Dan is a lifelong, mostly self-taught musician who was raised on college and community radio and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk rock. Equipped with an education in non-profit small business management, lots of connections in local college and community radio, and a mission to get his own and other local musicians' music out to listeners, he started a record label, Free Election Records, which recently released a compilation CD of Twin Cities artists called Apartment Music.

Like many musicians, Dan hates to have his band labeled as a particular genre: "Americana, I guess, it encompasses folk and country ... it's kind of got a rock edge to it ... But you don't want to be a folk-rock band, 'cause that's completely uncool!" Dan has always liked groups or artistic movements that come up with their own idea that creates a new genre. This preference is qualified, however, by his characteristic modesty: "Maybe we're not that great, and we're not good enough to make up our own genre, but I kind of feel like the Apartment Music compilation is a mission statement of what's happening, it doesn't serve it justice to call it an existing genre ... Listen to it, and make your own decisions, 'cause it's not indie rock, it's not lo-fi, it is what it is."

The program director of KFAI community radio by day, Dan lives in Minneapolis.

The Ashtray Hearts Left to right: John Jerry (drums), Dan Richmond (vocals, guitar), Steve Yernberg (guitar, piano, banjo, vocals), Ryan Huber Scheife (bass), Brad Augustine (piano, accordion), and Aaron Schmidt (trumpet, piano, vocals) photo from the Free Election Records website at http://www.freeelection.org/artists/ashtrayhearts.htm

Dan's early music life: Neil Diamond, Meathead, Boondogglers, and jail inmates
Dan started playing guitar and making up songs around the age of thirteen, but he's been doing music pretty much his whole life. Growing up in the small town of Waukesha, near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he was surrounded by the sounds of his mom's radio and music preferences: talk radio programs and pop ballad singer Neil Diamond. The songs he played at this early age, including the ones he made up himself, were stylistically far-ranging and mostly influenced by what Dan was able to play, rather than by any distinct taste in certain styles of music. As a student in junior high school, he traded in his trombone for a guitar, and he took guitar lessons for about two years. He'd done choir in school, so he could read music, but his later playing and songwriting has been mainly listening by ear and figuring out the necessary chords.

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As a teenager, he volunteered at a community radio station in Waukesha, WCCX, and started to discover a wider range of music, just listening and digging through the old records at the station. His first DJ experience was there. In middle and high school, Dan was in a band for three years called Meathead. They played a little bit of everything; they even had a DJ, "so that was pretty cutting edge for '91," they had some straight-up acoustic songs, some punk rock songs, hip-hop tunes; it was an experimental group in that its members were still learning what they wanted to do. They even got to the point of making demo tapes. Dan also formed a one-time group called The Boondogglers, which was his high school senior year solo project. This group was more song-focused, an "electrified version of your standard verse-chorus-verse pop," and this is where his more serious songwriting really started.

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At fifteen, Dan had a time slot at the college radio station WMSE, on the campus of the Milwaukee School of Engineering. His four-hour time slot was on Saturday afternoons, during the summer when all the students were away. Dan laughs at the memory of his teenage self and his friends having free reign at this station: "... it was actually a pretty strong ten-watt signal, but for the most part our listeners were our friends and people in the Huber Jail  ... three blocks away." Around this time, when he was immersed in college radio, Dan began to come into his own music preferences, many of which still influence his music today. He liked bands on the Seattle-based SST record label, like the Minutemen, Black Flag, Dinosaur Jr., fIREHOSE, Hüsker Dü, and Dischord records' Minor Threat. But more than these bands themselves, what really influenced Dan the most, he says, "...was learning about these different scenes and knowing about how punk rock didn't necessarily have to be loud and fast, but it was more of a state of mind about doing it yourself."

College radio made a big impression on Dan: " ...[it's] that whole connection that people are actually listening ... the power of radio on a small scale is pretty significant, 'cause we used to drive around the campus and listen to other programs before we were part of it ... you know, that little black box sometimes is pretty powerful."

