Akron Songwriter
Brian Lisik has spent decades making brash, garage-rock-rooted records, but …presents The Slovak Club began without a formal plan. A basement session with his brother and longtime drummer Craig Lisik turned into a seven-song set shaped by limited gear, first-take pressure, Slovak-American memory and Don Dixon’s instinct for leaving the right rough edges intact. The result sits at an interesting point between accident and intention: loose enough to feel alive, disciplined enough to know when a song has reached its destination.
Exposed Vocals caught up with Brian Lisik to talk about the take that changed the session, the unfinished songs he finally let go, the neighborhood photo that became an album cover, and the difference between spontaneity and sloppiness. The conversation also reaches the unusual release-night vision still taking shape in Akron—part dinner-club routine, part rock show, with room for martinis, bad jokes and, if he gets his way, pierogi.
The record began almost accidentally in Craig’s basement. At what point did the session stop feeling like a weekend experiment and start feeling like an album?
With “Why I’m Here” for sure. When we started I was worried we’d make this whole album and then be unable to get the tracks off Craig’s computer. So when that song came out perfect in the first take I went, “Let me take this to Don [Dixon, mixing engineer on the album] and see what we’re dealing with.”
“Why I’m Here” arrived in a single take from a riff and scattered lyric ideas. What do you hear in that recording now that would have disappeared if you had tried to perfect it?
The spontaneity for sure. Which you can never get back when it happens. I wish they all happened that way.
How did the limitations of Shangri-Lane Studio—the old JoeMeek compressor included—shape the personality of these songs?
I don’t know about Craig, because he is much more of a measured and patient producer than I am; I want to hear it finished before I even start writing it most of the time. But again, it created spontaneity. The gear—and Craig’s “let’s go have a cigarette and get back to this later” sort of style—kind of drove me nuts sometimes. So every time we hit record I thought, “Get it right the first time, ’cause you may not get a next time.” I’m surprised the songs sound as relaxed as they do, in fact. It really felt like recording in the ’50s or something. Ultimately, I like working like that. But it can be nerve-wracking going, “Did we get that? Please tell me we got that.”
You recorded more material than made the final seven-song sequence. What separated the songs that belonged to The Slovak Club from the ones you left behind?
They just got finished sooner. It wasn’t a matter of what is better and what is worse. In fact, two of the songs that didn’t make it—one called “Bloody Murder” and the other called “The Last One”—are really great. We just couldn’t figure out how to finish them and after two years trying I went, “Yeah, that’s enough.”
What did Don Dixon recognize in the recordings, and how did his mix preserve the basement energy while giving the album a finished identity?
I love Don. I remember the first time I met him, like 20-some years ago, he was speaking somewhere in Kent, Ohio, and he said, “I am the producer that makes people say: that band will be great when they get a real producer.” It’s amazing how he can leave something completely alone, yet make it sound a million times better. He’ll tell you he just threw some compression and slapback on it, but all wizards are like that—they never tell you what the real elixir is. And he came up with the guitar solo on “Romanian Eyes,” which is a thing of beauty.
The title and cover connect the record to the Slovak-American world you and Craig grew up around. How has that heritage shaped your humor, characters or sense of place as a songwriter?
I grew up around a lot of people who wore their ethnic heritage on their sleeves; Irish guys, Greek guys, Italian guys. And they all had clever T-shirts and social clubs. Slovaks did too, I guess. But it seemed less overt. Maybe we assimilated into American culture more easily, I don’t know. But I grew up with that curiosity—who are we? Where are we from? What do we eat? So it’s just curiosity. And I named the album pretty much as a joke. But we kept using it, and now—here ya go, it’s The Slovak Club.
The songs seem to balance sympathy for flawed people with a broader anxiety about the world around them. Is that tension something you consciously write toward?
My songwriting is seldom a conscious act of sitting down and saying, “Now let us write about … this!” I just react to things around me, things that are on my mind. And it’s like panning for gold. You have all these images and words and sounds in your head and all of a sudden you see something shiny in the dirt and go—there it is—gold! So I wouldn’t say I sought out that sense of tension, but it sure must have been hanging around waiting for me to write about it.
The cover came from a phone photo near the Jednota club. Why did that unplanned image feel more honest than a formal album shoot?
Ryan Humbert—who did the graphics work for the album cover—and I considered going out and re-shooting it, thinking, “Eh, is it good enough?” But he first sent me some basic ideas, using that image, and it’s just sort of … haunting, I guess. It’s an accidentally great photo in my opinion. The fact that I took it means nothing.
You’ve mentioned the possibility of a release show at a pierogi restaurant. What would the ideal launch night for this record actually look and feel like?
Unfortunately, the pierogi restaurant in Akron closed! Which was very sad. But there will be a release show at the Rialto Theatre in Akron on Nov. 7. It’s going to be an early, matinee show in their smaller room so I can do my dinner-club routine, maybe wear a tux, drink martinis and tell bad jokes. “Bring the lights down a little for this one, could ya, Sam?” And I might try and talk the management into putting pierogi on the menu that night too.
After the spontaneous beginning and two-year path to completion, what did this album teach you about trusting the first instinct?
Spontaneity seems to be a theme here, but I’m beginning to realize, after doing this as long as I have, that there is kind of an art to being spontaneous but not necessarily sloppy. Craig slowed me down when I was about to drive something off a cliff, and I’d like to think I got Craig to trust when something was OK enough to move on from when it was. So it took us a while, but we got us a really good record in the end.
That last distinction is the heart of the record: urgency without carelessness, and craft without sanding away the moment that made a song worth keeping. For Lisik, The Slovak Club is less a reinvention than a reminder that experience can sharpen instinct—and that sometimes the best production decision is knowing when the first take has already said enough.
Featured photo: Jason Chamberlain
