Snegg Band: The Moon Came Up

In February 2006, Marc Snegg gathered four longtime Nevada City, Calif. friends at Brighton Sound in Sacramento. After years of focusing on the visual arts as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, Snegg had spent months reacquainting himself with his first art form: teaching himself piano and penning a handful of songs in his parents’ Nevada City barn. Those songs, which became The Moon Came Up, drew from an eclectic group of musical influences (John Lennon, Kate Bush, Bob Marley, Graham Nash, Art Tatum, Laura Nyro, Howlin’ Wolf, Supertramp) while keeping in view a few beacons from the art world (Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp).

Recorded quickly after the band learned the songs, in live takes, The Moon Came Up is a refreshingly loose and vibrant collection. But despite the spontaneity of the record, the Snegg Band’s evolutionary roots run so deep that, as an ensemble, it almost appears to be an inevitability.

The recording session reunited Snegg with two of his high school bandmates: guitarist (and sometime bassist) Dan Elkan (Holy Smokes, Them Hills) and keyboard player Peter Newsom (Daycare), both of whom were in the turn-of-the-century live staple Pocket for Corduroy. Joining the proceedings at Brighton was drummer Neal Morgan, who, along with Snegg, had long formed the rhythm section of Golden Shoulders, and whose self-titled solo project has often included Elkan as a sideman. Rounding out the group and playing bass (after a late arrival, which explains Elkan’s bass work early in the session) was Ryan Donnelly, whose own Casual Fog band, in its most fleshed-out incarnation, includes Elkan, Newsom, and Morgan.

With so many intertwined story lines, so many stages shared, and so many assists dished out, one might be tempted to label the Snegg Band a mere subset of some sort of “collaborative,” but that wouldn’t get quite to the heart of the matter. This is a band—talk to any of the members and they’ll tell you that. The Brighton Sound sessions, impromptu as they were, galvanized the players into a dead-serious, take-no-prisoners unit. Enabled by their shared musical history, the five-piece coalesced quickly, picking up on one another’s ideas and playing to each other’s strengths.

The result of this seeming contradiction—spontaneity and inevitability (or should we say intelligent design and evolution?)—is a group that sounds all at once fresh and familiar. Putting on The Moon Came Up is like trying on a thrift store sweater, lovingly worn-in, that fits you perfectly—you feel as if, in some alternate universe, it’s been yours all along.