Website: www.bodeans.com

MySpace: www.myspace.com/bodeans

Twenty three years after their T-Bone Burnett produced debut Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams led them to win a Rolling Stone reader’s poll as “Best New American Band,” The BoDeans are still rocking and harmonizing gracefully, touring the U.S. regularly and exposing the kids of their longtime steadfast fans to real, heartfelt and trend-free music. Best known for their mid-90’s Billboard Top 20 hit anthem “Closer To Free,” which became the theme song for Fox’s “Party Of Five,” the dynamic musical duo—Kurt Neumann (vocals and electric guitar) and Sam Llanas (vocals and acoustic guitar)—is still focused on, as Neumann says, “writing songs that bring good things to the world.” Which makes the title of their highly anticipated 429 Records debut Mr. Sad Clown edgily ironic.

Reflective of Neumann’s feeling that his and Llanas’ songwriting on their compelling ninth studio album is among their most exposed and vulnerable ever, the two are in perfect harmony when singing the words “Mr. Sad Clown” on the bluesy ballad “Today.” It’s a term Neumann remembers from a party back when the two were in high school in the late 70s in Milwaukee. Llanas was being his usual social self while Neumann, typically reclusive, was sitting alone by a speaker listening to Pink Floyd. Neumann recalls, “A drunk girl came up to me and asked, ‘What’s the matter, Mr. Sad Clown?’ The song is about not always being socially acceptable, just as our music was never about gimmicks and fitting into popular styles. I never wrote from this point of view before and I like it.”

The irony continues throughout this eclectic project. Neumann, who lives 20 minutes outside Austin, told Llanas, still based in Milwaukee, that he was eager to write more songs from the perspective of an adult--about the paths we choose, the hard decisions we
make, and even raising kids—as opposed to the kind of song you write when you’re 20 and just looking for a good woman to hang out with for the night. “We’ve been down a lot of roads since then and I thought it was time to reflect this stage in our lives. Sam told me that he thought we had written enough songs about love,” says Neumann. “When he came down to work in my studio, two of the songs he brought were the rocker ‘Feel Lil Love’ and the ballad ‘Easy Love.’ It was pretty funny.”

Llanas insists that on the whole, the songs he and Neumann recorded over eight months embody the changing realities of their lives. “Let’s face it, we’re not kids anymore,” he says. “The first album came out in 1986 which is almost 25 years ago. The hope is that
we’ve matured and aren’t writing about life from the same perspective. We can write about love and relationships but we’re drawing on a lot more experience and a whole different viewpoint than when we were 21. It’s great having younger fans but we’re also
excited to make music for people our own age. Hopefully, if you’re trying to get better and evolve as a writer and artist, you evolve and write what you know about. Musically, the cool thing is, we’re not trying to reinvent ourselves. Between the two of us, we
naturally cover a wide range of styles and have a nice palette of colors to choose from.”

The BoDeans may be speaking to a slightly older generation on Mr. Sad Clown, but their approach to writing and recording is reminiscent of the organic, stripped down DIY vibe that Neumann and Llanas had in the early 80s, before they signed their first deal with Slash/Warner Bros. Back then, the duo would go into a small four track tape studio and do whatever they could, without any outside production assistance. This time, Llanas, still adamantly anti-computers and technology, would travel back and forth from Milwaukee down to Neumann’s home studio and the two would chip away at the songs. They’d lay down basic tracks and the multi-instrumentalist Neumann would later add bass and drums. For sweetening, they brought in good friend, Michael Ramos for keyboards and also trumpet parts on “Stay,” “Shine”—the one track the two wrote together from start to finish--and “Cheesecake Pan.”

I think there was a sense of getting back to that original place on this album. We’d just come up with our songs and do them our way, not really connected to what’s going on in pop music today. My home studio is isolated enough so that we could totally focus on developing the songs he and I both brought to the table.” Llanas adds, “He’s got fantastic equipment down there. With my songs, generally I’d fly down for a few days and would play him some songs and we’d find a beat that was good. I’d put down a version of my song to the beat and he’d take over from there.”

A perfect example of the BoDeans’ unique songwriting process is the sparse electric guitar ballad “If.” Llanas had the tune in his head but didn’t have the words. One day, he was watching Albert Finney in a movie about Winston Churchill. There was a scene in which his wife is leaving on vacation and he doesn’t want her to go. The emotion he conveyed without a single word was so inspiring to Llanas that he finished the song in ten minutes. After Neumann heard it, he decided it needed a third verse. Llanas told him the story and Neumann suggested it could be the last verse. “A great example of how Kurt can take a song I wrote and make it better,” says Llanas.

The songs on Mr. Sad Clown that capture the balance of beauty and sadness, of the swift passage of time are “Stay,” “Say Goodbye” (which was inspired by Neumann’s looking back on his days of youth), “Almost Ready” (coming to terms with the idea of moving on from the one you thought you loved the most in life), “Gone” (all things must pass) and “Are You Going My Way?” (people growing and changing and either moving together or breaking apart). Ever socially conscious, Neumann’s infectious and incisive “Headed for the End of the World,” taps into the greed, power and corruption that has always been
part of humanity. But, as he says, “The great equalizer is evolution. So take your allotted piece of nothingness and live it up.”

For the BoDeans, the fact that their music was never easily pigeonholed into a specific genre or style was more a strength than a problem as their career developed. They followed their debut with Outside Looking In (1987), Home (1989), Black and White (1991), and Go Slow Down (1993), which featured “Closer To Free” which became a massive pop and adult contemporary hit when the world heard it every week via “Party of Five.” In the late 90s, after the release of the 2 CD live set Joe Dirt Car and Blend (1996), Neumann and Llanas took a break to record solo albums. Llanas formed the band Absinthe and released A Good Day To Die, while Neumann played all the instruments on his solo effort Shy Dog.

Realizing, as Neumann said at the time, that “the sound we made together was bigger than the sound we made apart,” The BoDeans reunited in 1999 to perform a cover of The Beatles’ “I’ve Just Seen A Face” as the theme song for the “Party of Five” short-lived spinoff “Time Of Your Life.” A few years after the release of the 17-song compilation The Best of BoDeans – Slash and Burn in 2001, they returned to studio recording with Resolution (2004) and then a live album and subsequent DVD called Homebrewed: Live From The Pabst. Their last project, Still, was released in 2008.

“I think the reason we’ve stayed popular with the fans all these years,” says Llanas, “is that we’re real guys, not trying to be anything special and worrying about our hair, clothes and getting into goth or another cool flavor of the moment. People who like us are the same kind of fans who are into Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and Tom Petty. We give them the organic truth. It’s fun to do shows and that’s what I’m best at. I’m not a studio rat for the most part. Onstage, we get that immediate reaction to what we’re doing and feed off the energy people give us. When you walk into a room of 500 people, something amazing is bound to happen. A concert is like a tennis match for us. We lob the ball into the audience, they lob it back, and as it goes back and forth it becomes more exciting for everyone.”

Neumann sees the enduring success of The BoDeans as a byproduct of making music that creates a special connection to moments in people’s lives. “It’s not always this dramatic,” he says, “but we do hear of stories where people are ill or dying and our songs give them a sense of joy and hope. It’s always wonderful to be important to people’s lives. We also saw this YouTube clip of two kids in car seats singing one of our songs on a family road trip. Their parents are playing our songs and we are a part of their world in that moment. I want to know someday that I’ve brought good things into this world, and this kind of fan response confirms that Sam and I have been able to do this.”