Categories
Music Music Features

Wide Appeal for The Narrows

Not many bands can say audience members created a dance to one of their songs.

The Narrows can, thanks to their song, “The Wheel.”

“I think it’s still the crowd favorite,” says singer/rhythm guitarist Owen Traw, 23. “I think people like how it sounds. People know some of the lyrics.”

And, he says, there’s “a dance during that song.”

“It’s like a bunch of little hand movements that fit whatever the lyrics are saying,” says bass player Bella Frandsen, 22.

One of the lines is “Don’t fall asleep,” says Traw, who wrote the song. “People make a negatory motion with their hand, like wagging their finger. Then when I say, ‘Fall asleep,’ they fold their hands under their heads like they’re sleeping. ‘At the wheel,’ they make a driving motion.”

People teach other people the dance at their shows, Frandsen says. “There’s an ever-growing number of people doing this silly dance.”

There’s also an ever-growing number of people going to shows featuring The Narrows. The Memphis rock band also features Aidan Smith, 25, on vocals and guitar, and Chris Daniels, 20, on drums. The band will open for Juicy J on April 5th in the Bryan Campus Life Center at Rhodes College as part of the school’s Rites of Spring.

“The Wheel” was the band’s first single. “Our best song at that time,” Smith says. “The one that got the crowd going the most.”

“I wrote it when I was really sick,” Traw says. “I still have the voice memos of that moment when I was trying to make sure I didn’t forget it. “

He had a bad cold. “I was all hunkered up and all gross in my room. I had a chord change in my head.”

The lyrics originated from a drive Traw took to Nashville. It was bumper-to-bumper traffic, but people were speeding. “If anybody hit the brakes it would have been really bad. It’s basically just about the feeling that one’s decisions have really big impacts.”

It was Traw’s idea to form a band about a year ago. It became The Narrows. “I started the band basically because I really wanted to express myself artistically, but I didn’t know how,” he says. “I wasn’t a musician or anything.”

That changed after he saw Smith in One Strange Bird. “A band I formed with some friends from Rhodes a few years ago,” Smith says. “We were playing really shitty bars and stuff like that.”

“Aidan really blew me away,” says Traw, who thought, “Dang, he’s so good. I wish I knew how to play music.”

Traw already played some guitar. “I could play ‘cowboy chords,’ as they call them, on the guitar, but I couldn’t play barre chords or hold a pick.”

He was impressed with “the way Aidan played the guitar. It’s a really cool mix of rhythm and lead playing. The kind of stuff Jimmy Page does. Or Jimi Hendrix. Playing guitar and lead at the same time and it’s really melodic. Just really catchy and good, too. Tasteful.”

Traw originally met Smith when they were at Rhodes. “We met very, very briefly. We had one conversation, really, where I told him he looked like Kurt Cobain.”

He got Smith’s phone number, texted him, and asked him if he wanted to be in a band.

“He had a demo that was circulating through the friend group,” Smith says. “So I knew who he was. When he said, ‘Let’s jam,’ I was like, ‘Yeah. For sure.’”

As for Traw’s guitar ability back then, Smith says, “He’s being a little modest. He could play a little bit of guitar.

“I remember him playing four or five songs. I thought all of them were really pretty good.”

The songs “were all well constructed and sort of in a tradition I love from the ’60s and ’70s music. I saw the nuances and jumps from verses to choruses and back. And the way that the melodies would work with the chords when he was playing.

“That night I think we wrote a song together.’”

The song was “Waste,” Smith says “It was an idea that I had that we just fleshed out based on an experience with DMT, the psychedelic. A drug I had taken years before that. I really wanted to write a song about it. And Owen really helped me out with the lyrics.”

Recalling how he felt on the drug, Smith says, “It made me feel like all comfort and warmth was gone from the world. I was looking at the sunshine in my parents’ backyard and it was kind of frightening. It was a frightening and beautiful experience. I was doing a lot of it then. That was when I was 18 or 19.”

Traw eventually became comfortable playing guitar. “I definitely got to the point where I could play guitar a little bit better,” he says. “I almost learned through osmosis because Aidan is so good. The way he would move his right hand to strum and hold the pick. Or what he would do with his fingers on his left hand. I would basically just watch him and try to do that.”

He and Smith began playing together in public. “At that point Aidan and I were writing songs on acoustic guitars and playing open mic nights. We wanted a band, but we didn’t know who would be the drummer, who would play bass.”

They began auditioning drummers. Born in Memphis, Daniels began playing drums at age 5. “I was born in the church, so I always watched church musicians. My uncle [the late Bernard Wilson] played drums as well. He kind of got me into it.”

Daniels was in the jazz band at Ridgeway High School and Middle School. He’s currently in the jazz band at University of Memphis.

As for what makes The Narrows different, Daniels says, “You have your punk rock and stuff and all that jazz, [but] I think our music is different because we talk about real life events. And it’s basically like therapy, like you’re talking to a counselor or something like that.”

