Jeff Mueller Presses On

The crisp rim shot from the snare drum snaps out the beat to start ​“ReRecorded Syntax,” from Revisionist: Adaptations & Future Histories In The Time Of Love And Survival, the new album by June of 44 and its first in 21 years. The bass joins, pulsing on the groove, followed by two guitars that work in unison to create a mood that’s both urgent and atmospheric. The vocals only heighten the vibe, with lyrics that are both fractured and focused. The picture is clear; we just can’t see all of it. ​“Without air, still breathing,” the voices intone.

It’s no accident that ​“ReRecorded Syntax” sounds like the work of old pros, because it is. June of 44 was formed in 1994, made up of four musicians — Jeff Mueller, Fred Erskine, Sean Meadows, and Doug Scharin — who were already veterans of the indie rock scene when they got together. Their half-decade run of albums and shows garnered accolades and press and took the band all over the world. The band’s reunion in 2018 led to a long string of dates in the U.S. and abroad. The announcement that the band was recording a new album got written up in Pitchfork and received a feature in Rolling Stone. Further dates in the U.S. and abroad were planned for 2020, until the Covid-19 pandemic struck. Plans were scuttled, turned upside down.

But for the New Haven-based Mueller, it just meant falling back on the strategy for living and making music that he’d been following for his entire adult life: just keep working. Mueller owns and runs Dexterity Press, a letterpress shop in Erector Square, and the life of balancing printmaking, music, and family is one he has known for over 20 years.

“They’re all sort of bundled,” Mueller said. Getting into letterpress work in the first place, he added, ​“largely stemmed from my life in music.”

Monsters Of Rock

Mueller started playing music at 15, in Louisville, Ky. ​“I was in a rap band” with high school friends, he said. That band, started in the mid-1980s, was called King G and J Krew. The friends made all their music on tape, which meant they were at a loss for how to perform it. ​“We couldn’t just pick that stuff up and play it live so we decided to try to do it with rock instrumentation.” So by the early 1990s that ​“electronic rap music had morphed into a rock band.”

For college, Mueller enrolled in the Kansas City Art Institute, where he went for two years, from 1989 to 1991. He got foundational training in several media and concentrated on sculpture. Returning to Louisville, he ​“took a break from rap music. Just your average rock ​‘n’ roll story,” he said with a smile. King G and J Krew became a band called Rodan, ​“like the monster” from Godzilla movies, which gigged and recorded until 1995.

“There were successful moments and spans of time where we had generous guarantees and album sales,” Mueller said. But he also realized that ​“I didn’t want to rely solely on music as a source of income.” He needed a steady job that would let him continue to pursue music. He was also looking for a way to make graphics for music projects, and packaging for records and CDs that was more environmentally friendly. It was the mid-1990s, and ​“I had a hard time with all the plastic,” he said.

He moved to Chicago and found John Upchurch and Matt McClintock at FireProof Press, which specialized in doing album art for a long roster of indie rock bands. ​“The first job I did for FireProof Press was Shellac at Action Park. The second job I printed was my own record — June of 44. Which was terrifying, just to have your own hand on those skids of paper.”

In Chicago he met Kerri Sancomb; the two would in time marry. He also started June of 44 with Meadows, Erskine, and Scharin. One of them lived in DC and the other two lived in Brooklyn, and they were all involved in other musical projects. But Mueller had some song ideas to build an album around, and Meadows, Erskine, and Scharin were game to work. ​“I just asked them to give me two weeks of their time,” Mueller said.

“It was a pretty great model,” he said. He got money from the record label that supported Rodan — Touch and Go — to work on June of 44. He was 24 years old, and ​“borrowing $3,500 to record a record seemed like I would be in debt for the rest of my life,” he said. ​“When I arrived in New York I arrived with seven song structures in mind.” They were the skeletons for the other band members to flesh out. There were guitar parts and arrangements to do. ​“They were beefing up the songs, enhancing the parts and making the songs better. We wrote for two straight weeks and recorded with James Murphy,” later of LCD Soundsystem, who had a studio in Brooklyn. That was in November 1994.

“I didn’t know what was going to become of that recording,” Mueller said. ​“After we wrote and recorded we didn’t do anything until September the following year.” But Corey Rush at Touch and Go ​“loved the record,” Engine Takes to the Water, and wanted to put it out. Engine was released in 1995, and to support the record, ​“we jumped back together and rehearsed for three days and went on a 25-day U.S. tour.”

“That was not glamorous,” Mueller added. ​“There was nothing healthy or VIP about it.” They traveled in an Econoline work van that had been used by a painting company, employing benches that Mueller had built himself into the back. ​“After that we were done again until the beginning of 1996,” Mueller said. ​“And then it started to accelerate. Our shows were well-received and our record was well-received.” Erskine, Meadows, and Scharin were interested in continuing to develop the project. ​“So we got back together in the spring and wrote two more records,” both of which came out in 1996. July and toward the end of the year. They returned to writing again in the winter of 1997. All told, after Engine, June of 44 created three studio albums — Tropics and Meridiens, Four Great Points, and Anahata — two live albums, and an EP called The Anatomy of Sharks.

