Song Premiere: Walker Lukens’ Election Confession brought Bright Light Social Hour and Joi Chevalier together and it was magic
The Bright Light Social Hour can geek-out with the best of them. Case in point, when the band was invited to participate in Walker Lukens‘ Election Confession project which aims to mobilize younger voters, they met Texas Comptroller candidate Joi Chevalier and wrote a truly geeky song relating her story of meeting her Australian husband online in the early days of the internet. The interview and session took place at Native Hostel.
What’s interesting about the topic Chevalier chose to speak on is the story has little to do with her decision to run for elected office. The woman is so cool, she dismissed the opportunity to self-promote to share an endearing story of long-distance love. TBLSH simply called it “Computer Love.” The track was then mixed by none other than Spoon drummer and record producer Jim Eno on site at Native. Grant Epply engineered the recordings.
Bassist Jack O’Brien commented on the interview, “Joi told us the beautiful story of meeting her Australian husband online during the WAY early days of the internet (like ’91, pre-web), while she was a grad student at UT. They connected that way for years before eventually meeting up and marrying in Austin, in part because they’d run themselves broke visiting each other. This is our early 90’s prog-hop testament to their long-enduring computer-love, complete with D&D and WoW references. P.S. Joi is the fucking coolest, it was such a pleasure working on this with her!”
Only The Bright Light Social Hour could employ Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft references into a track and make it sound cool. As guitarist Curtis Roush mentions, the song includes sounds from the golden-age of hip-hop, Kraftwerk (German electronic music pioneers) and Afrobeat. The track was fleshed out with progressive rock guitar riffs. What is remarkable about witnessing this process was how easily the band worked together to formulate a song on-the-fly that accurately reflects the sound TBLSH is making currently AND tells Chevalier’s story. The song could easily appear on a future record by the talented act. Instead, as they’ve done in the past, (the band wrote a song for Wendy Davis) the group chose to shed light on our aching political system in hopes of driving new voters to the polls. Frankly we cannot think of anything more admirable considering the current American political landscape.
Roush offered his take on the session, “Bypassing politics and the upcoming election entirely, Joi Chevalier told us the story of meeting her husband in the early days of the internet. In the early 1990s, she was attending UT-Austin when she started interacting with a gentleman from Australia on some of the earliest online communities. Their eccentric and wide-ranging interests brought them together and eventually led to them bridging their geographic divide and settling down together in Texas. Our song tells this story along with sonics influenced by golden age hip-hop, Kraftwerk, and proggy guitar blasts.”
Watching the band work immediately after their interview with Chevalier was inspiring as was seeing how Eno worked the track for Superfonicos whose members showed up at Native during the TBLSH session to hear how their track recorded the previous day turned out. Head over to the Austin Chronicle to see that story by Kevin Curtain. It’s another impressive song created out of Julie Oliver’s message of hope for Texas. Oliver is running for Congress.
A vinyl LP of Election Confession songs, that includes local acts Sweet Spirit, Mobley, Superfonicos, Bright Light Social Hour and, of course, Walker Lukens can be preordered here via Modern Outsider Records. All proceeds go to the Travis County Democratic Office.
