You can never go home again, Thomas Wolfe famously wrote, but what if you could get just close enough to see it? On Gazebo, his second record as Ulna, Adam Schubert does exactly that, fixing his gaze northwest from Chicago to the suburb of Northbrook, where he grew up. This is not a nostalgic view. Schubert was, in his words, “a bad kid” who had to go to school off campus, was expelled, and spent most of his time hanging with other kids in similar situations. Now sober and a member of the thriving Chicago DIY scene—he plays guitar in Bnny alongside wife Alexa Viscius, with whom he duets on Gazebo’s “Prairie Fire”—he’s looking back on a conflicted suburban teenhood, one characterized and complicated by hard living and caring friendships. A sense of distance permeates these songs: the distance from the bright lights of Chicago, which a teenaged Adam saw on the horizon in Northbrook, and the distance of time from which he now looks back.
Schubert wrote Gazebo while he was also writing and recording 2021’s OEA, pulling ideas, structures, and images from a decade’s worth of daily songwriting practice. “I wanted to write a record that my teenage self would listen to,” he says, citing young loves Built to Spill and Modest Mouse as his lodestars. While both of those bands would develop their sounds into glossy, major-label indie rock, Gazebo points back to their earliest ideas: plangent melodies, narcotic atmospheres, deceptively intricate guitar lines. Like the work of ’00s indie heroes Girls, these songs carry their ambitions lightly, not making a show of their own complexity but revealing their facets with the patience and care of an old friend.
Working with producer Robbie Haynes or at home alone with his Tascam, Schubert mixed these songs down to varying levels of fidelity, adding compression, their ceilings lowering and going gray like clouds descending on a midwestern autumn. In “Dreams,” the guitars redline immediately, their sentimental chords going hoarse as they bypass their boundary. Even “Pennies,” a sweetly melodic reflection that unrolls atop a guitar rag, is heard through layers of tape and field recordings. At times, listening to Gazebo feels like peering back into a grainy expanse, trying to determine what actually happened back there, whether it’s as bad—or as good—as it seems.
“There are really specific moments that I remember fondly,” Schubert says. “I’m not even sure that they happened, but it feels like they did.” As Gazebo shows time and again, painful memories don’t always feel painful in the making. By immersing himself in the past, and framing the desires, passions, mistakes, regrets, violence, confusion, and graces of his teenhood together on this album, Schubert offers a warmly redemptive view of those years—one that could only be taken in from a distance. In the end, music provides a way forward. “Life goes on in that song,” he sings, a reminder that new futures can always be imagined.
--- Marty Sartini Garner