Parker, Benton, Chew.
Drums, keys, and guitar meander for just a moment. A sampled voice intones, “the city, the city, the city — the city of Townsville.” Then adds, almost at a scream, “is under attack!” The instruments snap into focus, digging into an urgent groove that’s one part anxiety, three parts creative energy. “Watch me go!” Moon Cha sings, mixing fear and exhilaration.
It’s from “Mojo Jojo,” the second song off of 900 Grand, a new album from a new band, Mightymoonchew, that combines the talents of three young New Haven musicians — Thailend Parker (a.k.a. Moon Cha) on vocals and guitar, Marcus-Aurelius C. Benton on keys, and Chris Chew on drums — who mine the chaos of 2020 to blaze a wide trail into 2021.
Parker, Chew, and Benton are all affiliated with The Quest Presents, a collective of musicians and artists based around Connecticut, so they knew each other from “the local New Haven scene,” Parker said — going to each others’ shows at venues around town.
“We had maybe just hung out and jammed casually,” Chew said. But “this summer we all needed something to alleviate the stress.”
For all of them, that meant the pandemic and the resulting economic fallout from it. For Parker in particular, it also meant a house fire in June — on their birthday — that left them temporarily homeless. Chew recalled getting a text from Parker a couple days later: “Can we jam? I really need to do something to get the energy out.”
But this spontaneous summer gathering was also a chance for Parker to try out an idea they’d had for a long time. “Before the world ended I was thinking about making a rock band,” they said. “It’s been a dream of mine since I was 13.” That was when they saw the movie School of Rock with their mom. They were 13 at the time. Their mother raised them on a steady diet of music that included guitar, from the Police to Prince. They started playing right away. They stopped for a while, they said, “because hip hop took over, and hip hop is so much more conventional for who I was. But then I realized that rock music might be the most appropriate method for expression, especially for right now.”
“Anxiety builds emotion in your body. Some people tap their foot or bite their lip. I strum,” Parker said. The day their house burned down, they said, “I bought a guitar.”
Parker and Chew reached out to Benton and they all agreed to get together at Never Get to Be Cool, the DIY space in Wooster Square that closed at the end of 2020.
“The chemistry was so well between the three of us,” Parker said. They brought their guitar. Benton had a keyboard. Chew had set up drums and, on a whim, microphones and other gear needed to record. Without further ado, the trio started to play. One member tossed out a musical idea. The others joined in with their contributions. Parker improvised melodies and lyrics.
“We freestyled this entire album,” Parker said. “It was so honest. I don’t think I’ve ever been so honest. With a few tweaks, it’s really the capture of a moment” — “what we were feeling in the summer of 2020.” But they also found themselves creating the structures of songs spontaneously. “There are parts that I thought, ‘hey, we decided to go into a bridge at the same moment,’ but we didn’t talk about it at all,” Chew said.
“It was like something was channeling through us. We’d break out in fits of laughter afterward,” Parker added.
“We didn’t play thinking we were going to make an album. But we recorded it all and listened and thought, ‘this sounds cool. It felt unique to all of us,” Chew said. The accidental nature of it contributed to its energy. “If I’m in a recording situation I might overthink it,” Chew said. Instead, he just played. He has played drums since middle school and “been more focused in the past five years or so.” He expressed particular admiration for Parker’s ability to freestyle lyrics. “I don’t know how they came up with something so powerful and interesting on the spot.”
“We were stressed!” Parker said. “Stress will do that to you.”
The group got together for two days and ended up recording about six hours of material. From there, Chew and Benton did the editing, mixing, and post-production to boil the material down into a 13-track full-length album. Chew was glad to be able to “retain that live, spontaneous energy, but edit it down so that it’s listenable,” he said. “And so we wouldn’t be putting out a six-hour album.”
“We were just vibing on the session,” Benton said. “All of us did a good job of keeping the live feel to it. We all found each other out.”
For Parker, returning to guitar also meant finding a new way forward with their music. Before the pandemic, they “felt like I couldn’t go back to guitar because at the time it felt anti-Black,” they said. “My ignorance,” they added, lay in not fully appreciating that “rock originated in Black culture.” Hanging out with Benton, they said, changed that. “Mark reminded me of James Brown and his iconic drum patterns, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Prince.” Picking up the guitar again “became me getting back to my roots.”
Benton has been playing keyboards for a year or so, is a longtime student of music “from different decades,” he said — “James Brown, Chuck Berry, Little Richard,” the acts who “inspired the White bands. It came from Black people. The whole genre, really. I feel reconnected to that style of music. The mainstream type of hip hop is containing, and it’s hard to be contained as an artist.”
The sound of Mightymoonchew, for Parker, is “freedom,” and “we try to cultivate that in every single moment because it’s being taken away from us right now. We’re not supposed to be surviving this, or overcoming. So it’s a real rebellion.”
Mightymoonchew is thinking about the future already. Since the summer, the band has played one show outside, done a livestream, and filmed a video. The members also have ideas for making videos for the songs on the album. “I think we’re all both excited and curious as to what shows will look like this year, if they happen,” Benton said.
“We already have a couple things lined up. But we could do anything,” Parker said. “Mightmoonchew could make a movie. We could make pottery. There’s no cap.”
And meanwhile, 900 Grand works as both a flash of a moment in time and a statement for what the band is about, and what it wants to do. “I just felt like I needed to scream and yell and get it all out, to show people and relate to people, and I hope that’s what the album does,” Parker said. “It’s a blessing to be able to do it. That’s why we feel the urgency to get it done.”
MIghtymoonchew’s 900 Grand is available on Bandcamp, Spotify, Amazon, and Apple Music.
