Taxiride

Forget about trends, hipsters, and flavors of the month. Forget about angst and out of tune guitars. These guys just came up from Australia with four voices and twelve songs that may in fact make you remember why you loved music in the first place.

Taxiride is four young songwriters and multi-instrumentalists whose presence in a room is as big and seductive as the swirling mass of guitars, drums, sitars, pianos, and four-part rock harmonies that jump out the speakers behind them. With unapologetically catchy melodies, earthy grooves, and lyrics that go straight for the heart, the music on Imaginate shows us what can happen when four guys that could have easily had solo careers come together for the good of the whole.

The album’s opening sequence gives us a taste of everything to follow: By the time Tim Watson and Tim Wild’s acoustic groove merges with Dan Hall’s bass, Jason Singh’s snaky electric and the understated drums, “Can You Feel” has pulled out just short of climax – and dives back in with “Get Set,” a full throttle rocker with a wall of vocals reminiscent of a Seattle-bred Beach Boys.

The album moves along with soulful themes of love, youth, and loss. Energetic and light-hearted songs like “Rocketship” are offset with songs like the richly orchestrated and prayerful “Let Me Die Young,” a Tim Wild composition inspired by the recent death of Jason’s father. “Can You Feel” came from Wild’s discovery of some wartime love letters his grandfather had written to his grandmother, “and like any respectable rock band,” he explains, “we lifted the best lines.” The groups trademark harmonies anchor arrangements that use piano, organ, and other classic keyboards; eastern instruments, strings, woodwinds, and the band’s guitar, bass and drums.

With all four members sharing lead vocals and songwriting duties it is tempting, but oddly unnecessary to go through and detail who sings what, who plays what, and who wrote what. Somehow it all comes through as a cohesive single voice coming from the same place.

Separately, Watson, Wild, Singh, and Hall had all been playing around Melbourne’s fiercely competitive club scene for three years, making a living and learning songcraft from the inside out by performing the hits five nights a week in cover bands. Says Watson, “After playing hits for a while, you begin to get a feel for what makes a song work, what makes it a good song.”

While they toiled away in this hothouse college of musical knowledge, the principals simultaneously were trying to find something more gratifying. When the two Tims first hooked up, they began writing and recording songs on the spot. It just clicked. They then contacted Singh. As Wild recalls, “We auditioned Jason by having him sing ‘Gimme One Reason’ by Tracy Chapman in about seven different keys to see how high he could get in his register. And he pulled it off.”

Soon thereafter, Wild took his weekly stroll through Camberwall Market and noticed a baby-faced guy busking on the sidewalk. “He was doing his own songs and eerie renditions of Jeff Buckley and I thought he was great,” Tim recalls. “So I asked him down to our studio for a sing, but he seemed more concerned about the fact that I didn’t throw any money into his guitar case.”

Nonetheless, Hall showed up, six pack in hand. It turned out to be a marriage of true minds and voices. “I went home with a tape of some of the demos that they’d already completed, and there were a few songs that absolutely hit me in the head,” reminisces Hall.

The band set about finishing up the demos, soon to be circulated by their managers. The response was quick and explosive, and the band followed up by singing and playing, sans mics, amps or any other amplification, in various record company conference rooms in Melbourne and Sydney.

After fielding bids from several labels including an attractive one from Warner Music Australia Taxiride’s demos came across the desk of Sire Records chief Seymour Stein. “I got instant goose bumps from the vocals,” Stein recalls. “It had been years since I had heard those kind of harmonies. But the songs – wow! They were equally terrific.” The proposed combo of WMA and Sire proved irresistible to the band, who signed a novel joint deal with the cousin labels.

But there was one other looming question: what would they call themselves? The inspiration came during the process of recording their first set of demos. Wild gave a tape of each new song to a cabbie friend who proceeded to blast it over his stereo as he drove his customers around Melbourne. Luckily, the response to the music was overwhelmingly positive. When the time came to officially name the band, Taxiride was an obvious choice in honor of the band’s first fan as well as its earliest (captive) audience.

In mid 1998 the newly named Taxiride went into the Los Angeles studio of producer Jack Joseph Puig (Jellyfish, Goo Goo Dolls, Semisonic). The result is an album called Imaginate. Listen with the top down.