Chris Carlone Photo
Brian Ember.
Producer Bill Readey sat at the sound board in his recording studio, the movie The Dark Crystal playing muted on the television overhead. He turned to singer, songwriter, and musician Brian Robinson and said, “Do you wanna get weird and rip some paper?”
“Why not?” Robinson said. After searching and finding an empty box of beer, Readey recorded Robinson ripping the box numerous times. This was followed by the two leaving the studio for the larger empty area at the end of the hallway just outside their door to record Robinson dropping a cymbal on the ground, as well as a number of other percussion instruments.
“This album is weird in how strangely epic it is,” said Robinson with a laugh. “It’s not Brian Wilson’s Smile yet, but we’re getting there.”
The above scene played out in the recording of The New Chastity, which the New Haven-based Robinson — under the nom de guerre of Brian Ember — released just this week. But that particular part of recording happened back in 2017. Robinson knew at the time that The New Chastity would take a while to finish. He didn’t know that “a while” would last almost three years.
“The focus on perfection took a lot longer than I thought it was going to take,” said Robinson while discussing the interim between that afternoon and this past week, when the final product was finally revealed to the public.
“It being my first time really concentrating on a studio recording, I wasn’t aware how much time it was going to take, or how long it was going to take to get to that moment when we were done — or at least felt like we could release something,” he said. “I was very positively optimistic my first year putting this thing together, and I don’t want to say things kept getting better and better while we were in the studio, but the more we spent time on the recording and the more people we had contribute to it and the more layers we put in it, it just felt like a more complete work.”
For Robinson, part of figuring out what the album’s final sound was involved figuring out what he was going to call it. “For the entire run of the first year-and-a-half to three years of recording, I was like, ‘The New Chastity is the name of the band,’ and the title of the record was going to be Tomorrow Looked Better Yesterday,” said Robinson. “I had actually written a song called ‘Tomorrow Looked Better Yesterday,’ but we never got around to recording it. And Bill kept telling me, ‘Why are you selling this as a band? You’re not really a band. You should just put it out as Brian.’ Part of the reason it took me so long to put the record out is I couldn’t figure out what my stage name was going to be.”
How did Robinson become Ember?
“I often refer to myself as a slow burn” said Robinson. “It takes me a long time to process my feelings. It takes me a long time to figure out where I’m at, but once I know it’s a steady burn. It’s like coal, like a coal fire. And I thought about the embers from that, and I really liked that word, ‘ember.’ Metaphorically you can say it’s like the ember of a dying fire that could spark a new one, and that’s where I was going. It was really the thing that got me to release the record. Two months ago I finally said, ‘I just have to shut the hell up and settle on something. I’m just gonna be this and I’m gonna own it and do it,’ and the next thing I knew, I was making the album art and I was making the website, and it was just really easy.”
The album is now available exclusively on that website and will be available via streaming services beginning in January.
This is the first album in Robinson’s musical career — one that currently includes being the manager of the Yale Symphony Orchestra as well as the leader of the rock ‘n’ roll string quartet Tet Offensive.
Robinson explained that 2017 was the perfect time to begin this new endeavor. “It’s a really strange set of circumstances. I’m a classically trained musician. I studied composition at Mannes School of Music, fully thinking I would be a classical composer, but I always had the rock end of things.
“I have the string quartet band, the Tet Offensive, which is kind of unorthodox, strange instrumentation, very theatrical and lyrically very metaphorical. I use a lot of imagery with the lyrics there. But in November 2015 life started happening a little too hard for me, a little bit too fast and hard.”
Robinson was going through a divorce. “I started getting songs in my head that were not like Tet Offensive songs. The first one I came up with, I immediately thought of Leonard Cohen. It was this mix between Leonard Cohen and Johnny Cash. It was the darkest song, and there was absolutely nothing in it, there was no metaphor, there was no imagery, it was simply ‘this is the situation I’m in.’ That’s the song.”
That song became “Philadelphia,” written in November 2015 when “things were getting rough” and Robinson thought he “needed a break.” He was deciding whether or not to go stay in Philly for a couple of days with a couple of friends and the song “came into my head. It was clear as day. It was startling. I immediately recorded it on my phone. I was like, ‘why am I writing a Johnny Cash song?’ I mean it was so clear. I wrote it while driving in the car on my phone singing the song. It was one of these moments.”
Five months later another song came into Robinson’s head while doing the dishes. “Suddenly I got this cabaret song in my head, where it’s like ‘everybody’s got a little something going on in their lives, that nobody knows about, ah ah ahhhh,’ and the ahs are a little silly. I remember posting on Facebook, ‘I think I’ve just written a musical.’ A few weeks after that, I started therapeutically writing songs.” Robinson started recording these songs a capella on his laptop and posting them on YouTube.
The New Chastity project itself sprouted in the midst of all of this revelatory writing from the seeds of Robinson’s youth. “The New Chastity began with these recording sessions that I was doing at home with Tim Borkowski” of Procedure Club, said Robinson. “We were recording old songs of mine from when I was a teenager that I liked. Paul Belbusti,” of Mercy Choir, “asked me to do a short set of songs for his and Lys Guillorn’s Wobbling Roof Revue at Never Ending Books in March of 2016, and I was like, ‘that’s perfect. I’m working on this set of old songs from high school. It would be fun to do a set of songs I wrote when I was 15.’
