In the early days of the pandemic, Little Rock musician and producer Jason Weinheimer closed his Fellowship Hall Sound recording studio. Sessions had dried up amid covid-19 precautions, and Weinheimer had no choice but to shutter the space.
"I had records booked through the spring and, of course, on March 15 the bottom dropped out," Weinheimer, 48, says earlier this month while seated in a comfy-looking chair in the studio's control room.
Creativity can't be stifled, however, and the shutdown became the catalyst for the making of "Faded," an excellent new album recorded mostly virtually by Weinheimer and his music-making coterie. The 10-song record, released under Weinheimer's The Libras moniker, drops Friday on Out of the Past Music.
The album's exquisite, cleverly catchy tracks bring to mind classic touchstones like the Beatles and Beach Boys, the rootsy amalgamation of NRBQ and the shimmering, early alt-rock of Big Star and the dB's in a way that sounds both familiar and brand new.
"Low-power pop," Weinheimer calls it, which is a pretty apt description.
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After shutting Fellowship Hall, Weinheimer found himself at home with his wife, Indy Grotto, a Spanish teacher at Episcopal Collegiate School, and their children, Jules, a senior at Little Rock Central High School, and Johanna, a Central freshman.
Weinheimer had lugged home some gear from Fellowship Hall — a 1972 Fender Telecaster; a bass; a small, vintage Magnatone tube amp; a couple of microphones and a Pro Tools rig — and set up a space in the dining room, mostly to keep working on little fixes and revisions to albums that were about to enter the mastering stage.
Arnold Kim, Weinheimer's longtime pal and former high school band mate in Shreveport, was riding out the pandemic at home in Merced, Calif. To combat the boredom, he suggested they work on some songs and the two were soon swapping demos through email.
They recruited their mutual buddy, drummer Paul V. Griffith, who had been on the road playing drums for Amanda Shires before finding himself back home in Los Osos, Calif., when the pandemic shut down the tour.
Weinheimer would crank out song ideas in the evenings then pass them along.
"I'd get the mics out and sing whatever that day's idea was," he says. "I would cut a demo to a click track and send it to Paul and Arnold and they would add their ideas. Then it would come back and I would add bass to it."
The occasional tip for smoking brisket and ribs was also included in these digital back-and-forths, Weinheimer says.
Other friends were pulled in, including Steve Berlin of Los Lobos, Marc Franklin and Kirk Smothers, who added horn arrangements, and organist Al Gamble of St. Paul and the Broken Bones.
"This whole thing started when Arnold suggested it as a way to pass the time," Weinheimer says. "After six weeks or so, I began to realize that this could actually be a record, and that's when we started assembling it."
As Fellowship Hall slowly began to reopen, Weinheimer tapped longtime collaborators Jesse Aycock, Paddy Ryan and Chris Michaels for an in-person session — masked and physically distant — to record three tracks, "Giving Up the Ghost," "We Carry On" and "Out of the Game."
The title cut is a Wilco-ish sigh of quiet frustration that would seem to encompass the slow-dragging days of quarantine and features a sweet bit of saxophone from Berlin and a mellow, sleepy organ riff from Gamble; "Can't Lose Everything," is a fun, loose, cakewalk-into-town parade march that sounds like The Band and NRBQ at a Kinks concert; "Quiet Part Loud" and "Been Away too Long" are gorgeous, ringing power pop.
"What God Only Knows" is a dreamy, magical track that gives a nod to the Beach Boys classic (listen closely, Weinheimer says, for his wife cleaning dishes in the background); "We Carry On" is another jaunty slab of pop aided by the horns of Franklin and Smothers.
There's also a laid-back cover of Dire Straits' "So Far Away," with backing vocals by Ambrosia Parsley. The song, about the frustration of being away from a loved one, seemed pretty spot-on for the era.
"I've done that song live for a long time," Weinheimer says. "It was mid-April, or maybe May, and I realized I hadn't seen anyone except my immediate family in a long time. [Isaac Alexander] texted me and said I should do it. I thought it would be clever and everybody was game for it."
"Out of the Game," with Charles Wyrick's fuzzy guitar, closes the album and is a callback to the title song. Weinheimer's lyrics seems bleak — "Everywhere I go I see reasons for the end times." Still, there is a sliver of hope as the song slips quietly to its conclusion and Weinheimer sings that we may be faded, but we're not out of the game.
The record is a natural sonic progression from earlier Libras efforts "Skies Are Grey" and "Love Ghost."
"As someone who is a fan, and who has listened to a bunch of his work, I think this is some of the best songwriting he has ever done," says Aycock, an Oklahoma musician who was a teenager when he first met Weinheimer. "The whole record, front to back, is so strong. I love that you can hear these different influences he has all tied into one record."
Griffith, who drummed on six of the tracks, wasn't too confident in his home-recording skills at first, but came around.
"I was going a little bit nuts. I'd been through my current hobbies ... and I needed something to occupy my time. Around that time, Jason said 'Hey, think you can record some tracks at the house?' If ever there was someone to try it with, it's Jason ... he is so creative and has such a magnificent ear. It was really fun."
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Weinheimer grew up in Tulsa and Shreveport. He and Grotto formed the Boondogs in 1996 in Tulsa and moved to Little Rock a year later.
"We were in love with Arkansas," he says. "We were in graduate school in Tulsa, but would spend all of our weekends here, either on the Buffalo River or in Little Rock."
His producing career began to take shape after home-recording the first Boondogs record, 2002's "This Is the Way the World Ends." By 2006, he was producing full time out of Lucky Dog Audio in downtown Little Rock. In search of more space, he started Fellowship Hall Sound, located behind Pulaski Heights Presbyterian Church (from whom he rents the building), in 2012. Isaac Alexander, who created the cover art for the album; Zachariah Reeves, who recorded the three studio tracks on "Faded" and musician Greg Spradlin all have offices upstairs.
The lovingly cluttered space, which is well-stocked with vintage instruments, old show fliers, albums, 45s and even a few bicycles, has a cozy, welcoming vibe. Weinheimer has produced records here for John Moreland, Hayes Carll, Alexander, Pallbearer, Spradlin, Gossip, Pony Bradshaw, Bonnie Montgomery, Shinyribs and many others.
Those recordings, of course, were created with everyone in the same room, making eye contact and feeding off one another. Creating a record in a pandemic is a little different.
"The way I prefer to make a record is to put a band together, work out an arrangement and track it very live," Weinheimer says. "That's how I've functioned and how I built this space. 'Faded' was very different, but also a learning process. I'm really pleased with it. I feel lucky that I got to spend time doing this during shutdown."