Tonstartssbandht - Petunia '2021

Tracks list

A few years ago, Bob Weir was telling a writer about his process, and how the
notion of constantly becoming—of life being lived in a state of
flux—doesn’t just apply to the ever-changing self, but to the
things the self creates. Speaking of the song “Saint of
Circumstance,” which he’d been playing live for 40 years, Weir
said, “I’m just starting to scratch the surface of what I can do
with that.” This idea of a song as a living, breathing thing, a liquid
portrait that sloshes to the borders of whatever frame is fixed upon it, is at
the center of Edwin and Andy White’s work as Tonstartssbandht. Through
constant touring, the brothers’ songs both take shape and change shape,
becoming something a little different every night as they explore the
possibilities inherent within them. With time, attention, and intention, these
songs—long, languid, full of open musical questions and temporary
answers—become distinct objects, and the process begins again. On
Petunia, the brothers’ 18th album and second for Mexican Summer, they
bring us to the earliest moments of this process, showing off a barn full of
hatchlings already decked with splendid plumage.

Where most Tonstartssbandht albums come together slowly over years, recorded on
the fly whenever the Whites have a few spare moments on the road, Petunia was
largely written and recorded in their home city of Orlando in 2020. Many of the
tracks had been played live, but in extremely rough form (“skeletons of
songs,” as Andy puts it), and hadn’t yet developed into any kind of
mature stage. With plenty of time on their hands thanks to the lockdown, and no
shows to play, Andy and Edwin decided to pack some flesh onto those skeletons
and bring them to life on their own. Petunia is the first Tonstartssbandht album
to be created in a sustained manner and in a consistent environment, written and
recorded in a single place over a focused period of time.

As a result, Petunia feels like a unified aesthetic statement. Using little more
than a 12-string guitar and a drum kit, Andy and Edwin weave together the gentle
headiness of Laurel Canyon and the sweaty pacing of Cologne; like a gyroscope,
its constant motion produces the illusion of stillness—and that stillness
gives it a sense of intimacy and introspection, something that’s further
illuminated by the new emphasis placed on the brothers’ vocals. Taking
cues from The Zombies and the falsetto-feathered singing of ’70s funk and
reggae, Andy and Edwin stitch their voices together so easily, and with such
generosity, it’s virtually impossible to see the seams. And it allows the
quiet wisdom of the lyrics—what Andy self-deprecatingly calls
“generic broad platitudes that I still think resonate when I say
them”—to slip in almost unnoticed, delivering their emotional
truths while preparing a feather bed for you to collapse into. “All roads
will lead to the heart of town, when you’ve been running too long,”
he sings in the album’s opening moments. “Being at peace only slows
you down, but you’ve been running so long now.” In
“Smilehenge,” he packs his bags, sweeps up the apartment, and says
goodbye to an old life and an old love. “How will it feel when you turn
out the light?” he wonders.

That same sense—of waiting in liminal spaces, of wondering what exists on
the other side of uncertainty, shimmers through single “What Has
Happened.” With an arrangement lightly influenced by Talk Talk and a shaky
guitar sounding like a sonar, Andy and Edwin perch at the edge of the self and
stare out. “Honestly,” Andy sings, his voice breaking, “What
has happened to me?” Opener “Pass Away” expands upwards on the
back of Edwin’s maracas and tapped percussion, and once they’re
firmly in the air, they fly freely, Andy’s guitar asking the questions
while Edwin’s drumming keeps them moving forward.

If Petunia feels like a journey in the direction of peace, that, too, is a
reflection of how it was made. The stability of the sessions, and the
brothers’ easy communication, allowed them to sit with these songs and
their performances. “It was very helpful and relieving knowing every day
that even if I start to feel frustrated for a second, we had the option to say,
‘I’m working with one other person, he’s my oldest friend,
and it’s no big deal to be like, “Let’s clock out
today,”’” Andy says. “Sometimes we go in and you can
tell it’s not going to work that day, and that’s fine,”
Edwin adds. “We didn’t have a tight crunch for time. There was no
rush. It’s like feeding cows grass—probably makes tastier
meat.”

The album’s clarity is also a result of Andy and Edwin bringing in
perspectives from outside of the White family. “It’s the first time
we’ve ever brought someone else into the mixing stage,” Andy notes.
While the album was recorded at the brothers’ home studio in Orlando
between April and August of 2020, it was mixed by Joseph Santarpia and Roberto
Pagano at The Idiot Room in San Francisco—“our old Florida buddies
who have great ears,” as Andy puts it. With those ears attuned to the
recordings, Petunia is brighter, punchier, and more direct than its predecessor,
the direct result of Santarpia and Pagano’s confidence in the
performances the album captures. “They were just there to help paint in
the mixing,” Andy says, but “they’re so good at bringing up
levels, leveling everything really well.”

Levels: Andy means the volume of the tracks and their balance, yes, but
there’s that sense of stability again, of building on level ground, and
what can happen when the artistic environment is stable, even while the
world’s environment is anything but. As the Whites have long known, a
song—like a person—is a constantly evolving thing, and a record is
a photograph, a way to pause that motion, to examine an object at a single
moment in its evolution. It’s a way of suggesting stability where it
doesn’t actually exist. Petunia is not Tonstartssbandht’s
definitive statement on these songs, because how could it be? But it is a
portrait of Andy and Edwin White at home in Florida, an artfully staged
landscape rich in detail, its winding passages and airy environment waiting to
be explored. 



1.01 - Tonstartssbandht - Pass Away (7:49)
1.02 - Tonstartssbandht - Hey Bad (6:39)
1.03 - Tonstartssbandht - What Has Happened (7:02)
1.04 - Tonstartssbandht - Falloff (8:26)
1.05 - Tonstartssbandht - Magic Pig (2:09)
1.06 - Tonstartssbandht - All of My Children (1:41)
1.07 - Tonstartssbandht - Smilehenge (7:07)
1.08 - Tonstartssbandht - What Has Happened (Edit) (4:59)
1.09 - Tonstartssbandht - Pass Away (Edit) (4:57)

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