The Pines of Rome Interview: “I don’t think we would’ve thrived the same way in another place”

During any year, new music always spawns a band whose music is like a thunderbolt from the gods: This year? The Pines of Rome.

Whilst the Providence, Rhode Island band perhaps haven’t been on people’s radars since their 2003 LP, The Everlasting Arms, the now four-piece, with Steven Kimura (bass) joining original members Matthew Derby (guitar/vocals), John Kolodij (guitar) and Rick Prior (percussion), return with their most precious jewel from the crown: The Unstruck Bell, which marks their first release in 20 years.

Formed in 1997 at the tail end of an era that was the hotbed for underground music, The Pines of Rome played alongside the likes of Songs:Ohia / Magnolia Electric Co., Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, June of 44, Shipping News, and Silkworm.

While undoubtedly a slowcore band, The Pines of Rome explored untrodden recesses within the genre, and it came in the way of a sharp country slant that proved to be their greatest boon. Following their 1998 debut, A Catholic Western (billed as an EP but now perhaps classified as an LP by modern day standards), the band’s ‘actual’ debut full-length, On All Fours put them on the map, arriving 12 months later.

While the aforementioned The Everlasting Arms was released in 2003, the band faded into obscurity shortly after, and it wasn’t until 2020 when Derby and Kolodij began writing music together again. The sessions were the embryonic stages of what would become The Unstruck Bell.

It’s an album that feels like a blur. Over before it’s even begun. In many ways, that’s the sign of all great records. The acoustic-led traipse of I Am the Road and Siren, songs where Derby exposes his inner-Willy Vlautin, while the band gets deep in the groove with the electrifying Slick Enhancer.

The sunset sway of album highlights White Ships and Beavertail Spoils expel the raw country echoes of A Catholic Western, however here The Pines of Rome pack a one-two punch like never before. It’s largely down to the sonic wizardry from behind the soundboards of one Seth Manchester.

The cosmic fairy dust merchant has been the producer that has led all and sundry in the experimental music landscape over the last three years, capturing an unmatched intensity in everything he touches, including The Unstruck Bell, which is all the better for Manchester’s ahead-of-curve recording methods.

“No one ever told you / This was how your life would be,” sings Derby on closing cut, The By & By. Through its simplicity, the message cuts through like never before and, in some strange way, feels like the key take out on The Unstruck Bell. It’s The Pines of Rome growing older gracefully and in doing so writing their best songs yet.

Early this month, Derby and Kolodij were kind enough to answer some of my questions about the band’s formative years, what they’ve been up to in-between, and The Unstruck Bell.

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S13: What are your earliest memories of the band during its first incarnation?

Matthew Derby: “I moved to Providence in 1997, not really knowing anything about the music scene, so witnessing the explosion of sound and art that was coming out of Fort Thunder at the time was pretty transformative. Listening to the records we made at the time, you wouldn’t really be able to pin down the influence, because obviously we weren’t making that kind of music. But there’s a shambly, ragged quality to our first EP that we certainly would’ve been motivated to polish out had we come up in another city, I’m sure.

“We recorded some of the songs for it in John’s apartment. His roommate had forgotten to pay the electric bill, so there was no power. We had to snake an extension cord up from the second floor to power up the four-track. It was a pretty scrappy time. Nobody had any money. But we had real time – the Internet was just a baby, more of a curiosity than a dominating force – so we had time to really follow our ideas down all the winding paths.”

John Kolodij: “…And I moved to Providence in 1995. I knew people from Ithaca who had moved (Difference Engine, Fern Knight) here, and it was and still is a beacon of creative optimism and promise. I loved bands like Small Factory and Six Finger Satellite, and everything seemed possible.

“I had been playing bass in another band but yearned to actually write songs on guitar and get slow and beautiful. Matt and I have always written in a very natural way, and that alone was revelatory – no ego, no judgment, and yeah, no money. I believe we labeled the Catholic Western home sessions as Fort Deluge or something. We willed it into happening and you can hear people really trying, really working together, and having fun, even if the songs weren’t reflective of ‘fun’. We were pushing Dischord Records into our other loves of say, Bedhead and Hank Williams Sr., and there wasn’t anything like that happening here, so we stuck out in places where others were just another band in ‘XX’ vein. The comradery of the band and the Community aspect of the DIY scene of the ’90s are why I keep doing this (also not knowing how not, too).”

