HereSay
Good Music, Acoustic Rock, Folk
26
songs
953
plays
Why Do I Stay Up/Fiberoptic Dog (Basement Demo) Why Do I Stay Up/Fiberoptic Dog (Basement Demo)
From the Track 4 Collection; Recorded in the Summer of 1999
BOJ (First Demo) BOJ (First Demo)
From the Track 4 Collection; Recorded in the Fall of 1999
Ride a Rohr (Original Demo) Ride a Rohr (Original Demo)
From the Track 4 collection; Recorded in the summer of 1999
Blue Hollow Breakdown Blue Hollow Breakdown
From the album "Theech"; Produced by Joe Huettner and Rob Leib
The Holes Are Only Stars The Holes Are Only Stars
From the album "Theech"; Produced by Joe Huettner and Rob Leib
Show all (26)
Welcome to the HereSay Anthology - a page devoted to the popular band from Adams County, Pennsylvania.
"The official beginning of HereSay would have to be when Rob, Ben, and I wrote the words "HereSay," "Hearsay," "Heerse'," and "Horensagen" on the cinder blocks of Ben's basement wall..the last one being the German spelling of "hearsay." We had been playing together for maybe a month or two, and decided on the word - it took another month to figure out the spelling.
But the beginning of the beginning was when Ben and I began hanging out - Ben had his Stratocaster guitar, and I had...well, I had anything I could play, but primarily an autoharp. The first song we played was "Big Me" by the Foo Fighters, because all the chords were on the autoharp. There we were, playing guitar and autoharp and butchering a simple song, but in our minds, we were already a band." - Joe
"Technically, I think it began with Joe and Henry [Benton] in my living room playing '5/4 Jew Funk' which was never released. At that time, Joe and I both played bass....well, we both had basses. Henry had the oldest, ugliest, sweetest green fake strat I'd ever seen. But beyond that, I think it really began late Summer '99 at Ben's house. We spent an afternoon recording 'Bad Moon,' 'Out of My Head,' and 'I've Got a Feeling'. I believe Crotch was also there at that time, playing Grant DeLong's mouldy drum set. I'm pretty sure HereSay officially began when we convinced Mr. DeLong that we'd bring the drums back someday soon." - Rob
"I remember I had just been told that HereSay would be happy to have me as a drummer and then one night I get a call from Ben. He says that the Quixotics need a drummer for a gig that night. I had never met any of the Quixotics and had never played with them. But I packed up the drums and Ben filled me in on the way. We sat down and played a great show, had lots of fun. And by the end of the night, when it was all over I realized I had just gotten the greatest introduction to a band ever." Mike
"Recording was a chore, but I don't remember it as one because we were always clowning around. I can't pick one funny thing over another, really - it was all very silly and I like it very much." - Ben
"[Sessions] were hell. Straight up. If Indie was ever cool, girls should be fainting in our footsteps, and we should be too cool to look down or avoid stepping on them. Our first recorder, lovingly dubbed 'Track 4' was actually worse than a standard stereo tape deck. It had 4 inputs, but only the fourth one worked. We also had one microphone, one stand, and a bunch of static-y instrument cables. From that, we produced the Soup Can Tape, our first album. As a result of high speed dubbing, all the tapes in existence ( I believe) self-destructed after 6 days.
Needless to say, things got better, but it was always by slip and by shod. We were always trying to get new sounds into the same old microphone. And we were always building foam walls and hanging mics from the rafters to try to keep other things out of them. I think recording with HereSay provided me with more problem solving tools and spacial conceptualization than Mr. Bair's Mechanical Drawing class ever did!" - Rob
"I think the sessions were a testament to the amount of Mountain Dew a high school kid could drink between midnight and 5:00 AM. They were a riot, and at the same time, they were a chore. My ultimate regret is that most of the sessions were at my house - which caused Ben trouble because of his allergies and my pets.
We also had about three "walks" a night - we would walk from my house down past the old Thomas mansion, to where the "Humpty Bridge" used to cross the railroad tracks. We would talk about anything and everything - our songs, our lives, our problems, what we'd record next...we talked a lot, and I think that's a good thing. It's almost like our CDs, to us, were a record of our conversations." - Joe
"I just remember the experience of recording all night and waking up to see if what we did the night before actually sounded good or if we were so tired that our "masterpiece" was actually some audible version of shit. Most times they really were masterpieces. I secretly kept all the shit sessions and now hide them in my cassette drawer filed under 'Randy Newman'." - Mike
"Several memories come to mind:
I remember the horrible midnight-8am session that produced "Fiberoptic Dog" in all of its unable-to-ever-recreate-again glory.
