When you think about Martha’s Vineyard, you probably picture scalloped frills trimming the wraparound porch, endless summers and gentle salt breezes from the Atlantic. The Massachusetts Office of Travel & Tourism has seen to that. But for the members of the Billionaires (all year-round Vineyard residents at some point in their lives), the associations are a bit different.
“We mowed those lawns and reshingled those roofs all through high school,” says singer/guitarist Tim Laursen.
“I house-sat for a family,” says singer Laura Jordan.
“When you live here permanently, you see the population swell in the summer and absolutely drop in the winter,” adds bassist Farley Glavin. “All you can think about in November is getting to the airport.”
Work, work, work, and still the blue-collar Billionaires—Laursen, Jordan, Glavin and brothers Sebastian (drums) and Joe Keefe (guitar, keyboards)—haven’t cracked the Fortune 500 list of top-earning indie bands just yet. The group, now based in Los Angeles, has issued Really Real For Forever (Too Soon), a debut whose precise harmonies and glossy-finish production compares favorably to sunny pop acts such as the Glands and Dressy Bessy. Lurking beneath the polish, however, is a suggestion of darker things. The bouncy “Eighties Movies” opens as a paean to John Hughes’ well-meaning if trivial teen comedies but soon moves into a vision of giddy youths barely keeping the machine under control. “Now Saturday is here/You work the pedals, and I’ll steer,” sing the paired boy/girl leads.
Other tracks, such as “The End Of Summer Song” and “Highschool High,” mine a similar vein: joyful celebration of a time and place that’s nonetheless destined for a quick and final close. That’s not pessimism, exactly. It’s just recognition that most bright moments in life, like the summer that produced Really Real For Forever, don’t last.
After living in Martha’s Vineyard during their high-school years, the members of the Billionaires began to head west on separate schedules and for various reasons. (Jordan moved to L.A. to pursue an acting career that’s landed her parts on TV shows such as Without A Trace and Playmakers.) In summer 2006, they all found themselves back in Martha’s Vineyard and began recording in the sub-basement of a small house built by Glavin’s father. Other people, friends and former schoolmates, stopped by and contributed to the recordings, which were initially intended as no more than a running document of various nights and parties.
“We’d burn CDs for people who hung out,” says Laursen, “just to put something about those nights on record.”
“The album started off being the result of a really loose, chill situation where we’d sit around and different people would come through the space and add parts to the songs as we went,” says Jordan. “It began as sort of a soundtrack for a particular time and place.”
The summer passed, and what started as an evening lark turned into a full-fledged project. Joe Keefe, by then an L.A. resident, suggested to Laursen that he come out to California to finish the tracks. Todd Phillips, founder of the Too Soon label, had met the band in Martha’s Vineyard and by February 2007 was making plans to release the Billionaires’ first album. About half of the tracks on Really Real are drawn from the demos; the rest were completed after the band regrouped in L.A. at the end of last year.
Separately, the Billionaires have multiple recording credits to their names, but they’d never done anything together, and nothing with the eclectic, genre-spanning feel of Really Real. Sebastian Keefe, for example, started out playing in hard-rock bands, a far cry from the Billionaires’ light, graceful sound.
“This isn’t the most difficult music in the world,” he concedes. “But what made it nice was there wasn’t any pressure to make anything in particular. Each song suited the mood of the evening when we recorded it. It was really just making music for a party, but it felt right.”
“I think about it like when you’re back home, the group you fall in with again,” says Laursen. “Some of us were up, and some were down, but there was a real family-type feel that didn’t necessarily have much to do with music at all. It felt good.”
—Eric Waggoner
