Brian Ember Makes A Village

“In my aspiration to be famous the one thing I’m looking forward to the most is press junkets,” said Brian Ember (a.k.a. Brian Robinson. More about that later). ​“I want to do them so bad. Please put me in front of a scrim and just let me talk, please, for the love of God.”

The press junket on this day consisted of this reporter, Ember, and two bowls of ramen, though at various points during an interview the other patrons of Mecha Noodle got to hear a snippet of German opera being sung by Ember — as well as lots of laughter — as we discussed the multitude of projects the New Haven-based musician has recently completed, as well as what he has in the works. 

In fact, mere moments before we met up, Ember released a video covering Meatloaf’s song ​“Heaven Can Wait,” as a tribute to the singer who passed away earlier in February. And mere days ago, he released another video as part of a festival in New York. For these and several other projects, he has reached deep into the New Haven music community. If it takes a village, you could say Ember has made one for himself.

Regarding Meatloaf’s death, ​“the day that I found out, just without any hesitation I Facebook-messaged Sean Rainey,” said Ember. They had never worked together before, but Ember had seen Rainey, who also lives in New Haven, play at a weekly piano bar event in New York.

“I said to him, ​‘do you wanna just get together and cover ​‘Heaven Can Wait’ and film it and put it out?’ and he was very amenable.”

The two got together at Ember’s house with Alexandra Burnet, who recorded the event, and Ember’s son Oliver, who was the cameraman, and spent about three hours running the song, playing it through about six or seven times and choosing the one they liked the most. According to Ember, there were no edits. 

“I mean there are flubs galore, but it’s got a real natural live feel,” he said. ​“The idea was to play it through — all emotion, no perfectionism — which for me is a stretch. That’s hard for me. I really have to let everything go. I didn’t want it to be polished. It was an immediate response in my gut to write Sean and say we should sing a song and record it. Meatloaf is so good — and when I say this, I mean this with the highest praise — he is all out there, like up front right away, and he’s not polished. In fact, I think he reveled in how not polished he was, and I did want to embody that a little bit.” 

Ember also went the no-edits route with another video project that premiered this past weekend for the Boog City 15.5 Festival, an event that occurs twice a year in New York City and is hosted by a friend of Ember’s. Part of this festival includes bands covering a classic album. This year’s choice was the soundtrack to the movie Singles — described by Ember with a laugh as ​“the Cameron Crowe Gen X‑ploitation film” — from which he chose two particular songs and two particular acts to join him in covering.

“First thing I did was I called Lys Guillorn, and I said, ​‘we never worked together. You wanna do something fun?’ and she said, ​‘absolutely, let’s go,’” said Ember. ​“I needed a rhythm section, and it just happened that week that I was having brunch with Jenn Dauphinais, and she was talking about how she started as a drummer. So I was like, ​‘do you wanna be my drummer for this thing?’ and she was like, ​‘fuck yeah, let’s go.’” Dauphinais also recruited her Wearebison partner Rory Thomas Derwin to complete the rhythm section. One rehearsal later and the band ended up at Scott Amore’s new studio, InnerSpaceSoundLabs in Durham, to record. 

“It turns out we were the first band to play there, to actually record there — the studio’s maiden voyage, and we were honored,” Ember said.

Gil Morrison of Falconeer Productions filmed the videos, which premiered this past Sunday online for the festival. The songs that were chosen ended up being the first two on the soundtrack: Alice in Chains’s ​“Would” and Pearl Jam’s ​“Breath,” again, because of Ember’s vocal range. Aesthetics — and having fun — were a big part of the production, as they always are when Ember is involved.

“I had a private session with Todd Lyon at Fashionista to dress me,” said Ember. ​“I was definitely going for a certain aesthetic. I wanted to sing these two songs inspired through PJ Harvey, so I got a long blue slip, and we had a good time. Lys Guillorn embroidered a hoodie that said ​‘Moist’ across the chest. It was hilarious. I couldn’t believe it. I think, for the first time, costume-wise, I’ve been upstaged.”

Ember has other reasons for participating in this festival beyond the chance to let go on video.

“I owe David Kirschenbaum, who runs Boog City, a lifelong debt of gratitude because he’s the reason for the Tet Offensive,” said Ember of his rock ​‘n’ roll string quartet project. Feb. 20 was the 20th anniversary of the Tet Offensive’s first performance, which happened in New York at the Knitting Factory back when the club was in Manhattan. Nirvana’s Nevermind was the classic album being covered that year, and Ember had chosen the song ​“Stay Away” as his contribution. He remembered it clearly. 