Traw was impressed when he learned Daniels played drums in jazz groups. “I played jazz drums but had long since quit. But I know jazz takes a lot of musicality, and it’s really difficult to play. And with Chris, you could tell he had serious chops.”

They then interviewed bass players. Frandsen, a Rhodes student from New York who already was a friend of Traw’s, felt confident when she auditioned for them. “I really just clicked. I got along with everyone and everything worked really well.”

Smith thought Frandsen was “super intuitive” when they were working on their song, “Ice About to Melt.” “I played off the bass line that she had dreamed up,” he says. “That became a main figure in the chorus of the song. I could tell she was really super musical and an overall musician instead of strictly a bassist.”

The band name came from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, twin suspension bridges spanning Puget Sound’s Tacoma Narrows strait in Washington.

“I also think ‘The Narrows’ is pretty evocative even if you don’t know what the body of water is,” Traw says. “In my head, it made me imagine scrawny figures.”

The group, which has been touring, recently played shows with their friends in Smokies, a band from Jackson, Mississippi. They’re planning a “more serious tour this summer.”

The Narrows also completed its first EP, Sloth & Envy, which the group recorded at Easley McCain Recording and Young Avenue Sound.

Describing the EP’s cover he designed, Eli Schwartz says, “It evokes a feeling of being lost, helpless, and feeling like a stranger to yourself. Wondering who you are and coming up empty handed.” 

Categories
Music Music Features

Reasoning Behind The Stupid Reasons

You’ve got to love a band named “The Stupid Reasons.”

That’s the duo that features Gus Carrington, 29, on guitar and Daniel Wasmund, 29, on drums. They’re working on a new album, Through to You, at Easley McCain Recording.

The band name comes from one of Carrington’s old journal entries: “Well, you need to do whatever it is that makes you happy. Whether playing video games or watching stupid movies, you have to find stupid reasons to be happy.”

Carrington used the stage name The Stupid Reasons when he played solo gigs at singer-songwriter nights.

It’s always been music for Carrington. “My parents have footage of me standing at point-blank range staring at the TV screen at the Beatles movie, Yellow Submarine,” Carrington says. “I think I had hair in that footage, so maybe [I was] 4 or 5.”

Wasmund was about 10 when his parents got him his first guitar. “And, as cheesy as it is, I think I heard Jimi Hendrix play once and I was like, ‘I want to be like that. I want to make those sounds,’” Wasmund says.

Carrington met Wasmund at an eighth grade dance. Wasmund and his friend, Kyle Owens, brought their guitars and amps to the dance, but they weren’t allowed to bring them inside. “They found two outlets in front of the school,” Carrington says. “Plugged it up. It sounded like there were some elephants here. Some loud animals running around White Station Middle School.”

Rather, it was Wasmund and Owens “riffing through ‘Stranglehold.’”

They began jamming together when Wasmund discovered Carrington played bass. “I honestly thought I wanted to play bass and scream in a thrash metal band at the time,” Carrington says. “They were very much more bluesy Hendrix licks. We tried to run through ‘Seek & Destroy’ by Metallica with no drums. That’s how that one went. And then Kyle started doing ‘Voodoo Child.’ And I hopped on the drums. And Wasmund started riffing the solo.”

He and Carrington have been in numerous bands together, including a current one, Bigger Fish, Wasmund says. “It started with What’s in a Name, evolved into The Jetpack Crew a couple of years later, and then pretty much after that started The Stupid Reasons.”

(Petunias) was the title of The Stupid Reasons’ first album, which they recorded with a slew of other musicians from 2019 to 2022. Carrington’s song, “Petunias (The Break Room Song),” was inspired by the giraffe keeper at Memphis Zoo, where he worked as a tram driver. He was talking to her about how he was frustrated because he was stuck at work and he couldn’t play bass for the recording of Blvck Hippie’s self-titled EP that day. “She hit me with this phrase I had never heard before. She said, ‘Well, you must feel like a petunia in an onion patch.’ I said, ‘You know, Shirley, that’s exactly how I feel.’ And I had that song drop out of me.

“I wrote all about feeling like a petunia in an onion patch. And then I modernized it: ‘I feel like a Ferrari in a used car lot.’”

Carrington describes (Petunias) as “a collection of songs written over different time periods in my life.”

“We were wrapping up (Petunias) when me and Daniel decided, ‘Hey, it kind of works for us to play as a two piece. Let’s just jam.’ All the songs on the second album are from us just jamming together.”

The new record will be a “full concept album,” Carrington says. “Inspired by post-punk and ’80s.”

Songs include “Passing Through,” which is “about somebody passing through your life romantically. And being at peace with that for a change. Instead of holding onto it and being bitter, but appreciating that experience and that chapter in your life even though it’s done.”

Lyrics include, “Passing through my life like a harmony I can’t return to. That’s you.”

For the new album, he and Wasmund are fleshing out some ideas on how to take the music to “new sonic places,” Carrington says.

The Stupid Reasons will perform July 26th at the Hi Tone Cafe at 282-284 North Cleveland Street; (901) 490-0335.