20th anniversary of “Submarines” to be released on vinyl!

Here Comes Everybody, on the cusp of 40 years as a band (and a married couple), is celebrating the 20th anniversary of their 2005 album “Submarines” with a brand new remaster for a limited edition vinyl release. Back in the oughts, before vinyl was king again, the dynamic duo released this pivotal album of original piano rock on CD, and held the release party on a late August evening, René about 7 months pregnant with child. As proud as they were of this record, perhaps their proudest moment thus far as songwriters, and as absolutely over the moon as they were to be collaborating with bass guitar legend Fred Chalenor, the responsibilities of becoming new parents of a bouncing baby boy would prevent them from playing shows to promote the album for at least a year or two. So in celebration of the 20th year of “Submarines,” and in celebration of their son’s 20th birthday, HCE presents one more time to the world what might be their proudest musical moment. René and Michael are currently looking for a venue for a special release show and are shooting for a release in December, 2025.

Here’s what Michael said about the record in his blog essay about the 21st century musical history of Here Comes Everybody:

“Submarines (2005) If the Astronauts album is, in part, about an exploratory mission that ends up flying apart, Submarines is an album decidedly about coming back to Earth. In 2004, we started writing music again after taking some time away. We wrote a couple of demos on René's new baby grand piano, started to record a few of these initial ideas, and then something kind of miraculous happened. Three miraculous things, actually. One, a friend of ours, John Curtis, who had been living in Minnesota for a number of years was moving back to Portland, and wanted to bring with him, to share with his musician friends, a songwriting process or strategy he called The Lodge, the brainchild from an organization that called itself the Immersion Composition Society, wherein, one day a month, each participant in their own way and at their own little home studio, would write, record, and mix 6 brand new songs in a contiguous 24 hour period. He invited us into this collective, dubbed our chapter "The Veronica Lodge," and our participation would begin the most prolific and productive songwriting years thus far of our entire lives. More about this later, but suffice it to say that about half of the songs that we wrote for Submarines began their gestation as Lodge tunes. The second miraculous thing would be that the person answering an ad we had placed for a bass player was a guy named Fred Chalenor, the bass player for local legends Tone Dogs and later Caveman Shoestore. I was a huge fan of this guy's bass work and was absolutely blown away that he would call us, express interest in what we were doing, and would continue playing with us over the next couple of years. He would be a central contributing factor to the music that would eventually end up on the Submarines album. The third miraculous thing was that, as the songs were written, the recordings complete, release party booked, we learn in the early spring of 2005 that René is pregnant with our first and only child. 2004 and 2005 were pivotal years; they were monumentally inspiring, healthy, creative, life-altering, wonderful years.

Submarines was the first full-fledged concept album we had ever attempted. It told a story. It revolved around three main characters, a one-armed boy who lost his limb in a turbine, his neighbor Delores the painter, and her unfaithful husband Joe. The story is likely more coherent in my mind than it was explicitly on the album, because after these songs were written, I took inspiration from them to write a novella that fleshed out the entire saga. So the record is impressionistic. Listeners to the album alone might not come to the same conclusions, or have the same depth of understanding as they would if they had read the accompanying novella--and that's getting ahead a little bit, as I would not start to draft that story for at least another year or two. As uplifting as this album is (it begins with the song "Hole" and ends with the song "Whole"), it is a serious record. There's almost nothing funny in it. I had allowed the smart-ass funny guy to take a back seat in Astronauts, for Submarines he was entirely absent. The result was, I think, Here Comes Everybody's best album. Not that there's anything wrong with humor in music and my usual satirical or whimsical approach to lyric writing, but that there's something about denying my automatic impulses, about forcing myself to approach things differently; it paved the way for some really strong work.

Listening. Recorded at home, my first Pro Tools project, our first recording made directly to the computer, mixed again by Bob Stark and mastered by Ryan Foster. This record sounds decidedly better, fuller, bigger on the bottom end, than Astronauts. It begins with this cheerful little song about a boy losing an arm, but shifts in the next tune to another character in the story, Delores, who hears the story about the boy with one arm, oddly enough, from a song she hears in her car as she drives to the Oregon coast away from her troubles. How meta is that? I'm immediately struck by Fred Chalenor's contribution. The bass solo in "Turbine" through gobs of guitar distortion is unholy in the best of ways, and his fretless work in "Meanwhile" should make you cry, if the lyrics don't. Like my experience with Astronauts, both "Meanwhile" and "Postcard" are tugging on my heart strings in a big way. More glorious distorted bass in "Postcard." And more fretless in "Medicine." I think René and I make fine music, but I have always marveled at how a third musician, particularly of the bass player variety, can complete the music in such a significant way. We have been blessed over the years with so many great bass players, but the work on this record, for my money, is astoundingly skillful, musical, inventive. Worth the price of admission all by itself. Damn, I forgot about those cello parts and how hard Bob had to work to tune them--but they are beautiful. Again, René's background vocal work on this record is just terrific. She's so good at that. Overall, and not just because of the conceptual work, this is the most progressive record we had ever made, and I don't think we've made (or released) anything as progressive since.

At first glance, this album is darker than Astronauts, because, while the former record anticipated the shit, Submarines is about characters going through the shit--and emerging, successfully, submarine-like, from the depths. It's dark until everyone kind of figures out their stuff, until they see what's in their rear-view mirrors. It was therapeutic and inspiring to hear it again. This new year, 2025, is the 20th anniversary of Submarines. It's possible that some kind of commemorative thing is in order.

Sadly, Fred Chalenor passed in 2018 of complications from early onset Alzheimer's disease. He was 63 years old. I am forever grateful to have met him and to have worked with him during this short but profoundly important time. His contribution to the record was epic. We kind of just slipped out of communication with each other over the ensuing years, and the next time I heard anything about him he was already very ill. Next thing I knew he was gone. Damn it, people: keep folks who are important to you close. Don't let them slip away if you can help it.”

To read the entire essay: https://michaeljarmer.com/2024/12/30/notes-toward-a-musical-autobiography-volume-xvii-here-comes-everybody-into-the-21st-century/