Brian Slattery Photo
Hoffman.
“Gardener,” the first track from The Alex Butter Field’s first release, Psychedelipop, begins with a flourish of guitar and drums, splashy yet focused, somehow both anxious and comforting. The introduction proceeds from one idea to the next, winding toward a key, toward resolution, then settles at last. “Gardener,” the vocal declares, “bury your seeds in my heart and we’ll see what blossoms.”
The song’s sense of journey and direction is, in a sense, a summary of the story of the making of Psychedelipop and the Alex Butter Field, the studio project of Hank Hoffman — frontman for Happy Ending, longtime chronicler of New Haven’s music scene, and executive director of Best Video. The album is seven songs of breezy, catchy, yet intricate music, clocking in at about a half an hour — and took about 20 years to make.
“I am the opposite of a prolific songwriter,” Hoffman said, and “I find the lyrics the hardest part of writing.” He wrote the first songs for Psychedelipop in about 2000. By the spring of 2002, he’d written all of them, music and lyrics — “what came to me and what I was least embarrassed by,” he said. “I was comfortable with them and felt I could sing them. Hoffman found inspiration in Love’s Forever Changes, and Billy Nicholls’s Would You Believe, which Hoffman described as a response to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, “but catchier.”
In 2002, Happy Ending, which had formed in 1983, was on hiatus. “It was just me and the drummer, Tom Smith,” Hoffman said. He still wanted to begin recording an album and had heard that “a number of people had recorded with thus guy Mike Deming” at Studio 45, in the Colt Building in Hartford. He met with Deming and they agreed to work together. So began what Hoffman described, with a smile, as “fantastic, fascinating, and frustrating experience.”
Hoffman and Deming decided to record to tape. Smith was to provide drums, percussion, and “invaluable moral support” (as the liner notes have it). Hoffman sang and played multiple guitars and electric sitar, keyboards, and melodica. To fill out the band, he recruited Andy Karlok on bass, Scott Amore on keyboards and further percussion, and Dean Falcone on further electric and acoustic guitars, an actual sitar, and keyboards. The recording process was to be done by building the songs from click tracks, with Hoffman providing scratch tracks of guitar and vocals. But “after the very first studio session,” Hoffman said — which was to involve recording Smith’s drums — “I got an email from Mike, saying ‘you better get yourself a metronome and start practicing.’”
That was just what Hoffman wanted. It was “one of the reasons I wanted to do a project like this,” he said — to grow as a songwriter and musician. He was a self-taught singer, songwriter, and guitarist, starting off with Ramones songs, moving on to the Beatles, and proceeding from there. He was ready to keep going. “I wanted it to sound professional,” Hoffman said. And Deming was a perfectionist. When Hoffman recorded tracks in the studio, “I had a lot of ‘no, you’re late! No, you’re rushing!” from his producer, he said. “Working with Mike was an incredible educational experience. He was a real stickler for things being tight and practiced…. When I’d play something well and do it in one take, I thought, ‘I pleased teacher!’”
Hoffman had a clear idea of what he wanted. “As a songwriter, I try to have song each song be its own thing,” he said. “My songs are easy to play — or I couldn’t play them — but the songs are hard to learn.” While “I love music that’s simple — three chords, straight ahead rock ‘n’ roll … when I start writing, I immediately want to complicate it.” He always wrote the music first, gravitating toward “weird song structures” and asymmetry. He had a knack for writing songs that “try to embrace, but also twist cliches.” And “I’m happy to use dissonant chords under a melody line.”
At the same time, Hoffman also knew his limitations as a guitarist, and knew when to call in the players whose skill he admired in order to get the sound he wanted. “You got to let go of the ego,” he said. On “Candy’s Got It” and “Radiating So Quietly,” he knew what guitar part he wanted to hear, but couldn’t quite play it at the level he wanted. So Deming called in colleague Jamie Sherwood, who learned the part Hoffman had written and played it. Falcone lent his expert touch to the acoustic guitar parts on the record.
