Jen Thayer rocks northern seacoast; plans new CD

Jen Thayer has been rocking the northern New England seacoast for several years. Thayer has composed 15 new songs t hat she has taken to her band mates to record for next album. With a lot of gigs on her schedule and her recording plans, Thayer could be the busiest musician in Maine.

Though she usually arranges a whole song before recording it, she wants to take a more basic route for her next CD. “I want to take a different approach this time and try to present them to the band members a little bit more raw, not in their complete state,” she said. “When I write songs, I start to hear all the different parts. I put them all together, either on garage band, or on my sequencer. This time, I’m trying to strip them down a little bit, so they can put their own personality into it and their own ideas.”

Thayer’s new songs will be similarly structured as her last album. She strives for a careful balance between the artistic and the commercial. “I always feel a little caught between wanting the song to be salable, but I also want it to have some guts to it, some thought behind it,” she said. “I grew up listening to classic rock. I also like some of the Top 40 stuff. I like Pink. But a lot of it’s so cookie cutter. So, I want serious structure, something that sets it apart, but I want it to sell.”

Her flute won’t appear too often in the new one, even though it’s her main instrument. Thayer is also a keyboardist and saxophonist. There will be saxophone solos and some horn that she can harmonize with her own horn parts this time around instead of hiring a horn section, which she did on her last CD. Mainly, it will be her guitar players and some synthesized sounds.

Saxophone and keyboards give her music more melody. Her sequencers allows her to put some strings in for depth. In some of her new material, she’ll have panning sounds, soft synthesizers, and brass she manufactures on her Roland XP 50. “It gives it a lot more texture,” Thayer said.

When Thayer plays out with her Jen Thayer Band, she and her band mates focus completely on covers. She used to sprinkle in her own original material when she called her band Naked Groove some years ago. But she noticed more and more, the rooms that paid decently had cover crowds.

“They really want to hear those songs they recognize and love. It’s kind of a bummer for musicians who like to write because that’s the creative fire in them,” Thayer said. “So, I’m splitting this band into two. We’re in three rooms that I like a lot that work well for us. They have a good positive energy, good crowds, and they’re close. We’re good with the cover stuff, and we’re going to start learning the original material, and I’m looking for a manager.” Thayer’s three main rooms are Bentley Saloon in Arundel Maine; The Station House in Dover, New Hampshire the first Friday of each month; and The Ri Ra Irish Pub in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

“Another venue we’ve worked our way into is Wally’s Pub in Hampton Beach. This is a very popular room and the place is just bopping,” Thayer said. She has also met Jonathan, the station manager at the Shark radio 105.3 FM. This station manager hired Jen Thayer Band for the Shark In The Park music series every year.

Thayer’s last CD, simply titled Jennifer Thayer, had a smorgasbord of melodic pop rock, danceable R&B, and driving rock all welded together by Thayer’s personality, voice, and arrangements. Her song “All About Me” is a mix of colors “gripe song” and she uses those colors to paint picture of a very annoying person.

“I can’t say (what it’s about) what if he reads it?” she asked aloud. “It was mostly about a person I worked with quite some time ago who was very narcissistic. “I worked with him in a band. He would just come through the door and literally, ‘Here I am!’ It was just all about him. It’s not that he was a bad guy. It was just that he never stopped talking. Oh, God, I feel bad, cause what if he reads this and he knows it’s him? I combined it with a couple of people I have met in my life that have sort of rubbed me the wrong way in that way.”

Another song on that CD “You Never Give It Away” is about another narcissistic man. Many people that she meets in life that are quite self-centered. “I can’t even begin to explain. They just irritate you, you know. And I’m not the sort of person to tell them where to go. I just deal with it,” she said.

Thayer sings lead and backing vocals on “All About Me,” the lead vocals having an edge while the backing vocals are sweeter. She likes to make those sort of contrasts in the vocal texture. Her producer, Brandon Harris, used many of these techniques. Harris has had a long career in the recording industry, having worked with Elvis Presley’s most successful songwriter Otis Blackwell.

“I had a say in some of it, and I didn’t in others,” she said. “It ended up working out OK.” Thayer has some interesting cover songs on her last CD. The titles which seem out of her style would make you think she was on something when she decided to add them. Yet, she makes them her own with her instruments and arrangements.

“A lot of those cover tunes are ones I never would have chosen. He kept sending me songs,” she said. “Those four songs on there are the ones we ended up agreeing on. I probably never would’ve chosen those songs, not that they’re bad songs.” She wrote her own arrangements for “Tambourine Man, ““Windmills Of Your Mind,” “Jim Dandy,” and “Cry Me A River.”

“I have to give credit to Carl Pearson,” Thayer said of “Jim Dandy.” He’s an amazing jazz pianist in this area. He rewrote and wrote out the horn parts, so I had a rough idea what I wanted for horns. On ‘Jim Dandy’ he’s really the driving force in those horns.”

