Review Fix Exclusive: Charlie Treat Talks ‘Look Around’ And More

Review Fix chats with singer/songwriter Charlie Treat, who discusses his new EP, breaking down the creative process, as well as creative process and goals for the future.

For More Info on Treat, Click Here. 

Review Fix: How did this project come together? 

Charlie Treat: I had been a folkie for years, playing around Boston with just my guitar. I recorded two albums there, both in one sitting, just a take or two per song. When I got to Nashville I was doing the solo folk thing still, but also playing in a rock group with my own original songs. I was recording myself in my basement, making my own videos. The songs were good but the delivery was too loud, too raw for Nashville. I had coffee with a friend and his words were this: your band doesn’t capture your sound, you need a new record, you need a foothold to launch you into the new year. I had to get out of my basement (my daily workspace), out of my head, out of the circle of people I always record with. I had to do something utterly new. And I knew I wanted it to be live, and with an already formed band, in a Funk Brothers, Chess Records fashion. So I called up Jonathan Smalt -drummer/manager of Devon Gilfillian’s touring and studio band- and he said he could get his guys together for an August session. I was already buddies with these guys and we’ve all jammed together before – I knew they could play and they had already been touring together for a while. It was everything I wanted. They added Jesse Thompson as producer and it was all over. We did one rehearsal, August 21, 2017 the day of the Great American Eclipse, and over the next 3 days we tracked everything and the record was done aside from some vocals and keys overdubs. It must be said that this project is as much Jesse’s as it is mine. We butt heads at first. I wanted more creative control, not realizing that Jesse was the key to achieving this new sound I was after. We hadn’t built trust yet, we didn’t know each other. But a few bottles, a few arguments, and a few JJ Cale songs later we came out of it great friends. Without Jesse you don’t have an Abbey Road, Dr Dog, FJM record, you have another Nashville “singer songwriter” demo with a great band. He was diplomatic enough to allow the band to express themselves fully and even take turns producing certain songs if they had ideas; yet bold enough to know when to take complete control and steer the ship. He has the guts you must have to be a producer, to be unaltered by infinite options and have the instinct to know the one right choice for the moment.  

Review Fix: What’s your creative process like?

Treat: It varies. Here are the usual ways. Sometimes I play guitar or piano and come up with the music first. I come up with a progression I like and I begin laying in a vocal melody, which turns into mumbled words and slowly into real words and ideas. I record it a couple times.  Sometimes I get lucky and a witty phrase, chorus or punch line will come to me in the moment. Either way, if I think its strong, I go back and completely rework the words so it’s a true lyrical piece. If it’s going to a record I repeat this process over and over again until I think it’s rock solid and often times alter vocal melodies and chord changes too.
Other times I start with the words, which in my opinion is the best way. Then it’s a process of finding the right music, the right feel, the right progression that will do justice to the words. In this case I often have several completely different arrangements so I can test each one and see which serves the song best. 

In ideal situations, such as No Woman, everything -words, chords, tempo, time- all come flooding in at once and the song writes itself and is complete start to finish in a matter of minutes. The “muse”. That song has never hit paper, it’s never needed to. There’s also hybrids of that, like Look Around, where the chords and words come to me but just a verse and chorus so I still have to go back back and “contrive” more verses/ be sure the muse was giving me my best stuff on the one verse. The muse is a real thing. But I don’t agree with David Crosby’s claim that it’s only way to write. I think a good song writer has to learn how to dig and work and push and read and write and invent and create and make regardless of “inspiration” and I think if a writer has that kind of tenacity then they are they much more primed, if you will, when the muse finally does strike.    

Review Fix: What makes “Look Around” a special track?

Treat: If Look Around is special, one reason is the chords. It begins in the key of D. Then there’s a few bars in the key of A. Then there’s a progression in the key of G. By the time you build to the chorus you’re in the key of C. The song repeats this way three times and with a little trick in the outro you somehow end the song in D, the same place you started. These changes are unimpressive to the average listener, and truthfully even the most skilled listener/musician, myself included, isn’t going to flip for a song simply because of complicated chord changes. Quite the contrary. “Any damn fool can make something complicated” (Pete Seeger). BUT it works because of the vocal melody. The vocal melody ties it all together and makes what could otherwise feel awkward, esoteric or avant-garde feel human and real. Despite the complex arrangement the song manages to still feel simple, and singable and retable.