S13: What had you all been doing in the years after the band had stopped being active?

MD: “I’d moved to Providence to earn an MFA in creative writing, so when The Pines ended I tried to make it as an author of experimental fiction. And when I said I ‘tried to make it’, I didn’t really try that hard. Or, I tried, but in all of the worst ways. So, when that fell apart, I became I guess what you would call a white-collar worker. Building websites in khaki pants. I got good at whittling down the years to a uniform size and texture.”

JK: “I took a sabbatical for a few years, where I was cooking professionally, and I didn’t really write much at all — the creative force was funneled into cooking and that grind.

“Then around 2009 I started playing out solo under the name High aura’d. I’ve recorded a bunch of LPs and collaborative works. It’s often a drone-y affair. A few years ago, Astral Spirits put out an LP by a trio formed while living in Cleveland – Dylan [Baldi] (saxophone) and Jayson [Geycz] (drums) of Cloud Nothings, called ICEBERG. I had really been working on playing free, and it’s in that vein.”

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S13: Had you all kept in contact? And do you remember the moment when you decided to get back together?

MD: “I feel like I remember this incorrectly, so I’ll let John tell the story.”

JK: “We all did keep in touch. Matt and I had another band together called WORKING, Rick has many bands working, and his solo project Squabblehut. We all had kids, etc. but we’d see each [other] often. I moved around a bunch too.

“Matt and I had gotten together in like 2005 to try and play together, and it was an abysmal failure.”

MD: “Oh, I thought that was in 2003? I have this memory of driving up to Boston where you were living at the time, and it happened to be the evening of the invasion of Iraq. We spent most of the time watching that surreal footage of the Baghdad skyline. So yeah, abysmal failure indeed.”

JK: You’re right! The South End of Boston. So, there was that in the back of our minds. But once we started, it was as if we’d never stopped. We brought Rick in when it seemed like it was real. And here we are.”

S13: I feel like there’s a real magic to these songs, and a real synergy between each band member. Can you tell us about the writing and recording process of The Unstruck Bell?

MD: “When we first got back together, we didn’t really have any ambitions to start up as a ‘full band’ again – at least, not to my mind. John was in Ohio at the time, and this was right before the pandemic, so it was purely about the pleasure of writing songs together again. I’d learned when we disbanded the first time that I can’t write songs without John. It just doesn’t work for me, so I was really grateful to have that creative channel back in my life.

“I remember that, when we started, we were both a little worried about the ‘nostalgia factor’. I definitely missed the kind of music we’d made in the past, but I wasn’t interested in resuscitating it. We also didn’t want to pretend our way into some other genre or style. So, we came up with a rule: ‘If it feels good, follow it’, which sounds obvious, but until we said it out loud, we were just afraid to lean into our impulses. But when we did, we made something that was both new and old – at least it sounds that way to me.”

JK: “The ‘if it feels good, follow it’ mantra became the oath. I write 5-6 parts, send them to Matt, we then get together and see where it’s going, then full band introduction. We recorded The Unstruck Bell in two parts, and just tried to relax and let it become what it already was, not make or project something else upon it. Working with Seth Manchester is always fun and he’s just an amazing technician and someone who can serve the song and our ideas of it well.”

S13: What was the key aspect you wanted to capture with the record?

MD: “In my memory, the sound evolved over time. The first time we went to record, I don’t think we had ambitions beyond capturing the songs we’d been working on (Slick Enhancer and The By & By). Seth Manchester – the brilliant engineer at Machines With Magnets, where we recorded – encouraged us to focus on the live performance (as opposed to drenching the mix with layers of overdubs). The effect is that you have this spaciousness in the mix that’s not achieved by layering but by letting the sound ring out. We were blown away by the sound of those first tracks, so the next time we went in (to record the remaining songs) we had a much better sense for where the record was headed, sonically.”

S13: Quite an outlandish observation here, but Beavertail Spoils feels like the first song that was written for this album. Is that accurate or I am way off?

MD: “I think we wrote that one somewhere in the middle, actually. The first three songs we wrote (Slick Enhancer, By & By, and White Ships) all had strong ties to the material we’d worked on in our first run – slow, big, etc. And Beavertail… was us trying to steer the ship toward new territory. Looking back, it wasn’t a huge departure, but it gave us permission, I think, to keep exploring.”

S13: I Am the Road is such a lovely opening track. Do you remember writing the song, and was it an obvious choice to open the album with?

