“Goodbye Sky,” from the New Haven-based Head with Wings’s latest album, From Worry to Shame, starts with the dynamic that drives the song: Joshua Corum’s and Brandon Cousino’s guitars weaving their lines together. Andrew Testa’s drums come in, spacious and crackling, Joe Elliott’s bass rumbling underneath. And then the vocals, direct and honest, electric with emotion.
“Find me underneath,” Corum sings. “Her body lies still. / The findings are impure as hell. / Goodbye sky. / You’re so far from here. / When lights go out, / you’re darkening all that I fear.”
The song breathes, ebbing and flowing organically, the result of years of practice and playing together. But as it turns out, it was also a studio experiment that went right.
“It started with an acoustic guitar riff that I thought maybe the band would get behind,” Corum said on a recent episode of WNHH’s “Northern Remedy.” But it didn’t take right away. “It seemed like it could have gone nowhere … but it ended it being a song that our producers were really pushing for.”
Said producers were Frank Sacramone and Jamie Van Dyck of Earthside. “They had a lot of faith in the song,” Corum said. But writing it turned into an experiment. The band members had developed the other songs on From Worry to Shame in the years between the release of their first EP, 2013’s Living with the Loss, and recording them was a matter of committing them to tape. “Goodbye Sky” was made in the studio as the recording process went along. Van Dyck heard a lot of “melodic potential” in what Corum was writing, and together they fleshed it out, working backward and forward from the riff that craft verses, choruses, bridges and breaks. Testa and Elliot got a recording of the song shortly before going into the studio.
But in another sense the collaboration involved in making “Goodbye Sky” was emblematic of the way From Worry to Shame was put together. It was recorded in various studios in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and then mixed and mastered in Australia. And it was a product of a lot of long-standing relationships — between the members of the band, between Head with Wings and Earthside, between the band and the music community in which they found themselves, and between Corum and the people he knows and loves around him.
Meghan Alexander
Cousino and Corum.
Corum first picked up a guitar in 2007, when he was 18. “It’s all about just being obsessed with trying to find an identity,” he said, in a self-deprecating way. “You could probably do that in less time, if you have the time to truly invest and dedicate yourself to trying to create a sound.” He was self-taught, following the examples of other self-taught musicians. “It’s part of what keeps me curious and wanting to move forward, because you unlock these secrets about yourself, and then you’re feeding into your own curiosity of what you can uncover, what you can learn.”
The first inkling of Head with Wings came in 2008. “I was like, ‘I want to do this band. Learn the guitar to do this band and cultivate a sound exclusively for this,’” Corum said. He was in college at Southern Connecticut State University. “It was a great experience,” he said. But he wanted to finish and try playing music full time. He’d been friends with Elliott since middle school; Elliott was Corum’s “right-hand man musically.” They’d been in bands together since before college, before Corum picked up a guitar and just sang. Corum met Testa in 2011 when Corum was in a project called Sunshowers with a guitarist named Mike Bledsoe.
“Mike was also a drummer,” Corum said, “and he said, ‘I have a protege, and his name is Andrew. You should come over to the garage one day.’” Corum was “blown away.”
Head with Wings played its first show as an instrumental trio in 2012 at Lyric Hall, with Corum on guitar, Elliott on bass, and Testa on drums. They played a 20-minute, three-movement song called “Severance.”
“We never played it again after that,” Corum said, with a laugh. But Cousino caught that performance, and saw in Corum “a guitar player that I won’t butt heads with,” Corum recalled. Head with Wings agreed and became a four-piece. “That started our union, and immediately led to the writing process of the Living with the Loss EP.”
The band members wrote the material in six months and Living with the Loss was released in March 2013. One song on it, “Harboring the Disease,” was in memory of Corum’s aunt. “There are certain deaths in everyone’s lives that you’re never going to shake,” Corum said. “Always too soon, never enough time. So that became a theme for that EP…. There was that element of feeling like we don’t have enough time in our lives to get what we want accomplished, or you may take for granted the time that you have with people that mean a lot to you, but then in hindsight, you maybe wish you were there more, or could have been there more.” And then there were “stories of that person’s past that you can’t shake — things that happened to them that didn’t happen to you.”
