Boston Phoenix
The Twinemen and the Family Jewels carry on the Sandman legacy:
by Ted Drozdowski

It's a glorious mid-April day, and the birds are playing a symphony outside the fifth-story windows of Hi-n-Dry, a recording studio atop a solid old industrial building just outside Cambridge's Inman Square. Laurie Sargent, Billy Conway, and Dana Colley are sitting around a table. Actually, Sargent is tilted back in a chair with her feet up. Colley is arching on his seat in an insouciant slouch. And Conway is perched on a giant yellow rubber exercise ball, slightly bouncing up and down as we speak. The conversation turns to why they've given their new band, the Twinemen, such an unusual name.

"Mark Sandman had this cartoon strip called The Twinemen, about a ball of twine with three heads, which was his comic reflection of us in the band," Conway explains. "The band," of course, is Morphine, the sonorous, deep-sounding trio that Sandmen fronted until he suffered a fatal heart attack on an Italian stage in 1999. "It starts with two heads. Then a third figure comes in to play drums and gets entwined. They go into the studio and make a hit record, and they get neurotic and go to a therapist who snips them apart. But that doesn¹t work out..."

"...And they go to jail," Colley chimes in. "It's great. It has the trajectory of a VH-1 Behind the Music." "It so succinctly explains what it's like being in any band," Sargent says a fraction of a breath after Colley finishes his last syllable. "You're twined together, and when you're apart you're less than you are together, but when you're together, you want to kill each other.

"We picked the name the day we finished the record. We went out to celebrate, and I watched Dana and Billy sit down and pour their coffee at the same time, put the same stuff in it, stir it at the same time. And as both of their spoons were clicking it was like, 'I'm with the fucking Twinemen!'

" What Sargent didn't notice is that she'd become a Twineman as well. It's obvious from the way these three connect one another's sentences and thoughts, and from the utterly relaxed way they hang out together. But they also have that indefinable thing called "chemistry," as friends and as musicians.

At least that's what it seems like this afternoon, and when they're on stage. So far the Twinemen have done just four shows with an expanded performing line-up at Cambridge's intimate Lizard Lounge, where the music has spilled out in warm, rolling grooves over a crowd of ardently respectful listeners. Among them have been a swarm of Morphine fans, music journalists, radio programmers, and Boston rock cognoscenti including Peter Wolf. Sargent applies her warm-toned voice to songs about midgets and figurative giants, to stories of life and its joys and losses. Conway keeps his drums pattering, his carefully tuned kit – struck with care and restraint – adding to the warmth of the music. Colley's sax-stretched melodies blow sonic smoke rings in the air, teaming with the notes from Andrew Mazzone's bass and the adjunct horns of Russ Gershon and Evan Harriman to create chords that dissipate into the aural equivalent of a black-and-white movie fog. And Stu Kimball's guitar injects sugarbursts and thunderbolts – patches of color that nudge new directions into the mix. The overall effect on that stage and in the Twinemen's just-finished debut album is a combination of gentility and intricacy and depth. Their sound is comforting, but it offers plenty. It's fueled by virtuosity and rich with improvisation and yet always smooth, cool, textured, and relaxed, even when Sargent is working the lyrics into a fever.

"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, banjo, 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. As for Sargent, a versatile and natural singer who's a veteran of the '80s Boston band Face to Face and several major-label solo releases, with the Twinemen she enjoys the freedom to improvise melodies and phrases and even new words. "It's probably the most unstructured music I've ever played," she says. And yet it seems as solid as the brick walls that enclose Hi-n-Dry.

The Twinemen began to take shape two years ago, just before Colley, Conway, and Sargent put together Orchestra Morphine, their touring musical tribute to Sandman. "The three of us spent a little time playing around and writing some music," Sargent says. "It got shelved when we did Orchestra Morphine, but a lot of that material got pulled out when my own band did a residency at the Lizard Lounge. I made a rule for those shows that we'd play three new songs a night, so we¹d learn them during soundcheck. They had a different feel from the songs my band was already doing, and we started putting them on tape."

Conway says to Sargent, "We were making your record [a more structured solo album called Cockypop, which will follow the summer release of the Twinemen's debut CD] at the same time, and it became clear some of the songs didn't fit. We just kept recording with nothing in mind other than to make great songs together. And the next thing we knew we had close to an album, so then we figured we might as well write and record a few more. And then we realized we've got a band and we're looking for a name to call it." The rest, of course, is comic-strip history.