Gettin' Fizzy With It

11/08/1999 5:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
David Weiss

Bullsh-t--an important commodity for a lot of bands trying to get by with little else besides some guitars, a pretty face, and maybe a pretty voice--is not something Tonic tap for their success. "The most important thing in songwriting is being honest," states guitarist Jeff Russo. "If you're not being honest, people know you're bullsh-tting. Somehow, they just know. We wanted to approach our new album from a very honest standpoint: write about our feelings, what we've been through."

It would be hard to accuse Russo and his bandmates of bullsh-tting with Sugar, the pure-sounding follow-up to their platinum-selling debut album, Lemon Parade. In record company economics, one hit is usually good enough to assure a return invitation for another go-'round, and Lemon Parade had three: "Open Up Your Eyes," "If You Could Only See," and "Casual Affair." With their bittersweet acoustic strum on top of determined guitars and firm rock beats, Tonic's songs definitely had a rare straightforwardness about them.

All the better for Tonic to express themselves. "Songwriting gives you a chance to communicate to somebody in a way you couldn't just speak," Russo says. "It's using music to augment the communication of a word. You're writing these words with music and melody, which really drives home the point."

But it's not just any kind of music Russo is talking about. Along with singer/ guitarist Emerson Hart, bassist Dan Lavery, and their drummer of the month, he's playing rock, which, according to many reports, passed away some time ago. "Rock is not dead!" Russo shouts. "It's a feeling, an emotional response you get. There's nothing that can speak to you like a great lyric or melody. Rock is a sure-fire way of communicating."

With the coincidences needed to get Tonic together in the first place, maybe it's no wonder that Russo is looking for a few guarantees. Emerson and Russo knew each other as teenagers growing up in the Big Apple, but it took separate moves to Los Angeles and, of course, billiards to get the band together. "After being in L.A. for four or five years," recalls Russo, "I walked into a pool hall where Emerson worked. We got together a couple of nights later, drank a bottle of bourbon, wrote a couple of tunes, and it's been a whirlwind ever since."

That wind eventually blew all those hit singles their way, then landed them in recording studios in L.A. and New Orleans, where they produced Sugar themselves. "We wanted to make one whole, flowing record that from beginning to end takes you on a journey," Russo says. "With the advent of CDs, you don't have a side one and a side two anymore, you have 55 minutes that goes straight from track one to 15.

"When you listen to Sugar from top to bottom, it really takes you somewhere as far as emotional response. The lyrics move up, move down, then up again. At the end it takes you to, 'Does this really end? Where does it go from here?' Maybe to the next record."

As evidence, consider the raw hooks of the opening cut, "Future Says Run." Next, "You Wanted More" plays those acoustic and electric textures off each other perfectly, and "Jump Jimmy" is a bluesy cruising tune that sounds like it had to have been born down there in New Orleans. And you want direct? How about the no-bullsh-t chorus of the slow-burn "Mean To Me," where Hart sings, "Why you gotta be so mean to me?/ Why you gotta drag me down just to make me see/ You know I don't listen good and I'm always in need/ Why you gotta be so f--kin' mean to me?"

Working at their own pace, Tonic achieved a more open and airy sound for Sugar via thorough experimentation, especially when it came to their forefront guitars. "We had a bunch of different amps, effects, and pedals," says Russo. "Old sh-t, new sh-t. We tried a bunch of different things. Then, when we found something that worked, we tried 100 other things.

"We're a guitar-based band, so guitar tones were really important. Different sounds and different guitar parts will definitely make you feel different things. So if we put up a guitar sound and said, 'Wow, that sounds great!' then that was the one."

Still, Tonic know they can't get the song's all-important message out if there's four walls of distortion surrounding it, which means a snazzy effect only goes so far. "We always approach producing from a song's point of view--we never want to add something just to have a cool sound," Russo points out. "There were a lot of times when we were just trying sh-t out, and a lot of it was awesome! But it didn't seem to take the song anywhere. We were like, 'That sounds really cool. But not here.'"