On the first warm day of 2014, Julien Ehrlich and Max Kakacek left their Logan Square apartment and went for a walk. They didn’t stop until they’d nearly reached River North. “It was one of those moments,” Kakacek recalls of the two musicians listening on loop to a demo recording of “On My Own,” a new track the pair had created. “It’s hard to explain without seeming super vain but you’re just so into what you’re doing.”
Sipping on drinks one recent afternoon at the Handlebar’s back patio in Bucktown, the musicians and former members of indie-rock outfit Smith Westerns point to that walk as the genesis of their new band Whitney, a country-tinged indie-rock outfit that oozes with Kakacek’s sticky guitar melodies and drummer-singer Ehrlich’s loose vocals that bite with just a dash of irony.
Despite being members of a buzz band — prior to Smith Westerns Ehrlich played in the indie-rock crew Unknown Mortal Orchestra — both see their new project as a decidedly fresh beginning.
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“It’s way different,” Kakacek says comparing Whitney, whose debut album “Light Upon the Lake” is due June 3 via Secretly Canadian, with his previous band. “With Smith Westerns” — who disbanded in late 2014 — “we felt somewhat alienated in Chicago. We were younger and didn’t really know how to hang out. We were weird and didn’t get along with people. This time we have this giant family in Chicago supporting us. I feel like watching things build has been super exciting.”
After Smith Westerns broke up, both musicians were working menial jobs and writing music in their free time without any sense of what was next. “That was just us purging out ideas that weren’t necessarily going to form into an album,” Ehrlich says. “We were almost creating the space for Whitney to come in organically like it did. We just woke the project up.”
Early shows at intimate local venues like the Charleston, Whistler and Flood House felt more like a house party with friends, they recall, than a formal gig. “Those shows we played just for our friends will be in my memory forever,” Kakacek says. “Smith Westerns never had that. We played parties for high school friends where people were beer bonging and freaking out. It’s more of a family vibe now. We’re all best friends on stage. Smith Westerns was like that for awhile but then things got crazy.”
The musicians wrote the majority of the album in their Logan Square apartment — albeit with some slight detours along the way. Before recording the near entirety of the LP last year in Los Angeles, when homeless for a brief period in late 2014 the pair spent several weeks at Kakacek’s family cabin in Salem, Wis.
“We were too prideful to go sleep at Max’s parents’ house,” Ehrlich, who is an Oregon native, recalls. “There was nothing else to do.” Wisconsin days and nights were spent drinking beer and writing songs. With some restrictions, of course: “We’d hold off on drinking until we got enough of the song done,” Ehrlich says with a laugh. “Max would take trips back to Chicago and I’d sit there and write lyrics. He’d get back and we’d discuss them. I would take it upon myself to do most of the work on the vocals and he would do the same for the initial chord progression and arrangement. And then we would work at each other’s parts. We’d pick away at each other’s puzzle pieces.”
The best songs on Whitney’s debut operate with a nod and wink: “Dave’s Song,” for example, was inspired by their former downstairs neighbor at a previous Logan Square apartment. Dave, large in stature with a ponytail and a Tupac Shakur tattoo that said “outlaw,” Ehrlich says, was “always one to lose his mind and get wasted.” On the album’s title track, Kakacek adds, they laid the sounds of cicadas chirping outside their apartment into the final mix. In fact, embracing country music, both men say, was a bit of a gas in itself: “It was about us experimenting with a new sound in a kind of silly way,” Kakacek says referencing artists as wide-ranging as Abner Jay and J.J. Cale as inspiration. “But once we heard what we could do we decided it was something we should work on really hard. It was working all of the cheesiness out of it.”
Sure, they say, Whitney would love to play big-tent festivals — they’ve been name-dropping Stagecoach in interviews partly because it’s become an in-joke among their friends — but Ehrlich says they’re trying to not put too much pressure on themselves to be successful. “The goal is to keep it as organic as it was when we first started the project,” he says. “If you let outside expectations infiltrate the band it’s going to screw you over.”
Dan Hyman is a freelancer.
Twitter @chitribent
When: 9:30 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St.
Tickets: $15; 312-526-3851 or www.ticketmaster.com
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