MILO BINDER
T H E U N S P E A K A B L E
MILO BINDER
Available via:
Produced by Willie Aron
All inquiries: binderville@yahoo.com
A B O U T M I L O
If you live a life around music, you hear a lot of stories. Some are about success and some are cautionary tales. Most are hype and flat-out lies, but then there’s Milo Binder’s story…
A song-obsessed kid falls under the spell of his era’s great singer-songwriters and he lives and breathes songwriting for his entire youth. He eventually writes his own bag of memorable songs and makes a name for himself in post-punk Los Angeles. His reputation spreads quickly, garnering him press in the form of pictures and column inches in local and national publications; inclusion on a few high-profile compilation albums; and eventually a critically-admired 1991 self-titled debut album. The album was released on the San Francisco-based Alias Records, with guest performances by Garth Hudson (The Band), Victoria Williams, and “Sneaky Pete” Kleinow (The Flying Burrito Brothers). The album’s acclaim led to profiles on NPR, college and folk radio airplay, a national tour, and appearances with the likes of The Indigo Girls, Cowboy Junkies, Donovan, Sarah McLachlan, Dave Alvin, Tom Russell, Peter Case, Michelle Shocked, and even The Butthole Surfers and Soundgarden. Then inexplicably… Milo Binder (given name Todd Lawrence) disappeared for 33 years.
Well…perhaps ‘disappeared’ is the wrong word. He was still physically visible the entire time but he stopped releasing music and only sporadically played live. What he WAS doing was living his life. Some of his retreat from performing was unintentional. You see, in short order while recording his never-released second album: his label dropped him (singer-songwriters went immediately out of vogue when Nirvana arrived like a tsunami on the
All inquiries: binderville@yahoo.com
music industry); his manager and best-friend John Schillaci was killed in a car crash; and then, Milo’s own first child was born with profound, life-altering disabilities. In Milo’s thinking, success in the world of Indie-music just was not his priority any longer.
That brings us to today, and “The Unspeakable Milo Binder,” the album that stands before you now. Why the return? “I just woke up one day and realized that nothing was stopping me anymore.” Traumas had healed, his family was secure, and suddenly, songs started coming to him again. So, he played a few for his old friend Willie Aron (The Balancing Act, Thee Holy Brothers), and sessions commenced at the Portland studio of Victor Krummenacher (Camper Van Beethoven, Monks of Doom, The Third Mind).
While this was happening, as luck would have it, Heyday Again (a reboot of Alias’s then crosstown rival Heyday) was itself also in the process of re-emerging. So, it seemed like a perfect match for both label and artist to do so together.
One of the features of a double reboot such as this, is that everyone involved is older and wiser and a bit more philosophical about their efforts. Nobody involved in this record cares much about the “industry” part of “the music industry” to the extent that any industry at all still exists. Moreover, everyone here is clear that being an ‘auteur singer-songwriter’ in 2024 is akin to being a maker of elaborate ships-in-a-bottle. But Milo Binder is still song-obsessed. He has made a new ship-in-a-bottle, and it is a good one. It was made with love and care for whomever appreciates such things.
W H A T’S L E F T U N S P O K E N
A Biographical Interview by: Steve Hochman
Moses came down the mountain, his beard was gray as sand
Gave me ten good reasons baby, why I should be your man
And with that Old Testament kick-off, delivered as a plain, direct truth, Milo Binder is back with his second album, The Unspeakable Milo Binder. He hasn’t been wandering the desert, per se, but he has moved around the country a few times. And it hasn’t been 40 years. But it’s been 33 since his 1990 debut, simply titled Milo Binder. Close enough.
So, what’s been up with him?
Todd Lawrence, as he is known in what we might call real life, hesitates for half a second before attempting to account for the gap. “At one time I was a promising kid who a lot of people talked about. And then my life took on a few atom bombs that forced me to go in a different direction. I attended to that.”
Now, Milo Binder doesn’t trade in general outlines. The songs that made him someone who people talked about (“Sly, romantic and childlike,” said Richard Meyer in All Music Guide, deeming the debut “superb”) are filled with close-up portraits and portrayals of people, places and circumstances, vividly detailed dioramas carrying deeply felt emotions.
The thing is, there’s no way to address everything that has happened in his life since the first album other than with a general outline. But if you give a
listen, you can hear a lot of life embedded in the new songs. Simply put, there has been a lot more life to infuse and inspire his writing now than there was back then.
Those atom bombs included the car accident death of his manager/best friend/chief cheerleader John Schillaci, a marriage and family-spurred a move away from his native Los Angeles (followed by two more moves before he landed in the Portland area) and having two daughters to raise, the eldest with severe special needs. All this meant putting aside his music-career dreams and ambitions and taking on, well, life.
“I kind of spent a lot of time feeling voted off the island, you know?” says Lawrence, who has worked mostly in the non-profit world.
