Twinemen is Dana Colley, Billy Conway, & Laurie Sargent.
Twinemen combines a deep respect for songwriting with a distinctive organic musical chemistry and creates music that is both difficult to describe, and yet resonates with a warm sense of familiarity.
From the beginning the band's manifesto was to create unusual music, as Dana and Billy did for years with the band Morphine. Twinemen were brought together after the death of their friend and bandmate, Mark Sandman, leaving Dana and Billy without the band they had been a part of for ten years, with five records, (Rykodisc, Dreamworks) a Grammy nominated video and relentless worldwide touring.
In the year after Mark's death the two put together Orchestra Morphine, a nine piece rollicking celebration of the work of Morphine, and toured the US and Italy. One of the members of Orchestra Morphine was singer Laurie Sargent, and with her the seeds were sown for the music that would become Twinemen.
Dana, Billy and Laurie spent the summer of 2001 working in their Cambridge, Ma. studio, Hi-N-Dry, the recording studio created by Morphine. There, comfortable in their surroundings and surrounded by their musical past, they began developing new ideas that grew into songs, and these songs grew into Twinemen. With the help of Russ Gershon (Either Orchestra, Orchestra Morphine) and Evan Harriman (Coots, Orchestra Morphine), and Andrew Mazzone (Family Jewels, Dennis Brennan) and Stuart Kimball (Bob Dylan, Carly Simon, Face To Face), they created a collection of darkly hopeful songs that reflect both a past and the possibilities of the future.
"The beacon for creating these songs was to make music that couldn't be easily categorized," Conway points out. "I like the open-endedness of this group. We left the door open for any direction we wanted to take." For Colley, that includes turns at bass, guitar, piano, and other instruments. For Conway, that means replacing the drummer's usual urge to be rhythmic with the idea of being simply musical - a tack that's already a hallmark of his formidable style. "It's probably the most unstructured music I've ever played,"says Sargent. And yet it seems as solid as the brick walls that enclose Hi-N-Dry.