I remember Joe falling asleep in to lucious sex-filled dreams courtesy of an all-night 'Undressed' marathon, while Ben and i slaved to record "I'm Confused" in its never-to-be-played-live-even-once-thus-excluding-the-possibility-of-trying-to-recreate-it glory.
I remember Ben and I writing songs by candle light on some cold ass fall night because the power was gone out. We wrote "All I See" and something else brilliant. Then we went outside and screamed "Go Home Joe!" into the wind because we thought Joe was trying to come down to Ben's house from Boy Scout Camp. He wasn't though. He was pursuing other creative urges at the time.
The best memory by far was when Joe was doing the final take of vocals in Somebody/Nobody. Ben and I stood behind Joe asses bared to the sun waiting to give him a heartfelt round of applause. Its still on the track on most copies of the disc. Some of the ones I distributed did not have it because I liked an alternate mix of the track in which i had removed the jocular reveries. Thinking now, I'm not sure why Ben and I did it, I think the idea came from Sgt. Pepper's." - Rob
"(Laughing) Yeah, I remember coming back to Ben's house...I actually did walk a good mile from Boy Scout Camp to my girlfriend's house...and I stopped by Ben's so that Rob could drive me back. It was freezing that night! I remember that Rob and Ben played me "All I See" and "Why Do I Stay Up"...and they had started writing "So Hard Feelin' Good." I was amazed - it was almost like I myself wasn't taking the band as seriously as they were until I heard those songs that night. This was when we were going from a goofy, almost comical band, to a group that was seriously putting a lot of time and effort into our music." - Joe
"I think the reason for HereSay's popularity wasn't that we did anything flashy or extremely crazy...most bands during our high school years were either loud heavy rock bands, or moshing punk bands. We just wrote music and wanted to share it. Our success was really due to our confidence and our ability to get people to our shows - which, for the most part, was all Ben." - Joe
"My favorite live memory was when we struck up "Sunshine" at the Ridgewood Wedding gig, to see a throng of people rush up to us and start their own dancefloor! Sweet!" - Ben
"Okay, picture it: Emily Paull's birthday party. We were on between Boot-n-Jon and some sadly band from New Oxford. Boot-n-Jon played. No one noticed. They got off easy. We played, and played with such fury and depth of character that the winds began to whip around us at upwards of 70 knots. Unfortunately, this just blew all the equipment off stage and made any semblance of cohesion impossible. The fury was so great, they say, one of the New Oxford kids was suddenly un-bored, causing his head to explode. However, the rest didn't even stir from their sad contemplations, and we didn't get paid either. I say this memory was good because it was on that very day that I became aware of my own mystic powers, forcing me to drag my feet about and shun live preformance forever after, fearing for the lives of those around me." - Rob
"We used to play "Baby One More Time" a lot, that Britney Spears song. I think the fact that it was just a ballsy move struck a chord with most people, but in reality, we were trying to show people that it's actually not a bad song at all. It was when we started teasing people with other songs, like "Stairway to Heaven," before going into a Britney Spears tune - that was when we got some reactions. Not always good reactions, but reactions, nonetheless." - Joe
"I'll always remember the middle of "Rocketman" at the Biglerville show. When we hit the middle and started rockin', we clicked. All of us there just knew it. I remember Ben lookin' over at me and smiling ear to ear. We really became a band that moment, up on stage, rockin and just loving music. And of course, the light-stylings of Jarrod Jones put the icing on the cake." Mike
"Our shows were usually two sets, and we'd take a break between them - which became time for Ben and I to play solo songs. I performed "Out Loud" by Dispatch once, and it was just a cool feeling, even though I didn't write it, to see people singing along. And other times, it was great to just see people bobbing their head to our songs.
My favorite song to perform live, by far, was "Red House." Ben knew that song like the back of his hand, and Mike would feed off of what he played. And I just got to sit back and groove on it. When my solo would come up, I'd always go crazy with it, until one night I started playing, and my hands started doing the melody of "Night Train." And since we were all in the BHS Jazz Band, Ben and Mike went right along, hitting the accents perfectly. It was just a fun time." - Joe
"They were an amazing batch of songs for who we were at the time. So Hard feelin' Good, Pudding, BOJ, Joe Forgotten, and Elevator were always what I thought of as the big five- the ones that held the album together. But honestly, Somebody/Nobody is genius. Till the End ismost moving song we ever had. What the hell did I write again?" - Rob
"'All I See.' It's a pretty simple song, but it's a beautiful melody and a beautiful message - "you and love are all I see", it's a simple notion. See? It all fits together!" - Ben
"My personal favorites, from the early days, were the collContact
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