W
orld-traveled model Charlotte
Kemp Muhl swears she wasn't
looking to make a love connection
when – eight years ago – she and a girlfriend
hitched a ride to California's annual
Coachella festival with Kanye West. Her
chum had talked her into the desert adventure, swearing she'd have a great time. "But
it was kind of weird – I felt really awkward
and out of place," she remembers. That's
when she bumped into Sean Lennon. "And
he instantly seemed really intelligent, and I
noticed we had some chemistry, so we were
walking around all day, talking and bonding and spilling our guts about our whole
childhoods. Then he went off on tour, and
Ghost
The
Of A Saber
Tooth Tiger
Soulmates
By Tom Lanham
we ended up developing this really intense
written relationship through postcards, letters, E-mails, and texts, and we started
falling in love that way. It was kind of an
old-fashioned courtship."
The pair has been together ever since.
"We're soulmates," declares Lennon. "I
mean, if there's such a thing, we're that. And
it wasn't a decision – when something like
that happens, it's uncontrollable, it's overwhelming." And only gradually did his missus reveal the truth – she, too, had a knack
for singing and making music. And she and
her childhood chum Eden Rice grew up in
rural Georgia, secretly writing folk songs
together that they never bothered to release.
So, two years into their relationship, Lennon
and Muhl formed their own experimental
outfit called Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger,
named for a play Muhl wrote at 7 that her
beau unearthed when they moved in together. Then they formed their own label,
Chimera Music, to release their collaborations, like the new GOASTT set Midnight
Sun. The company also issued Muhl and
Rice's vintage Kemp and Eden material,
plus albums from Lennon's renowned-artist
mother Yoko Ono and Cibo Matto, whose
Yuka C. Honda is partners with them in the
project.
"Sean and I design all the graphic art on
the label, and Eden actually drew all the
drawings on the website, with Sean's help,"
says Muhl. "I do all the photographic art layouts, and we design all the T-shirts and
draw and color them together. We fund
every aspect of the label ourselves – it's like
a mini-Motown or something. And it's like
26 illinoisentertainer.com may 2014
'Oh, God – we have to wake up at 8:00 in the
morning and have distribution meetings
and then pick out the packaging for the next
CD and then pick out a color for the next Tshirt we're making. It's a lot of work. So this
is the first time in our lives we've ever felt
like adults."
The duo's New York apartment doubles
as a home studio and warehouse. "It's where
we ship all of our records out of – my
kitchen downstairs in the basement,"
explains Lennon. "We take all the orders
from here, we make all the music here, we
record it, mix it, and then we master it up
the street at Sterling Sound. It's a really mom
and pop shop – we spend all of our time just
working from the ground up." Believe it or
not, he adds, the lovebirds have never had a
true vacation. "We just work. We're not
relaxed, we don't fly places. I've never even
taken her on a weekend getaway to
Vermont. It's really fucked up, actually!"
Left to their own devices, what musical
magic does this outfit conjure up? Disregard
anything you've heard before Midnight Sun,
pleads Lennon. That work, he says, was parenthetical, just a snapshot of a moment and
not really what they were intending. "This is the album that we
really wanted to make, this is the
one that was premeditated and
very thought out and thought
through," he says. It opens on
the hazy stomp of "Too Deep,"
with their voices melded in a
dreamy swirl, then gets
even more psychedelic
with "Xanadu," a decidedly Beatles-ish "Animals," a
blues-beefy title track, the
stormy Muhl showcase
"Devil You Know," a carnival-flavored creeper
called "Golden Earrings,"
and the funereal, 6:46long prog-rock closer
"Moth to a Flame." And
Yes, Lennon's pneumatic singing voice often
eerily resembles that of
his dad, the late, great John Lennon. As does
his long-hair-and-spectalces look these
days.
And the songs were carefully considered. The ethereal, lyre-elegiac "Don't Look
Back Orpheus," for instance, borrows from
the classic journey-to-Hades myth, filtered
through brilliant films like "Black Orpheus"
and Cocteau's definitive "Orpheus." "I love
those movies," Lennon says. "But honestly,
we had this crazy old chamberlain and a
harp sample, and Charlotte had bought this
old calliope, so it all just kind of worked out
and crystallized. And we knew that
(Orpheus) had been written about a million
times already, but we felt like we had a way
of doing it that was different, or different
enough."
Lennon put