MD: “Thank you! That one came together right before we recorded. I think we’d only practiced it a few times. I know I was still finishing the lyrics on the day we captured it. I wrote the song about a poet/activist I knew named Mark Baumer. Back in 2016, he started walking barefoot across the country to raise awareness about climate change, and he was killed by a motorist in Florida on the day that Trump was inaugurated. He was this brilliant, energetic, provocative person, and his death on that day felt causal, intentional – as if he was the first casualty of that administration. I recognised that I could no longer take anyone or anything I knew for granted, and that, in a sense, made it necessary to put the song first on the record.”

S13: With a song like Slick Enhancer there’s a line, “Let’s die before things get rough”. I don’t think a younger version of the band could have written a song like this. Can you tell us about it?

MD: “Yeah, I hear you on that. For me, the fear of death has a much different quality than it did when I was 25. Then, I think I was terrified of dying, but it also felt so distant and abstract, with miles and miles of unknown future laid out before it. Now, with the poisoned gift of knowledge and experience, and death much closer on the dashboard, there’s a way in which it could feel like a blessed peace-ing out before the worst. ‘Sweet release’, whatever.”

S13: White Ships forms a real bleak backdrop, almost like a Richard Ford novel. I think it’s one of the best songs you’ve written. Is fiction an artform that you’re influenced by?

MD: “First of all, wow, thank you – that is serious praise! Like I mentioned earlier, I came to Brown for an MFA in creative writing. I’ve always gravitated toward songwriting that feels like a conjured fictional world, like the songs on The Natural Bridge by Silver Jews or anything by Gillian Welch. I almost hate listening to that stuff because it’s so good. Like the gifted athlete in gym class just lapping me again and again.”

S13: Have your songwriting methods and approach changed in anyway from when the band released their debut album up until now?

MD: “It’s always started with me and John sitting down and layering parts on top of a skeletal frame. There’s some kind of weird alchemy to that process, where the result never resembles the parts in any way. So much so that we can no longer figure out how we wrote the old stuff. Can’t make heads or tails of it. But recently, we’ve been pushing to explore the boundaries.

“There’s this part in Jeff Tweedy’s book How to Write One Song where he advocates stealing other peoples’ songs. His point is, unless you’re actually trying to pirate someone’s music, no matter how hard you try, anything you write will sound like you, not them. For the last few songs on The Unstruck Bell, we’d say, ‘John, write a song that sounds like Neu!’. And John would go off and we’d end up with REDACTED, which sounds nothing like Neu!. John does a take, and then Rick, Steven, and I add in our own influences, and in the end, it’s just… us. Almost like a game of telephone or a live exquisite corpse. It’s been pretty exhilarating.”

S13: While not all the band is based in Providence these days, how influential is the city to The Pines of Rome?

MD: “I mean, we’re all within walking distance of Providence. And as I mentioned before, in many ways the city made us. The art scene was so welcoming and accommodating, and there was such amazing energy in the city when we started – I don’t think we would’ve thrived the same way in another place. And I think Rhode Island’s inferiority complex also plays a big role in our identity. I remember, I was at this party early on after moving to Providence, and I said something about Rhode Island being the smallest state, and this guy actually said – really defensively – ‘I’m pretty sure Delaware’s the smallest state, buddy’. I feel at home in that attitude, and I feel like it seeps into our sound.”

JK: “Providence is the greatest city.”

S13: The music landscape has changed a lot since you released On All Fours. Did you ever envisage that things like streaming and social media would play such a significant role in presenting music?

MD: “Back then? No way. I assumed it’d be Kinko’s flyers and Maximum Rock & Roll forever. I’ve never really been good at spotting trends or predicting change. Chronically behind the curve. But John, you’ve always seemed more on top of that stuff. Did you see anything coming down the pike?”

JK: “No! I mean, naively, I think it just seemed like it would be more a tool for physical product, spreading the word, not the vehicle it is now. I do hope zines really do make a big comeback.”

S13: Are there any plans for another album?

MD: “Yeah. We’re writing more material, at any rate. I personally just love the process of recording, so even if the album never goes wider than our hard drives, it’ll still be worth it for me.”

JK: “Yeah, it’s already very much unlike anything we’ve done together as a band, so I’m excited to just ride this thing and see where we go.”

The Unstruck Bell is out now via Solid Brass Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.