Now he’s back. Unspeakable brings us up to date with 12 songs featuring the wry observational eye of the debut, mixed with wisdoms gained through the years. All this is enlivened and enhanced through the keenly nuanced settings crafted by producer Willie Aron*.
Lawrence and Aron have been close friends since they were in their early 20s, the richness of that coming through on the album. Aron’s ‘80s band The Balancing Act emerged from the same Los Angeles-area circuit as Lawrence, and he played on the Milo Binder debut. And he and Lawrence collaborated on the 2019 original fairytale concept album Paisley and the Firefly, which marked the return to writing and recording for Milo Binder, a key step toward the new album.
The bond between them shows strongly in a Zoom chat about the album — a lot of memories, laughs, in-jokes and, ultimately, love and respect. It also is very much in the music, the trust Lawrence had in Aron to help shape the songs and sounds. Aron’s brings a sensitive touch overall, favoring understatement (the bare-bones approach of opener “I Should Be Your Man,” the sad waltz “Tipped Over Night,” the parent-to-child benediction “You and Your Boyfriend”), letting the words and voice stand forward. But here and there songs are enlivened with perfect ornamentation (the Baroque-pop of “Green Coin Purse,” the lush Beach Boys-esque chorale on “I Asked the World”). Aron handled much of the instrumentation, with Victor Krummenacher (a co-founder of Camper Van Beethoven, currently with the Third Mind) adding bass and acoustic guitar to some songs and Kevin Jarvis (Lucinda Williams, Steve Wynn, Ben Vaughn, many others) on drums.
Sonically, as well as lyrically, it reflects Lawrence’s path that brought him to this place where he could once again create and share like this.
“At this stage of my life, things are good. I’ve been able to get my family to where we need to be. And it’s time to claim some space in the world. That’s the outline of how I see it.”
That said, he cautions us not to read too much into these songs if we’re looking for clues about his life of the past three decades. Take “Our Little War,” a portrait of a relationship marked by emotional cruelty, embedded in the song’s tone of resignation.
At the mention of that, a voice comes from across the room: “That’s not autobiographical.” It’s Lawrence’s wife, Julie, prompting Lawrence to explain that this comes more from his childhood experiences observing the tense situation of his parents, before and after they divorced.
But then there is the album’s tender closer, “You Must Break Your Heart,” which does ring with the currency of his life now, being addressed to his and Julie’s youngest child from his perspective, now, as a parent.
“Our daughter went through her first big breakup,” he explains. “I had the title, the idea, how they break horses, and breaking your heart could be like that. That was a thing I wanted to say. As soon as she went through that breakup, I got the key to the song.”
And, it must be noted, that his youngest daughter is older than he was when he wrote the songs for his first album. “It’s actually harder when it’s your kid,” he says. “It’s harder to watch them go through it, you’re helpless to fix anything — and you wouldn’t be valued even if you could. So, you have to watch, and just write a song.”
This, perhaps, is the real clue to the album, plain to see in the album title and in the song “Unspeakable,” in which he asks himself what’s to be said, what’s to be left unsaid.
The pleasures of flesh, finance and folklore
The endless attempts to jimmy the heart?
These are the things we think we live for
But these are the things that have kept us apart.
Here are unspeakable, unnameable, unthinkable emotions being spoken, named and though.
We all have a sense in our life that there’s the surface of the story we’re living,” he says. “And then there’s the subterranean story and the question of could we afford to ever say what the actual story is here? That’s what I try to do as a writer.
“Try to get at that layer of — I don’t want to say layer of truth, because I don’t know what the hell the truth is. But just that layer of experience.”
That song, in fact, is one of several that date back to the unrealized second album of the early 1990s.
“I’m proud of that first record, but I felt I had gotten better,” he says of what was left, well, unsaid, or unreleased, back then.
The mix of melancholy, wry self-deprecation and humor has refined and matured over time. His use of the latter may seem meant to deflect, but really it serves, cleverly, to draw us in close to see the cracks in life and, more now than ever, the scars from healing. In that sense it reflects profound influences from some of his biggest musical heroes — Randy Newman, Leonard Cohen, Loudon Wainwright III, to name three.
And that other name, the first one on the album, the very first word in fact: Moses. Here, Lawrence jumps right into an honored tradition (Dylan? Cohen?) of Old Testament titans help sort out very personal, very current, and yet eternal, puzzles. In this case, the sage descends Sinai to point Binder to his promised land. And if that’s not enough, how about the voice that spoke to Moses?
In dreams I walked the desert, I sailed the salted sea
I came upon a burning bush, it spoke these words to me
It said only one thing’s certain, ‘bout God’s majestic plan
And Baby, I should be your man
A commandment’s a commandment.
That one for me was just so immediately undeniable,” producer Aron says. “It just has that directness that we both prize in songs. It’s a devotional, has that theme to it.
