British-influenced thing. Everybody else was doing a heavy rock kind of thing.”
Over the course of six albums, the band has settled into a comfortable songwriting rhythm. Summers says he’s generally concerned with melody and song structure, while Weikel is more interested in the production side of things, and their respective approaches form something of a creative yin and yang.
“We both relate to the world through music, and we’re always looking for new sounds,” Summers said. “And we both bring something to the songwriting process that the other doesn’t. … But we’re always trying to write something that you’re going to remember, and hopefully something you can relate to through the melody and the lyrics.”
The band wanted its newest LP to capture the spontaneity and improvisation that went into its creation, but the tunes on “The Helio Sequence” are even
A lot of the lyrics also seem to reflect the keep-your-head-down work ethic that went into the album: When Summers sings, “Let it bleed, let it all come out” or, “Keep your eyes on right ahead,” it’s impossible not to hear it as a personal mantra.
The album itself is self-titled, Summers says, because it represents a stylistic and creative rebirth for the band. Considering how naturally the songs on “The Helio Sequence” came about, this new deadline-focused process could likely influence the way he and Weikel write and record from now on.
“We found that when we were working (quickly),” he said, “so many of the positive things that we know about ourselves as musicians and collaborators came out.”