| B-SIDES | ▼ Music Now We Know His ABCs Musician Paul Slavens completes his love letters to famous women with new album Alphabet Girls Vol. II. BY DANNY GALLAGHER T en years ago, singer, composer and KXT host Paul Slavens self- released Alphabet Girls Vol. I, a stream of jazz tunes with an al- phabetical list of songs about fa- mous women in power. He got as far as the letter “N” on his first album, but he’s finally completed his ABCs with Alphabet Girls Vol. II. “From a compositional standpoint, I had been working on the whole thing all along but ever since I finished the first volume, which is like 10 years ago, by [that] time I had already had a couple of the next ones,” Slavens says. “I think it was ‘Sadie’ and ‘Zelda.’ I wasn’t in any hurry to finish writ- ing them all. I didn’t figure I was gonna re- cord and put out a second album.” Slavens took the tunes he had for his sec- ond album, which veer between slow and sweet to swift and snappy, and kept them in his back pocket, playing them at various gigs — one of which helped him launch his sec- ond volume of jazz odes. State Fair Records founder Trey Johnson, who died last February, heard Slavens playing a couple of his Vol. II tunes at at a steakhouse where he played piano for the dinner crowd. “He contacted me because he wanted to know if I could play piano at a steakhouse in Dallas,” Slavens says. “It was a good gig, and I took it. That’s when I got to know him, be- cause he was always there and it was a cool gig. That’s when he heard me start to play and asked what those songs were.” The two started working on releasing Slavens’ long-awaited second album. Then the pandemic reared its ugly face and then yet an- other tragedy struck before the final release. “I recorded a lot of it, and it sat for 18 months and months while I grinded away during the pandemic, and while we were getting to the finish line, Trey passed away,” Slavens says. “He was kind of the one who was the wind in the sails for this project. One thing for me personally was he was the one I would always bounce the ideas off, and when he was gone, I kind of had to imagine him there to bounce those ideas off and imagine what he might say and encourage me in person.” James Bland Fortunately, Slavens says, Johnson got to hear the full album before he died. “He probably listened to the album more than anyone else has,” Slavens says. “He was happy with it, and I’m happy with it. I’ll just try to go on and make him proud.” Alphabet Girls Vol. II starts with “Naomi,” the last track on Vol. I. Slavens describes it as a “sad waltz,” as it explores its new space with the sounds of violin, harp and accor- dion. The rest of the album follows suit with a wide variety of instruments and new styles that go from serious to unapologetically silly. “Some time ago, I found a melodica at a mini-mall in Denton and I just love it,” he says. “It’s one of those instruments that gets a bad rap, and I was always interested in in- struments that get a bad rap. There are some beautiful instruments, but they get associ- ated with some comedy like the accordion. The accordion is the most versatile instru- ment if you know how to play it.” The new instruments also give Slavens the chance to improvise new sounds and veer off from the styles that have been a sta- ple of his musical career. The song “Ophe- lia,” an ode to Hamlet’s love interest from Hamlet’s POV — that uses sounds and foot- age from Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film adap- tation of the Shakespeare classic — is playful without being a straight-up parody. “I love having humor in music,” Slavens says. “It doesn’t have to be real obvious or going for a laugh or something. It has a light- ness to it. It’s understated. The problem with me is it’s way too easy for me to over- state. That’s my bias. Instead of going from zero to five, I go from three to nine. I didn’t want that to be the tone, but I also didn’t want it to be somber. I kind of got what I wanted. It’s kind of unusual and kind of con- fusing but it’s beautiful.” He’s also not taking a break, even though he finished an album he’s been prepping for almost a decade. Slavens is getting a band together after a Paul Slavens has completed his ABCs in the recent album Alphabet Girls Vol. II. long time as a solo artist. He’s putting to- gether a group to compose and perform a live score to the 1921 Charlie Chaplin classic The Kid in September at the Texas Theatre. Slavens says scoring the film made him more eager to experiment. He’s got “a ton of classical stuff” he’d like to get recorded or re-recorded,” and he’s maybe ready to