lee family Curse

the lee family Curse was born in college basements around 1994 in St. Paul. Called ourselves the Bottomfeeders for a little while, till we learned that was a bar band in St. Louis. The new name was a nod to the supermanly royal family of Asian film, also described the way we all felt sometimes. We trucked our big amplifiers to the industrial parts of town where rehearsal spaces tend to be, back and forth to the Turf Club and 400 Bar.

Then things got complicated. Josh and I wanted to reign in the songwriting. Corwin moved out to Providence, joined up with American rockers Barn Burning, became a furniture builder. Mike Storey eventually landed in NYC, started the power garage rock Izzys, built a giant plate reverb from scratch. Brian Tester started Triangle, took that out to Oakland. Adam put together a recording studio, produced live albums for Triangle and Lifestyle of Wigs, and studio albums for Spikedriver and the Izzys, and a lot of his own songs, alone and with Josh or Kieran. Adam went to medical school in Brookyn NY, kept making music. Josh taught high school art in Edina, met a lot of good kids, this summer entered architecture school.

2005, Adam came back from Brooklyn to Minneapolis to marry Erin Rein and start neurology residency. Had a backlog of songs from the long years in med school. Met up with Josh over the summer, rehearsed every day. Went into the studio (the Terrarium in Minneapolis) recorded the skeleton for 13 songs to 2-inch tape. Drums were recorded with 16 microphones all round a big brick and maple room. Played guitar on an ancient 12-string Rickenbacker through some giant old Fender amps. Played flute and strings sections on an actual Mellotron. Then took the music home to hammer out bit by bit while trying to trudge through neurology residency, an 80 hr/wk job at times.

The music kept Adam anchored, relatively unblackened. Worked on it in stretches after hours. Neurology puts you in contact with the strangest side of life - what happens when the left half of the brain dies after a stroke, what happens when the muscles of your face, throat, and diaphragm all lose strength in ALS, or when MS melts holes in the spinal cord paralyzing the limbs. People become very frail, lose the ability to swallow, move, even think, families rally around, take on all that burden. Medicine to Adam has been a haunting and lonesome line of work, where you find yourself in all sorts of hard, cold places, facing the most unfortunate people alone in the middle of the night. To come home tired and shell-shocked, the drive to record and create music was so great, to find that solace.

Three years later it is all here. Really perfected, fully finished. Amazing things happen to songs after you think about them every day for 3 years. And to be honest the songs were still being transformed right up to the end as they turned em over and over. The soundscape is often dense, but the thousands of manhours show through, power the sound up and along…