Corum’s lyrics are always deeply personal. Writing them “takes its toll…. some new ideas that I’ve been having these days, I’m having trouble singing out without almost breaking down. And sometimes they’re not even to me the most powerful words.” It’s just that when he writes, and when he sings, whatever he’s carrying around, “you’re wearing it on your sleeve,” he said.
“It always has to be based in reality,” he added. “I love prog, and I love concept records, but what I love even more is honesty.”
So From Worry to Shame is a concept album, but it’s about a family going to pieces after a school shooting. That element was drawn from the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook and the ways that it reverberated across the state; it left a permanent mark on Corum as it did on many people in Connecticut. But in sorting through how his fictional family might grieve, break down, and possibly heal, Corum turned both inward and to those around him.
The year 2015 “wasn’t exactly my best year as a person,” Corum said. He was married, but found himself unemployed. He didn’t have the money to get the album off the ground. He was drinking more than he wanted to. “How could someone ever support someone that doesn’t really have their feet planted, but yet is indulging in these vices?” he thought.
A friendship he struck with an older neighbor in the apartment complex where he and his wife lived spurred further thoughts. “Seeing somebody, not at the end of their life — I mean, the guy has been through so much — seeing where I was at, and then meeting somebody who was so far down that path, was very sobering for me, kind of a wake-up call.”
He combined his own struggles with those of his new friend. “That led to the story of the album — almost like if he and I were fused as people, like a cautionary tale.” There’s empathy, but without being blind to “the damage done to your family, yourself, probably stemmed to work, to other relationships in one’s life. It’s all interrelated.” And “those relationships find their way into our music, from a very real place.” he said.
“There’s no reason it has to be all about me. I find that boring,” Corum added. “I like to write it in a way that people know that they’re included … because everyone in the human experience is prone to feeling any given way about relationships or how they’re handling themselves, or how society makes them feel — all of that finds its way in.”
Relationships are also what helped Corum get back on his feet. “When I was at my bleakest, my buddy Frank stepped in and said, ‘we’re going to make this album.’ And that was the boost that I needed.” Sacramone also helped Corum find a job — with Sacramone’s father, an attorney in Hamden. “There’s so many aspects of that job that I’m utilizing to this day.” He found fulfillment with that job. He felt better. He looked around at what he had, not just personally, but musically. He had a band, and material ready to be recorded. He had a producer who believed in him and was ready to help him not only with putting the album together, but with getting the music out to its audience. “That’s so game-changing,” Corum said, “and in 2015 it really kickstarted everything again.”
So after the shifting textures of “Goodbye Sky,” “Somewhere, Something Gives” asks furious questions about whether — and how — anyone can move past a personal tragedy, if it’s big enough. The questioning continues through “In Memoriam” and “From Worry to Shame,” with Corum’s voice soaring over his and Cousino’s guitars as Elliott and Testa lay down a vast, desperate landscape of a rhythm for them to range across.
Then, midway through the album, something happens. “Down for the count,” Corum sings in the opening line to “Beyond the Wall.” “Come away with me / for a while / find some stability / in ruination.” There’s so much emotional work to do. But in the music, the pulse quickens, the guitars’ rhythm gains urgency. It suggests there’s life here yet, a sense of staring into an abyss without falling in. Of holding on. It sets the stage for a glimmer of hope that appears on the next song; by the time Corum sings the refrain — “just one more stepping stone / to live a life reborn” — it feels lived in, earned. The end of the story isn’t about people living happily ever after. But a feeling of defiance, of gathering strength, pervades the rest of the album. We might not be able to put everything back together. But it doesn’t mean we give up, either.
It’s a bold statement to build on, as Head with Wings launches From Worry to Shame, is already kicking around ideas for the next album, and plots, with a new sense of ambition and determination, where to go from here.
Click below to hear the full interview with Joshua Corum on “Northern Remedy.”
