Age Rings
Gig Seeker Pro

Age Rings

| SELF

| SELF
Band Alternative Pop

Calendar

This band has not uploaded any videos
This band has not uploaded any videos

Music

Press


"Performer/Cover Story"

Ted Billings of Age Rings has somehow hurt himself today. There is a ring of duct tape around his left hand that holds a swatch of gauze over an impressive looking gash. This sort of improvised setup is Billings' specialty. "Music is really all I'm good at," disclaims the sandy-haired 23-year-old, raising his hands and his eyebrows simultaneously. "I'm not that great at anything else besides writing and recording records," he concludes.

Billings has proven himself adept at the recording process with his first release under the name Age Rings, a ten-track record that sounds more like a haunted redwood forest rather than a sapling that has just recently began growing. Some records take years of work from a multitude of people to complete - Age Rings is four months' work to the hyper-efficient Ted Billings. "I am the most productive motherfucker you will ever meet," he posits, thumping the table in front of him for emphasis. Coming from most artists, this might sound pretentious or hollow, but it's not difficult to believe when Billings says it, based on the light that shines in his eyes. You get a feeling that he just composed a beat there three seconds ago when thumping on the table, and that anything he says might end up in an Age Rings composition somewhere down the line.

Exactly how productive is Billings? Consider the fact that the Big Bang that begat the Age Rings world occurred less than a year ago, in August of 2005. Two months later, they recorded drum and bass tracks at New Alliance Audio, then a month after that, the Age Rings held a pseudo-record release party back at New Alliance. By January of 2006 the band was playing at Bill's Bar.

While the initial recording exists in the physical world as concrete evidence of just what this "Age Rings" project is all about, many details of the venture are shrouded in mystery. First off - who actually is Age Rings? Examining the makeup of the group is an exhausting exercise, but it gives a few clues as to a possible meaning behind the metaphors inferred by the name.

The Age Rings' page on MySpace.com lists 334 "friends," the top eight of whom include local luminaries such as the Campaign for Real-Time and the Lot Six. The "band" is listed as Billings plus five others, but that isn't actually the "band" either. The tracks on the record were recorded by three people - Billings, Aaron Sinclair of the Lot Six, and Josh Smith. In truth, the entire Age Rings world revolves around the brain of one person - Ted Billings.

Billings grew up in Hanover, Massachusetts. Along the way he found several close friends in his hometown, and they began working on music with each other. Billings and friends quickly found their way into the Boston music scene. "We were all like 14- and 15-year-old kids, getting dropped off at the train and coming into Boston for shows on the weekends. Well, sometimes on the weekdays too," says Billings, trailing off like he's worried his mother is in the next booth. She's not. He continues, saying that this mishmash of Hanover's rock scene and his own integration into the Boston rock scene has found him the impressive names on his friends list.

Almost every proper name that Billings mentions, save those such as Tom Petty, Beck, and George W. Bush, are close friends. The common theme within Billings' own internal friend list is music - everyone is involved somehow, and that is one of the resources that he draws upon in his own music. "Keep it close," he says, continuing that he would never want to work with someone he did not know and trust implicitly. This highly personal approach to what many consider exclusively a "business" has put Billings in some tough spots, but it has also allowed him to shine through and produce some truly special material as he has done with Age Rings.

It all started with a high school band named Slater, which Billings professes to have been a "combination of synth-pop ... and a meandering sort of grunge music." Slater was a set group of people all playing certain instruments, working together to create sound, and Billings was the compositional spark-plug, writing all of the songs from behind the guitar, and eventually the drum kit.

Like most high school bands, Slater began losing steam once their time in high school began running out. When their drummer moved to North Carolina, it signaled the beginning of the end for Slater. "I was really bummed out," says Billings. Like any good band, they attempted to persevere, procuring a drum machine and altering their compositions to adopt even more of a synth-pop sound. "That's how we envisioned playing it live, with a drum machine," explains Billings. But they soon discovered that the dynamic was not the same. Furthermore, the schedule had become an issue, with the other members of the band in college. Billings found himself drawn into music more than education, and after a while he was forced to make a drastic reappraisal of the entire scene. Would he be happy today if Slater still existed? Billings turns the idea over and over in his mind. "I don't know ... maybe?" he asks.

