Rob Meany joins Preston Frazier to discuss Terramara’s new single, “Beautiful Circles,” Terramara trio of earlier albums and his offbeat solo project, ‘Ferris Wheels Unbound’:
PRESTON FRAZIER: I absolutely love your 2016 solo release, Ferris Wheels Unbound. You have quite a catalog with your band Terramara too.
ROB MEANY: I’m going to take you back to around the year 1999, and I going around to different groups, playing as a sideman and looking towards maybe starting my own group. I was feeling like ‘I can do this too.’ I can write songs, maybe I can sing, I don’t know. I didn’t have a lot of confidence at that point, but I went ahead and just dove right in. I just started recruiting people, locally here in Minneapolis and we went through a fair number of personnel changes. The first couple years were a little rough. We were in and out of drummers and bass players and things.
We ended up with a solid lineup to record that first record called Terramara in 2000. Then there was a lineup change again and we had a new guitar player and a new bass player. We recorded the second album [Four Blocks to Hennepin] and we had a new bass player, and we recorded the third album [Dust & Fiction]. I think from 2008 on, it was a pretty solid lineup. I think I found the right guys, and we kind of gelled and we found our niche. I’m still calling on those guys to play with me. On “Beautiful Circles,” the single that just came out, has those same guys that I played with back in 2008. We haven’t done anything since before the pandemic. And they were ready to go. So, we’ve been recording and we’re gonna do another song.
PRESTON FRAZIER: “Beautiful Circles” features Karl Koopman on guitars?
ROB MEANY: Yeah, that’s right, Karl Koopman. With Terramara, James Towns is on bass and David Thomas is on drums.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Let’s go back to 2000 and the debut album Terramara. What can you tell me about the songs, “Jaded Little Love Song” and “Summer’s End”?
ROB MEANY: This is taking me way back. “Jaded Little Love Song,” there wasn’t a particular inspiration for that. I like to tell my wife that not all the songs are autobiographical. It’s not related to this or that relationship. I guess a narrator in this case was fed up with the way things were going. Maybe he is getting a little older and was losing patience with the dating scene. Interestingly, we were trying to get some of the songs licensed back in the day and we had some luck with some of the songs. This one was picked up for a series called Supernatural. When they moved from broadcast to streaming, they could not afford the licensing for some Blue Oyster Cult song. And so they pulled the BOC song and inserted “Jaded Little Love Song.”
PRESTON FRAZIER: The song is perfect pop, it’s catchy. The playing is great. The lyrics are ironic and fun. It’s just a great song, and a great way to open the album. Tell me more about “Invisible People” from 2005’s Four Blocks to Hennepin.
ROB MEANY: I had an idea that I wanted to talk about homeless people in a way that would draw attention to their plight without being too preachy. I thought I found kind of the balance there. I was also trying to write a kind of a riffy, catchy tune – a tune that was a little more rocking than maybe some of my other stuff. The band knows how to take a riff and really run with it. So, the production was really good on this one. We had a really good time recording it, and I think it turned out really well as far as that’s concerned.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Ken Chastain was the producer?
ROB MEANY: That’s right.
PRESTON FRAZIER: The second album’s different. Your melodies are always sophisticated, but I think on Four Blocks to Hennepin, there was a definite shift. Tell me about “Wooden Man.”
ROB MEANY: “Wooden Man” was sort of social commentary. I wanted to aim at politicians. That definitely has sort of a flavor as well, trying to talk about some of the problems with our political system without naming or anything. I wanted it to be a little more of a group effort. I think on the second record, I let myself expand a little bit more on my own vision harmonically or what I wanted to write. So I think I delved a little more deeply: I like playing sort of a jazz-rock thing; I like to do something with some elaborate chords.
PRESTON FRAZIER: The third album was Dust and Fiction. Tell me about “All That I Am.”
ROB MEANY: I went with a different producer who was a guitar player as well, and I wanted to make better use of our guitar player because he’s so phenomenal. I wanted to see if maybe this third record could be a little more guitar driven as opposed to keyboard driven, and maybe a little more pop oriented. That song I think has a lot of twists and turns harmonically, but it still has sort of that catchy quality that you’d want in like, a pop ballad – a love song kind of thing.
PRESTON FRAZIER: That’s exactly it. It has all the elements you’ll want in a great song, but there’s something different in terms of level of sophistication and the arrangement which makes it stand out. How about “Screaming at the Pouring Rain”?
ROB MEANY: This one has to do with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and with the travesty and the tragedy of it all – and how we didn’t step up and help these people and get out in front of the response help mitigate this disaster. Sometimes I’m a little bit opaque about things. I don’t wanna be too explicit about what I’m talking about but if people are interested, they can dig a little bit.
PRESTON FRAZIER: It draws the listener in. The keyboards are wonderful. It just works. Let’s talk about your solo album, Ferris Wheels Unbound before we get to the song “Beautiful Circles.” The feel is totally different from Terramara, even though you are the songwriter and the singer and the keyboardist. Talk about that transition that you wanted to get from the group feel, even though a lot of the players were the same on Ferris Wheels Unbound.
ROB MEANY: I was going in a different direction. I was trying to rethink how can I present my songs in a different way? This time around, I thought, ‘You know, I have a fair number of songs that would fit over sort of a jazz trio. So, I recruited some real heavy cats to play bass and drums on this. And, then the other half of that, of course was the strings. Some of the songs are mostly just me and strings.
My producer Andy Thompson, who I have to really credit a lot on this record, distilled down a lot of these arrangements into something very stark. I think on that record, it was all about the songs and just a few elements that could enhance the song and just keep it really chill. “The View” is one of those ones where it was a little bit of a throwback to maybe an earlier Terramara. We actually brought in somebody to do the horn arrangements on that. So that was kind of fun to have somebody else do the arrangements where I usually did some of that stuff myself.
PRESTON FRAZIER: “Cover of Snow” is gorgeous.
ROB MEANY: I think four tracks out of the 12 songs we actually did have all of the Terramara guys on the recording. That was one of ’em, so you’re actually hearing Terramara. You are getting a lot of Karl Koopman playing some beautiful guitar parts and everybody else playing their parts but at the same time, it’s completely mellow. We’ve got the strings coming in, and the interesting thing about that song is actually, I wrote that in 36 hours because I was part of a contest. I was happy with the result. I think part of what that forced me to do was make a very simple song. It didn’t have a lot going on in terms of development, but that kind of fit the topic and it kind of fit the story of just this person kind of at the end of a relationship and the changing of the seasons.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Is the single “Beautiful Circles” another change in direction? It’s self-produced and also recorded in your home studio.
ROB MEANY: I went back to my producer Andy Thompson from the Ferris Wheels album, and I said, ‘Hey Andy, you know, if I put this thing together, can you mix it?’ He agreed and made some sense of the tracks. So I had everybody come over here and do their parts, and then we went to a local studio to get the drums. It was the Terramara guys back together after a long hiatus. We basically delivered that to Andy and he did his magic on it. Now, I’m looking at trying to put out a single every six weeks or so.
PRESTON FRAZIER: What is your home rig in terms of your keyboard set up?
ROB MEANY: I do have a baby grand, which is my main instrument. Then I have a Nord keyboard from the stage. I have Triton. This is kind of an old beast that I used to play a lot, but I use it as a controller for a lot of the keyboard sounds.
PRESTON FRAZIER: In terms of your home equipment, what do you usually use?
ROB MEANY: Well, I’ve got a pretty simple setup, as far as home studios go. I think compared to a lot of people, I don’t really have a lot of outboard gear. I use Pro Tools. I’ve got an Apollo X four, so I’ve got a fair number of inputs.
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