The Bargain Strikes A Balance On New Album

“There’s something in the moon / I feel it in my bones / The end is coming soon / Repent and be reborn / Don’t be broken into pieces / Cast into the fire / Don’t walk in slippery places / And fall into the mire.” 

Thus begins ​“Garden of Sorrow,” the first song off the new album ​’22 by The Bargain. Heady topics, but delivered with the most heavenly of sounds by the three singer/songwriter/musicians who make up the band: Frank Critelli, Shandy Lawson, and Michael ​“Muddy” Rivers. The 11 songs on the record feel like lightening in a bottle — an empty bourbon bottle perhaps? — captured at sunset on a crisp fall day. 

“I think our music has a theme,” said Critelli, ​”And therefore, the album has a theme because it reflects the music. The themes are life and death and love and art. Those are the things that we think about and write about, and that’s what the record’s about.”

The record also has a hopefulness to it, something the band members share themselves. 

“I don’t think we’d be doing it if there wasn’t some hopefulness in it,” said Rivers. 

“I think the hopefulness comes from the instrumentation,” added Critelli. ​“A mandolin” — which is played in the band by Lawson — ​“is a bright instrument. There’s a sunshiny quality to it. Like Steve Martin used to say, you can’t play a sad song on the banjo. There’s lots of sad songs played on the banjo, it’s just that the banjo brightens it up, and the mandolin does the same thing. Probably the nicest of us and the happiest is Muddy, and he comes up with the chords 99 percent of the time, and he’s got an optimism he brings to it. I’ve always loved that dichotomy, where you have a serious lyric based on a bouncy melody.”

Rivers agreed. ​“I’ve always loved juxtaposing a downer lyric with an upbeat melody or chords,” he said.

“That’s a common thing in music, not just our music,” said Critelli. He then sang the portion of Queen’s ​“Bohemian Rhapsody,” with the lyrics ​“Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me, for meeee!”

“I’m going to hell let’s all sing!” he shouted with a laugh. 

The vibe is similar on the song ​“Real Time,” where Lawson is responsible for a mandolin-only intro that sets the tone for the rest of the piece. The chords for that intro had been around for about 25 years, according to Lawson, written not long after he got his first mandolin.

“The whole song, I think, was written around the intro,” said Critelli, who added in an almost spoken verse that follows it. ​“That’s one of my favorite songs on the record.” 

“It’s one of my favorites to play live now too,” added Rivers. 

“Me too,” Lawson agreed. ​“It moves.” 

Laced with a number of Biblical references as well as the concerns of the modern world, the songs on ​’22 question what is perceived as good and bad, grappling with personal demons as well as one’s thoughts and actions towards others and the world itself. They convey an intimacy that invites everyone in to share their fears and desires. And there is always a healthy dose of camaraderie and compassion, which is how the band came together in the first place back in 2019. 

According to Lawson, he was moving back home from California and needed a place to stay. ​“I asked Frank,” who Lawson had been friends with since 1999, ​“if he had a spare room, and he said yes without asking how long I was going to stay or if I was gonna pay rent or anything, so I moved in. He and Muddy,” who Critelli has been friends with since 1991, ​“were already working on a couple songs and I just sat down with my mandolin uninvited and started playing. They didn’t know how to ask me to leave, and I’m still here now,” he added with a laugh.

And though his time staying at Critelli’s was temporary, his spot at the kitchen table there became permanent. The three began writing songs there weekly. Their first live show was at Three Sheets in January 2020, right before the pandemic, with Calvin DeCutlass. 

“We didn’t have enough songs to fill the show, so we all did solo songs within the set, but we had a half a dozen or nine tunes that we felt really happy about,” said Critelli. ​“The plan was to play a bunch of gigs and be a band and stuff like that, and then Covid happened.” 

During lockdown the kitchen table sessions became less frequent. They tried mimicking them over Zoom ​“for a minute.”

“I remember Frank said ​‘The Bargain is going to be the band that Covid kills,’ and I said, ​‘no no no, because I wanted it so bad, it’s going to be the band that Covid creates,’” said Rivers. 

“And that’s kind of the way it happened, because we just … kept going, writing songs,” added Critelli. 

They participated in a few livestreams, and they recorded a bunch of songs, many of them in Lawson’s bedroom as demos, releasing some of them digitally throughout 2020 via the two EPs called The Ammer Session and In Line for the Medicine.

Then in 2021, they put all of those songs on a record called Hindsight 2020, ​“a collection of digital releases with some new tracks to make it interesting,” said Critelli. 

The songs on ​’22 are more recent, and according the Lawson the band members have been ​“more selective” about what to put out ​“because we will come up with something that’s great, but it’s not for this album.”

Rivers also noted that there were songs ​“we didn’t know how to flesh out, really. Like a song like ​‘Everything Changes,’ we had for a long time, but we never played it live. We never did anything with it and couldn’t figure out how to finish it, until we did the little David Bowie homage in it and then we’re like, ​‘oh, this is done now, now we can do it.’” 

Playing with a full band also ​“really helped.”

The model for ​’22, according to Rivers, was the band going into Bonehead Studios with Jim Stavris on drums and Bobo LaVorgna on bass, then sending everything to Lawson’s studio (known as Shandyland) where he ​“would really do his magic.”

“Color in the lines,” added Critelli, which he said is his ​“favorite part.”

The songwriting process itself is fun for the band, and according to Lawson, for the most part it happens ​“pretty much the same way every single time.”