For the record, Ted Billings does not condemn the former members of Slater, nor anyone else who feels the scheduling gridlock that can occur when combining too many aspects of life into one existence. In fact, some of his former bandmates now play in the live Age Rings setup. He knows that the pull of work or education can draw a person away from the world of studios and stages. "That's your education for life and I respect that," he says without a hint of condescending tone in his voice. Billings doesn't exactly play guitar for money in Harvard Square or anything; he works as an accountant for a family business, and he probably wouldn't have learned that at Berklee anyway.

He spent exactly one semester at Berklee, before coming to the decision that this was not going to be the right place for him. "It didn't work for me. I felt ready to go do it and book this big tour, live day to day and ... do it," he emphasizes. He felt that he had already learned a lot along the way in all aspects of the music world, and that continuing his Berklee education would render all of his experience and prior knowledge moot. This was simply not acceptable to Billings either, so he moved on.

What, then, is a musician to do in this scene? His friends have either moved away or are not fully available to work with. He's not going to college - he didn't even really dig music school. Ted Billings found himself in an existential funk: "Band's gone, that was my life, so what am I gonna do?" There was only one answer: "Fuck it. I'm gonna do a record on my own."

Age Rings is something that Ted Billings can truly call his own, and he is intensely proud of the sound that he has put together with this grassroots campaign of local musicians. The Age Rings' only website is the MySpace page, though the artist is quick to point out that a MySpace page is really a perfect format for music online, more than any service where artists have to pay to be listed in an inferior format. The highly-productive Billings puts up songs as he finishes them, supporting them with small blog announcements written in all lower-case letters and signed "ted."

Age Rings tends to produce a strong response from anyone whose ears they find, and that response is usually a positive one. Ask Billings what his influences are, and he whips out a 20GB iPod that is so full of music that the sides noticeably bulge. He swings the earbuds your direction and becomes an iTed Shuffle; cueing up songs from the Jackson 5, the Beta Band, Tom Petty, and the Arcade Fire, to name a few. Age Rings has so many influences that you have alternately never heard of or are intimately familiar with that they all swirl together to create a rhythmic maelstrom of sound.

There is something that is totally refreshing about the fact that Ted has a new-model iPod and is willing to write on his blog that Electric Light Orchestra's Face the Music is Now Playing. Billings is not into any form of musical "I-Know-Bands-That-You-Don't" name-dropping snobbery, despite the fact that he looks like a prototypical indie-rock kid, with his black hooded sweatshirt and off-kilter scally cap almost screaming "Allston" even though he lives in Quincy now. "Yeah, I know those kids, and I can out-band any of them."

Age Rings' sound is full of little ironies, both implied and concrete. Your normal DIY solo artist produces every track alone in the basement or the bedroom, surrounded by posters and, on occasion, a pet. Billings is the most social solo artist around. Instead of a Postal Service sound, Age Rings tracks come fully fleshed out by physical instruments. Sure there might be a little drum machine action here and there, but each Age Rings track becomes fully realized and lightly seasoned by the sound of three different performers playing the sound of one musician's vision.

The recording process for Age Rings was clearly a job and a half, complete with Billings, Smith, and engineer Mark Flynn lugging hundreds of pounds of gear up the stairs to Flynn's apartment after recording initial bass and drum tracks at New Alliance. The Helpinstill, a 300-pound electric piano, weighed as heavily on the backs of the artists as it did upon the recording. The Helpinstill, which belongs to Smith, shows what Billings is capable of with the right inspiration and surroundings - immediately after getting the heavy instrument upstairs, Billings unfolded it and began writing a song on it.

"I'm a very limited piano player, but that's how I like to write songs sometimes," says Billings. This is a different approach from most, but it points directly to his effective use of all available resources - he did not shun his "limited piano skills," but rather he worked with them to create something new and worth existing. This track, "Firefly," ended up on the Age Rings record that was recorded within the next two weeks.

Billings' DIY-resourcefulness knows no bounds. "I went overload. On every song I tried to find a reason to go all-out," says Billings, and while this sounds like a recipe for an overly ornate mess, Age Rings' songs all have a well-crafted sound, pulled together by Billings' ability to fully realize his ideas before recording or even showing them to his cohorts. There are several instances on the record where this truth becomes self-evident. "Calm Down" sounds like an electro-pop composition, yet it is fully fleshed out by physical instruments. "I wanted this record to be like a dance record," says Billings.

Age Rings also chose to not use a drum machine on most of their recorded songs, rejecting the closed-circuit feel of recording along with a programmed machine. While not recording along with a click made some post-recording tricks impossible, it also served as an additional challenge to the project, the kind that Billings thrives on. These are the elements of the process that play a key part in the highly creative sound that is Age Rings.

