In the lore of rock and roll, there are those legendary passing of the torch moments, like when Bob Dylan introduced The Beatles to cannabis at the Delmonico Hotel in 1964 and in doing so, shifted the course of pop music forever. That night became myth, one artist turning another on, unlocking something deeper, more expansive.
I didn’t have Dylan. But I had The Essex Green.
It was almost 20 years ago, backstage in a green room, when my band was lucky enough to open for them. I smoked weed for the first time, through an orange, no less. Unlike The Beatles, I didn’t go on to make Rubber Soul, but I did start to see music and The Essex Green a little differently that night.
They weren’t just one of my favorite bands. They were the kind of group that felt like they were conjured out of thin air, like something too good to be true. A band that slipped through time unnoticed by the masses, but felt like everything to those of us who found them.
Their music had a strange, mystical way of appearing in the biggest moments of my life. The night I first saw them live, May 14th in the year 2000 at Gabes in Iowa City.. my friend Joe and I met our future bandmate Devin. That meeting would become the foundation of our band, three-fourths of what would become hundreds of shows, years of memories. And through it all, The Essex Green was there. Not just on van's stereo, but in our DNA.
We saw ourselves in them: multiple songwriters, a love for genre-hopping, a deep respect for pop craftsmanship. But where we were raw, sloppy, and learning, The Essex Green were graceful. They could swing from psych pop to folk to country to garage to breezy baroque melodies, all while weaving in guitar lines that could make Steve Cropper proud.
And they did it all with such charm, such mystery. They felt like a secret, beautiful people making beautiful music in an era that maybe didn’t quite deserve them. Timeless songs about love, geography, the ways we connect with one another. Records that stood apart from everything else in the late 90's and of the early 2000s. And somehow, despite being labelmates with Arcade Fire, Spoon, Magnetic Fields, Superchunk, and Neutral Milk Hotel, The Essex Green remained one of indie pop’s most under-sung treasures.
Which is why it meant so much that, decades after that orange and that green room, Rudy Fischmann, Mathew Bell, and I got the chance to sit down with Sasha Bell, Jeff Baron, and Christopher Ziter for a conversation about it all.
We talked about their records. Their tours. Their New York before the boom. We talked about making art in basements, Traveling in vans, and why it was always about the joy of making music together.
And the heart of it was this: they still love what they created. And so do we.
So on this episode of Discograffiti Don't Bother Wearing Seatbelts our interview with The Essex Green. For everyone who ever stumbled across their music and felt like they’d found something magical. For everyone who found themselves in their harmonies. And for everyone who believes, still, that the right band at the right time can quietly, beautifully change your life.
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