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[Cellars]

Harmonic convergences
Paved Country and the Weisstronauts

BY JONATHAN PERRY

It’s late morning at a corner table inside the Cézanne Café in Central Square, and Marjie Alonso and Sarah Mendelsohn are finishing each other’s sentences. The experience of sitting down to talk with the pair about their country-folk outfit, Paved Country, is nothing like listening to the collection of sunset-streaked songs that make up Deconstructing Paradise, PC’s self-released second album. The disc’s sense of roomy open spaces and clear horizons — not to mention the blend of voices — is nowhere to be found amid the continuous laughter, anecdotal interjections, and self-mockery that are all hallmarks of a long, lived-in friendship.

Although both women grew up in Cambridge and went to the same high school, it wasn’t until they attended UMass-Amherst together that they became friends. “Neither of us wanted to be in college,” remembers Mendelsohn. “We were both miserable, and I walked to her room one day and she was singing and I was like, ‘Whoa!’ And that started it.” The pair began hanging out and singing together before graduation, jobs, bad relationships, and worse marriages intervened and they drifted apart. Years later, they bumped into each other again at Ryles: Alonso was working as a cook and Mendelsohn was tending bar.

Eventually they started singing and writing together again, and they discovered what had been missing in their lives — each other. Alonso recalls “the first feeling [of singing together again], which was, ‘Wow, this feels really complete.’ We naturally harmonize with each other, we like the same songs — I don’t know why, but I know this huge stable of very old country songs. I didn’t grow up listening to them — I don’t know how the hell they got there.

“We’ve had a bumpy ride in our lives, individually and together. What’s great is that, over the 20 or so years, we haven’t always been friends or even close, but when the shit really hits the fan, we end up back together, or we end up playing music, or we end up helping each other through. It’s a relationship that is lifelong and based on music and the knowledge that whatever else happens in our lives, we’ll end up somewhere at the same place.”

Deconstructing Paradise features the stellar musicianship of Paved Country guitarist Andy Pinkham (who triples as the band’s engineer and as Alonso’s significant other) and a host of talented guests ranging from Telecaster guitar whiz Jim Scoppa and multi-instrumentalist T-Bone Wolk to top-shelf drummers Keith Levreault and Billy Conway. But what makes it stand out are the vocals — Mendelsohn’s lighter, folkier air cutting clean and clear across Alonso’s rich, darker-toned country lilt in songs of heartbreak and hard-won happiness.

Of which both singers have had their fair share. Alonso’s “I Wish Our Love Was New” is a deceptively rollicking number whose narrator examines a relationship gone cold. The palpable melancholy continues with the sublime understatement of Mendelsohn’s “Turn Out the Light” (not to mention a masterful cover of Merle Haggard’s “What Am I Gonna Do”), and it lets up only at the end of the album, in Alonso’s soft promise that “It’ll be all right.” Even then, you only half believe her.

“I’ve actually had some people tell me that they sit there and cry listening to it,” Mendelsohn says with a mixture of pride and awe. “I remember being a teenager, sitting in front of the speakers in my mother’s living room, just letting it out, and that was such a good feeling. Music did that to me for me more than anything. I would search out the song that would give me that feeling. And to have our album affect people like that is a great thing.”

“This album is pretty seismic to us,” Alonso allows. “During the course of this album, I ended a 15-year marriage and Andy and I got together and I would say I woke up. There was no easy day during the last two years. I have two sons that I love more than anything in the world and had to deal with things like ‘How do I be without them sometimes? How do I end the marriage? How do I start another relationship?’ I can’t write one song about leaving a life, starting a new life, finding passion, finding pain — all those things would be one really tedious song. But it makes a pretty good bunch of songs.” Mendelsohn interjects, “She writes a helluva song when she’s miserable.”

(Paved Country will play the Plough & Stars, in Cambridge, on March 9; the Sit ’n Bull Pub, in Maynard, on the 15th; and Mount Blue, in Norwell, on the 24th.)