Age Rings is the new DIY: do it yourself because you want to, you can, and most importantly, you care about doing it yourself. Each Age Rings disc is carefully hand-crafted, inscribed in Sharpie and placed into whatever CD packaging is available at the time, be it an old Playstation game or a Madonna single. "I didn't really think ahead to this point," says the man who is Age Rings, pointing at the table he now sits at. "I just wanted to do this record and have it sound the best that it could - I have never done a record like this."

"This ... uh ... happened," says Billings, looking down at his hands, and it's unclear if he's talking about the wound that crosses his palm or Age Rings. Either way, no one wants to fade away without a few scars or crowning achievements. For now, Age Rings' first release, with its mix of haunting urgency and earthy patience, is good for Ted Billings, even if he has five new songs bouncing around in his mind's ear. Billings pays the tab and then dashes off into the night, headed straight for the center ring that he lives in and whatever fantastic world from which the sound of Age Rings emanates. - CD Di Guardia/04.12.06


"Boston Globe/Rock Notes"

ALLSTON -- What do you do when your old rock band breaks up, but everyone still likes everyone else and there seems to be more to say? Why, you start another group, of course. And if you're really lucky (and really right about having more to say), it might even be better than the first one.

This is precisely the story of the Boston-based Age Rings, a newish and constantly morphing pop collective whose core includes three longtime friends -- singer-guitarist Ted Billings, guitarist Will Spitz, and bassist Andrew McInnes -- who started their first band together, Slater, when they were still in high school in the South Shore suburb of Hanover. (Age Rings' fourth core member, Peter Baker, was brought into the fold last summer after meeting Billings at a party.)
Slater had a fruitful run as a noisy, grungy rock outfit that released three albums and even won the WBCN Battle of the High School Bands. But the band fell apart when its drummer, Joe Cutrufo, moved to North Carolina last year. Suddenly, the thing that had been a constant in the lives of its members since they were teens was gone.
''Our last band went kaput after six or seven years, and that was really sad," says Billings, 23, over beers with his bandmates at Great Scott. ''We needed a bridge to get to the next thing." That bridge is Age Rings' not-yet-officially-released debut, ''Look . . . The Dusk Is Growing," an audaciously good album whose 10 songs were written, recorded, and performed mostly by Billings and a couple of friends that included Lot Six drummer and Frank Smith frontman Aaron Sinclair and organist Josh Smith. At various times both have performed with Age Rings, who next play the Middle East Upstairs on Thursday.
''The record was a thing that had to happen and that I needed to do," Billings says. ''It's good that [Slater] ended, because it had run its course. It was time to start something new."
For the remaining band members, that was easier said than done. ''We had been playing together forever, so none of us knew what to do," says Spitz, 23. ''We were kind of aimless, because none of us had started a band since we were 16. But Ted always has an album in him, and he's constantly writing songs. That's what he lives and breathes, so he just whipped out a record."
Even though Billings has yet to get ''Dusk" properly pressed -- Age Rings currently give away homemade copies of the disc at their shows -- covert smart bombs such as ''Everything Will Fall Apart" and ''Bar Think" are already causing a commotion among old friends and new converts. If ''Yankee Hotel Foxtrot"-era Wilco covered tunes by Pavement and Spoon, it might sound something like this band and these songs. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the fast-circulating buzz is that Age Rings have only performed in public a total of five times. ''We've had as many practices as shows," jokes Baker, 29.

Age Rings may technically be just getting started, but onstage the band members carry themselves with the cocksure charisma of veteran rockers at the top of their game. Which, in a way, they are -- except what was a tight four-piece may now welcome twice as many musicians onstage, maybe even a trombone. Says Billings: ''It's a good experiment to do as a band, and I think us knowing all of these songs front, backwards, and sideways has made us stronger playing together." - Jonathan Perry/4.7.06


"Village Voice"

After two days of YouTubing You Tu death, we got you a thank-you-for-letting-us-crash-on-your-couch present. That Jarvis Cocker/Air reference a couple days ago? Deliberate attempt at giving SOTC's first real week some semblance of a narrative thread. Cheap rockist tricks, we know. So what.

So the Friday-afternoon gift we got you—a sign of gratitude for letting us eat your Cheerios and smell up your sofa—is an unreleased version of an unreleased song: Boston band Age Rings covering Air's "One Hell of a Party," a track leaked from the French duo's upcoming Pocket Symphony. For the sake of relevance, the MP3 is also vaguely related to Pazz & Jop: Age Rings's guitarist is one of the 494 critics who voted this year—his name's Will Spitz, he hates dance-punk, and loves sushi. Make fun of his ballot here.

