Downtown Money Waster :: Features :: Trolleyvox :: Indigenous Cobblestone Reverberations

Philadelphia emerges gallantly ahead as the Ben Franklin Bridge is the only thing standing between a traveling automobile and the waters of the Delaware River. It glistens in the cold night air as its' weary eyes have seen a country, which it has so daringly given birth, mature. She is a city that is not only beloved by the nation which flourished around it, but by the artists which inhabit it.

The cobblestone streets can only be matched by the rumbling road bikes which engulf South Street and the barbeque vixens which command the craft of pony tail swinging beer guzzling backyard meat roasts.

“What was the scene like in Philly in the late 80s? It was like the Hooters,” says Andrew Chalfen as a burst of laughter overtakes the conversation. “We were not into that. Everybody was trying to copy Springsteen but we were to busy hanging out with the punks. We became real good buddies with The Dead Milkmen and Electric Love Muffin. That was the Philadelphia underground.”

“By the 90s punk and Indie rock had gotten bigger. The nexus for all of it now is a club called Johnny Brenda’s in fishtown. That is Indie rock ground zero. There was a bunch of other clubs which had restaurant scenes attached to them where post college New Jersey frat kids would go to party. It became really hard to play there on a Friday night because there were really not a lot of hipsters around. It was like day of the locust with an infestation of staggering people. It used to be cool down there with store fronts, but now it is black turtle necks and velvet ropes. It is hard to recognize.”

Chalfen has one of the friendliest voices I have experienced to date. It was like catching up with an only friend as each thought ends with a mutual chuckle. Engulfed by New York City, I am almost jealous of his laid back nature. His speech seems free of any creative or unwarranted burden.

Spearheading a band of American guitar pop disconnected from the weight of a ravaged media market, Andrew Chalfen (guitar/fables) has forged the Philadelphia based Trolleyvox through various lineup corrections to press a double full length LP.

Entitled Your Secret Safe/Luzerne, the album features a disc of electric compositions accompanied by another of rural acoustic echoes. The lineup surrounding Chalfen includes Beth Filla (vox), Owen Biddle (bass), Adam Stanburg (drums) and Eve Miller (cello).

“My older brothers are to blame because they were all music heads,” says Chalfen. “When I was four years old I was really into Jimi Hendrix and the Velvet Underground. My oldest brother would go see these groups and their records would be lying around the house. His mission was to warp me at a very early age.”

“Philly is a great city to live in if you don’t have much money. My friends and I never have any money! We couldn’t live in New York. Philly is a city where you can do your own thing and not really be influenced by anybody else.”

“I met Beth Filla because I put an add in the paper for a local singer. She was the third person to respond. Auditioning people to be in a band is such a drag. You end up knowing within the first three minutes if it is going to work or not. There is this story about the Yardbirds and how they were auditioning guitarists after Clapton quit. Jeff Beck was sitting in a gymnasium with like 20 other guitarists and they ended up trying him out first or second because they heard about him. After he started playing they sent everyone else home.”

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“What it means to make it as a band is changing. As a younger musician you probably think the sky is the limit, but there are a million bands... it is really unlikely that your gravy train is going to come in when you are in rock n’ roll. The odds are really small. So you have to be in it for artistic reasons.”

- Andrew Chalfen
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With the artists trolling around the barrooms of New York City in a dash for an express one-way ticket to the rock stratosphere, Chalfen and his Trolleyvox counter parts are basking the in easy of artistic freedom.

“Fulfilling a dream is about stubbornness. To be able to do anything, you have to love the process. Music most of the time is a money loosing proposition. You really have to plow through. You have to savor the little stuff. What it means to make it as a band is changing. As a younger musician you probably think the sky is the limit, but there are a million bands. I guess all you can hope is that maybe someday you can have your song in a Cadillac Escalade commercial,” as sarcastic laughter follows, “it is really unlikely that your gravy train is going to come in when you are in rock n’ roll. The odds are really small. So you have to be in it for artistic reasons.”

“Being in a band now is different from being in a band twenty years ago, because everyone has a band now. It has become a right of passage and the market becomes oversaturated because of it. There are plenty of places to play and plenty of bands to see but there is just not enough audience to go see these bands because they are in bands themselves.” Chalfen’s musical philosophy comes to the forefront. “I like when bands dig deep into history to fuel songwriting. You have to go back further than Sonic Youth! These bands like Fall Out Boy are entering a point of diminishing return,” he says as the conversation shifts to the creation of the record.

“My intentions have always been to continuously write better songs,” he offers. “It is fun to play in front of an audience. As much as I love doing that, putting out records is what I always wanted to do. I want be able to write better songs and put out records. As long as I can keep doing that I think I will be very happy.”

“The idea behind the EP was we wanted to make a recording that was really wide open. Usually I have material highly arranged by the time we go into the studio. We were working with a recording engineer who likes to do a lot of experimentation and arranging. We thought we could bring in some ideas that were not completely set in stone or in our minds already. I had a bunch of songs that were not quite 100% in terms of arrangement. The six songs that came out were “I Call on You,” “Reading,” “Cricket In Euphoria,” “It’s Not Real,” and two older songs that we never got around to recording. Our record label liked it so much they requested an album.”

Creatively, the whole session was supposed to be a single EP and it turned into a double record. It is a long story,” as Chalfen begins to explain.

“We were finally finishing up The Karaoke Meltdowns in the Spring of ’06 with an infusion from our new label. Most of the Trolleyvox recordings up to that point had been recorded by my long-time friend and producer Adam Lasus, but he had recently moved his studio from Brooklyn to LA, making recording with him more logistically complicated for a Philly band. So we brought him to Philly and recorded three more full band rock tunes to finish out the record at Brian McTear’s Miner Street Studio, with Brian assisting on engineering. Our label (Transit of Venus) thought it’d be cool once Adam finished and split to have Brian record and then mix an additional set of tunes for a future between-albums ep."

“So we finished the EP, and our label started thinking “how the hell are we going to market an EP? The idea came about to do a double ep as a gimmick, with the other ep being mellow and acoustic, as we’ve always had that folky hushed side, though most folks don’t really know that side of us. We always put a few quieter tracks on our records, but they seem to not get as much notice as the rockers.

“We wanted to do some really mellow Nick Drake kind of songs and that turned into a whole album in itself. It was just there alongside all of the electric compositions. After a lot of back and forth the marketing plan was to do an accompanying acoustic CD as a gimmick.”

"We all got to wondering how in the world a basically unknown indie rock band gets a little acoustic record recognized in the pop culture data storm. So we eventually settled upon the novel idea of a dual releasesneaking our acoustic stuff into the light along with the rock, basicallyand inexplicably, Transit of Venus fell for it. So our between-albums release is now two albums."

“And that is how a single EP becomes a double record.”