Beep Beep comes to your house

Singer Eric Ray trades secrets for couches.

By Joey Vergara

Published April 23, 2009

If things go wrong for Beep Beep's Eric Ray, he might ask himself: What would Kate Bush do?

"Gosh, I don't know how to summarize," the singer/guitarist said. "She's like a kid forced to stay in a room all day. She's created her own world and there are so many beautiful things in there."

And a lot of things have gone wrong in the past few years for the Bush devotee. Since releasing Business Casual in 2004, Beep Beep, in many ways the black sheep of Saddle Creek Records, has faced an almost wholesale lineup change, including the loss of founding member Chris Terry and a yearlong delay on the release of sophomore album Enchanted Islands.

Despite the hold-ups, Ray was able to put together an album that captures his eccentricities and boundless imagination, much like his idol, the wacky and unbridled Bush. The album is marked by a split personality, at times recalling Beep Beep's chaotic debut and at others slowing down to a crawl.

The addition of Ray's occasionally disconcerting falsetto on Enchanted Islands is a conscious effort to combat the misconception the band faced with its first album -- that it was an uber-masculine, aggressive statement.

"I just wanted to remove any inkling of machismo from Beep Beep," Ray said. "(It's) wishing I had the physical properties of a woman in order to make such beautiful music, and I sure don't. But having the tools that I have at hand, my very amateur, even falsetto was all I could bring to the table."

The second album's writing process also marked a departure from more traditional, analytical songwriting for Ray.

"I have this little Canon camera that does video," he said. "For all of Enchanted Islands I would just turn it on and start playing and have probably a thousand clips. Maybe 20 of those were actual material for the record."

What resulted is a much less monotone, more Kate Bushian record. The lyrics recall strange fantasy worlds, and all the pieces fit together more loosely than before.

"Chris and I both certainly tried to let our right-hemisphere spit out whatever it wanted to spit out and try not to censor it or edit it," Ray said. "I love to organize and make things structured and concise, which my brain wants to do as soon as any random idea spills out. Just putting that on hold and not trying to understand was something I was definitely consciously trying to do."

With line-up issues resolved and his album finally released, Ray, who is a year away from a chemistry degree at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, can go back to his day job: destroying the divide he sees between fan and musician. Before the band's current tour, he issued a call to interested fans to get in touch about "Beep Overs," slumber parties during which the band gives away secrets and basically hangs out with fan volunteers. In return, the band has received couches to sleep on, cookies in D.C. and a periwinkle jacket in Seattle.

It's all part of a bigger hope Ray holds for people to avoid the "cool" attitude and posturing now taken to an extreme in independent music.

"They're full of horrible self-awkwardness and things that people are trained to be embarrassed about," he said. "We want people to stop trying to be so cool and just enjoy being how amazing they are as they are."