Great art, they say, takes time.
Friday, August 9, Cats Cradle Back Room will host an album-release show for the band Bats & Mice – celebrating their new LP “PS: Seriously,” which has been gestating for more than a decade.
“Life got in the way,” says band member David NeSmith. “There were kids that came along, and jobs, and life – but we always wanted to get back to it.”
Most of the music for the album was actually recorded back in 2012, in Baltimore where NeSmith was then living. Even then, it was already a project many years in the making: it had been ten years since the band released their last full-length album, “Believe It Mammals.”
Band members NeSmith, Ben Davis, and Mark Oates have been working on the project off and on ever since – recently completing it with a final push from NeSmith, who also (inadvertently) provided a fitting title.
“I was sending an email to the band at one point,” he says, “and I signed off with some ridiculous comment – then at the bottom I put ‘PS: Seriously.’ And that was it…
“I kind of took it as, like, people couldn’t really fathom that we were finishing the album finally.”
Neither could NeSmith – who had his album-related files saved on his computer as “American Socialism,” as a nod to another famously long-gestating project, Guns n’ Roses’ “Chinese Democracy.”
Stream the full album on Bandcamp.
Do the songs hit differently now than when the band first played them 12 years ago?
Not as much as you’d think, says Davis.
“We thought that maybe the songs wouldn’t hold up,” he says. “A lot of times when you do stuff over a decade, you don’t really want to play that stuff. (But) the nice thing about our band is that it’s fairly simple music, kind of meditative, simple, straightforward. And we found that when we came back to it…it felt real natural.”
Bats & Mice will celebrate the album with a show at Cat’s Cradle Back Room Friday, August 9. Also playing will be Sweet Home (featuring Ben Davis’ son Rick) and Treasure Pains.
Visit CatsCradle.com for tickets.
Bats & Mice stopped by 97.9 The Hill to discuss the album and the upcoming show. They also played three tracks: “Worst Time” and “Buried Just Beyond,” the album’s two singles, plus the album’s opening track, “Out of Line.” Listen:
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