THE ROOM THAT PETE WEISS and his new band, the Weisstronauts, are occupying one slush-and-snowstorm-socked Monday night happens to be O’Brien’s in Allston. Although the competition for the patrons’ attention is considerable — Keno numbers on the tube; most of the grunge canon circa ’93-’95 cranking at maximum volume on the jukebox before the band’s set; and a none-too-steady dude requesting/yelling for the Stones’ “Dead Flowers” about 12 times — the band are making the best of it. As an experiment, they decide to try playing without a rhythm section. So drummer Emily Jackson (who as an alumnus of Pete Weiss & the Rock Band is familiar with Weiss’s penchant for surprise shifts in the game plan) gets to drink cheap drafts and watch as Weiss, second-guitarist Ken Lafler, and third-guitarist Aaron Tap gamely weave through the material that makes up the outfit’s all-instrumental debut CD, Featuring Jaunty (Stereoriffic). It isn’t pretty.

“This might represent a low-water mark in the history of the Weisstronauts,” observes Lafler as he surveys the lone couple dipping and dancing, real slow, before him. In a way, though, the Naugahyde ambiance of the gig is perfect. After all, what better place to trot out soon-to-be-released tunes like “Twistin’ in the Living Room” and, yes, “Jaunty”? Mustering jauntiness in the face of unspeakable odds is something the Weisstronauts do well. (Starting tonight, February 22, the band are at Brookline’s Washington Square Tavern every other Thursday; they’ll also celebrate the release of their CD with a show this Friday, February 23, at the Lizard Lounge, and on March 16 they’ll begin hosting a monthly series at the Lizard called “Garage ŕ Trois” that will feature hand-picked bands performing round-robin-style.)

Neither the night nor the band is exactly what Weiss had in mind when, in the wake of the Rock Band’s demise, he set about forming a new power-pop combo. What happened?

“I don’t have a good answer for that because it doesn’t make sense after the Rock Band,” he says over beers with Jackson and Lafler when we sit down to chat before the show. “Over the past year or so, I had worked with a lot of instrumental bands [by day he’s owner and producer at Zippah Studio, in Brookline], and I think that maybe subconsciously a lot of nifty ideas filtered through.” Indeed, a fair degree of humor infuses swinging surf-and-twang tracks like “Mornin’ Ma” and “Crustacean Vacation.” And yet there’s nothing laughable about the musicianship on the group’s debut full-length. Besides Baby Ray’s Lafler, former Betty Goo ax man Aaron Tap, and Rich Gilbert on guitar, there’s ex-Sugar drummer Malcolm Travis lending a hand on a handful of tracks, and Peter Linnane, also a producer at Zippah (he’s since bowed out of the band because of travel-time constraints), contributes guitar, bass, and accordion. Jackson and bassist Kevin Quinn, meanwhile, make for a rock-solid rhythm section.

“It’s a good antidote to Baby Ray,” says Lafler when I ask why he joined up. “It’s a completely different kind of music — I just get to think about playing guitar and I don’t really have to sing and worry about writing songs and all that other stuff that you worry about when you’re in a band that’s yours. It was appealing to me to play with two guitars because it seemed that you could either go way overboard into extreme kind of Foghat or Allman Brothers guitar-wanking overkill or else you could try to stay out of each other’s way — both of which are interesting and fun to figure out how to make work.” Plus, Lafler says he had wanted to learn how to “do this chicken-pickin’ stuff . . . And Pete knew I was into that and suggested that the Weisstronauts might be a good way for me to practice.”

“I feel really lucky to be able to play with these guys because it’s challenging for me,” offers Jackson. “I’ve been in different band situations when the music’s great but the people don’t always mesh, or vice versa. And this band’s got everything.” Well, everything except a workable cover of “Dead Flowers.” “Hey!” the Stones fan yells out again between songs. “You guys from around here?”





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