“So we got a band together — me, Jon Watanabe, Tim Borkowski and Bob Breychak — and we did this set. We didn’t have a name for ourselves, and we were at Never Ending Books the night of the show in the women’s issues section. There was this book titled The New Chastity and we all looked at it and were like, ‘what the hell is that?’ I pulled it out, and it was some ultra-conservative 1970s author advocating for anti-feminism, like ‘go back to the kitchen,’ that kind of thing. But that term, ‘The New Chastity,’ really sang to me. I liked the idea of, like, a new chastity. It’s sort of like that line in the movie Reality Bites, where Wynona Ryder tells Ben Stiller she’s a born-again virgin. So to me, that’s exactly the same thing. It was hilarious to me, even the concept, but in a way, it was really appropriate for what I was about to go through. Not looking at chaste as a sexual thing, but looking at being chaste in a personal way. It seemed really appropriate, so I took it, and we announced ourselves that night.”
The band performed again in December 2016, once more at the request of Belbusti for his Mercy Choir monthly residency. But they have not performed since — until the recording of this record.
“I took the gig thinking I would do more high school music and I wound up doing six songs that I had written that past year,” said Robinson. “And we kept The New Chastity name because it was still the same makeup. It was still rock music, still rock ballads and stuff, so it was like, ‘this seems appropriate.’ It was an evolution, almost as if I went from 18 years old, skipped 20 years, and then I’m back in it again. It was really strange. There’s almost a direct departure from everything I’d been doing, invoking all these tools I had as a kid.”
Robinson has lived a life full of both words and music since an early age.
“When I was nine I learned to read music,” Robinson said. “I played the trumpet. It was the first time I saw sheet music. At first I was like, ‘this is garbage, I hate this sheet music stuff, nothing makes sense.’ But as I learned it I was like, ‘I love it, I can’t get enough.’ I remember being nine and staying in for recess specifically because I wanted to transcribe from memory the ‘Steven Spielberg Presents’ theme song from the TV show, and Back to the Future, that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to write like John Williams and Mozart, those were the two. Then when I was 15 I got a guitar at a garage sale. I didn’t realize at the time I was playing it left handed, I didn’t know I was playing it wrong, but I finally figured that out. I started taking guitar lessons, and from 15 to 21 just wrote so many songs. Maybe a dozen of the 50 or so were decent.”
Robinson started writing poetry around this same time. “I was in the gifted and talented program at my elementary school,” he said, “and my project for the semester was to write a book of poetry. I remember it being significant because when I wrote my poetry, my mom got me a therapist, because she thought they were too dark,” Robinson said with a laugh. “I had a poem called ‘Mom’s Lies,’ and it went ‘although moms have very pretty eyes, they also have very pretty lies. Lies about Santa Claus coming down the chimney, and lies about the tooth fairy when it’s really she.’” Robinson laughed once again after reciting these lines.
Robinson noted that writing and recording the songs for The New Chastity was a cathartic experience.
“This is a compulsion,” he said. “This whole year” — speaking about the year 2017, was “about listening to myself and listening to my heart and what it’s saying even if it’s difficult. The album definitely reflects that lyrically and musically. Even the act of producing the album is a reflection of that.”
Karen Ponzio Photo
Readey and Robinson recording in 2017.
After the recording of the sounds in the hallway on that summer day in 2017, Robinson and Readey re-entered the studio to record more vocals for the song “Four Seconds” — which was initially supposed to be the first song on the album and is now the final one.
“This one is about restraint, then losing restraint,” said Robinson. Soon after he was done, Daphne Lee Martin and Anjanine Bonet joined the session to record background vocals for the song “Philadelphia.” The day before Bob Breychak had been there recording drums, and even more musicians recruited by Robinson and Readey were ready to be added to the already vast amount of talent and sound he had on the record thus far. “I want to honor, not imitate,” he added. “I want David Gilmour” of Pink Floyd, “but not full Gilmour.”
Robinson was quick to laugh at himself, but he took the business of making music very seriously, continually reviewing the recordings with Readey, asking for more takes when needed, but also raising his hands in the air and responding with a triumphant “yes!” when he heard exactly what he was hoping for coming from the performers.
“Essentially the bottom line is for me, as a composer of classical music who has a string quartet rock band that does theatrical rock with costumes — my weirdness, me being weird, is to be so normal,” said Robinson. “With this, I went ‘let’s do a rock band,’ where the performance is the thing, but the singing, everything, is concentrated on the music — but its drums, bass, guitar, and vocals, and that’s it. There are keyboards too, but still, it could have been a Jeff Buckley album or it could have been Pink Floyd or something. And these were the inspirations I was drawing from, which were completely different from the other things I was doing.”
“For me different is doing what everyone else does,” Robinson added with a laugh and a smile. “Different is doing a normal thing.”
The album is available at Ember’s website. Other information about Brian Ember can be found at his Facebook page or website.