Through all of this, Mueller was working at FireProof Press. Then, in 1998, he and Sancomb moved to Philadephia, where Sacomb enrolled in the University of the Arts for an MFA in printmaking and book arts. ​“Kerri obsessed herself with grad school I obsessed myself with traveling,” Mueller said. June of 44 went to Europe and Asia — just about everywhere, Mueller said, but Africa. ​“None of it was pristine or fresh. It was really kind of gross. But it was for the experience, and laying groundwork for future trips. We were satisfied and happy to break even.” After that, the band members moved on to other musical projects.

Mueller had formed The Shipping News in 1996 with Jason Noble — also of Rodan — when they created music This American Life. They produced five albums — Save Everything, Very Soon, and in Pleasant Company, Three-Four, Flies the Fields, and One Less Heartless To Fear. He and Noble ​“worked without interruption until he had cancer in 2009, and he needed to deal with that,” Mueller said. Noble had synovial sarcoma and died in 2012.

Mueller and Sancomb moved back to Chicago in 2000 when Sancomb took a job at the University of Chicago. In those two years, Mueller said, ​“FireProof Press had pretty much dissolved.” Upchurch was now working in the graphics department at Columbia University in Chicago. ​“John was no longer taking new jobs,” he said. He reprinted Shellac at Action Park with FireProof. ​“By the end of the year,” Mueller said, he and Sancomb ​“had started Dexterity Press.”

Coming Home

From 2000 to 2010, Mueller and Sancomb ran Dexterity Press and Sancomb worked at the University of Chicago. But she felt like she was reaching her limits with that job. She was originally from Hamden, and was close to her parents. She wanted to move closer to them. Apart from family visits, Mueller had visited New Haven twice as a touring musician, once playing at the Tune Inn and once at Cafe Nine.

“At that point music and my business could essentially be picked up and lifted anywhere,” Mueller said. ​“We basically dropped a pin in New Haven” and started looking for jobs close to it. Sancomb landed a job at Yale, as exhibition coordinator across the university’s library system (“It’s a really cool job!” Mueller said). Mueller moved his printmaking shop into Erector Square, and established himself there (see this 2017 article in the Independent about that).

In addition to music and printmaking, Mueller has a business as a house painter, which he has been doing since 2000. ​“I’ve always kept my foot in it just in case something like a pandemic happens,” he said, only half-joking. ​“This is my version of success. I can maintain all these things that are of interest to me.” He found security in the balance, moving away from the idea that one had to create new music all the time. ​“What happens if you show up to work that day and your muse is not there?” he said. ​“To me it’s healthier to have respect for your creativity and know that you need to take a break from this.”

In 2018, June of 44 reunited. Tours and recordings were made, and more were planned. Then the pandemic came along.

“We finished the new record in January in Chicago,” Mueller said. ​“We had friends who were returning from Italy who caught the coronavirus there. They were on the last plane back from Italy before it shut down. I came home and my business, between Dexterity Press and music — I was set up for work. By the end of March, 80 percent of that came unhinged.”

Record plants had stopped manufacturing, so there was no need for jackets. Jobs to print invitations for eight different weddings vanished. ​“That was not a good sign,” Mueller said. June of 44’s tour dates in Europe in May and July, and Japan in September, were put on hold. Fortunately, Sancomb’s job remained secure, but there was loss of income to consider. ​“We came up with a plan and figured out how to make life work,” Mueller said. They have two children, ages 15 and 7. ​“You can’t hit the panic button and let yourself lose control over circumstances that are out of control,” he said.

“My focus was directly related to our kids,” Mueller said. ​“I didn’t want them to deal with any of that stress. My primary focus was keeping a smile on their faces.” Heading into the fifth month of the pandemic, Mueller added, ​“we’re actually quite good. We get a cabin fever moment, but we get to hang out with each other.”

Work for house painting and Dexterity Press has started to come back. ​“Nobody wants printed ephemera for a wedding,” he said, but has been working on a sculpture for a building owned by the same people who own the Corsair, after he did a sculpture for that building in 2016. Another client ordered a run of thank-you notes after their wedding in June. He has also been printing scorecards for Stymie Scorecard, which serves ​“as a memento or souvenir of the day” for golfers. The company makes the cards for golf clubs and tournaments — ​“a beautiful thing that you get smudged up and mucked up and it’d be indicative of how the day went,” Mueller said.

Meanwhile, Mueller and June of 44 are looking to 2021 and 2022. ​“It’s awful to think that none of this can exist until then,” he said. But making even tentative plans for the future is, on balance, helping. ​“I’m healthier for them as long as there’s some outro that makes sense,” he said.

And he has been finding balance in other ways, too — such as moderating just how much news he consumes a day, versus working on art and spending time with family. ​“At the end of the day, we are what we eat, and if we ingest all of this virus and this toxicity, we become those things,” he said. ​“There’s no more important time to focus on art and music to be happy. It puts you in a space where you can survive.”

Most recently, he recorded music on his phone, made art, and did some writing to create Amid Life Crisis, which he released in May under The Shipping News. ​“At the onset of the pandemic, one of my favorite moments was just sitting on the sofa with my son. I wold sit there and I would just write — anecdotes, stories, remembrances.” He made that ​“instead of watching statistics and listening to the president talk about whatever he talked about.”

He counts himself as among the fortunate. ​“I have a house I can go paint or a press I can work in,” he said. ​“Whatever allows me to have some sense of security is a success story. I don’t want to have a Lear Jet. I just want to make things that are legitimate.”