Antietam are a band that fits like a glove. If you glance at your record collection, they are like a concoction of all your favourite things in it. Street-level but possessing the powers to be somehow worldly, with riffs and melodies all built on raw spirit and soul.
Led by Tara Key (vocals, guitars, keys), Tim Harris, (bass, vocals), and Josh Madell (drums, congas) the New York via Louisville act have spent the last four decades intersecting folk, punk and indie-rock into a kind of hybrid that sparks the mind like an electric dream.
As the years roll on, there’s been no let up from Antietam. With many albums under their belt, following the 2024 EP, Pitch & Yaw, Antietam up the ante on The Counting Game. An album filled with the band’s best moments of the past, as well as their strongest in the present.
Starting with the warm rush of Way Too Well. From its opening chords, it’s clear that Antietam haven’t sounded so comfortable in their own skin. And this is the biggest take out on The Counting Game. Key and Harris’ songwriting synergy, sizzling through the mainlines.
And it continues on Spy Vs. Spy. A song that seemingly dropped out of the speakers like a gift from the gods. The primary sources, an acoustic guitar and keyboards that feel a part of the living room furniture. Every Other Star possesses a similar aura, providing the warmth in said living room. Its beautiful radiance, reaching every corner.
Antietam produce moments that lift the roof off, too. The Finest Line and Good Advice, occupying space in between Yo La Tengo and Eleventh Dream Day. Meanwhile, Coco Bella and Coney Island sees the band at their most free-wheeling and open-sourced, feeding into the punk ethos that has been at the core of their DNA. The Counting Game, sonically perceptive and thematically whip-smart, as Antietam delivers one of their strongest releases in years.
Ahead of The Counting Game’s release next week via Dromedary Records, exclusive to Sun 13, be the first to listen to the band’s new single, The Finest Line, below.
Speaking of the track, Key comments:
“The daily minutiae are running roughshod – hucksters for the mundane stealing focus, pulling their bait and switch. So you retreat to the beach, to the country: wherever you can have stare time.
“On the horizon is a line. But it is a blur, it cannot be frozen. The home of the Fata Morgana, ghost ships, conjured land, the underworld portal. The division point between worldly and ephemeral.
“So I stare: What’s important? What can I give instead of take? Note to self: re-evaluate value. How did I get here and where am I going? And where exactly did they all go? I feel them all without form but I can hold them with my heart.
“The finest line – the line that isn’t really a line – exists for me to remember how to trust, to keep faith, have hope. Now I can drop back in on the hamster wheel chaos and dodge that traffic, stand in that line and pay those bills, happy to be alive to do it.”
Ahead of tomorrow’s official single release, we took the opportunity to ask Key and Harris some questions about The Counting Game. Naturally, this led to history of Antietam, their songwriting processes, and so much more.
Sun 13: The Finest Line is probably my favourite track from The Counting Game. What else can you tell us about it?
Tim Harris: “It’s my favourite, too.”
Tara Key: “Sometimes things get the best of me, or I just need a reset. Nothing is better for that than a good stare into space. Whether on a drive in the country or sitting on a beach, the horizon is a drug for me. It’s hypnotic, a demilitarised zone for assessing and appreciating. It’s a relief to not have to define something, and it’s humbling to not be able to. That space, or that line, induces a kind of reverence, and I think the song almost feels like a hymn. (That’s how I knew I needed to play Hammond organ on it.)”
S13: What was the most important aspect that you wanted to capture with The Counting Game?
TH: “The title of The Counting Game refers to both something specific in our lives and to a more overriding theme. When we go on a trip, we are won’t to say something such as, ‘We are only halfway through’, or ‘We still have a whole week left!’ And then the other says, ‘Don’t play the counting game’. Or maybe even, ‘Apologies for playing the counting game, but we still have three full days here!’ No matter what, we continue to play the game, even if privately.
“This transmogrified into a phrase referring to the passing of time, aging, the death of friends, family, and other musicians and artists. But in naming our record this, we insist on, not so much ignoring those things, as putting them aside in the pursuit of the present moment. It’s like I’m bringing up the loss of a friend, a past stage setting, an experience we had, and Tara is glaring at me, ‘Watch how you go there!’ Hence, the cover: counting on an abacus having gone awry.
