Dead Man Winter finds new life in ashes of post-marital despair
Behold the dreaded breakup album. Once a release gets pegged as such, it’s immediately saddled with enough presumed emotional baggage to prompt the most seasoned marriage counselors to reassess their vocation. And never mind the artistic expectations often assigned to such overt catharsis.
Hence, Dave Simonett finds himself in a bit if a predicament with Furnace (GNDWIRE), his second and most personal effort as Dead Man Winter, the plugged-in alter ego to his bluegrass-inspired acoustic outfit Trampled By Turtles. He leaves himself dangerously exposed to scrutiny on Furnace—though it’s not as if he had a choice.
“Breakup records aren’t generally something I’m interested in, but I couldn’t get past the damn thing,” the 36-year-old Simonett says of the emotional unraveling and ensuing creative windfall that followed the demise of his decade-long marriage—a relationship that began when he was just 19 and produced two young children. “It had to be done.”
Furnace’s conventional folk/rock shell provides a certain measure of comfort, as does Simonett’s languid vocal delivery. But you won’t find much comfort in the words. “I’m a destroyer, I’m burning in the starlight/All I wanted was to die, but you would not let me go,” Simonett sings on “Destroyer.”
Furnace was once a much different album. Looking to regroup after his divorce, Simonett retreated to an isolated cabin in his Minnesota home. Snowed in much of the time and left to his own devices, he wrote like crazy. Trouble is, he didn’t like what he heard when he got back, even after the record was mastered. “It just sounded kind of hollow,” he says.
So Simonett recruited some pals from the Minneapolis roots-rock scene—including Trampled By Turtles bassist Tim Saxhaug—and headed to Pachyderm Recording Studio. In the wooded-retreat setting that produced such classics as Nirvana’s In Utero, the group recorded everything live to tape. “A lot of the songs the guys were learning during the first take, but it was easier the second time around because I had some space and time,” says Simonett. “I could actually focus more on making the record than my own stupid misery. It was like letting the steam out of a valve.”
—Hobart Rowland