With all that said, lyrics are king. If the song works it’s because it celebrates the fragility and vulnerability of life. There’s a humility and danger to it that off-sets the lofty, orchestral, Elton John ballad feel. There’s also prosody: the last verse is meant to directly respond to the first. The last line of verse one: “The laughing ladies with their flower babies are pretty enough to send us all to war”, means the greatest things we have push us to death. Whereas the last line of verse three “The bullets around us, the fall from the mountains make each step a precious move,” means death is what pushes us to appreciate even the smallest things. At first glance the song is about two lovers walking around the city, out of the city into nature, and back into the city in the end. But in reality the song is more of a socio-political and philosophical piece. It pushes us to rethink what evil means, and also what beauty and happiness are. Life is filled with beauty, thats why we fight. Life is also filled with death and danger, that’s why we find it precious and beautiful, perhaps it’s the only way to. The so called “evil” we face perfectly silhouettes all that shines. And so called “beauty” is the very thing we fight over, lust over, covet. And even if all of this is boring and academic, the heady verses are off-set by simple, singable, almost laughably joyful choruses.

It should also be mentioned that I was in love when I wrote this.   

Review Fix: What’s your standout song away from “Look Around”?

Treat: Lonely Believer.  

Review Fix: How was it written?

Treat: I wrote down all the different ways one could be the only believer in something. Luckily for me this list, almost word for word, became the verses. I already had the chorus -it just came to me one day when I was playing guitar. I liked the way it made me sing (or think I was singing) like early John Lennon. Crackly. Like Look Around this song is at first glance a love song. But in reality I was feeling, and still do at times, very detached from my people, from my friends, from the world around me, and the song is more about the universal ‘YOU’. It was my way of salvaging some hope and connectedness at a time when I felt removed. The song purposely toes the line of love song and universal song. First line: “you rode in on white flames, the big bang had a girl” can mean an incredible compliment to a girl in that she actually IS all of creation herself. Or that women are, I like to think of it as a somewhat feminist line.  Or it can mean that I’m after a connection to the world or universe at large, and the universal ‘you’ means that anyone listening to the song, or everyone out there in general, is meant ‘for my heart’. I was feeling isolated but somehow hopeful at the same time. Lonely. Believer. Later I looked it up because it seemed like it could be a cliche. A bunch of Christian blogs popped up online with the exact title. So, the gospel thing is not as subtle as I thought.   

I had the pounding riff you hear from the top. So I created the vocal melody over that. Then in the B section of the verses I tried a “Black Water” – Doobie Brothers vocal melody but eventually sort of stole the George Harrison “Something” major 7 thing you hear now. For the bridge – I had the rhythm of the vocal that I wanted, almost hip hop sounding. So I custom fit a bunch of words -that made sense with the theme- into that specific rhythm. Juan Solarzano went nuts on the slide and Jesse got all those great sounds in there. The triplets on the instrumental were my idea. I wanted Blinded By The Light (the Manfred Mann version) and my triplets are in there mixed low but Carson Cody took it to the stratosphere when he played the 16th note triplets that are more prominent and blast you off into the last chorus.        

Review Fix: Why is this EP a must-buy?

Treat: Because there’s a wall of sound and yet you can still follow the story. And because the words stand on their own two feet. 

Review Fix: What are your goals for the rest of 2018?

Treat: To watch lots of football, fix my garden, eat well, save money, gain weight, grow a beard, learn to swing dance, make friends, avoid girl friends, make sure my dirt bike doesn’t get stolen again. 

Review Fix: How do you want your music to affect people? 

Treat: I want people to say “I could never do that but now I want do something no one else can do”

Review Fix: What’s next?

Treat: FULL LENGTH RECORD, SPRING 2019.