Steven Wardlaw had a gig lined up, but no drummer. Luckily, Wardlaw, leader of Holyoke post-punk band So Very Small, didn't have to look too far for a stand-in for drummer Teri Morris. In fact, he didn't even have to get off the couch. All he had to do was yell up the stairs to his 13-year-old son, Sam.
"Teri couldn't make the Who tribute show," explains Wardlaw. "Andy [Farr, bassist] and I were up for playing. Sam's a drummer, so I asked him if he could do it."
This was not a case of nepotism: the kid's got chops. "First of all, he's amazing, so it wasn't like we were doing a favor for Sam," says Wardlaw. "If he couldn't have done it, I wouldn't have asked him. I called the organizers first, to make sure he could even get into The Elevens."
"He's been playing drums since he was seven, but this was his first rock show," Wardlaw says. "He'll write up a drum piece, set up his kit, and perform in front of his entire middle school class, and the place will go nuts. So I'm thinking, 'This kid won't be nervous.' Then I'm looking at him on stage, and I'm like, 'Holy shit, he is nervous.' He was tight going into the first fill, but he loosened up right away and was tremendous."
The Who tribute show is not the first time that Sam has helped his father musically; according to the elder Wardlaw, the two have been working together for a few years now, particularly in the recording realm. "I started off having him help me bounce stuff down to two tracks and burning them to CD and stuff, just to get acquainted with the process, because he's actually really into that stuff," says Wardlaw. "This last recording session, he came for everything. Helped me set up the drum mics, getting levels, and sat there for six hours tracking Teri's drums, and then we got home to do the guitars and I'm like, 'Let's go Sam, time to track,' and he lined up all the patch bays and off we were."
And then there is daughter Zoe, who maintains So Very Small's Web presence. "Zoe has this dark, twisted sense of humor that she gets from me," Wardlaw says. "All my kids do. She is really funny. She's 15, runs the website. … And she's an amazing musician. She plays the clarinet and she's unbelievable.
"Zoe probably doesn't realize it, but she has a huge influence on my music," says Wardlaw. "Sam listens to all my old stuff, the back catalog stuff, the Who and the Clash and everything, and I know all that music. Zoe is the complete opposite. She will sit online and just literally look for bands; she's so hungry for new, cool bands, and so she'll yell out to me, 'Dad, come listen to this band!' She introduces me to way more music now than I introduce her to, which is really good for me, to hear fresh new stuff."
So Very Small is the latest in a series of outlets for Wardlaw's compositions. After playing for years in revered local punk band the Marshes and watching that band's pace slow, Wardlaw felt it was time for something else to keep him more active: "Well, the Marshes had been trying to figure out what to do. We have all this material, probably an album's worth, maybe two. We've just never been able to finish it. It had been dragging."
After a stint in The Speak, a band that also included Farr, he decided to change gears. "I started to write some acoustic material," says Wardlaw. "I did that, and I actually thought at the time that I would enjoy playing that material live, and then as I played it live, I didn't enjoy it as much. There were no musicians to feed off of. I'm so used to playing high-energy music and feeding off everyone, and I realized I didn't enjoy it as much.
"It was the first time I had sat down and written so many words on my own, without [Marshes' writing partner] Emil [Busi]," Wardlaw continues. "So I kept on writing after that, working on more material, thinking that I might record it acoustically, and then I thought, 'You know what? I think these songs might lend themselves more to being in a band situation. I think I might enjoy that more.' So then I called Andy, and he was very into it; we'd always liked playing together. I thought about drummers and then I thought about Teri, who's not only a great drummer but a great singer, so I called her up and brought her in."
Wardlaw now had a trio, a dynamic he was familiar and comfortable with, thanks to his lengthy run with the Marshes. "I really like the chemistry of a three-piece, and that collaboration," he says. "And the lack of extraneous personality things that occur in a three-piece. It's been wonderful playing with them."
Wardlaw's songwriting methodology has shifted. "Back in the Marshes, we would sit down to music that we wrote, and then write vocal melodies and words after that," he says. "And I always had it in my head that that's the way I should write music for myself, but I was never able to do it. Everything that I ever did I hated. Despised. I'd listen back the next day and be like, 'That sucks.' Then I all of a sudden started to just write words that mean something to me—things going on in my life, whatever it is… and I'm like, 'Why didn't I do this for the last 20 years?' Stupid idiot."
The lessons might have revealed themselves slowly, but Wardlaw is still thankful the new routine has made all the difference in his new band. "Now I have some sense that I need to leave Teri and Andy some space, or that they're going to do something great if I just do this, give them a starting point for an arrangement," he says. "And now I have a sense of how we work as a band, it's really helping the new batch of songs I'm writing. I've never had any interest in writing other people's parts. They're going to come up with something far more interesting than I could come up with."
So what's the story behind the band's name?
"It just came from, literally, the fact that my life is so very small in the context of a country, a community," Wardlaw says."The world is so very small in the context of the universe; the universe is so very small in the context of multiple universes, you know. It's just sort of a universal theme in my head."
Wardlaw contends that after three kids and two decades of creating and playing songs, his passion for music has not waned. "I've never been more enthusiastic," he says. "But I can't help it. It's always just been in me. I have to be playing music, writing music. It's really not a choice. My wife doesn't particularly like that. I try to explain that to her, and she says it is a choice. I tell her it's not: I have to do it, and I can't shut it down. My enthusiasm for it never changes. If anything, it's expanded thanks to the kids."
For songs and a list of upcoming shows, visit www.myspace.com/soverysmall.
