Oregon Music News

“Dirty Radio is honest.”

It’s about “always being comfortable” and always “being true to yourself,” says Sallie Ford.

“When I turn on the radio, it all sounds the same. It ah-all sounds the same,” belts Sallie Ford in her distinctive, beguiling bawl on the first track from the band’s debut full-length. With a purposefully placed stutter, her words come in soulful exhalations and end in muffled grunts.

“What have these people done to music? They just don’t care anymore. They just don’t care anymore.”

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Those lyrics, from “I Swear” (above), and the rest of Dirty Radio epitomize the honesty that can be felt through the music of Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside–a sound that may be utterly foreign to that dirty mainstream radio but is quite familiar here in Portland.

The band of Portland transplants has something honest to say, and after more than a year in the works, the record on which they say it is finally available. Dirty Radio was released via Partisan Records on May 24th and Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside, which features Ford Tennis on drums, Tyler Tornfelt on upright bass and Jeffrey Munger on guitar, will celebrate with two shows at the Doug Fir Lounge on Friday, June 3rd and Saturday, June 4th with handpicked openers sharing the stage.

Stream the entire album below:

“Radio sometimes has a reputation of not including swear words and chopping up songs,” continues Sallie Ford. It also, like popular culture, has a reputation for being fickle.

Yet something about Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside is timeless. It may be their unclassifiability, the gospel and soul divas present in Sallie’s uncommon vocals, or her throwback backing boys who conjure up classic folk, Americana, blues and straight-up rock ‘n’ roll rhythms.

The fluctuations in Sallie’s vocals create an energy, a palpable spontaneity, that comes from her style of songwriting. “The way I write lyrics,” begins Sallie before changing her train of thought. “I used to sort of write them down but these days I don’t even do that. It’s a rhythmic thing and sometimes they end up forming themselves.”

Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside’s debut album has been a long time coming, but if you’ve been paying attention over the last year, much of it has already been revealed live or reworked from their five-track, 2009 Not An Animal EP.

Gaining subtle crispness in production, the band worked with Mike Coykendall (“We had originally wanted to work with him [on the entire album] but he had a real busy schedule”) and Adam Selzer at Type Foundry Studio. Recording with Mike in February of 2010 and Adam in March of the same year, the band has spent more than a year not just trying to get all the pieces together but putting everything in the right places–not to mention spending the appropriate amount of time simply “feeling overwhelmed with the business side of things,” including shopping the record around and putting together a management team.

Tim Perry of AgesandAges introduced the band to Tim Putnam (a music aficionado who is “the nicest, coolest guy” and who “used to be in a band in Portland called The Standard“) of Partisan Records, Jeff Saltzman remixed the album, and, as Sallie says, “Voilà!”

On a record that captures the band’s unique stylistic diversity, it also runs the gamut of emotions from wrathful (“Cage”) to dramatic (“Poison Milk”) to sentimental (“Thirteen Years Old”) and, of course, wittily fun (“This Crew” and “Write Me A Letter”) as well as logging some of the slowest moments in their short careers (on closers “Miles” and the minimally epic “Nightmares”).

Although some of the drama may not be placed entirely in her own reality, Sallie says many of the stories pull from the adversities of others that, even if removed, have “affected me in some way.”

“I haven’t dealt with too many really intense tragedies but when they have happened it definitely sticks with me,” she adds. For example, Sallie clarifies that “Miles” is not a love song, it’s actually about a classmate of her’s that died.

Finding emotion in the experiences of others, she’s picked up some tales along the way from Asheville, NC to Portland, but Sallie hopes that she hasn’t confused people on “Thirteen Years Old,” “because my dad didn’t die.” Rather, it relates to a story her sister shared with her about how children sometimes don’t recognize or “know how to deal with a big tragedy” like the death of a parent–another idea that stuck with her.

A self-assured performer, Sallie Ford has an unmistakable stage persona, but only while she’s singing–small talk with the audience or an encounter off stage reveal the true Sallie Ford. Sometimes a bumbling personality, Sallie frequently bursts out laughing during any conversation, and it’s this lighthearted attitude that comes to life on real, upbeat stories like fitting in and finding a home in Portland on “This Crew.”

“I don’t ever sit down and think about what I’m going to write about; it’s always very loose,” says Sallie nonchalantly. “I feel like it’s kind of a creative killer if you’re over-thinking things. Whatever just comes to mind first, just go with it…or whatever.”

