Morphine Members Form Twinemen
After Sandman's death, Morphine members start over with new band, album:
by Andrew Dansby, 5/28/2002

Morphine drummer Billy Conway and saxophonist Dana Colley and former Face to Face singer Laurie Sargent have formed the Twinemen, a new outfit which will release its self-titled debut album on July 9th. For Conway and Colley, the album will be their first studio recording since Morphine's 2000 album, The Night, which was released nearly a year after the July 1999 death of frontman Mark Sandman.

The band's lineup sprung from the duo's first post-Morphine project, the Orchestra Morphine, a nine-piece ensemble that toured, playing Morphine songs following Sandman's death. "What we knew to be true is that the true test of a good song is if another singer can deliver it," Conway says. "And Mark was a great songwriter. Laurie just offered to sing while we figured out what the hell to do for this memorial for Mark."

Among the difficulties that faced the two Morphine members after Sandman's death was finding a way to rise above that group's distinctive sound. With Sandman's spooky vocals and two-string bass, along with the drums and bass, the group formed a unique fabric that tossed out all rules for trios. "To me, that's really the good music, when it gets hooked up in a way that when you pull it apart it becomes something else," Conway says. "Just the sound of people who have played together a lot is just palpable. Like Los Lobos, you could just tell those guys have played together forever. They could play a Henry Mancini piece or some Seventies disco cover, and it wouldn't matter. It would sound like them and it would be great, and it's hard to achieve that voice."

Following the Orchestra Morphine tours, Conway and Colley began work backing Sargent on her solo project. "As the case would be," Conway says, "jamming came to be a little songwriting. Pretty soon it began to not sound like her record anymore. So we put that down like little kids in a sandbox, 'Let's mess around with this for a while.' The next thing you know we were searching around for one more song to make it a record, and searching for a name of a band. It was a fun process, because seldom in your musical career do you get to record without a preconception of what it was you were after. We weren't anything. We were just searching out of thin air for songs. So that was an interesting creative place to be."

As for that band name, it is both a new start and a tip to Conway and Colley's past. The Twinemen was taken from a comic strip that Sandman worked on regularly. "It was a comic reflection about being in a band," Conways says. "It was this twine ball with three heads, they play music and they have all sorts of capers. They have a hit record and then they go to therapy and they drift apart and realize they're always thinking about each other. And then they go to jail [laughs]. Over the years he kept these, so somehow for us it made sense."

Next up for the new ensemble will be the usual round of touring, with all the anxiety about connecting to old fans and finding new ones. "It's been really great for us so far," Conway says, "because we really didn't know what we were doing. And a lot of people are saying, 'Way to go!'"