ERIC BACHMANN returned to Asheville, North Carolina, to record his latest album. It was a homecoming of sorts; Asheville is where his father lives and where Bachmann went to high school. But despite the notes of nostalgia on Eric Bachmann, the nine-song album that came out in March on Merge Records, the recording sessions weren't meant to be a look back. Rather, the songwriter was simply in need of a great piano, and Asheville's Echo Mountain studio had one: a Yamaha C7 grand whose sound Bachmann wanted to drive the new songs.
"The funny thing with using a piano like that is that you have to take some of the sound away to allow all the other instruments to fit," Bachmann says. "So you should know the tracks on this album are very sparse, because we wanted to make sure that piano had enough [space]. And if you get two things sounding great, it sounds better than 30 things sounding average."
Despite the deliberately stripped-down arrangements, Eric Bachmann is surprisingly lush, due to its full piano sound and layered backing vocals, which function as deliberate callbacks to the pop and doo-wop sounds of the early 1960s. "'Mercy' and 'Carolina' are kind of the bookends of the record, the main things that I based everything on," Bachmann says. "With 'Mercy,' the content of the song is really a specific message I'm trying to send to people from the generation ahead of me. That generation and their music, they love Frankie Valli, they love the Beach Boys, they love the Motown bands—so when I made 'Mercy' and I knew what the intention of the lyric was, I wanted to send it directly to them. That's why it starts with the Phil Spector beat. It's specifically designed for them to kind of go, 'That's a nice sound! That's what I used to grow up listening to!' And then you hit 'em with the lyric. And when that worked, I thought, well, I can do the whole album with that in mind—so it defined the arrangements for the rest of it."