“The songs on The Counting Game bear out this dichotomy, with three of them literal connections to our past: a recording we made in Vermont in the late 1990s (Coney Island), a song we had totally forgotten from a gig in the late 1990s (Way Too Well), and a jam found from a rehearsal from 2009 (Every Other Star).
“In the case of Way Too Well Tara took the time-shifting even further by writing new lyrics about having lived through certain aspects of our current politics over and over. But the rest of the album is contemporary, that is, based on themes or compositions we have had floating around recently, more or less in rehearsals over the last several years.”
TK: “Antietam is intense, and we usually lead with that. But a lot of this record came together just before and during the last presidential election. And as a counterbalance to our usual ferocity, some of the sounds I was hearing tapped the melancholy I was fighting. I questioned if this was even the right time to make a record.
“I thought about my mother, June. She was a political junkie from the New Deal on (as a child she was already campaigning for FDR). Even though I joked that this second administration would have done her in, that is not really how she would have reacted. She would have had a measured, less despairing take. I heard her voice in my head when I wrote the line ‘In bad weather, stick together’. Simple good advice. If you had known her, this is pure June: have perspective even while in a tornado.
“The sequencing of the record was deliberate. It begins looking outward, deep dives internally, and comes out the other side having administered first aid. I think a lot of us have spent the last couple of years finding an action plan. This record can be seen as a road map to mine. The benediction on the record, Coney Island, was recorded in 1996 in Vermont and is meant for producer Jon Williams (RIP) to hear somewhere and somehow. You figure out how to keep people if not alive, then present. A lesson I am learning way too well.”
S13: There’s a lovely homeliness to this record, and it’s through the feeling that your creative alliance is so seamless. Has it always felt like that in the band?
TK: “Yes, absolutely. I tend to only play with friends or people I think could be friends. I have been in situations, like the first incarnation of Antietam, where the collision of disparate ideas, instead of all being on the same page, made interesting music. But yeah, Tim, Josh, and I have played together for, like, 35 years, and I love the shorthand that results from reading each other for so long. We never feel stuck or complacent. It is nice when the fields are fertile rather than having to check for rocks before you plant. And we are more than just bandmates and that shows in the music we make.”
S13: How much do you think your immediate surroundings influence Antietam’s work?
TH: “Our surroundings have a big influence on us. Certainly, the buzziness of NYC (which we can actually watch from the window in our studio space), and for Tara and I, the soul of our hometown of Louisville. And then, we have all been inspired to travel to various places in the world, after having spent a couple of decades usually only playing around America. But part of knowing even in a small way, what it’s like for people in other places, is also knowing what it was like ‘everywhere outside’ at all times in the past, i.e., how we got here.”
TK: “Even though I love Louisville, even though I am Louisville, I am entertained by the barrage of input in New York. I still feel like I can’t believe I live here after 43 years. The city’s kinetic energy totally comes through in Antietam songs.
“We toured through most of the ’90s. But eventually, the whole terrain of touring changed radically, and Tim and I started taking other trips. Now traveling is important, not only because it’s fun, but because the change of perspective gives me the chance to be an observer and a gatherer. The songs come later. (See The Finest Line and the value of stare time.) On tour, I used to feel a sense of free fall that was pretty delightful – when I could just listen to people’s stories, hear about their lives, get outside myself, telescope my sense of home down to the ritual of plugging in my gear night after night. I used to gather impressions: sunsets, weathered downtowns, the guy at the bar who must have his name written on the stool (fill in the blank for town), Army museums in the desert.
“We encountered butterfly migrations, shelf clouds that could become tornadoes seen from a distance on flatlands mesmerizing in their starkness. Now it is more the sound of footsteps and hearing my heart beat on a lonely street in Venice that arrests me. Still, even when flung far and wide, at my core is Louisville and the river. It is geography, it is sound, it is smell. It is the memory of me, 16, sitting on the banks of the Ohio River at Carrie Gaulbert Cox Park, doing what would become The Finest Line stare trying to figure out what was to come.
“In 2019, on the night our friend Wink last played second guitar with us, in what would be the final year of his life, we were indeed within 1,000 feet of that spot on the river, and after our set, classic and raucous in a way that is the Louisville Way, I walked alone amid the bullfrogs and lapping of the currents and stood on the bank to give thanks aloud to the river, the source.”