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Coming (and returning) to the Twin Cities
Dan came to the Twin Cities in 1994 to attend the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. He studied small business management with an emphasis on non-profits, and he minored in history. While he was a college student, he became involved in Radio K, the University of Minnesota college radio station. At Radio K, he was a DJ, then the Underwriting Director, then eventually the Music Director. After a post-graduation year-long sojourn in Ireland and London, during which time he wrote many songs, Dan returned to the Twin Cities to a new job, as the program director of KFAI.

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The anatomy of a song
Songs come to be, Dan says, a few different ways: you can start with a simple melody and work with that, or you come up with a chord progression and work with that, or you come up with a lyrical idea that you want to complete. For Dan, it's usually those three things coming together, or one of them. Sometimes he's simply playing guitar and there's a chord progression, then he comes up with a melody line, then he makes up fake lyrics that turn into real lyrics, then he works off that. Other times he gets lyric ideas from his journal. For a while, Dan was making use of a process called free writing, similar to writing in a journal, but with no purpose in mind. He did a lot of this when he was traveling, and many of the songs he wrote during this period now form the core set of the Ashtray Hearts.

Dan thinks his songs tend to be more successful when he starts with the words first. The pitfall to starting with the melody is that if you have a great melody, you want to complete it, and if you don't have the words for it, sometimes the words will suffer because you want to get it done quicker: "That's kind of been my problem for the last few months." Sometimes, though, he goes to his notes and tries to plug in some of his earlier writing. Though Dan has written the band's songs so far, it's really a collaborative effort. There's a basic structure to the song, but then the band members have free reign as to what they want to play, whether it's horns, piano, accordion, or guitar. They've done a few different arrangements of the same song, like Trestle, and usually they finally settle on the one that seems to sound better, usually it's a gut decision. As far as practicing goes, the Ashtray Hearts practice once or twice a week at Dan's apartment, depending when they have upcoming shows, but they're likely to get their own rehearsal space soon, because Dan is moving into a new place with his girlfriend.

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Autobiography and ear-ripping bar fights
Dan doesn't have any music heroes, exactly, but he feels an aesthetic affinity towards certain artists, acts like Richard Buckner, Joel R.L. Phelps, and Elliot Smith; artists, Dan says, who have a story to tell and who really work on creating an atmosphere with their music. When asked what he wants his music to say, Dan, again, is characteristically modest, being thankful that anyone even listens to his songs and might find some connection to them. He thinks of his music as hopeful, and himself as "somewhat of a romantic, in that I cherish my relationships with the people around me and I try to take notice of my surroundings, and at the same time I realize how lucky I've been to have the experiences I've had." When he writes songs, Dan draws on his own experiences and makes something that he likes out of them. Every time he hears a song he's written, it brings back those original ideas behind the song, or the time, place, or emotion. His songs are autobiographical, but not always in a direct, literal way: "You fictionalize the truth, like when you tell a story about something that happened to someone else ... you take this moment in time and then you match it with something else, it can have a narrative of its own that's completely independent of the five or six events that inspired the lyrics, it can be all about one thing or two things, or more, or the rest is just made up, [but] there are certain lines in every song that remind me of when I penned a certain phrase."

Such as? 

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Country Bar, one the last songs the Ashtray Hearts wrote for the old numbers record, was partly based on Dan's experience of being the best man in a wedding, getting really drunk, and making a bad speech. He wrote some songs trying to perform the customary reply to the bride, and he came up with this one line, "being blinded on her wedding day."

