Marah – After the gold rush
For fans who claim to be puzzled by the Float Away episode, Serge can relate. It’s a bit of a mystery to him, too.
“It will take me five years to really understand. Now, moving on from it and having made another record, I am beginning to understand.”
Radio didn’t buy into Float Away With The Friday Night Gods. Media interest in the album was tepid. A vocal faction of Marah’s fans hated it. The group toured for a few desultory weeks before pulling the pin. And then the Bielankos parted ways with both the latest edition of the band and with their record company. Seemingly, they made a record that pleased no one. History was not made.
“We had a year invested. And then you see a lot of hopes and dreams and desires sort of fall apart,” Dave says.
If, on the part of the Bielanko brothers, there had been much calculation in the making of Float Away, then one would have to describe the whole exercise as a serious miscalculation. But Dave and Serge had simply done what felt right as their next move. Few new fans were drawn into the fold, while some that had championed the band to that point viewed Float Away as a commercial compromise, which neutered the things that made Marah unique. In the stores, it was an utter disaster; to date, its Soundscan totals are less than half that of Kids In Philly.
Yet neither brother voices any regrets.
“The experience of [making Float Away] is worth its weight in gold, for us,” Serge says. “Maybe it is selfish in a lot of people’s eyes, but we want to have these experiences. I don’t think consciously this was on our mind when we went to make another record. It was just, this was a real comfortable next step for us.
“I am proud of the record. It did hurt where people were venomous with the feedback. That’s life, I guess. The making of Float Away was a crucial part in our band’s history. It did help us realize, here’s what our band stands for.”
Adds Dave: “I wouldn’t listen to anyone say this record sucks, period. To me, we could sit and play the record on acoustic guitars today and it is still beautiful. It is this picture of these two people who are dreaming of being somewhere else….We just let it take us where it took us. To us it had an amazing sense of humor. But was it the quintessential Marah record? Absolutely not. We knew exactly what it was.”
With no band, no songs and no label, Serge opted to stay in London and cultivate his relationship with Caroline Lost. Dave settled in Brooklyn. “We were sitting in our corner thinking we were going to have a bunch more rounds, and you come out of that corner and you want to come out swinging and fighting and feeling good. But I don’t think we had the smelling salts to revive us,” says Serge. “We just needed to be on our own.”
Once in London, Serge immersed himself in the classics of popular music and literature. “I was listening to Sly Stone and What’s Going On a ton, you know? And Motown. I am not going to listen to anything new. I don’t expect to sell records in those numbers or connect with people in the numbers those have done. But if you can connect with even a handful of people, the way What’s Going On did…that’s what we wanted to do next.”
One night, Serge called Dave to play him something he’d written. It was a strange song about a downtrodden cross-dressing junkie with a death wish. The song was called “Feather Boa”. Crackling through the transatlantic, tinny digital cell phone, Dave heard his brother quietly sing the lyrics.
You know sometimes just a whisper,
From the god of hope descends,
And doubles back to these types
For a reason
“I swear that song will never sound as good as it did then,” says Dave. “He was reading the words and botching the chords and singing this small little sad story. I thought, that is so cool.”
But beyond the simple humanity of it, what made Dave identify with the character Serge created for “Feather Boa”?
“[The character] is living under fear. Rock ‘n’ roll bands are very much like that; you get on your knees and you do what you gotta do to get by….I heard this song and I was fucking like: Let’s go there now! That was it.”
Says Serge: “I wanted [the song] to say to other people, here’s a very strange person you may not be able to relate to at all on the surface, but underneath we are all scared of the same things. And we all want the same things.”
The songs kept coming in London for Serge, who would play the new tunes over the phone and then fax to Dave’s place in Brooklyn handwritten lyrics with notes explaining how he imagined the music. Dave began cutting demos mapping where he wanted to take the recordings, and they developed an across-the-ocean songwriting correspondence.