Antietam - The Counting GameS13: Way Too Well is such an exquisite opening piece to the album. What do you remember about the writing and recording of that track? And was it an easy choice to lead with?
TK: “Thanks, Simon! Making The Counting Game was a little different than usual. We did not start the album with each song mapped out. It just felt like the time had come to start completing songs, to build a superstructure, and to see how the songs worked together. At the same time, the door was left open for anything that might bubble up. And it did! Last year I set out to digitise about 300 cassettes from the last half-century, which turned into two months of intensive work. This included tapes (live, rehearsal, studio) from my first band, No Fun, the Babylon Dance Band (where I met Tim), and all eras of Antietam.
“Enter Way Too Well. We were running off tapes while doing other things around the house when a tune came on as part of a set played in NYC in 1997. Tim and I looked at each other and said, ‘WTF is that!?!’ It turned out we played this song exactly one time live. The version on TCG is structurally the same as that live version; the vocal melody didn’t change, just the lyrics. It seemed like a complete gem had dropped in our laps, we reintroduced it to Josh, and it moved to the front of the line.
“I reframed the song as a response to current events. Those of us of a certain age have seen assassinations, futile wars, splits between young and old, the Right against the Left, John Birchers, Yippies, the crookedness of Nixon, and yet, somehow we came out the other side. It shouted out anthemic guitar and seemed like a good preamble.
“In fact, this is one of my favourite things about this album: we could put a song on it that we finished almost 30 years later, another song recorded and never released from 1996, and a third that we last jammed on in 2009. I have always been an inveterate taper and, man, it really paid off and I expect it will continue to.”
S13: Winter Watch really encompasses the atmospheres that Antietam have created within their music over the years. It got me thinking about creative processes. Some artists say that certain aspects of it are out of their hands. Would you agree?
TK: “Oh for sure. My band gives me grief sometimes about my metaphysical spiels, but I do feel that when we make songs by jamming together – the usual way we write – I have an antenna up and there is not a rational reason I could give you to explain how my brain and body work in cahoots to make a move, a squawk; to interrupt a melodic line with the equivalent of a solar storm of notes and so on. It feels like, at its most potent, I am a code breaker receiving a transmission. It’s up to me to make it get to you, to communicate what I plucked out of the air.
“On Winter Watch, I was inspired by a loop Tim made playing distorted bass. I added a skeleton for the rest of the song. I invited three players to respond to the piece and told everyone I would probably mess with their contributions, so they should react in the moment instead of thinking of parts. Tara Jane O’Neil, the last to record on the track, was the only one of my three guest collaborators to hear what the others had done. Katie Gentile (violin) and Mark Howell (trumpet) only heard what I had put down first. I took their tracks, chopped them up, and shaped the song. In this case, I actually did take it out of their hands!”
TH: “Over the decades, we have played consistently (if not constantly, as in our youth). Although at times, one of us might bring in a song, usually, our melodies and riffs are something we ‘find’ in our playing and then work to fashion into something.
“I was very taken by something T. S. Eliot said in a similar vein, about coming up with phrases that struck him, and then working to make something from them, without having an initial conception of something ‘meaningful’. Not knowing, really, what it means or where it is going.
“A few times, we have just walked in and played a new song from scratch, as if it occurred to all of us at that moment. I give credit to Tara for the initial riff on The Finest Line but also remember it as coming together for all three of us at the same instant.”
S13: Do you think your songwriting methods have changed at all over the years?
TK: “In the sense that we have almost always written from a jam and shaped a song out of that, or have combined one good jam with another, like doing a jigsaw puzzle, which is Tim’s specialty, no, that hasn’t changed. The sonics and riffs still usually precede the nuts and bolts of verses, choruses, bridges, lyrics. But a couple of things about our process were different on The Counting Game.
“I have always written lyrics by myself and often it has been a painful process. I am really particular about lyrics and the mouth feel of words. At times in the past it seems like they have had to be chiseled out of me. The words, telling me what I meant to say. It is really odd, but this time I felt it was the other way around; like there was a new directness in these songs and, for the first time, Tim and I worked on lyrics together. I can’t explain why it never happened before, but it made the process less stressful, and his turns of phrase cinched several songs. Tim also sang a lot more on this record, and he doubled me on vocals more than ever.
