MORE DARK, THEN LIGHT: THE MAKING OF "PAINT NO DEVILS"
"Whatever’s left, I can’t see it / I fell in love in your good season / Now the color’s gone
and the heat went with it / And winter left me stranded with your ghost." —"Whatever's Left"
In late 2005, Robert Cherry slipped from beneath the heavy cloud cover of Cleveland, Ohio—his home of two decades—and rolled south toward The Queen City, where he planted himself in the buckled plates above the Ohio River. Numb from one too many Cleveland winters and struggling with apathy, the singer-songwriter thought he might be done with a lot of things—past lives haunting the ‘50s-era apartment complexes dotting Lake Erie’s south-western shores, month-long stretches without direct sunlight… maybe even music itself.
The music, however, wasn’t finished with him. As an experiment, Cherry embraced a new songwriting method—actively not writing. And through the winter of 2006, the songs found him in a thinly walled four-unit apartment building, finger-strumming an acoustic, whisper-singing melodies. The chords were full and comfortable, the melodies melancholy yet uplifting, the lyrics straightforward and elemental—timeless themes made personal in the dynamic present.
If the writing of the album—the follow-up to his solo debut “The New Forever"—was a solitary, sepia-toned affair, the recording was just the opposite, a virtual and often literal party attended by old friends and overseen by a new one. Produced by former Afghan Whigs bassist John Curley at Ultrasuede Studios, “Paint No Devils” features Cherry's croon and strum backed by singer Paul Lahey, guitarist Calvin Brown and drummer Andrew McMullen (all late of the Toronto-based quartet Leviride), as well as Curley’s signature melodic thunder.
Bearing Gibson guitars, Fender amplifiers and armfuls of duty-free Canadian beer, the group and an associate known as the Brampton Fog entered the studio’s shag-covered walls that spring and slipped into an efficient, albeit well-lubricated, routine. Embracing off-the-cuff feel over technical perfection, the musicians generally captured the songs in a few takes, with Curley judiciously leaving the frayed edges intact and keeping overdubs to a minimum.
The approach is audibly manifest on “My Midnight Sun,” a three-minute firefight that grabs your attention from shouted count-in to amp-buzzing outro. In contrast, “More Dark Than Light” is a study in restraint, with Brown’s cascading mandolin line and Lahey’s stacked oohs and ahhs underscoring Cherry’s resigned directive to “start again.” “Paint No Devils” falls somewhere between those magnetic poles, building from a largely acoustic arrangement to a throw-the-radio-in-the-tub crescendo of squalling guitars, baby grand piano, vibraphone, sleigh bells, and what sounds like bowed saw (in actuality sculpted feedback).
The latter song provides the album’s title, a reference to a Hungarian proverb that instructs, “Don’t paint the devil on your wall or he might appear.” In the context of the track, the phrase—“paint no devils”—is intended to quiet insecurities through a night pining for an absent lover. In the context of the album, the title recognizes the subjectivity of today’s barraged listener, challenging him or her to check expectations at the door and attend with new ears.