“Halfway through the audience just kind of starts going nuts,” said Ember. ​“I felt a little tingle, and I was like, ​‘oh, this is the thing I should do forever.’ It was that moment that I was like, ​‘yep, this is it.’ So, when David asks me to do something, often I can’t because I’m living in New Haven now and working full time. I’ve done a lot of gigs with him, but I’ve said no a lot, and this time around, because it was remote, because I wouldn’t have to travel to the city to do it, because I wouldn’t have to ask a bunch of people to come to the city with me, we could just do it here. It was a lot easier for me to make the ask and say, ​‘hey, is anybody interested?’ I felt more comfortable doing that.”

Ember has noticed a change in the way he approaches collaborations since the pandemic began. ​“I’m seeing more of a difference in myself,” he said.

“I am so cautious when I ask people if they’ll do something with me.… I’m a long-term visualizer to my own detriment, and I want everything to be perfect.” But more recently, ​“I’m basically asking people on the fly, ​‘hey, so you wanna do something?’ and we’ll do a one-off and see how it goes, and there’s no commitment to do it again.”

Before recording the Meatloaf video, Burnet had given Ember a song she had written with no lyrics and no melody and asked him if he wanted to lay down a vocal track. Ember said yes, wrote it Monday afternoon, and Monday night recorded it. 

“It’s been a very productive week because I’m just saying yes to things,” said Ember. ​“And also, just putting things out there a little more.”

The thing Ember is more than ready to put out there is his first live on-stage performance of 2022, happening this Friday at Cafe Nine with two other acts — Falconeer and Shelley Valauskas Experience — and yet another new collaboration.

“I wanted a full band in the worst way,” said Ember. ​“I wanted all the instruments to make the performance feel full and give everyone their money’s worth, and I wanted to hear the songs the way I intended them to be performed. I realized after doing the Vomitorium with Dean Falcone back in November that I love his friends and his whole group of musicians, and they’re fantastic to work with and they’re super professional, and they learn songs on a dime, and they play them well. So I wrote him … and we worked it out and had our first rehearsal last week. We’re going to have another one this Sunday, and it sounds amazing.” 

The band playing with Ember this Friday includes Dean Falcone on guitar, Rich Dart on drums, Brian Stevens on bass, and Rick Mealey on keyboards. Working with Mealey has been ​“a long-time goal” for Ember. ​“We used to sing in church together at Church of the Redeemer and on our breaks used to talk about prog rock,” he said with a laugh. ​“This has been a lot of fun. This is straight up Brian Ember in its full glory the way it’s meant to be heard.”

The physicality of a Brian Ember performance is also one of its main highlights and a major part of its glory.

“When I’m on stage, I don’t stop moving for 45 minutes,” he said. ​“I am doing everything, both singing and keeping your diaphragm supported and keeping your body in the right positions but also the gesticulating and the dancing and hopping around and the flailing and everything else that I do. I got to do it on video on Saturday, but I wanna do that once a week. If I had my dream, it would be, ​‘oh, we’re doing Vermont this Saturday and next Saturday we’re doing Boston, and all of that.’ I wanna do it as a band because I wanna give everybody the full effect. I’m full-on lounge glam, and it is hard to relay that as a solo set.”

“I’m traveling through aesthetics right now,” Ember noted, one that began with the first Brian Ember album and another that was ​“lit up” during a photo shoot with Morrison during Covid. He still has more music and aesthetics to come, including a five song EP called Tomorrow Looked Better Yesterday and a LP after that of new music called Get Ready To Hate Me. Tet Offensive also recorded an 11-track record at Firehouse this past year, a first for that band. 

“I’ll support them with touring if I can but right now, I just wanna get them finished and presented,” he said.

In the meantime, he is memorizing hundreds of pages of German for a late August performance in the Wagner In Vermont Festival as Alberich, one of the principal roles in Wagner’s Das Rheingold, a character that Ember said has been ​“egregiously villainized in most productions.”

“I’m taking a much more nuanced — not a compassionate view of him, but a much more complex view of him where not everyone is wrong,” he said. ​“Everybody is wrong but not wrong all the way, and it’s just their combination of wrong has led to horrible circumstances, and I’m playing it off like that.”

The role has also inspired Ember to make another change.

“They’re so supportive that they’ve actually asked me If I would bill myself as Brian Ember for the opera,” he said. ​“And I’ve taken it on. I’m like, ​‘you know what? I think I’m really gonna separate my personal life from my professional life with this name.’ Anything that I’m doing creatively is as Brian Ember. It keeps a chain through it all.”

“Brian Ember loves to get on stage wearing ostrich feathers and a tutu and make everybody cry, even though he’s singing in ridiculous outfits, whereas Brian Robinson likes to frame a closet and hang drywall and fix a sink and make a nice carbonara for the kids. So there’s a nice divide there. I can really be both.”