Tobin Sprout (Photo by Brooke Olesnavage)
The production's as muddy as ever; some dropped eighth notes on the hi-hat are pretty easy to pick out. But that's part of the aesthetic, or at least part of the expectation, for Tobin Sprout's work. It's all gauzy at the edges — perfection obscured by the haze of ambition, memory and the plain imperfection of life.
In each of the past four decades, Sprout has worked through various acts initially based in Dayton, Ohio, a town that's managed to give the world work as dissimilar as the funky Ohio Players and Kim Deal's ’90 rock ensemble the Breeders. But Sprout's stint helping to craft Guided by Voices' beer-soaked pop poetry coincided with some of the act's most lauded and influential efforts — 1994's “Bee Thousand” and 1995's “Alien Lanes.” Since 1995, though, the multi-instrumentalist has been issuing work under his own name.
Universe LP Cover.
His first long-player since 2010, “The Universe and Me” vamps on notions that easily could be linked to his time in GBV.Kinksian melodies remain as important to this new disc's success as ever. Opening with “Future Boy Today,” Sprout delves into a seemingly omnipresent lyrical conceit, something explored in more than a few GBV cuts, as well as in his own work.
“I go back to my childhood a lot...” Sprout says over the phone from his Michigan home. “Just the imagination you had as a kid, you reflect on that and try to get back to that or incorporate that into the songs.”
“When I Was a Boy” sketches out a life where Sprout's protagonist zips up his coat, explores the world and later reflects on finally making a life for himself. It's a song written perhaps to comfort the songwriter; the chorus reminds us all not to fret too much.
Given his unrelenting desire to cull the past for sepia-hued memories, Sprout's work on children's books was a reasonable extension of all the poesy floating around in his head.
“A publisher got a hold of me who had seen my illustrations and said, ‘Do you want to do a book?' I’d never done a book before, so I had to sit down for a month or whatever to focus on it and got away from music,” Sprout says about working on his first book, 2009’s “Elliott,” and explaining the six-year gap between solo dispatches. “I think it was a totally different experience than what I expected. It was different than writing a song — it was more difficult.”
Excavating childhood for concepts to splay out across his various creative endeavors, though, didn't disallow Sprout, who has a background in illustration and graphic design, from rendering guitar chords more gnarled and sooty than elsewhere in his catalog. He attributes the sound to fiddling with a new effects pedal but sees “Universe” as spiritually linked to “Carnival Boy,” his 1996 album that sports a title track portraying a kid searching the world for his future. Over 20 years later, “The Universe and Me” could be understood as that recording’s resolution.
“It’s almost like you have an idea of where you want it to go, but then it goes wherever it wants to go,” Sprout says about working through the songwriting process. “I think I still write the same... I’ll start recording a chord sequence and work with that for a while, add drums and listen to it for a while. Some things work and some things don’t. I’ll sculpt the words and the melodies, and by the end of that, I’ll have a recording.”
Illustrations, though, don't work the same way for the Ohio-born artist. There's a different sort of incubation period, with sketches and an eventual fleshed-out version of it all dashed with color. And while Sprout has found more than a modicum of success in each of his chosen mediums, there remains a screen between the world outside and his internal state and sense of self.
“I always saw myself more as an artist. I love both of them,” Sprout says about working in the art world, as well as in music. “My own ideal of myself is as a visual artist.”
Multifaceted artist Tobin Sprout plays Strange Matter May 25 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $13 in advance and $15 at the door. 804-447-4763 or strangematterrva.com.
