Ueland makes solo effort personal

Kent Ueland had been playing with Terrible Buttons his entire adult life when the band dissolved earlier this year. The local folk seven-piece, which had amassed a devoted fan base during the five years it was active, announced their split via Facebook just a few weeks before the band’s final show in May.

“Life takes people different ways,” Ueland said. “Some of us wanted to tour and make this our main thing, and some of us had real lives. But we did what we could with our time together, and I think we did pretty well. … It was a good run. I loved being in that band and I miss it like nothing else.”

Coupled with a breakup and a string of canceled tour dates, the Buttons’ split capped a year that Ueland, 23, calls the darkest of his life.

“(I was) unemployed, just out of college, living off whatever pittance I had left,” he said. “I was living in a two-bedroom duplex with two other guys, so I was sleeping in the living room and just playing guitar.”

The songs Ueland started writing during this time of personal and creative upheaval inspired his new solo project the Holy Broke, which releases its debut album “Do It Yourself” early next year.

“I started writing these tunes on the side with no intent of them ever being public,” Ueland said. Perhaps that’s why so many of them are nakedly, aggressively personal. They carry a brutal honesty, and you get the feeling you’re eavesdropping on an intimate conversation you weren’t intended to hear.

The lyrics on “Do It Yourself” have a bitter, cynical edge, as Ueland explores themes of isolation, desperation, depression, alcoholism, religion and loss. “Old Flame” details a drunken night with an ex (“A drink turned into an evening / And the floor swapped spots with the ceiling”), the shuffling “Roadsick Blues” is a bittersweet love letter to life as a touring musician (“I miss playing through the blisters / With my brothers and my sisters”) and the morose title track is a meditation on suicide (“I ain’t nervous about death no more / I invite her to knock down my door”).

“There’s not a single piece of fiction on the record,” Ueland said. “It’s sort of this debauched journey into heartache, about what happens when a man with a questionable moral foundation suddenly feels wronged. And that’s a dangerous situation.”

Ueland describes the tunes he wrote for Terrible Buttons as “an exercise in philosophy,” his lyrics inspired by the political science he was studying at Whitworth University at the time. It was initially a struggle, he says, to spill his guts so openly on the Holy Broke songs.

“It was difficult at first, but now I revel in it,” he said. “The relationship between the crowd and me is so much different now, and a lot of times there’s discomfort in the crowd. … People laugh sometimes at some of the lyrics, and I take that just as well as clapping. It seems like the laughter is, ‘I don’t know how to take this.’ I love the awkward interplay with the crowd.”

Ueland recorded “Do It Yourself” in Northfield, Minnesota, a small town less than an hour’s drive from Minneapolis, in a studio run by the Buttons’ former label Plastic Horse Records.

“Their studio is heaven,” Ueland said. “It’s all analog – there’s not a computer in the space. It’s the most creative I’ve ever felt.”

Producer Michael Morris brought in Minnesota-based musicians that included bassist James Buckley of the Pines, honorary Replacements drummer Peter Anderson and banjo player Little Omar to perform on the album. It was intimidating, Ueland says, to hand his songs over to such talented musicians, but they found common ground in the DIY spirit the album’s title espouses.

“These are people working so hard to do it themselves, to get outside of the major labels and big money and just make great music,” he said. “Not being the orchestrator of everything and giving some power away really helped the record.”

Now that “Do It Yourself” is complete, Ueland is quitting his part-time jobs and hitting the road on his own, and he’ll be taking time to stop again in Northfield and record album No. 2.

“I think I’m finally making records the way I want to make them,” Ueland said. “I mean, songwriters are selfish people. So it’s very nice to be able to call the shots and tiptoe around personalities. … I’m in a better creative space than I’ve ever been in. The whole thing’s about honesty.

“Three chords and the truth – that’s what a song is supposed to be.”