Allen Coté is more aware than most musicians of the many factors that can shape a recording session. Some of those factors are obvious—where the songs were recorded, when they were recorded, who they were recorded with—while others are less tangible, like an artists’ mindset or the general feel of the session, but all of them can leave an major imprint on how a recording turns out. That’s why Coté’s recent output has arrived as a series of self-contained EPs rather than as the full-length album he’d at one point intended to make.
In 2012, Coté carved out some time to record with some friends, including Jackson Messner and Justin Rolbiecki of the dreamy folk-rock band The Vega Star, with the goal of capturing some material he and Messner had been kicking around. “Jackson was moving to Flagstaff, Ariz., for grad school, and we’d been working on some stuff for a couple of years at that point, so we just wanted to get some of that down on tape before he left town,” Coté says. “So we got together in Darling Hall, which was the practice and recording space for The Vega Star and some other bands at that time, and spent a weekend together. Friday night we went in for eight hours and knocked all the songs out, and they turned out ridiculously well for one recording burst.”
Those recordings seemed as good a foundation for an album as anything, so Coté set up another session to expand on them, this time at producer Ryan Elliott’s 7711 studio in Wind Lake, Wis., and with a different but overlapping cast of musicians that included members of The New Red Moons, The Great Lake Drifters and Lisa Ridgely and the Fainting Room. Compared to the session at the now-defunct Darling Hall, this one was more leisurely. “This time we’d actually rehearsed to the point where we kind of knew what we were doing,” Coté says. “There was a lot of downtime. We’d run a couple of takes of a song then break for two hours. We were right across the street from the lake on Memorial Day weekend, so we spent a lot of time just sitting on the grass.”
Those recordings turned out well, too, but when Coté tried pairing them with ones from Darling Hall, he found they didn’t mesh. “I couldn’t tie them together,” he says. “The cast was different, and the repertoire was so different, and so was the way we approached the songs.”
So he sat on both sessions for a couple of years until he could figure out what to do with them, before opting to release them as a series of EPs called The Sublimative Sessions. The first volume, released in 2014, collected a live session Coté recorded with Messner at WMSE in 2009. The second, released later that year, Vol. 2: Darling Hall (RIP), documented his 2012 sessions at The Vega Star’s now-defunct practice space. And the latest, Vol. 3: The Bad Verse, captures that laidback Wind Lake session.
“It felt like we were telling different stories in each session,” Coté says. “The way we chose which songs to play, the way we arranged the songs, the way we communicated with each other improvisationally—we were all in a completely different place in our lives from session to session. It felt like these stories worked better as a play in three acts as opposed to a novel.”
Vol. 3: The Bad Verse is the lightest of those three acts, featuring some of Coté’s most effervescent folk-pop yet. The twinkling “So Long” plays like an homage to Wilco’s Summerteeth, while opener “Gonzo,” a giddy duet with Lisa Ridgely, resembles Magnetic Fields and Jonathan Richman in its playful humor. Coté shows particular range on the pair of worldly tracks that close the EP, the starry-eyed “Le Bon Mot” and “La Muerta de las Cucarachas,” a David Byrne-esque foray into Latin music.
Like its predecessors, The Bad Verse is a digital-only release, though at his EP release show Friday, Coté will be selling zip-drive bundles of all three Sublimative Sessions, packaged with wooden whistles he carved himself.
“I had an idea for Christmas that I would make a bunch of toys for my nieces and nephews, and I discovered that making whistles was a lot easier than I imagined,” Coté says. “So the whistles are also going to be an interactive part of the show.
“There will be noisemakers, too,” he adds.
Allen Coté will be joined at his EP release show at Linneman’s Riverwest Inn on Friday, Jan. 22 by Lisa Ridgely and the Fainting Room and Krystal Kuehl. The show starts at 9 p.m. There will be a $5 cover.