take on bigger challenges like writing “some- thing for theater or ballet.” “The one thing that is problematic and that most artists don’t have to deal with is they only do the kind of music that they do,” Slavens says. “You ask, ‘What do you play?’ and they tell you. That was always a problem for me. What kind of band is this? I don’t have one answer because I play a bunch of different things. It’s a marketing problem. That’s the way this album is too. It goes to a lot of different places.” ▼ MOVIES W SINGER JARET REDDICK FROM BOWLING FOR SOUP HAS A NEW PODCAST ABOUT MOVIES, AND HE’S BRINGING IT TO LIFE AT LAVA CANTINA. BY VINCENT ARRIETA SCORING A STRIKE hat better way to accompany the Rangers’ next homestand than with what may be America’s sec- ond favorite pastime: movies about baseball? Bowling For Soup’s Jaret Reddick is bringing his Jaret Goes to the Movies podcast on July 12 to the stage at the Lava Cantina for a screening of 1993’s Rookie of The Year with the film’s star Thomas Ian Nicholas. Unlike most movie screenings, where a Q+A is held before or after the movie is shown in its entirety, Reddick’s events in- clude pausing the films in order to discuss or break down scenes with various guests. “It’s a really cool pace because we can sort of control where those little interview parts are going to happen,” Reddick says. “[There are] good points in the movie for us to go, ‘What was this like?’ So, it works out really well.” This is not Nicholas’ first rodeo with Reddick. A previous live incarnation of Jaret Goes to the Movies offered a screening of American Pie, which Nicholas also starred in, leading to Nicholas joining the festivities for that screening and promising to return for future screenings. While Nicholas has continued to act, a large portion of his creative energy these days is devoted to music. He self-released his debut album in 2008 and two LPs and an EP since. Nicholas even co-wrote “All The Way” on Blues Traveler’s 2015 collab- orative album Blow Up the Moon, an album that also features a collaboration with Bowling For Soup. Somehow, Nicholas and Reddick never crossed paths at the time, only meeting in- person at the American Pie screening, and the duo have become fast friends ever since. “We were instant friends like we had never spent a day apart,” Reddick says. “I mean, it was bizarre, our instant connection. It’s just a really cool friendship that we’ve got, like this instant brotherhood. My wife is just like, ‘You guys are like oil and oil.’” Nicholas has taken that brotherhood to the musical plane and decided to parody Bowling For Soup’s hit cover of SR-71’s “1985,” except it has lyrics describing the plot and characters of American Pie. The song, which is scheduled to be out July 9, features Nicholas backed by Bowling For Soup themselves. While saving the majority of anecdotes about the making of Rookie of the Year for the screening, Nicholas did fondly recall working with the film’s first-time director Daniel Stern, who’s most famous for playing Marv in the first two Home Alone films. “Danny was fantastic,” Nicholas says. “He’s very different than the zany characters that we know him as. I think actors can make the best directors because they understand the acting process, and Danny was one of them. He definitely understood what we needed as actors. And he’s a very caring, thor- ough person and director. He was great.” As for future screenings of films from Thomas Ian Nicholas, Reddick says he has not ruled out a screening of Halloween: Res- urrection. Ironically, despite being a part of one of the most beloved baseball films, baseball fever never caught Nicholas in adolescence or adult- hood. He says he has an affinity for the Cubs after having filmed Rookie of the Year at Wrig- ley Field but doesn’t keep up with the sport much these days. Appropriately, Nicholas did actually join his school baseball team after making Rookie of the Year, to mixed results. “The rule of the baseball team was if you missed a practice, then you had to sit on the bench for the next game,” Nicholas recalls, “and every week I would miss the practice because I would be going to auditions be- cause I always chose auditions over baseball. So, I rode the season on the bench not for lack of talent, but for lack of commitment. I’ve always chosen the arts over sports.” 1 dallasobserver.com | CONTENTS | UNFAIR PARK | SCHUTZE | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | MOVIES | DISH | MUSIC | CLASSIFIED | DALLAS OBSERVER MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 JULY 7–13, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.com
