I Want Out

Back in February of 2016-- maybe 2015— we, Friend Roulette had a great offer to go do two shows in Virginia. Even though we love, love, love our audience in Richmond and Harrisonburg, a two show run wasn’t quite enough to make the drive make sense. So we contacted Alex Tebeleff of the band (and then house venue of the same name) Paperhaus about putting together a DC show. He had another idea. Record an album at his house. His bandmate Ricky had just moved into the basement with a bunch of mics, a huge mixing board, etc. We had new songs. It was just enough to justify the whole trip. 

What I, Matt Meade, the guitarist in Friend Roulette, really loved about this session was that I was completely checked out. Up to this point in the band’s life, I usually played “leader", and in studio settings, I would spend my time pacing back and forth, staring at the clock watching the minutes pass, worrying if we were going to get everything done, worrying about the parts other people were playing… generally annoying the fuck out of everyone. When we headed south for this trip, I had just finished a good 28 days straight of working long hours and was about as tired as I'd ever been. When we arrived, I recall immediately going into my usual nervous studio mode upon walking into the house. Then I encountered Ricky. Ricky might be the slowest engineer-producer we've ever worked with. The pace was “okay, so that snare sounds pretty good, bass sounds good, let’s go have a smoke and then maybe get some guitar sounds" whether the band was smoking or not. I felt like there was a spliff sparked in between every take. It gave us lots of time to think about what we were doing... or not think at all. As soon as we had all the basic tracks and I had done my few vocals, someone gave me a Klonopin or Xanax or something and I just laid on the floor of the studio and went to sleep for 5 hours. I woke up around 11pm to the sounds of cheering and bottles being cracked, because the album was done. 

Then we waited. Friend Roulette loves to wait. We just waited and waited until finally we decided to get Mr. Jeff Berner to mix it. We mixed it in one day with the guy and then we waited some more. I was on a boat in Mexico when I decided this album needed a 4th song. I knew very clearly what song It had to be as it was ringing in my ears. It was a song that John Stanesco, Friend Roulette EWI master, had written for his senior recital in college 6 years prior. I arranged it, Julia wrote lyrics for it, and we recorded it in my home studio. And then we waited some more, until we got offered some more free studio time to record the drums and bass to finish the track out. 

Nw we’ve got a four song record that only took about that many years to make. What these songs are about I don't quite know, but as I’ve revisited them, I’ve realized there's something timely about them. You might think “Black Hole” was written in response to the kind of shit we’re dealing with today with that shitbird we call president. "Clocks" is somewhat of a self-hatred self-realization song. “Wash n' Burn" has heavy escapist themes to it. And I think “Blacked Out” may just literally be about your cell phone dying while you're blacked out. There’s gotta be some useful metaphors in that. Anyhow, these are really just my guesses. Lyrically these songs are sparse, yet perhaps direct and incisive, too. We hope people will actually make something out of them for themselves, as we, Friend Roulette have resigned to letting them exist just as they are and nothing more. 


The Matt Sheffer Songbook Volume 1

A decade ago, before Friend Roulette had formed, its future members were all friends with a singer from Houston named Matt Sheffer. Matt had the most beautiful, powerful voice. Though he wasn't much for alcohol, he could still go to karaoke bars to hustle for free drinks anytime he felt like it. Even more impressive than his voice was his compositional brilliance. He would spend days at a time crashing on his own couch (he had a bedroom, but seldom used it), recording songs on Garageband using his laptop's built-in microphone, leaving the apartment only to buy more Diet Coke & Ritz crackers. Every so often, he’d ask someone if they’d like to hear what he was working on. Without fail, he'd present an utter masterpiece, that despite its crude recording, was a radio-ready instant-classic.

Sadly, Matt was his own greatest adversary and harshest critic. Shortly after bringing these incredible songs to life, he would inevitably doubt whether they were any good at all. He disavowed entire albums of material, removing them from his Myspace page, only to start the process all over again. Eventually, Matt gave up his fraught musical pursuits in Brooklyn for the slower pace of Austin, TX. After a long period of inactivity, Matt finally returned to the world of left-field pop over the last few years, trickling psychedelic epics into the ether with his eccentric and uniquely-Sheffer sextet, Zettajoule.

In 2016, Friend Roulette decided that they had a responsibility to record some of Matt's old songs as an act of preservation. After rearranging the material for their unique instrumentation and adding some ensemble elements of their own, they yielded The Matt Sheffer Songbook, Vol. 1, a loving tribute to a talented friend and a strange body of music that without, the band would not likely exist. Though they did not compose the song's skeletons themselves, the album feels like a Friend Roulette origin story, like their self-titled debut seven years late. It's through this deep-rooted musical kinship and ESP-level chemistry that they've created something greater than Matt could've in his crippling bouts of self-doubt, yet also greater than they could've without his clear vision as their guiding light. A decade ago, Matt Sheffer had already mastered an uncompromising and ever-adventurous all-in pop sound, that same sound that Friend Roulette has chased for its existence, and one that still sounds shockingly modern today.