On a front porch in Philadelphia in early , Anand Wilder and Maxwell Kardon sat with a guitar and a banjo and busily fingerpicked to keep their hands from freezing. The facts, as communicated, were a half-remembered pastiche of rampant discrimination, frayed family ties, and double-dealing.
The principal heroes and villains of the story were lost to history and buried in mineshafts and unmarked graves, and the particulars of the outcome were primarily recorded on newspapers lost in warehouse fires and floods. Nevertheless, the tragedy struck both as an ideal thread to weave through a series of stories they had been telling each other about a town full of unlucky, lovelorn people.
Wilder and Kardon spent the next several years traveling, each writing and tinkering with songs about their town and sending each other hastily recorded demos and fragments of lyrics. The story of Greenbelt grew and the cast of characters, from robber barons to union men, migrant farmers to crooked ministers, became fleshed out.
In , they put together a core band [featuring Ira Wolf Tuton of Yeasayer on bass and Christopher Powell of Man Man on drums] and began arranging the songs of Break Line for a full ensemble. With the help of recording wunderkind Britt Myers [Chairlift, Yeasayer, Passing Strange] they finally began putting the music down onto tape, staying up late experimenting with sounds and arrangements.
Usually, this method reduces the amount of chords used because looped beats love a droning minor chord. With this album, because I was going for a more stripped-down organic sound, it was mostly the former method, a lot of snippets of voice memo chord progressions and melodies that I would bring into my computer and then keep adding from there.
On one song I actually kept the uneven rhythmic wobble of the demo, because aligning it to a strict time grid made it lose all its mojo. Harder for editing, but a fun technique to keep songs alive. I also used a lot of Varispeed on this record, just to give these acoustic guitars and piano sounds a little spookiness and atmosphere. As far as lyrics, I still use all the Jimmy Webb tools-rhyming dictionary, thesaurus, and I also like to steal phrases from poetry books and short stories, like Delirium Passes is from a James Joyce short story.
I journal a lot, especially as a way of purging some nagging looping thoughts, and sometimes snippets of journal prose make their way into songs upon review.
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