Age Rings is from Boston, but don't hold it against them, you big-city snobs. Core members—Spitz, frontman/guitarist/songwriter Ted Billings, and bassist Andrew McInnes—played in a high-school band for six years called Slater, which eventually morphed into Age Rings when a fourth member moved away. One of their locals described them like this: "If Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-era Wilco covered tunes by Pavement and Spoon, it might sound something like this band and these songs." That's a relatively accurate comparison, but we wish he'd have taken a little more time with that sentence.

Anyway, we've had these two tracks on repeat for the last four hours and we're starting to like Age Rings's version better than the original. The preference is mostly emotional: one version is full of regret, the other afterglow. Set in the aftermath of a sleepless bender, Air has Pulp's demigod stewing from a night that sounds both nefarious and Dionysian, as if last night included at least one of three things: 1) an affair with his brother's wife; 2) a Rope-style murder; 3) a coke mountain that left his dopamine receptors all fried.

Meanwhile, the party at the Age Rings house sounds like it was way more fun. Ted Billings's exuberance leads you to believe: 1) Every guy in the band finally hooked up with their longtime crushes; 2) At one point, a tubby mutual friend got naked and jumped on the sofa; 3) Somehow, at the end of all this, there's more PBR in the fridge—the beer genie must've come. Air makes us want to swallow pills and slit our wrists; Age Rings makes us want to hit brunch and drink Bloody Marys.

Tomorrow night, Age Rings play Piano's at 8 pm. Kid-buzz band Care Bears On Fire open! - by Camille Dodero/2-9-07


Discography

"look...the dusk is growing" (self released, 2006)

Photos

Bio

ALLSTON -- What do you do when your old rock band breaks up, but everyone still likes everyone else and there seems to be more to say? Why, you start another group, of course. And if you're really lucky (and really right about having more to say), it might even be better than the first one.

This is precisely the story of the Boston-based Age Rings, a newish and constantly morphing pop collective whose core includes three longtime friends -- singer-guitarist Ted Billings, guitarist Will Spitz, and bassist Andrew McInnes -- who started their first band together, Slater, when they were still in high school in the South Shore suburb of Hanover. (Age Rings' fourth core member, Peter Baker, was brought into the fold last summer after meeting Billings at a party.)

Slater had a fruitful run as a noisy, grungy rock outfit that released three albums and even won the WBCN Battle of the High School Bands. But the band fell apart when its drummer, Joe Cutrufo, moved to North Carolina last year. Suddenly, the thing that had been a constant in the lives of its members since they were teens was gone.

''Our last band went kaput after six or seven years, and that was really sad," says Billings, 23, over beers with his bandmates at Great Scott. ''We needed a bridge to get to the next thing." That bridge is Age Rings' not-yet-officially-released debut, ''Look . . . The Dusk Is Growing," an audaciously good album whose 10 songs were written, recorded, and performed mostly by Billings and a couple of friends that included Lot Six drummer and Frank Smith frontman Aaron Sinclair and organist Josh Smith. At various times both have performed with Age Rings, who next play the Middle East Upstairs on Thursday.

''The record was a thing that had to happen and that I needed to do," Billings says. ''It's good that [Slater] ended, because it had run its course. It was time to start something new."

For the remaining band members, that was easier said than done. ''We had been playing together forever, so none of us knew what to do," says Spitz, 23. ''We were kind of aimless, because none of us had started a band since we were 16. But Ted always has an album in him, and he's constantly writing songs. That's what he lives and breathes, so he just whipped out a record."

Even though Billings has yet to get ''Dusk" properly pressed -- Age Rings currently give away homemade copies of the disc at their shows -- covert smart bombs such as ''Everything Will Fall Apart" and ''Bar Think" are already causing a commotion among old friends and new converts. If ''Yankee Hotel Foxtrot"-era Wilco covered tunes by Pavement and Spoon, it might sound something like this band and these songs. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the fast-circulating buzz is that Age Rings have only performed in public a total of five times.

Age Rings may technically be just getting started, but onstage the band members carry themselves with the cocksure charisma of veteran rockers at the top of their game. Which, in a way, they are -- except what was a tight four-piece may now welcome twice as many musicians onstage, maybe even a trombone. Says Billings: ''It's a good experiment to do as a band, and I think us knowing all of these songs front, backwards, and sideways has made us stronger playing together."
-Jonathan Perry, Boston Globe, 4/7/06