Unexpected Success

But after licking his wounds in Austin for a bit, Graham was offered some session work by guitar wizard Mike Hardwick, who had played with ex-Byrds Gene Clark and Michael Clarke, Jerry Jeff Walker, Kelly Willis and Michael Fracasso. "I don't even remember who the session was for," Graham says. "The fact is, I needed the money real bad. So it was, 'Okay, I've quit, but I'll go do this because I need the money.' So I went, and in the course of the session, I started sitting around with Mike playing some songs. And he was like, 'Hey, that's really interesting. We should get together and work on some songs.' So we started doing that just for our own sanity, not with any idea in mind. Then we started doing it in public, just kind of fucking around, and this whole cycle of songs and body of work started taking form."

After Graham and Hardwick played the Live Set show on Austin public radio station KUT, fellow musician Matt Eskey, a.k.a. bassist Earl B. Freedom in Mojo Nixon's Toadliquors, offered to put the show out on CD on his tiny-yet-tastemaking Freedom Records label, just as he had earlier with a Derailers Live Set taping. "At that point it had never even occurred to me," admits Graham. "We told Matt, 'Give us the money you would spend to have this mastered and redone, and we'll give you a real record.' He goes, like, 'I don't think that can be done.' We were like, 'We can do it.' Less than $5,000. Cut in three days. Mixed in three days. On the seventh day we rested.

"When we finished mixing, I remember thinking, If I see this on the shelves somewhere, I'll be happy. But we ended up getting pretty substantial radio play. With '$100 Bill,' we were on 51 stations at one point. And we're still getting play. I'm still getting publishing money on that. We ended up selling close to 5,000 copies, and when you spend $5,000 on a record, that's pretty good odds. I wasn't even thinking in terms of a second record, much less having any kind of success with the first one. It's all this unexpected stuff."

His recently released follow-up, Summerland, finds Graham now on the far-larger New West indie label and presents an upbeat flip side to Monster Island's dour meditations (just compare and contrast the titles). "I think that a lot of people are saying, 'Oh, well, they're radically different. The first one was one thing, and the second is something completely different.' I think it's like two halves of the same sword. But sonically I think the second one has more to offer. There's more color to it, more variety, more breadth. Some could argue that there isn't the focus on the second one that there is on the first one. But I find the second one easier to listen to, you know," he says with a laugh.

"On [Monster Island], with the songs, there was this linear, sequential story that was told," Graham explains. "On Summerland, there's still a story that's told, but it's more about the pieces in the whole story. You can put any three of those songs together and they will tell an essential aspect of the whole story. Also, it's just, I think, on [Monster Island], I got to do one thing I do really well, but on Summerland, I got to do everything I like to do. There's the acoustic songs, there's the badass rocking songs, there's the kind of quasi-pop songs, so the story is a little more complicated. This is the story about what happened when we left Monster Island, I guess.

"I think that record kind of made itself. And [on] this record I got to actually make the record, instead of the record making me," he says, even though Summerland still took a mere 13 days to record and mix. "There's something to be said for both processes. I think the second way made for a more colorful album." The differences in spirit between both albums are also reflected in their cover art, "which goes from this sort of duo-tone, real low-chromatic kind of thing to cover art with all this color exploding," he says. "That's kind of how I view the music, too. This is more colorful and warm."

On both records, Graham has eschewed the big-picture rock and pop focus for something more subtle and personal. It's a style that embraces most all of his experiences yet doesn't quite comfortably rest in the Americana bag it gets stuffed into.