Another part of the song comes from this experience:

"We went to visit a friend of ours who'd moved out of town, and we went to a bar on a lake in the middle of January last year [2001] where a lot of snowmobilers went ... we witnessed this really bizarre bar fight where a bottle was broken and some guy lost part of his ear ... [You saw the ear come off?] Well, you know, it was just the tip, it wasn’t like the whole ear... I think [what started it] was just dirty looks, and drunkenness. It was completely dead, it was a Saturday night in Shawano, Wisconsin, near Green Bay, where some of the other band members are from ... There was one group of snowmobilers and another group of snowmobilers, and it this was a small town, there might have been a dynamic I didn't know about ... so anyways, I came back and wrote about it. And it also had elements of people I’d met overseas, but it's really kind of based around that whole weekend of a friend of mine that I was really close to at one point, that had moved away, kinda having this one night where we were all going out drinking at various small town bars. That's pretty much it. But really what it’s about is the girl we were visiting, how our relationship has changed over time, it's not somebody I’d ever dated, but somebody I was really close to, looking at our relationship from a different perspective, I guess."

Do you feel differently about the song now?

"I guess because we play it so much, there is some kind of emotional distance now. The sign of a good song to me now is one I don’t get sick of, and I'm not sick of this one yet, so I think it’s a good song. I  had years and years to write all these songs that form the core of our set right now ... now I’ll have to write a lot of songs and not all of them are gonna be great ... a lot of them are an exercise to get to the point of writing a good song."

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Listen to the Ashtray Hearts

Listen to an excerpt from Country Bar:

RealMedia download (1.19 MB)
MP3 download (2.67 MB)

Listen to the entire (short) song Amusement Park:

RealMedia download (612 KB)
MP3 download (1.32 MB)

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The Ashtray Hearts and social co-dependency
One thing that becomes quickly apparent when talking to Dan is that, for him, music, as much as being a form of artistic expression, is a good way to spend time with friends: "Music for me is more of a social thing; your friends listen to the same kind of music, and you go out and experience music together ... it's just kind of a lifestyle thing, I suppose." This philosophy explains how The Ashtray Hearts came to be: when Dan first got together with the other two original members of the band, his good friends Steve and Brad, it was a really informal thing. They just wanted to get together on a weeknight in the middle of winter just to pass the time. Steve had been in punk bands in high school, and Brad had never been in a band but was a multi-instrumentalist. The informal jam session began to get gradually more serious. They bought an accordion and learned how to play it, then a piano, and figured out how to play it, (Steve took some lessons, Brad just figured it out) and so on. Dan says that if you know basic chords and music theory, you can just figure things out, at least for the kind of music they do.

The reason the band later grew to six members is that the band time was taking away from hanging out time, so the other friends just joined the band. When this happened, the Ashtray Hearts got louder, with the addition of a bass and drums, and their sound also filled up a bit with another vocalist and a trumpet player. Along with the bigger ensemble comes the extra work of coordinating a tour or a show for six people with busy schedules.

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The Ashtray Hearts are:

Brad Augustine: accordion, piano
Ryan Huber Scheife: bass
John Jerry: drums
Dan Richmond: vocals, acoustic. baritone
Aaron Schmidt: trumpet, piano, vocals
Steve Yernberg: guitar, banjo, piano, baritone, vocals

The local scene
Dan says that the Twin Cities is a good place to be in a local band: "Minneapolis is a big city, I guess, but in many ways, it's a small town with a very vibrant arts community ... the music scene here is all about relationships, it's a business like anything else, so as long as you're good, and you're good to the people that you work with, there's enough venues in town where you can play once a month pretty comfortably and not be over-extending your welcome." Dan says people locally have been really receptive to the Ashtray Hearts, he thinks maybe it's because the kind of music they do is kind of unique to the city.

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The Apartment Music compilation came together almost spontaneously, through the band's connections when they first started playing shows. A lot of those connections were formed at the Clown Lounge; Dan says it was very exciting for them to find that a lot of the other local bands had the same sound [as the Ashtray Hearts], the same approach to music, that it didn't necessarily have to be loud to be good, or to get people's attention, and part of that commonality was also the energy that happens sometimes in a really intimate venue. The idea of "apartment music" wasn't completely thought out, it just kind of happened to become the concept of the compilation, as it turned out that many of the featured Twin Cities artists practice, compose, and record their songs in their apartments.

