Pink Widower, Wednesday August 6

[August 6th, 2008]

To hear Jed Allan talk about his new band, Pink Widower (“I want to write ‘get up’ music,” he says. “High-life music to move asses and inspire people”), you’d be forgiven for imagining the 31-year-old Portlander as a zonked-out hippie instead of a clear-headed, stylishly unkempt man enjoying kombucha and a cigarette on a late summer’s evening. The dichotomy is fitting for both Allan’s approach to writing songs for this new project and the loose-limbed yet locked-in style that his bandmates use throughout the one-year-old band’s debut album, The Enchanted Realm of the Pink Widower (North Pole Records).

Many of the tracks feature a laconic reggae groove topped with a honking horn section, but have the clean, streamlined feel of a classic pop song. Others (the steady rumble of “Christmas Lights” and the uke and Rhodes piano-inflected “Let Me See”) take a path similar to that of the group Allan fronted for nine years, Six Foot Sloth.

Although Allan understands the associations between and Pink Widower and Six Foot Sloth, he sees the new project as a move past what he deems the “morose” music SFS trucked in. “It was great for me at the time,” he says, “because in our lives, we had so much sad shit happen to us. So that’s what we were into: writing really sad ballads.”

“I still write from a lost-love perspective,” he says, pointing to the shuffling track “Battledogs,” which contains the lines, “’Cause if my head stops working overtime/ That means our hearts won’t beat as one” as a key example. He is quick to mention, though, that “even if there’s dark stuff lyrically, there’s usually sun at the end.”

If there’s any negatives with Pink Widower, in Allan’s view, it’s in trying to wrangle his bandmates together for shows, as all of them play in other groups (drummer Gilles and tenor sax player Amanda Mason Wiles with Rollerball, sax player Christine Denkewalter with the Evolutionary Jass Band, and trombonist Toussaint Perrault with Tu Fawning and solo project Babydollar$). Still, “I trust them so much to make the most of it,” he says. “It’s that kind of music that’s easy for people to fall into and get into it. It’s no sweat.”