“Cry Me A River” is one cover song that allows Thayer to use her rangy belt, and she sings it with wild abandon, like a woman possessed. Though Thayer had been more into haw-haw guitar from classic rock, Maine blues musician Rod Wells applied “phenomenal slide guitar” throughout the CD. “We played with Rod. He was a well known guitar player in this area,” she said. “I was never all that flipped out about slide guitar, and kept putting it in there and finally it just grew on me, and I wanted to hear it more.”

Thayer‘s song “Circus Wheel” opens her first CD. It has creepy, eerie sounds because it’s about a bad relationship she was in for many years. “When we were together, it was phenomenal. We loved each other very much, bur when we fought, it was awful. You feel trapped, ‘a victim of pray. You swallow me whole,’ she said, quoting her lyrics.’ I think everyone goes through a relationship like that.”

“Circus Wheel” blends R&B keys and horn blasts, edgy classic rock guitar, and modern synch. Thayer likes to work with all of those different colors in one song. “I laid them all out on my sequencer. I started with the bass line,” she said. “The introduction bass line was something Jimmy Rapa put in. That was all his, which is really, really cool.”

Rapa came in from New York to work on Thayer’s CD. Thayer changed a trumpet part on her sequencer to a guitar line. She usually starts with a bass line or a drum line. “I have the idea in my head, how I want the song to go.” From there, she can add horns, synchs, strings, and vocals. “I presented it to the band. They’re all just incredible musicians. I have been so blessed to be surrounded by them. There’s so much talent around here(Kittery, Maine).”

Thayer wrote a groovy bass line on her tune “She’s Falling Deeper” and her bass player last album used a fretless bass. The smooth bass line introduces a dark story about a friend of Thayer’s who’s always had a cloud over her head. “She just can’t escape this bad luck in her life. She’s never been given a fair shake from the get go. She had a very tough childhood. She’s very giving, and I love her. She’s one of my best friends. I wrote that song when she was really down and out.”

Thayer will use similar structures and timbres on her upcoming CD. Her music community friends always tell Thayer that they can easily tell that it’s her song, her sound the first time they hear it. She’s going to rock it up a little more, make it edgier. She’s injecting dual guitar licks and dual leads because she has two guitar players. “I liked the Scorpions growing up. Some of the stuff sounds almost a little bit like Blue Oyster Cult, Scorpions,” she said.

Since her last CD, Thayer has had more time to listen to her own local talent around Kittery and to listen to different styles of music. “I’ve been busy raising my kids. My kids are teenagers now. I just haven’t gone out to a lot of different shows when they were younger,” she said. “I just hadn’t had a lot of time being a working mother with two kids. I got a job at the school system they were in. Lately, I’ve had a lot more time to listen to a lot more local musicians and what’s going on around me and just being able to turn the radio on again and listen to music. When the kids were younger, I didn’t listen to a lot, which I always thought was kind of strange. I stopped writing too. I feel like writing again. I feel there’s a place out there for a woman my age.”

Thayer’s goal is to open for big name bands at Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom and other mid-size concert venues so she can get her own material out there and sell her CDs. She was in her high school marching band in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Her school’s marching band entered the competition rings and competed at the national level in contests in Virginia. She said learned a lot of discipline playing in marching bands. Privately, she studied piano and saxophone.

Thayer’s band includes her husband Rick Thayer who plays rhythm guitar, some lead, and sings. She said his voice is full of blues character and grit. Her husband also co-wrote some songs for the upcoming album. Allan Foreman is her lead guitarist, and he owns the light show for the band. “Our guitar player is an engineer in a very specialized field. He is a very intelligent man and a wicked guitar player. One of the best around in my humble opinion.” Thayer added.

Chris Parkers is her bass player and is part of the band’s nucleus as he’s been with them for seven years. Parker runs the band’s website through his own business ComputerSense.com. Drummer Chris Gove was the last to join. He sings from behind the drum set, and he has a sense of humor.

“There’s usually not too much tension. It’s usually pretty good. I don’t know if that comes with old age,” she quipped. Finally, Thayer credits sound man Mike Christy as a member of the band. Christy has his own sound company, Pisces Sound. “We won’t do anything without him. We’ve gotten to the point where if the venue’s not big enough for the five of us and the soundman, we’re just not going to do it. He’s given us such a quality sound. The quality of our sound is amazing. He’s just an amazing sound man.”

Thayer and her boys have numerous clubs and VFW’s on their schedule. “We’ve been busting our asses,” she said. “We’ve been working so hard at getting enough material together. The thing with cover bands, you either have a specific genre or you’re all over the place, and we’re all over the place because we all have such different tastes. We go from ‘Folsom’ Prison’ to ‘Misty Mountain Hop’ and we try to do songs that you don’t hear every cover band do, but we have to do some of that material. When we play the Ri Ra where the age range is between 21 and 35, we have to pull out the younger material. When we go to the V.F.W. we play the Van Morrison and the well-known rock songs that they know and love.”

Thayer and her band can be seen at many V.F.W. posts and functions in the Kittery area.
www.jenthayer.com

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