“One song, Coco Bella, simply announced itself as I was in a deep sleep in Rome at 3am. I rolled over, grabbed my phone and not a word of the song changed from writing it down at that moment. Then I went back to sleep. What a surprise when I woke up and remembered what I had done – it’s only happened to me once before.
“Some songs were recorded as usual, in the classic Antietam style with all three of us together, live. Partly due to circumstance, partly to just mess with the norm, we recorded some basics to a click in our apartment with Josh adding his drums later. I did not play guitar at all on the title track. Winter Watch scrambled the process completely, as described above. So, this was a real pastiche of approaches, and I am proud of the sounds.
“Is songwriting easier now? I actually think so, in part because we have several new (for us) ways to make a song. That’s exciting!”
Antietam (photo credit: via the artist's Bandcamp page)S13: With capitalism eroding art from physical concepts to streaming platforms and jpg images, how important are labels like Dromedary in this current economy?
TH: “I sometimes laugh at how much the phrase ‘late monopoly capitalism’ came up in the 1970s! Under the current industry regime, some things are worse for us, other things are better. We don’t visit a community with a box of vinyl, where they ‘can’t get our record’; everybody can get everything anywhere.
“Dromedary is huge for us. The great thing is Al is tapping into our long history, which is something we can offer. We will go on regardless, but Dromedary’s crafting of an aural identity in this age is like a life raft he’s thrown to us, keeping us connected to the big ship.”
TK: “I enjoyed some aspects of putting out our own records and some not as much. It’s easier to have a megaphone work on your behalf when you are not the one holding it. I’m really happy to be on a label again, not any label, but one that seems to exist for many of the same reasons I make music. Al Crisafulli is generous with his support and his time and, most of all, he leads with kindness.
“By presenting Dromfest, a weekend festival in the Catskills, each of the past few years, he has crystallised relationships between bands, between bands and fans, many of whom are also reconnecting with each other. I don’t mean to imply it’s just a nostalgic meet and greet – but at Dromfest I have had conversations with people I shared stages with years ago and lost track of and I have met players I have long admired. Now we have become label mates with some of these folks on Dromedary.
“Al has built a community, the label has a strong identity, and that is no easy feat in these niched-out days. I am thrilled to be a part of it. It makes me feel a bit less like we are on an island, adrift in a sea of content.”
S13: Lastly, how central is Antietam to your lives?
TK: “The first night I played music with anyone else, at my first No Fun rehearsal (the first punk band in Kentucky) at art school in 1978, I wore a white shirt and a tie and bloodied my hands. I had never felt so like myself. So once that genie was out of the bottle, it wasn’t going back in. I feel the same today.
“When we were younger every decision about what we did was put through the filter of the band. For the first 15 years that Tim and I were together we never took a vacation. We both worked, and any time off was, without question, to be devoted to playing shows and making records. The band was never minimised; we had to have a way to support ourselves. I think my compatriots at the library I worked in would be surprised at how much time I spent hiding in the stacks and reference room balcony feverishly trying to finish the lyrics of a song. The band is still the first filter, but I also am serious about making art and writing. Tim has published a couple of books.
“As I have gotten older, I find all of my enthusiasms play nicely with each other. When I play music, I see colours and ideas for paintings in my head. When I take a picture, I hear a song. (I was recently asking my friends if they have a running soundtrack in their brain while, say walking down the street. Their answers were mixed. I always do.) When I am working on the book I am writing about vice in Gilded Age Louisville, I am inspired to make art from the photos I am studying, and then I am capable of spinning off into thinking of the soundtrack I would make if I took all those stills and made a video.
“The band is still where I grow the most. Where I learn the most about myself. Where I am my best self. I know how stupid it might sound, but my guitar is still my teacher, my guide. And we have built a family – not just a band. We have seen Josh grow up and start a family of his own. I put a guitar pick in Beatrix Madell’s incredibly tiny hand when she was three days old. Now she has played with us live and she sings and plays piano on Spy Vs. Spy.
“Still, of all the things I am drawn to, my favourite is to play with Antietam. Collaborating with others is very different from creating alone. When I play with the band, I have to be quick on my feet (mind); I don’t just play, I wrestle with my guitar (body); and along with the guys, I make something bigger than myself that, even if no one else hears it, still moves air, stops time, and shakes up some molecules (soul).”
The Counting Game is out September 4 via Dromedary Records. Pre-order from Bandcamp.