“Most of the time I’m rooting around in the fridge for beer, Muddy starts playing chords — he’s just noodling half the time, he’s probably tuning — but Frank likes something he hears and says ​‘play that over again,’ and Muddy will start playing this chord progression,” said Lawson. ​“Frank will put his head down and grab his pen. I have my beer and I’ll sit and watch it, and they’ll just do that until its half-baked but par cooked, the bones are there. Frank will hear music that he likes and Muddy will adjust those as he’s playing and make it something Bargain-ish, something that’s us. I’ll try to figure out where my place is in it and Frank will hammer out the words.”

“We’re all doing our little part at the same time, which is kind of amazing for three artists to all work on the same thing independently and then have it…

“Really gel,” said Rivers, finishing Lawson’s statement as if on cue.

“It’s the gel that works for me,” added Critelli. ​“Shandy is absolutely right in that most of the songs start with Muddy. When I start to write sometimes I’m forcing it and it’s a trick, but for me these songs are written and Muddy just tripped over something, like ​‘oh what was that? oh my god, the fucking song’ … and the words fall out of the sky based on the mood, based on something that fell out of Shandy’s mouth, or an experience that Muddy had walking through the door, or a conversation we had earlier, and again, the life and the death and the love, the things that are floating around already, fall out onto the page and we kind of like arrange them in that sort of way.

“My favorite part is when Shandy comes back from the fridge with the beer and picks up the mandolin … and it’s happening in front of me, and I can almost see it … and it falls out right over here and that’s it.”

“The songs do come together suspiciously fast sometimes,” noted Lawson. 

“And sometimes it’s almost as fast as playing them,” added Rivers. 

One example of that is the final song on this album, ​“Amen,” which Critelli and Rivers wrote at the kitchen table before driving over to Lawson’s house. 

“This was one of the ones that was like lightning, I think. Correct me if I’m wrong, Frank,” Rivers said, ​“but I think you just went stream of consciousness on this writing of ​‘Amen.’”

“I have the page,” Critelli answered with a smile. 

“And we didn’t really know what we had until afterwards,” Rivers continued.

Lawson ended up recording the two playing that song when they got to his house. That was the first time they had played it, and that’s the track that went on the record, with Lawson adding in mandolin and a bit more guitar.

“Frank and I insisted Shandy play on it, but he didn’t want to,” said Rivers. ​“I’m like, ​‘you must.’” 

“I kept it minimal because I thought it was perfect as is and it didn’t need me on it, but it seemed weird to end the record without all three of us on it,” added Lawson.

“That’s that coloring in of the lines, that’s my favorite part,” Critelli reiterated.

They also noted that the song is the last song on the album and is called Amen, and the first two songs have Biblical references.

“Well, that’s the life and death part, and the balancing of the books,” said Critelli. ​“The life part is the ups and downs, the things you do terrible and the things you do right, and looking at your life and deciding if it has meaning, or which side do you come out on. Am I on the good side? Am I getting coal for Christmas? Or am I on the good list? Which is it gonna be? If there’s a heaven, do I get to go there? If there’s a hell, am I going to have to suffer it? Thinking about that kind of stuff. All the songs are really about that: consequences and rewards.”

I recalled a line from the song ​“Real Life”: ​“Holy mother of God, what a joy to be alive … and what a crime.”

“Well, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” said Critelli. ​“Same is true of the universe and nature. For every birth there has to be a death and the books have to be balanced.”

Like ​“Turn, Turn, Turn,” I asked, referencing the Byrds song that also famously references the Bible.

“Turn, turn, motherfucking turn,” Critelli answered with a laugh.

With ​’22 out in the world, The Bargain looks toward the season ahead, including an album release show scheduled for Dec. 3 at The State House with a full band, where CDs of the record will be available. They’ve also booked a couple of shorter performances, and then a winter break from recording and playing shows. They will come back in the spring with a tour that begins at Daryl’s House in Pawling, N.Y. on April 16. 

During the winter and their regular Mondays, the band wants to ​“perfect that show” and when they come back in the spring, they want to come back as a five piece. 

“We want to come back as a bigger outfit,” said Critelli. ​“The songs on this record suggest bigger productions, and we want to play those kinds of shows just for the fun of it until we’re too old to do this kind of thing.” 

The three will also continue their solo projects, which they are all working at separately on a regular basis.

“Anytime we take a break from The Bargain it’s not like we’re not making music,” said Critelli. ​“And then there’s always Monday nights at the kitchen table regardless.”

Those Monday nights are considered ​“sacred time” and recently the band started spending one of those each month at New England Brewing Company in Woodbridge, for what they are referring to as The Bargain Sessions. It’s kept informal, though they invite a different guest to play along each time, which Rivers said is his favorite part. 

“We sit around and they’ll play three or four songs, and sometimes we go into a round for a little bit and everyone plays a song,” said Rivers. ​“That’s one of my favorite ways to do music, when you get a bunch of songwriters sitting together and just sharing songs.” 

“It’s a public rehearsal,” added Critelli. ​“Songwriting for us is always getting in the zone. It’s hard to do that in a public place, but I think that’s really important as a performer — to be able to get into the zone in a public place, knowing that everyone is looking at you.”

And with this record, the band is hoping people not only look, but listen.

“You make your art, and for me a record isn’t done until people listen to it,” said Lawson. ​“That’s what I want, I want people to listen to it.” 

“I hope people like it half as much as I do,” added Rivers.

“I think the goal of any art is to affect someone in a positive way, and for them to have a reaction to your music,” said Critelli. ​“I would like a positive reaction, of course. We all want people to react positively to what we put out into the universe, but this is us and we feel good about it. It’s where we are right now, and we hope that it connects with you somehow and improves your daily lives. Our daily lives are improved by art, and this is our art, and we hope it improves your life somehow.” 

’22 is now available digitally on Bandcamp. CDs will be available at the band’s album release show on Dec. 3. Tickets for that show can be purchased through The State House website.