Two masterworks from musician Tim Seely
In the early aughts, musician Tim Seely moved from Seattle, Washington to Oxford, Mississippi. It provided the singer/songwriter with a change of scenery, and a place to lick his wounds after the failure of his band, The Actual Tigers. The group’s demise followed a familiar story. An amazing band releases an amazing album only to have it disregarded by the public. Still, in his home studio in Oxford, Seely began working on new songs. Tim soon reconnected with producer Dennis Herring, who had helmed The Actual Tigers’ lone LP release, Gravelled & Green. Multi-instrumentalist Clay Jones signed on next and before long, they crafted an outstanding group of tracks. Seely then moved back to Seattle to make a new album. He called the project, Funeral Music.
Although the name suggests a solemn tone, the music on Funeral Music is much in line with what Seely made with The Actual Tigers. Gravelled & Green is a band album filled with upbeat pop tunes and gentle melodic ballads. On the record, band members play a plethora of instruments—organ, accordion, pedal steel, ukulele, vibes, electric piano. And they bring in outside musicians to add French Horn, trombone, and cello. Critics compared the group’s sound to Paul Simon, Wilco, and the Dave Matthews Band, but the group’s influences go much deeper. Tim Seely would later say that on Gravelled & Green, he “was trying to sound like some combination of my heroes at the time.”
The origin of The Actual Tigers began in Seattle in 1994. They named themselves Willis, and the band included Seely (guitar/mandolin/vocals), Diarmuid Cullen (drums), John Low (keyboards) and Max Perry (bass). “We met in high school,” Low told The Seattle Times in 1996. “We got fed up with a lot of the music we were hearing and we kind of wanted to do our own thing. We started out parodying music…from there, we came up with our own sound. Diarmuid is the only trained musician in the group. The rest of us taught ourselves how to play.”
Tim Seely wrote the songs and after picking up a local following, the group self-released their debut in 1996, followed by the five-song EP Bourgeois Blues in 2000. Willis had signed with Capitol Records in 1997, but in their three years with the label, “Standing By” became their only label release, a track on the Never Been Kissed soundtrack. And after discovering another band used the Willis name, they came up with a new moniker, The Actual Tigers.
Capitol Records asked the newly re-named band to re-record their Willis debut for their first Actual Tigers LP release on the label. “We spent a lot of time trying to make the old songs sound new,” Seely told The Seattle Times. “Hearing those old songs, a lot of them I wrote before I was 18—I compare it to getting tattoos when you’re young, and then as you get older you realize they suck.” Instead, the band put their efforts into creating a new album and giving the songs elaborate backing. A record where each track is a showcase. When Tim Seely spoke to The Seattle Times in August 1999, the band seemed pleased with what they were making. “I think it’s a fuller sound—we used to be really stripped down,” Seely said. “This album is a lot more orchestral, with strings and horns.”
Gravelled & Green is almost a perfect record. The opener “Yardwork in November” eases the listener in with pedal steel and brass before a burst of keyboards and guitars present “Standing By” from Never Been Kissed. Up next is “Time and Space,” which features French Horn, trombone, crawling piano, and Beach Boys styled backing vocals. With its soft arrangement and thought-provoking lyrics, it is one of the two drop dead gorgeous tracks on the album. “End of May” is the other, with delicate acoustic guitar and sad cello. Although they were not keen to remaking their debut, the band re-recorded three songs from their Willis EP: “Bourgeois Blues,” “Bad Day,” and “Testimony” for this album. There’s variety with each song on Gravelled & Green, creating an album that’s enjoyable from start to finish.
As it sometimes goes with big label record deals, Gravelled & Green did not get must support. It would be The Actual Tigers’ “debut/swan song” as Seely later called it. “We were kind of going for something different, something no one else would have … Our label wasn’t sure what to think of it,” Seely said in 2001. Instead of a large promotion, Gravelled & Green came out on a smaller imprint, Nettwerk America, in 2001. After five years on Capitol Records, the group found themselves without a record contract, so they broke up. They had made a magnificent album. Now what?
Fortunately, Tim Seely kept the same spirit in making Funeral Music as he did for Gravelled & Green. With Dennis Herring back in the producer’s chair, the two albums almost fit together as one. An array of instruments provides the texture in Funeral Music, including strings, brass, banjo, pedal steel, and even Tibetan Prayer Bells. And Seely mixes it up again, with knee slapping music for the title track and songs of beauty with “The Bees at Nite,” and “Lady Luck.” He also resurrects another track from the Bourgeois Blues EP, adding the moody “Trucker’s Lullaby” to the palette. One difference between the two albums is the somber topics in the songwriting. “Almost all of the songs have common themes somehow relating to death,” Seely told today.com in 2005, “whether it be fear of death, not accomplishing enough during the course of one’s life, the idea of immortality and questioning/challenging the idea of the afterlife.”
Funeral Music (also called Caw Caw) got more attention when it was released in 2005, and reviews were positive. Doug Miller, in his article about the album for today.com wrote, “Funeral Music is harm pop that delivers on that promise. Seely’s mélange of tasty guitar picking and his soothing, unaffected singing, a rarity in an indie world that’s often cluttered with pretension, play well over the dark lyrical content.” World Cafe David Dye was just as enthusiastic about the album, calling it, “a beautiful and intricate folk-pop album brimming with atmosphere.” Tim Seely added his own off-beat comments about Funeral Music for Seattle PI, describing it as, “folk rock at its core, or it’s folk pop or something. With a little bit of weirdness.”
In 2006, Tim Seely told Seattle PI, “I want to continue to create music that I don’t hate as long as I can and hopefully make a few friends along the way.” Sadly, these two albums are all that have come out of The Actual Tigers/Funeral Music camps. On his still active Myspace page, Tim Seely lists his influences as Badly Drawn Boy, Elliott Smith, and The Flaming Lips. Echoes of these artists can be found in both albums. Seely still maintains a website, armyoftim.com, with a shop that offers T-shirts and CDs, although most links are no longer active. Gravelled & Green appears to be a one-off and Funeral Music feels like a finale.
The end of the story?