A little more to sing about

by Benjamin Joe

Adam Putzer in Mohawk Place. (photograph by Benjamin Joe)

Adam Putzer, a Western New York transplant by way of Staten Island, said that the biggest thing for him when it comes to music is that  he doesn’t have a lot to say.

But let’s say that one shouldn’t start complaining.

The former guitarist for the popular three-piece, The Tins, followed his musical aspirations to Buffalo, making it his home and base of operations. For years the band continued its work in music, but eventually went on hiatus — a Christmas present from the COVID 19-pandemic —and Putzer found himself landing in a world of new signposts with new priorities.

“I feel like back in the day I had to struggle for subject matter. I always want my songs to mean something, but it’s also I fully admit (that) I didn’t have a tough childhood. I didn’t have a super tough life unless it was of my own creation. So, it’s not like I had any trauma to sing about. It was always about what was angering me that day,” he said.

But that was soon to change. Putzer’s son was born amidst the pandemic, a harrowing time for anyone, but especially for young parents. Also, because of Covid, no one was touring, though that may as well have been a blessing, because Putzer wasn’t keen on leaving for a month at a time in any case.

“You hear all these horror stories about musicians going on tour and being negligent parents,” Putzer said. “I don’t want to be a negligent parent. I want to be a good dad. I want to be able to see my kid everyday.”

Then, as though things weren’t “heavy” enough, a landmine of news exploded just a few months later.

“It was back in June of 2020. I had just had my kid in February, so we were in lockdown,” Putzer explained. 

Putzer said he decided to take a bike ride, get out of the house and enjoy the outdoors. He was a little sore — he doesn’t exercise, he joked, — but that night there was blood in his urine.

“I was like, ‘that’s not normal.’ The rest of my night my kidney felt like something was pushing on it. It was very uncomfortable, I couldn’t sleep.

“The next day I went to the emergency room.”

Putzer said the doctors wanted to do a biopsy of his kidney to see what was going on. The results came in quickly. A test on a piece of his kidney tested positive for cancer. Responsibly, Putzer got a second opinion, then went under the knife.

Now he had two choices. Just wait a year or two to see what happens or do chemotherapy to reduce the risk of it returning. He went with the chemotherapy.

“It was heavy. I lost all my hair. I was on steroids, so my head grew three times the size it is! It was strange. I looked like a dolphin,” he laughed. “But ever since, after I stopped in January (2023), I’ve been good.”

For a long time, Putzer said he regulated his songwriting to “snapshots” or instants in his life. How different things made him feel. For the rest of it, he ran a pretty short shift when it came to perfecting the performance of songs, without getting too much into the lyrics.

Contributed image

Now, all of that’s changed.

“2020 just threw me for a loop,” he said and laughed. “I now have such a ton of things to sing about.”

Putzer said “Slipping’” was a direct result of his experiences in 2020. In the lyric, “I’m losing my grip, and I’ve got no one to blame but myself,” it’s straightforward in its vulnerability.

“That was in the aftermath of a lot of things,” Putzer said. “My son was born, the band broke up. I was just in a very rough place for a couple of months.”

“Slippin’” and “Blue Shadow” can both be found on streaming under Putzer’s stage name: asalone.

A Work in Progress: David Lewis’s split music personality

by Benjamin Joe

Photo Credit Benjamin Joe. David Lewis in Starpine Studios.

In the outskirts of the suburbs, an unassuming house stands next to other unassuming houses. There’s a driveway. Yard. Garage.

And inside of this home is another room filled with different odds and ends. A slow compilation that will eventually become a full recording venue. It’s called Starpine Studio , and like its owner, it’s a work in progress.

David Lewis, aka Dov Leon, and founder of two very different projects started his career in shortly after learning four chords on the guitar.

“I picked them up, I tried them and I was like, y’know, I’m in love with this!” he said.

And the rest is history.

Lewis put the act into high gear while in college at University at Buffalo. He put together a duo called Seven Sails and he and Cristian Trochez started playing together. It was an indie band that got some help along the way from the producer of their first EP, Land of Lions, Lewis said.

“The producer we were working with, he had a drum kit and he was also a very talented guitar player. So, we go in with our acoustic song and he said, ‘I think I hear bass, I think I hear drums,’ so he helped us out because he was talented on all of them,” Lewis said.

The band was a place for that indie sound, Lewis said. Later, Trochez moved to Florida. They still stay in touch and Trochez will occasionally send a recording of a riff or progression and the two will work out the song remotely.

