Introducing: The Slow Sound

“I am no longer a dreaming tyrant who can command and match the light. The air joins the slow sound with the breath in my pillow. I am the voice that matters.”

Harold Brodkey, The Runaway Soul

I was sitting on a hotel bed in Washington D.C. at a work conference. I was supposed to be focused on a work project (a heartfelt posthumous apology goes out to my former boss). Instead, I was talking to my good friend Kendall Sallay-Milotz about this idea for a new band.

We just spent a few weeks preparing for a show we were playing together fronting our mainstays Young Elk (my band) and Starover Blue (her band). Since about 2015/16 (I honestly can’t remember) she has been singing on Young Elk recordings. So I asked her to join our live show for this special show we were playing.

We would meet up for lunch, hang for a few hours and then eventually get down to the business of rehearsal—a creative practice that has become the norm for us. We were having so much fun playing music together we started to wonder why we weren’t doing this on a regular basis.

We both revealed that we secretly wanted to be doing things we had no business doing. Kendall, a brilliant writer of artful pop drums wanted to play drums and sing in a band. I was a synth texture obsessive endlessly buying, trading, and rebuying synths that I didn’t know how to play.

We bonded over our mutual love dark pop and Billy Joel (we actually covered a Billy Joel song semi-secretly). So we committed to this uncomfortable process of flexing new musical muscles.

As I was sitting in a DC hotel room not focused on work scribbling down a bunch of terrible band names when we settled on The Slow Sound, an obscure reference to a Harold Brodkey novel. We were a band.

A lot happened over the next several months.

Shortly after we participated in an emotional trust fall exercise of agreeing to make music we weren’t comfortable making, we would have to stop our in-person rehearsals because of a worldwide pandemic.

Life got weird and difficult pretty quickly.

Tours were cancelled.

Recording plans postponed.

Kendall tragically lost her very good friend Dominic Miranda.

My sister lost her battle with Leukemia.

Somewhere in the middle of all that while we were processing some big things (grief, loss, isolation, the paradox of loving music but loathing the painstaking process, our mutual obsessiveness the art of pop music), we recorded a song and made a music video.

“Elora”

I will always love how we made this song and that we did it despite a lot of crazy, shipwrecking events that were swirling about. Everything about it was a scrappy venture. From passing endless vocal takes and synth patch ideas back and forth to making a music video with found materials in Kendall’s garage and our practices space.

It’s one of the healthiest art-making ventures I’ve participated in. We’re both very honest about what we want out of it, our insecurities, and we cheer each other on through our neuroses.

Elora is a direct result of how we make music, and a near-perfect metaphor for The Slow Sound. We wrote the song about the 1988 fantasy classic Willow — the story of a reluctant farmer who leaves his place of comfort and safety into an unknown land to preserve a world he loved.

We’re not saving the world or battling evil witches, but we’re stepping out into a place neither of us has been.

We’re actively figuring out how to be a live band and have plans to be just that next year and hopefully start making an actual record. In the meantime, we hope you dig this representation of the last two years of our creative lives a musical entity.