Part II With The Ryans: Jingles, Farrelly Brothers and Bogmen Revival
The Bogmen '09
Last week we dug into the Ryan Brothers’ recent work with Gordon Gano of the Violent Femmes, and the challenges of putting out a record in ’09. In Part II, the guys recall their transition from rock stars to jingle and film score writers, and reveal their plans for a new Bogmen record.
In addition to Gordon Gano & The Ryans, you guys also do music for commercials and films via Ryan Bros. Music. How did you end up in that world?
Brendan: We started doing it before The Bogmen ended. We’d toured with this NYC band Rake’s Progress, and we became friends with those guys. The drummer (Pete Klinger) and the singer (Tim Coherty) started their own jingle company and had a studio they let me use at night. (They’re now part of the NYC disco-party band Booga Sugar.) Pete taught me how to do a lot of the technical stuff. I learned Digital Performer and eventually Billy and I got our own studio together. We started doing jingles for them, and then we started doing it independently.
So, you guys did well at that? Or at least enjoyed it?
Billy: Well, it was just so competitive. We’d be at The Blind Tiger and when we met up with other musicians, it seemed like everyone was working on the same Folgier’s spot.
Brendan: There were and still are so many people like us, musicians who’d had record deals and then had to figure out what to do after that. It became so easy to put a studio together and do music for TV. With so much competition, our motto is (still) that usually…you lose.
Now, I think the production houses prefer to find a track that fits to picture. The art of scoring really isn’t there as much as it used to be. We have a library on our website, and we’re working on a deal right now with a company that does licenses all over the world to rep a bunch of our music.
Well and your music’s been licensed in films as well. You worked on a couple Farrelly Brothers movies — Fever Pitch and The Heartbreak Kid — how did that come about?
Brendan: Pete Farrelly and I had a mutual friend from Providence College, where we both went — a priest, Father Quigley, and he made the connection. I sent Pete some music and he responded really well to it. We pitched music for his film Stuck on You. Then, they licensed a song by our band Mad Larry, “Window Pane,” for Fever Pitch. Pete Farrelly’s been so supportive of us, and that’s been a big inspiration.
And then we got the gig to score The Heartbreak Kid. It was very rock-oriented, so Billy laid down a lot of rock guitar. The Flaming Lips wrote a song for the film that was in the opening credits. And they licensed a lot of really cool music, which was really great to work with from our end.
Was that your first film score?
Brendan: No, we scored this film, Mo. Then The First Saturday in May, which was about the Kentucky Derby.
And, we just scored a film called A Gun To the Head, directed by Blaine Thurier, the keyboard player for The New Pornographers. It’s dark and funny, and it debuted at the Toronto Film Festival. It was great working with him because he’s a musician and knows how to give direction. When he asks for a Bill Evans-like piece, he knows what he’s asking for and can articulate exactly what he wants.
And you’re juggling all of this with Gordon Gano & The Ryans, playing regular nights at Bar Nine, and the occasional show with The Bogmen. What’s new with The Bogmen – are you guys making new music together?
Billy: Yes! Brendan, Billy, PJ and I have been having a lot of fun writing and recording together again. We started last year, in preparation for our Nokia Christmas show. We did a new song and video: “Ocean’s Apart.” Now, we’re like four songs into an album and we have a lot of ideas floating around. We hope to get back up to The Carriage House, to do some more recording.
Brendan: So far, we’ve been really happy with what we’ve come up with. Just last week, we had two great horn players — Dave Smith and Paula Henderson — come in and play on two of the songs. It sounds great with The Bogmen; it’s a really cool sound.
The Bogmen’s Ocean’s Apart Video:
What is the sound now? Does it resemble what you guys did in your heydey?
Billy: I personally am very excited about our direction. It’s a mix of Pogues meets Van Morrison and Tom Waits, but definitely higher energy. Then we have some other stuff coming up that sounds more Cure-ish. We’re still figuring it out, and that’s been fun.
Brendan: It does get tricky though, because now we’ve been apart, playing all different styles of music with our other bands: Billy [Campion] with Vic Thrill, which is very electronic, and us with our film stuff.
So, we get together to make music as The Bogmen, and now it’s not just about what we want to do. There are all these fans out there, so you want to keep a bit of a thread between the past and the present, while keeping it authentic. You don’t want to stray too far away from what people liked about it back then.
It’s rare for a band to have a fan-base like you do. You’d probably do well putting out the record by yourselves.
Billy: Well that’s the question now. We can do it all ourselves and put it on iTunes. Do we really need a label?
Brendan: But the challenge is that we have a fan base in a concentrated area, and you need help to get it out to other areas. Or, maybe it’s enough to just do it ourselves for our fans. Is it worth bringing someone on to get it to the next level? Or do we do the grassroots thing? There aren’t many bands who can do 4-5 nights at the Bowery Ballroom at $40 a ticket.
We want to make music and play it live. And we want to keep putting out music and keep scoring movies, etc… Mark Mothersbaugh’s career is what we aspire to. You have the band, you have something that’s fun and then you get to do all this great scoring work, mixing all these awesome styles of music.
Billy: What we don’t want to do is waste time, playing gigs to nobody. We’re trying to tighten everything up and as Jack Nicklaus advises: “Play within our game.”
Do you guys have any advice on how to make a living as a musician in NYC today?
Brendan: You need to be able to accept failure, and know that a lot of the success is luck. We’ll do a great jingle — we did one last fall for Coca-Cola. It was an Elvis song, and Gordon sang it. The creatives loved it and we were all really excited. But then it came on during the Super Bowl with somebody else’s music on it.
You have to accept that stuff like that is going to happen, and then out of the blue, you’ll get a break. So, you have to keep on doing everything. You can’t do one thing, you have to try be multi-dimensional.
Billy: You also have to get out and play, regularly. We do our Bar Nine thing. It’s important to get your chops down.
Brendan: Yeah, you really have to get out there and play live. In this day and age, of emails and text messaging, working with people out in LA who I’ve never met in person, it’s really good to get out and play live, and invite people down to your shows. Meet up with people in person.
Gordon Gano & The Ryans are playing November 14 at The Knitting Factory in Williamsburg. Get your tickets here!