But there were some tracks that weren’t quite for Seven Sails.

Lewis took his more hardcore and electronic, and even hip-hop based projects to his second identity, Dov Leon.

“I also loved post-hardcore, like We Came as Romans … I loved both styles so much I was starting to fuse them,” he said. “That’s when I realized that maybe I should stick Seven Sails to that acoustic, indie stuff because that’s what people came originally came on for. My first fans were there because they liked that style and I was going too far the other way, and that’s when I made the split.”

Contributed Image. David Lewis.

Lewis started collaborating with other names for that “gritty” vocals — screaming vocals — to keep his own Seven Sails vocals clean. Rob Davies from the UK was featured on one of the songs.

“This is the one thing in my life that’s been consistent, writing music because of the joy it can bring going through the process,” Lewis said.

Over the years Lewis has worked to perfect both of his projects. He’s reached out to people to play different parts and honed the sound on each track that he’d record and produce from Starpine Studios. Parts of Seven Sails discography include violins and parts of Dov Leon’s tracks hold “chunky” electric guitar highlights courtesy of Lewis’s uncle.

Lewis talks a lot about why he does what he does. It isn’t for the money and it’s not for the fame. His audience is a small one, but the way he figures it, if a song can touch one person or help somebody come to something for themselves? Then that’s what he’s in it for.

“I’d say my audience is why I write the music now,” Lewis said. “When you start writing music, there’s multiple drivers for it. There’s the passion. There’s wanting to inspire people. And there is that little piece of, ‘Can I get this up to a million or 100,000 streams?’ There’s just that little … — I don’t know — temptation to fame instead of focusing on the real beauty of what you’re doing. It’s almost selling out if all you’re concerned about is the stream counts.”

Interested parties can catch Lewis’s act as Dov Leon at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdaIutrCFSs for a feel of “Virtual Vices.”

Seven Sails is also still hanging out on streaming sites. Linked here is “Rewind”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FSqCckF1kY.

Support your politics and getting it right

By Benjamin Joe

Photograph by Benjamin Joe

It’s not easy getting up and performing, but it’s something that sometimes has to be done. Some would say that music creates a safe space for marginalized people. There can be a lot of reasons for a performer to do what they do.

And it can also can be pretty scary.

“Some of the shows that stressed me the most out were house shows because they’re right there,” Adelaide said, laughing. “You’re really singing right to them.”

The artist known by their middle-name, Adelaide, talked about their life as a musician and ultimately, a person, in a well-known bakery and coffee shop on the West Side of Buffalo.

The Southern Towns native wrote their first song on guitar after living in Colorado for a spell (in the middle of nowhere) before coming back to Ithaca where they’d recently dropped out of the University. Once there, they started playing out with a band called “Thunderstorm Clouds.”

Many lifetimes later, Adelaide is in Buffalo for now, recently bereft of their day job and is a consummate musical artist who is frank about their gender (they are queer), their beliefs (healing with music) and their ability to “feel intensely.”

“I’m a bit of a vessel, a channeler to something bigger than myself,” they said. “Lyrics will come to me as I’m falling asleep or when I’m in meditation. …

“More often than not it comes from feeling something so intensely that it reverberates outside my body and it needs to go elsewhere.”

Adelaide had a few things to say about the music industry, but also said that “confidence,” was the major factor that has allowed them to play in so many bands, in so many places, write so many songs and have so many people connect with them. Life’s been good, however, they did note a male dominancy that seems to overcast the industry.

But this is not an unchangeable obstacle.

“When I lived in Portland, when this magazine started – it’s now a larger collective called ‘She Shreds Media’ –… I was a subscriber. So obsessed. Was very invested in what was going on,” Adelaide said. “It finally felt like there was a community of guitarists and bass players who were women or nonbinary people who wanted to change the narrative from ­– like pictures in the classic guitar magazines – where there’s a woman in a bathing suit holding a guitar.”

Adelaide said that rock guitar has a long history of women, but it’s been taken away. Today they say they listens to women and femme musicians to “honor that legacy.”

“I think there’s such value in uplifting musicians that are in whatever various, for lack of a better term, a marginalized identity,” they said. “If I go to a show and it’s five cis straight white guys playing instruments, I’m just like (pause).

“I value it in its own way, but I really at this point want to see more musicians of color, more queer people, people who’s gender, you don’t know their gender, but I’m digging their vibe.”

