There was a time, and it wasn’t all that long ago, when you would have to wait for stuff. No joke. For instance, musicians would spend years working on albums, release them, and then, it’d be years—sometimes decades—before fans could expect new music from them.

Not so in this digital age, where everyone’s free to binge virtually all forms entertainment. Today, music is released online in dribs and drabs, because appetites are never fully sated.

For three decades, lifelong musician Philip B. Price—who is perhaps best known for his enchanting work with Massachusetts indie rock outfit Winterpills—has written and recorded solo tunes he was just too busy to release. That is, until now.

Over the last year and a half, Price has been digging through his past, coming away with a dozen albums’ worth of material he has remixed, re-mastered, and in some cases, reinterpreted. “It’s been a little stressful because, well, it’s kind of a lot,” Price confides. “I’ve wanted to work on this project for years, and I really thought it would go quickly. For a while, I felt like maybe I bit off more than I could chew.”

But he got through it, and on Dec. 8, the 12 solo LPs—the result of Price’s “neurotic compulsion to write songs” in his downtime from 1980s art rock act Memorial Garage and 1990s power pop group The Maggies—will be released digitally. “I couldn’t help myself,” Price admits of the group of songs, which range from dance-noise to shoegaze. “And now, I’m quietly dumping a huge load of music on the world.”

Price understands 143 songs is a lot of music to unleash all at once, so he’s compiled a 39-track best of album he’s titled Without Your Love I’d Be Nowhere At All. “I’m glad this stuff is seeing the light of day and I can finally distribute it properly,” says Price, adding he’s working on new tracks for a solo album he’ll issue in 2018. “It feels good to get it all out there.”

Price, who plays guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards, has been a New Englander for most of his adult life, and lives in Northamption with his wife, Winterpills keyboardist Flora Reed. But he grew up outside of New York City before moving to Los Angeles, where his father, Eugene, worked as an established screenwriter.

He says he can’t imagine what his life would be like had he not moved to Massachusetts after graduating from Bennington College in Vermont. Price—a member of Fountains of Wayne frontman Chris Collingwood’s solo band, Look Park—says his songs are largely influenced by New England’s landscape, although he doesn’t discount the influence his peers have had on his style. “For an area of this size, it has a lot going on, and it has cycles of renewal,” Price says. “It’s like every eight years, it feels like it’s dying off and then, it surges back with all these new artists.”

A sampler from Price’s new collection is available here. To hear what’s on his playlist when he’s not combing through his musical archives, check out our Take a Listen Spotify Channel. You can also hear the playlists of other musicians we’ve featured.

Philip B. Price, guitarist and vocalist, Winterpills
Northampton, Massachusetts
Website
Facebook
Soundcloud

The post The Price is Right appeared first on Take Magazine.

You could almost set a timer —every 20 years or so, the Northampton-area music scene attracts national attention. Bands get signed, stories get written, hype builds. Then, like a lighthouse beam, the spotlight rotates away to the next town or sound. A couple of decades go by, and the whole process repeats: starting in the late 1960s with western Massachusetts acts like Arlo Guthrie, Clean Living, and Fat; continuing into the late ’80s and early ’90s with Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, and the Scud Mountain Boys; and moving all the way up to a crop of current groups that includes And the Kids, LuxDeluxe, and California X.

Yet as any music fan in the region knows, the local scene doesn’t rely on outside illumination to thrive. For more than 45 years, the sound of music in western Massachusetts—in Northampton, but also throughout the Pioneer Valley and the Berkshires—has been abundant and varied. Rock ’n’ roll, blues, punk, and various indie rock sounds have all taken root, along with heavy metal, jazz, and plenty of folk. Bands have come and gone; venues have opened, closed, and burned down; and the scene has flourished through it all.

“I just always marvel at the richness of it, considering how small the area is,” says David Sokol, who was music editor at the Valley Advocate from 1977 to 1993.

Dave Sokol, photo by Izzy Berdan

Billboard magazine expressed a similar sentiment in a slightly condescending frontpage story in 1992 that described the area as “a picturesque, place-that-time-forgot farming community.” Yet despite a population less than a quarter of the 3.4 million people in greater Seattle—the aspirational baseline for music scenes since the city birthed the ’90s grunge explosion that gave us Nirvana and Pearl Jam—the four counties of western Massachusetts have for years had the essential ingredients of any successful music scene: a creative class of musicians; places for them to play; audiences who will go see them; and supportive local media, including radio station WRSI-FM and the Valley Advocate, that will play their records on the air and write about them.

Western Massachusetts is also an affordable place to live, with a youthful atmosphere that flows from the local colleges, most notably Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts. It’s also near the intersection of two interstate highways, which is helpful when it’s time to go on tour. Those attributes have made this area attractive to a continual flow of music-minded people, far more than there’s room to mention. Some of them got famous; more of them, then and now, play music simply because they love it and it’s fun.

“Northampton is an incredible place to emerge as an artist and to find that group of people who support what you do,” says folksinger Dar Williams, who moved to Northampton in 1992 and began building her career. So far it’s yielded 10 solo studio albums, including this year’s Emerald. Though she relocated to New York in 2000, she adds, “I would say it’s the reason I’m still doing what I’m doing.”

Ray Mason, photo by Izzy Berdan

The beginnings of the western Massachusetts scene date to the mid-1960s, when musicians like Holyoke native Ray Mason would play the local YMCA and slip an occasional original song into sets of covers of The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and The Rascals. The covers-are-king attitude started to fade when bands like the Rockin’ Ramrods from Boston and The Wildweeds from Connecticut came through playing their own songs, almost as if they were demonstrating that such a thing was possible for regular guys from New England.

The post Reverb and a Zip Code appeared first on Take Magazine.