Band leader looks to grow
By Sean Moeller
At age 26, Chicago musician Casey Meehan could be like most people his age in the direction he takes his aspirations.
He could hope for greater workplace success, maybe moving into a higher income bracket from the one that came with the first few post-graduate years. He could be looking to settle down a bit, to start making house payments in lieu of renting and to cut back the amount of times he drinks too much in a single weekend.
But really, he just wants more string players for his band. He’d like oboes, flutes, more brass and more options to give shape to the gigantic and adventuresome pieces of music the Windy City implant has been working up in his head over the last four years since his move from New Orleans.
“I’m looking to put an orchestra together in the next couple years,” he said. “My band right now (trumpet, baritone sax, two guitars, bass, piano, drums and occasional violins) is getting, basically, too big to function. It’s hard playing shows and getting everyone into a car. I’ve got these other big scores that I’d like to perform, but I’m taking my time with it.
“I’m not expecting to play out with it that much. I’d like to put out a record with it I guess. Sometimes it makes me jealous of people who just have the trio.”
The opportunities for the dreamer in him and the resources to bring those dreams a heartbeat couldn’t be found there. He had friends in Chicago so he packed up and came north.
“I hung out down there for a while. I might move back down there someday. But Chicago has a lot of good bands and musicians and there’s a better chance to get seen. I took the plunge,” Meehan said. “And The Reader (a weekly Chicago entertainment paper) has free classified ads for musicians. It makes finding trumpet players a lot easier. It’ll be good if I can hack the weather. I think New Orleans warmed my blood permanently. But it makes it real easy to stay inside and work.”
The band, which combines the complicated delta texture of the late Squirrel Nut Zippers with a greater call to the darker phrasings of a classic bluesman and a folk storyteller, has had a difficult time finding the right billings around its city as it doesn’t fit right in with a dead-on rock crowd or a softer and gentler indie crowd. It’s that round peg trying to fit into the square hole.
Meehan recognizes his group’s abnormal fence-sitting between audiences and genres, but there’s nothing much he can do about what comes to him in the songs he primarily sketches in the piano practice rooms at the Chicago Public Library near his apartment.
“A friend of mine said that the job of the artist is just to get the hell out of the way. If something is coming through, you don’t want to twist it in any way. I just try to clear my head as much as possible and keep writing,” he said. “(New Orleans) really made itself most prevalent when I moved to Chicago. I guess I just fell in love with the instrumentation down there. It’s funny because when I lived down there, I was writing about my visits to Chicago.”
Sean Moeller can be contacted at
(563) 383-2288 or smoeller@qctimes.com.