Tamara Alswager
The new songs explore issues of addiction and mental illness.
The story of Communist Daughter bandleader Johnny Solomon is filled with almost every rock star cliché imaginable: a spectacular flameout of a promising band, crippling drug addiction, stints in jail and rehab.
Despite setbacks, though, the Twin Cities-based Communist Daughter is back on the road. They play the Frequency Nov. 8, where the audience will hear songs from the band’s sophomore album, The Cracks That Built the Wall.
For Solomon, who writes the band’s songs, getting clean came with growing pains. “It was harder for me to write after I got sober,” says Solomon. “Getting back on the straight and narrow, and getting my health back, it was really hard to write. I felt like I lost a lot of my ability.”
In a harrowing memoir published online at Talkhouse, Solomon recounts some of his struggles with undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
“While recording music, I was visited by spiders in the periphery of my vision all the time, and as I got less and less sleep, they would drift into my line of sight — from giant spiders on desks and ceilings to hundreds of tiny spiders crawling across the computer screen,” he writes. “One night, I sat up watching wave after wave of spiders made out of blue electricity wash over my room. Thousands of tiny spiders made of light crashing over everything. I knew I was in serious trouble.” He goes on to recount how he once tried to break his own nose, thinking a spider had crawled into it, before appearing in a taped session for a local radio station.
Communist Daughter’s first album, 2010’s Soundtrack to the End, was released in the throes of Solomon’s addiction to alcohol and meth. While two tracks from it were getting played on Grey’s Anatomy, Solomon was sitting in the Hazelden treatment center in Minnesota. This year’s follow-up, The Cracks That Built the Wall, is a new start for the band, which is composed of veteran Twin Cities musicians, including bassist Adam Switlick, a former member of Solomon’s previous band, Friends Like These; and Solomon’s wife, co-lead vocalist Molly Solomon.
The Cracks That Built the Wall is a sonically eclectic, intensely personal album that, in many ways, serves as Solomon’s autobiography. On “BB Gun,” he addresses his addiction issues directly, while the mournful “Balboa Bridge” features a kind of familiar intimacy rarely achieved in a four-minute song. And as the songwriter describes it, the whole process has been rewarding: “Everybody’s got a little bit about them that’s broken, and we all have to come to terms with that.”
“I feel like it’s easier to write now,” Solomon adds. “There’s always bad stuff in life. Even if your life is great, there’s always suffering. So I like to explore the darker end of things. And I’ve got plenty of history, so if I want to pull on my history, I don’t have to go too far to remember.”