“All the lyrics are beautifully stated, not cliché, and sincere without being heavy-handed. It just has that right balance to it, so we put it in the pole position. It became, ‘This is the mission statement, right here.’”
Lawrence laughs and remarks, “The mission’s statement is ‘Big Jew here!’”
As they both chuckle, Lawrence, for emphasis, points to the cap he’s wearing, a present from Aron on a recent L.A. visit, which bears the words: “Hold on while I overthink this.”
But Lawrence and Aron made a point not to overthink this. The tone was set when Lawrence kicked off a rush of songwriting in a way he hadn’t done in years, if ever.
“It was somewhere since about the beginning of the pandemic,” he says. “Starting New Year’s Eve, the beginning of 2021, I put a song up [on the Internet]. Then I kept writing a song a day for about three weeks and I was posting those. A couple of those made it on the record. Before that point I was writing kind of in stages. Ever since Willie and I did Paisley together, I’d been connecting again with writing. But I was still doing this thing where a song would take me months at a time. And there was a lot of worry: ‘Is this right?’ ‘What’s my voice anymore?’ All those questions. When I started doing that song-a-day thing was when I basically shot all of that out of my way and basically said, ‘Just write! Don’t worry if they’re your voice or the right thing. And every once in a while, one will come and feel like it is your voice. And just hold on to those.’ Since that time, I think I’ve written something in the neighborhood of 60 or 70 songs.”
The selections from those that wound up on Unspeakable were joined by several revived from 30 years ago including two, “Tipped Over Night” and “Don’t Fly Away,” co-written with San Diego musician-songwriter Andy Robinson.
When he started thinking about making an album, he turned to Aron. In addition to Paisley, the two had also been collaborating on a recording project with noted L.A. poet Stephen J. Kalinich, a close friend of both who had co-written the Beach Boys’ “Little Bird” and others. The question for what was to become Unspeakable was of finding a balance between a desire on one hand to avoid common singer-songwriter tropes and on the other not to fuss too much and obscure the poetry and honesty of Lawrence’s words and manner.
“We talked about that a little bit,” Lawrence says. “It’s a singer-songwriter record by nature, if you’re listening to the guy go ‘blah blah blah blah’ over the top and there are no moments where the music carries you, then it’s going to get boring
But again, they wanted also to avoid the overthinking trap. Still, there was much thought given to the sounds of the songs, though a lot of it came from their shared instincts and sensibilities. This came through in the initial sessions done at the Krummenacher’s home in Portland, not far from where Lawrence and his family live.
He notes the process for “Skywriters,” an idyllic musing on how we know so little of the private life behind so much of what we see, writ large, in public.
“The last thing we wanted to do was have one tone throughout all the songs,” Aron says. “And the last thing I wanted to do with this song was remind people of some regular, middling attempt at folk-rock. So I put on a sort of Jobim-ish piano and had Kevin play very light percussion, just keeping it very minimal. And I put some background ooos on it, and I think we enhanced the intimacy of the song. And that was the other mission statement, to enhance the intimacy of the whole album.”
That means that when the music becomes more ornate, it is done with purpose and to great effect. “It’s All For You” has echoes of ‘60s proto-country-rock in a way that might remind some of what Mike Nesmith did with the Monkees (you can imagine him singing the opening lines, “This song is just a metaphor for every song you’ve heard before, it’s a symbol of mankind’s search for meaning”).
And “I Asked the World” is doo-wop via the Beach Boys, with that wordless chorale at the end. Who are all those singers on that?
Aron laughs: “That’s a whole lotta Willies!”
That song was co-written with young Seattle singer-songwriter Abby Karp, who had participated in an online Covid-time open mic series Lawrence had frequented.
“We’ve written a bunch of songs together,” he says. “I knew as soon as we got done with this one that to me it was a special, top-of-the-pile song. I just loved the idea of an existential doo-wop song.”
In that setting, the lyrics evoke the spare poetry and romantic breadth of Rumi, as posing a quartet of questions to the universe, the first three, having met indifference, evaporating in the power of the fourth:
All the questions would fade
And the answer’d be you
No outline here. It’s the whole of the story.
*Willie Aron, of The Balancing Act is also an award-winning composer, producer, writer, session musician, member of the power duo Thee Holy Brothers with Lone Justice co-founder Marvin Etzioni and long-standing member of the Wild Honey Orchestra. Most recently, he appears as a guest keyboardist with acclaimed psychedelic supergroup the Third Mind featuring Dave Alvin.
L I N K S
All Inquires: binderville@yahoo.com
For the latest on Milo: Facebook
Where to find Milo’s music:
The Unspeakable CD:
Physical copy via Real Gone Music
Download copy via Bandcamp
Milo’s debut CD via Amazon
Paisley and the Firefly via Amazon