Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
October 14–21, 1999
music issue
Sky's theLimit
The Skywriters: The little indie band that can
There are two kinds of pop music. The one that everyone knows: Total Request Pop with a capital "p" made by ex-Mouseketeers. And then there are the pop songs that your boyfriend’s too stupid to know about: the stuff that comes from bedrooms and basements. Music played by and for lonely obsessives looking for the perfect song for an imperfect world, hoping for their crush to crush on them too. This is the stuff of The Skywriters.
"They’re all love songs, really," says drummer/Philadelphia Weekly contributor Bethany Klein, a 21-year-old Bryn Mawr grad and Smiths fanatic who formed the quintet with a bunch of her friends a little over a year ago. The band originally started as a duo with guitarist, ex-metal head Jayme Guokas, 24, from neighboring Haverford College. Then came bassist Joel Tannenbaum, 23, a former member of punk band Plow United. Klein met him as a teenager when they both worked at Happy Harry’s Pharmacy in Chadds Ford. Vocalist Rose Bochansky, 22, lived in Klein’s dorm. She was asked to join because she sounded really good in the car. The youngest Skywriter, 20-year-old Neal Ramirez, got his start doing Ben Lee-inspired bedroom recordings under the name The Thrift Shop.
Last spring, The Skywriters released a nifty self-titled EP on the tiny Providence, RI-based label Brentwood Estates. Then the EP’s Small Factory-like boy-girl duet, "Maybe Baby," ended up on the local Legion of Boom compilation. A single on Japanese label Galaxy Train is to follow, as well as a compilation in the works by Ramirez and Tannenbaum.
Their combination of jangly guitars, sweet vocals and innocent lyrics call to mind the pre-Nirvana pop underground: Heavenly, Beat Happening, The Pastels. While The Skywriters are the kind of band you could picture in Chickfactor (the People magazine of indie pop), they’re flattered to get that kind of praise.
Ramirez half-jokingly says that he wants all Skywriters songs to sound like "Washington, D.C.," the misunderstood song from The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs that’s part ’70s tourism jingle and part "Mickey." Klein compares their EP’s handclap, feel-good closer, "King of Noise," to "what Sesame Street could have been if they went that extra step." One of The Skywriters’ new song "Love Supreme" sticks with the PBS theme: each of the song’s four parts is named for one of The Teletubbies.
Recently, the band embarked on their first tour, a nine-city East Coast jaunt where they learned that you can actually have fun in Baltimore of all places. While Klein and Guokas did the aquarium, Bochansky, Ramirez and Tannenbaum wreaked havoc in the harbor, offending families and experimenting with paddle-boat safety. They tried to fake Ramirez’s drowning by dropping him off in a secret location and then sailing back to the dock with a conspicuously empty life jacket. "Nobody said a thing," says Tannenbaum. "We totally could have killed him."
"It was a typical Skywriters moment," says Bochansky. "We weren’t as punk rock as we were trying to be."