And true to her offbeat form, she inconsequentially worries that listeners might not understand the lyrics on “This Crew” (her imitation of Bob Dylan’s “speedy talk”), but the song is about the Hawthorne-area and “seeing a lot of tall bikes and weird characters around the streets.”

Even though portions of the album are down tempo, you can expect the same raucous live show from Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside. “It’s kinda hard for me as a performer to do a lot of slower songs,” admits Sallie.

Known for speeding things up a bit live, you can look forward to a Daytrotter session that the band recorded while at SXSW (aka “indie Hollywood”) this year or more recently, this Wolfgang’s Vault session plus an OPB studio session. OMN spoke to Sallie Ford as the band was gearing up to release Dirty Radio, kick off a summer tour that will take them across the US, and shoot a few music videos.

“We’re about to shoot some music videos,” Sallie says. “We shot one over the weekend ['I Swear'] and one my dad made in North Carolina.”

Watch the “time traveling” video of the first single and first track on the new album, “I Swear,” filmed in Portland “at my house and at Ford’s house and a couple friend’s houses.” It’s directed by Matthew Ross, who has filmed several Typhoon videos in the past, plus Typhoon’s frontman Kyle Morton appears as the television announcer in the opening sequence of the video.

Your dad is an artists too, isn’t he?

Yeah, he did the video for “Cage.” He’s a puppeteer but he can do everything. He’s a magician.

Literally… or he’s just magic?

He’s just magic [laughs]. He can do, like, build things, do set design, puppetry, make clothing for his puppets… he’s really good with paper art–just all sorts of art. And he plays music.

So, does the video star the band or does it have puppets in it?

Yeah, it has puppets that are us. [Laughs]

Two of the songs on your new album are re-recorded from your EP–”Write Me A Letter” and “Danger.” Why did those two songs make the cut?

At the time we were recording, we’d ended up with 11 songs and it was a lot of down-tempo songs and then someone suggested that we add “Danger” and “Write Me A Letter” [to speed things up]. We went back into the studio in May [to re-record those two songs] because we had recorded the other 11 tracks in March. We ended up cutting a couple of songs that were recorded in March but we wanted more of an upbeat album with a good mix of stuff we’d been working on right before we went into the studio and stuff we’d been working on since the very beginning of the band.

What about “Not An Animal”?

I think people had wanted us to do “Not An Animal” as well, because I guess those [three] were the strongest songs, but we ended up using “Not An Animal” as a bonus track so I think that will eventually go out as a download.

How did these songs change when you went in to re-record them?

Well, I think when we were performing “Danger” a lot I realized that it was a bit too high of a key for my voice so once we decided to do it in a lower key, it just stuck. And now if you compare the two tracks, they’re in different keys.

And “Write Me A Letter” sped up, huh?

Oh yeah. And I don’t think we really thought about that. That’s one habit that our band has… speeding up the songs [laughs]. We’re trying to be better about that because I think even since we recorded some of those songs, when we play them live, we have the tendency to speed them up. Maybe just because there’s more energy or something [laughs].

I did notice that the album sounded more down tempo than the EP…

Yeah.

And a bit subdued compared to live Sallie Ford performance I’ve experienced and become accustomed to over the last year or so. But you should be pretty comfortable with this material because you’ve been playing live for quite a while, right?

Yeah. The last song on the CD ["Nightmares"] is sometimes a little hard for us to play live after we recorded it. The recording is so epic… we’re gonna try to reproduce it at the live show at the Doug Fir with guest instrumentalists. We’re trying to get more comfortable with that song and I’m just realizing that it might be a little more sparse [live] but that’s okay.

What’s going to be special about the two release shows?

We’re trying to get as close to the album as we can for these performances, and since we’re in town, there’s going to be two violin players, a keyboardist, and people singing with us and some percussion. I was really excited because we got to pick all the openers.

And here’s Sallie Ford on the openers:

Quiet Life: “They bring pretty good energy and cool music to dance to and stuff [laughs].”

What Hearts: “Vintage-y, pop, girl group, more silky, lots of pretty harmonies.”

Pancake Breakfast: “The whole band is awesome.”

Celebrate the release of Dirty Radio with Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside with Quiet Life and What Hearts on Friday, June 3rd or with Pancake Breakfast and Old Light on Saturday, June 4th. $11 advance, $12 day of show, separate ticket needed for each night. Doors at 8pm, show at 9pm, 21+.

Plus catch the band on their way home on 8/27 at the Eugene Celebration.