The Ratboys "Singin' to an Empty Chair "
Indie rock stalwarts Ratboys release Singin’ to an Empty Chair, via New West Records,
Despite its title, Singin’ to an Empty Chair isn’t defined by what’s missing. Rather, it’s the beginning of an important dialogue with a close loved one vocalist/guitarist Julia Steiner finds herself estranged from. The music on the band’s sixth studio album – its first for New West Records – fills the space that person left behind with 11 songs showcasing Ratboys' twangy, effervescent, as confident as they’ve ever been, and more emotionally interrogative than ever before. If the band’s last record, 2023’s widely-praised The Window, was "a level-up record,” then Singin’ to an Empty Chair is Ratboys at the peak of their powers.
To craft Singin’ to an Empty Chair, Julia Steiner, guitarist Dave Sagan, drummer Marcus Nuccio, and bassist Sean Neumann decamped to a 75-acre plot of land in Wisconsin’s Driftless Area to write and demo the new songs. Months later, the group reconvened back at the same cabin to begin tracking with co-producer Chris Walla, the band’s trusted collaborator who also produced The Window. After a one-week cabin session, Ratboys and Walla took the songs to Steve Albini’s famed Electrical Audio studio in Chicago, and later to Rosebud Studio in Evanston, Illinois, to finish recording. “We wanted to approach this record like it was a quilt,” Neumann says. “We recorded the songs in all these different places, so we approached it in a way where different songs had different scenes. Certain parts of songs were recorded in different spaces, and we switch back and forth between them throughout the record to help tell the story of each song.”
Steiner is “[a] sharp-eyed lyricist” (Vulture), and nowhere is this more clear than on Singin’ to an Empty Chair. "A big, overarching theme of this record is my attempt to document my experience being estranged from a close loved one,” she says. “The goal is to update this person on what's been going on in my life and to try to bridge that impasse and reach out a hand into the void.” Singin’ to an Empty Chair marks the first Ratboys album written since Steiner began therapy. The title references a therapy exercise called “The Empty Chair” technique, during which a person attempts to have a difficult conversation with someone who’s not physically present, by speaking out loud to an empty chair and imagining that the person is really there.
“It's not all doom and gloom,” Steiner adds. Though Singin’ to an Empty Chair navigates complex family dynamics, the band expertly weaves in candid honesty, chaos, and whimsy along the way. Humor finds its way into the conversation on the caffeinated anxiety anthem “Anywhere,” for which Steiner found inspiration in Sagan’s family dog. “Whenever Dave’s mom leaves the room, oh man, his whole world just falls apart,” she says. “You can see it in his face. I think a lot of us can relate to that sort of anxious attachment style.” The accompanying video, directed by Bobby Butterscotch, is an amusing visualization of this type of relationship. Footage of the band ripping a performance in a fish store are woven with clips of a pet owner visiting various places across Chicago with his goldfish.