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So what's special about the Twin Cities as a place for local music? "It's ... a place of really humble musicians ... the punk rock scene here is really humble ... I was at a D-Four [local punk band Dillinger Four] show recently, and they said 'The thing about Minneapolis is the winter will keep the assholes out of town.' Minneapolis is really supportive of artists, and it's really supportive of its music scene, but at the same time, people don't come here to get famous." Dan says musicians seeking fame and fortune are more likely to live in New York, Los Angeles, or even Seattle, where it's easier to tour. "People make music here just for the sake of making music, and I'm sure there's people with commercial aspirations, but I think all of them in the back of their minds are doing it just because they love it ... it'd be great if we [Twin Cities musicians] got more attention here again like we did in the '80s, but I think we're alright even if we don't, too."

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Venues
The Ashtray Hearts have played these venues regularly. Dan says these venues get the most local recognition for independent rock and roll.

The Turf Club / Clown Lounge, http://turfclub.net
tel. 651.647.0486
Corner of University Ave. and Snelling, in St. Paul

First Avenue, www.first-avenue.com
tel.612.332.1775
701 1st Ave. North, downtown Minneapolis

400 Bar, www.400bar.com
tel. 612. 332.2903
400 Cedar Avenue, Cedar-Riverside neighborhood

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Getting the gigs
They haven't played out of town much yet, but June 2002 saw the Ashtray Hearts' first tour, which went to Madison, Chicago, Iowa City, Denver, Salt Lake, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Olympia, and Seattle. Dan says there is a good touring circuit now, that wasn't there twenty years ago. With Minneapolis having such a good local music scene, though, if a musician has a good job, there's no incentive to tour, because there's not much money to be made that way. The June tour, Dan says, is mostly just a vacation and a chance to visit out-of-town friends. Through his connections at Radio K and elsewhere, Dan has been calling in favors to book the tour, and before that, to get those first crucial shows.

The Ashtray Hearts have opened locally for some well-known acts such as California folk-rocker Richard Buckner, Boston-based Willard Grant Conspiracy, and Vancouver-Chicago-based New Pornographers (featuring well-known solo artists Neko Case), and opening for acts like that opens the door for future bookings. Being a radio programmer in his day job, Dan knows how to make his band stand out, which is no easy feat in this moment of do-it-yourself music production: "There is so much music out there now, you can spend two thousand dollars and have a record out, which seems like a lot of money, but if you have six people, that's not a lot of money, and you do judge a book by its cover, you do judge a band by its press kit. It doesn't cost that much more to do it right." Another boost came with the local music media designating the Ashtray Hearts one of the best new bands of 2001.

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Free Election Records
Dan started Free Election "mainly just as an excuse to put out my own stuff and not have to convince someone else to do what I'd envisioned ... I'd built up a good credit card limit and I wanted to put some of my small business education to use." Dan chose the name Free Election from a huge list of interesting possibilities, it doesn't have a specific meaning, it just came up a lot in his history classes. Dan has learned a lot about running a label, mainly that there's a lot of up-front costs involved. Even if a record sells pretty well, you have to wait for the distributors to pay you back. At this point, Free Election Records is definitely not in the black, but, Dan says, the trick is to stay around long enough to build a name, and build a catalog of recordings that will sell over time.

He wants to build a community out of it; his original vision was to make a local non-profit label, and then using that status to treat music like art rather than as a commodity. His experience working in non-profit, however, has caused him to ask which is better, since success in both seems to require equal amounts of salesmanship and compromise. His dream label would be artist-friendly and self-sustainable once he's tired of running it. His priority would be to find money up front so the label could encourage artists to take time away from their jobs to pursue their art. He says there are a few non-profit labels who are doing well: Daemon Records, based out of Decatur, Georgia and founded by well-known American folk singer Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls, and the Smithsonian Folkways label, most of whose artists are dead. Dan concedes that his dream label may be beyond what's possible, but it seems to him that it's a business model that would work in a non-profit world.

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