Librettos made music

There aren’t many bands who’ve named themselves after a piece by the contemporary classical composer John Adams. In fact, there’s probably only one: the indie Philadelphia sextet The Chairman Dances.

“I really love Adams,” says Eric Krewson, the head Chairman. “And I love Alice Goodman, who wrote the libretto for two of his works.”

Matching librettos to music means more to Krewson than it might to the average chamber-pop craftsman. A published poet and flash-fiction author as well as the possessor of a master’s degree in music history, the 38-year-old university music librarian and happily married father of one comes at his band’s music with the sensitivity of a scholar.

He also comes at it with the spiritual sensitivity of someone who, baptized as an infant and made to attend church every week by his mother, underwent a “spiritual awakening” in his early 20s and hasn’t looked back. “I guess I’m most aligned with Reformed theology,” he says. “That just really speaks to me.”

It speaks to The Chairman Dances’ music as well, albeit subtly. The band’s new self-released album, for instance, the Daniel Smith-produced Evening Song, grew out of a four-section, elliptically narrative blank-verse poem of the same name that Krewson published last April in the Christianity Today-affiliated arts journal Ekstasis.

In the poem, a young man and drummer named Chris and a young woman named Maggie—a “church goer” whose interest in religion was inadvertently sparked by a copy of the Book of Common Worship that she’d stolen and intended to burn—meet and begin to fall in love, suggesting (although the poem never comes right out and says it) that the Lord really does work in mysterious ways.

To turn the poem’s 175 lines into a 44-minute album, Krewson rearranged the chronology of the events and took some liberties with the verse. The result was 13 discrete songs that complement the written version of the Chris-and-Maggie romance by giving it musical wings.

There’s surreal cha-cha (“Turn on the Lights, the Radio”). There’s delicate Britpop (“We Rifled Through,” “Where/When,” “She Leans They Kiss,” “Hadn’t Tried”). There’s campfire country replete with pedal steel guitar (“Faded & Fraying”). There are even whispers of prog rock (the second half of “Before You Know, the Day Is Done”). And while you don’t have to pay close attention to the twists and turns of the plot to enjoy the music, you’ll want to at least once. “Once I knew that the music could have its own life,” says Krewson, “I was kind of off to the races.”

“Honestly, it was a fun and a liberating process.”