For the future of Buffalo’s music scene, Adelaide sees a lot of hope. The working class rust belt mentality has a long way to go in terms of being progressive, they said, but they still feels, “there’s an effort to push past that.”

“I think my music could be considered rock,” they said. “But it’s so lyrically and emotional driven it steps out. There’s a saturation of dad-rock in Buffalo. It’s interesting because it’s not all (that way). There’s so much of every genre here, in Buffalo, but I do think there’s a saturation of dad-rock… It’s changing because that’s how time works. People from every generation are coming through and I think that’s a good thing.”

In the end, Adelaide said one should never, “live in regret,” which is something they’ve learned from the very young and the very old.

“There’s a lot of people who I think lose that because they have to focus on the basic needs … to survive. There’s no shame in that, that’s living life,” they said. “I feel very fortunate. One of the things I love most about Buffalo is the cheap rent. If I lived anywhere else I couldn’t quit my nine to five. Being able to live as an artist in a location and make art – and obviously it’s changing, Buffalo is changing – I do feel so grateful to have this perspective. Sometimes you need to just go for something, even when it’s risky.”

Adelaide’s single “Fire” can be found at https://adelaideband.bandcamp.com/track/fire. While the song is about Portland, OR, many have listened and said it’s got to be about Buffalo. 

Coral Collapse finds its place in pandemic album

Coral Collapse rocks out at Nietzsche’s for the release of “Symmetries.” (Photo submitted)

By Benjamin Joe

Coral Collapse is a four piece from Buffalo, New York and has put out a new album called “Symmetries” where the members’ individual sounds and melodies meld into a sonic force.

With Gandi Rizek and Kevin O’Connor checking their space on guitars, Seth Zielinski playing the drums, Joel Russell on bass, and O’Connor again on vocals, listening to the band’s lineup is a far cry from just another “slap in the face/drunk in the morning fiasco” but more like a never-ending, not to be forgotten, hurricane in sound.

The band put out their debut album in 2019 called “Don’t Wait to See Me Say Goodbye” but formed in 2015, releasing an EP called “Hafla” in 2016. 

Coral Collapse has since walked the line set onto musicians living in 2022. In a Zoom interview between O’Connor, who was speaking from Kentucky, and Russell in Western New York, the two long-time band members talked collaboration and making a mark in the music world even as life continues with its familiar landmarks and challenges.

“I think we start off, generally, together in a room, just noodling around,” Russell said. “Kevin always brings his recorder and from that, sets out the choice mixes and I think we continue to noodle around individually, then come back together, eventually, to put it all together.”

Each song is unique. O’Connor noted that after five minutes, the band could know it’s a song, but other jams sit on his recorder for months at a time before being pulled up.

“I feel that was a song like ‘Apparition’ on the new album,” O’Connor said. “Which is like a darker, weirder track. That song … It didn’t initially hit me as a Coral Collapse song, but sitting with me, it kind of stood out.”

“Apparition” can be listened to on https://coralcollapse.bandcamp.com/track/apparition.

While inspiration strikes in and out of the studio, the band’s journey through the years is a kind of inspiration in and of itself. Between day jobs, kids and out-of-state responsibilities, the four members came together to make an album that almost never happened.

“We had this week where we were just going to go into the studio, and go in kind of raw was the idea,” Russell said. “To go in with some loose ideas and flush them out. Be a studio bank for a week. We had this week and then the pandemic happened.”

Many months later while COVID-19 raged and “everyone was wearing masks” Russel said a studio sounded like the safest place to be. At that point they were all out of practice, jamming in Russell’s garage and outside for fear of spreading the disease, but committed to continue.

“It really wasn’t much work for me to come up with the melodies for these songs,” O’Connor said of the acoustic renderings going back and forth between the bandmates. “They seemed to have a suggested melody already in them. Really the only challenging thing with those songs was trying to fit the lyrics in. … Because we weren’t in the same room … At the same time, we had already written a lot of songs together.”

O’Connor said the band had an idea of not only sounds they’d like to make, but of emotions they’d like to convey, noting that feelings were “harder to talk about” but the band plunged ahead anyway. 

The end result is an album that speaks to every part of the room and soul and features a dusky, almost trade book cover feel to its art and name. Russell said this hearkened back to the early 1960s New York scene, which O’Connor also appreciated.

“I feel like ideals were more important then,” Russell said. “Or were just more in the mainstream.”

Other stories on Coral Collapse by this author can be found at:

Buff State alumnus releases ‘surfy’ album with his band