While Hoffman was recording Psychedelipop, Deming started a boutique microphone operation called Charter Oak Acoustics and moved his studio to Enfield. Recording got trickier. In 2009, Hoffman digitized the tapes he’d made and recorded overdubs with Amore, which they did until 2013. Derek Holcomb & Tom Dans of the Furors put backing vocals on a song. Later sessions involved Erik Elligers on saxophone, Yannis Panos on trumpet, Netta Hadari on violin, Colin Benn on viola, and Aimee Kanzler on cello, working from arrangements by Falcone and Hoffman. Greg DiCrosta mixed the record at Firehouse 12 in 2015. There was also the question of finding album art, which in time came from Christian DiMenna, who also works at Lovecraft Tattoo.
“Since I didn’t have a gigging band,” Hoffman said, “I wanted to do it right.”
The name of the project — The Alex Butter Field — was likewise a long time in coming for Hoffman. “I’ve been doing live taping of music since the late 1970s,” Hoffman said. “Alex Butterfield was my nom de bootleg” — named after Alexander Butterfield, the deputy assistant to Richard Nixon who revealed the existence of the White House taping system during the Watergate scandal that ultimately led to Nixon’s downfall. By splitting up the words in the name to create The Alex Butter Field, he could likewise nod to the names of psychedelic bands of the past, like Strawberry Alarm Clock — and join a lineage of psychedelic music that has proven quite robust since the style was developed in the 1960s, proliferating across several genres to become part of the vocabulary of American music. Locally, Hoffman said he most recently detected strains of psychedelia on Brian Ember’s The New Chastity and Rob Nelson’s latest releases.
“Maybe it’s the combination of both rock impulses and aggression and the ability to embellish it and go in more abstract directions,” Hoffman said about the style’s longevity. It was about “paying attention to timbres and the arrangement. I think there’s a certain beauty to it, a spaciness that, in times that are bleak, can take you to another place.” If you could understand the psychedelia in the 1960s as a response to the threat of nuclear annihilation, “now we have climate change,” Hoffman said. “It’s a sound you can immerse yourself in, and wander around inside.”
For Hoffman, the sound of psychedelia had been a part of his consciousness since he was a child; he recalled hearing “Meet the Beatles” at the age of 8, when the band’s cultural impact exploded across the youth of America — from elementary school-age kids to college students. “There will never be another event like that,” Hoffman sad. It was also part of the soundtrack for the formation of his politics; psychedelia and left-wing politics went hand in hand — for better and for worse. “Left-wing politics became associated with the counterculture in a way that we’re only now just breaking out of,” Hoffman said.
Psychedelia’s legacy has in some ways been more robust than the rock music that helped spawn it. Rock isn’t the “trailblazing, cutting-edge music any more,” Hoffman said, even as he declared that it’s “what I love.” But as he listens to younger musicians, “I’m hearing lots of bands play music that I like.” They deploy psychedelic sounds and song structures, but “they’ve absorbed it — it’s gotten into their pores. You don’t have to have bowl haircuts. They’re just feeling it.” Psychedelia is part of the air American music breathes; “there are patchouli molecules floating around,” Hoffman said. Psychedelipop — and its imminent companion album, Popsychle — are part of the atmosphere.
He credits his and other artists’ releases during the pandemic to the “democratization of recording technology,” as many musicians now have the means at home to continue to create albums. He doesn’t see the pandemic slowing that down. “I imagine there’s going to be an explosion of creativity and expression” when the pandemic is finally over and the people in the arts scene can congregate again. There is much to process; “2020 is a year that packs two months’ worth of events into two days,” he said.
Hoffman is already looking ahead. He holds out the possibility of performing Alex Butter Field songs with a band, if time and resources (and the world of live music) allow. He also has another set of songs that Happy Ending has been playing. “I really want to go into the studio and apply what I’ve learned,” Hoffman said.
But for now, there are the Alex Butter Field songs, come to light after 20 years of patient work. “Most of the songs I’ve written, I’m still happy with,” Hoffman said — one of the upsides of taking his time in writing them. For each song, “I want it to be something I’ve made — I want it to feel like I’ve written something different, created something new.” But he also, always, has an ear toward connecting with an audience.
“They’re strange,” he said, “but they’re also pop songs.”
The Alex Butter Field’s Psychedlipop is available on Bandcamp.