The holy resurrection of Kansas City’s beloved Shy Boys
For over four years, the founding members of Shy Boys — brothers Collin and Kyle Rausch and Konnor Ervin — lived together in a dilapidated house on Bell Street, on the far west edge of the West Plaza. They called it Bell House. I spent a fair amount of time at this place. One afternoon in 2015, I stopped by and was shown a marijuana plant growing wild in the side yard. There was no mistaking what this plant was. It was gigantic, and the leaves looked like cartoon cannabis, and it smelled like a big bag of stinky weed. If you walked up to inspect this plant, and looked up, you saw that it was growing directly beneath a bedroom window. The plant bloomed in this spot because one of the band’s members had, for several years, been emptying marijuana ash out that window. At some point, a discarded seed burrowed into the ground, germinated, and sprouted into a plant. Eventually, the inhabitants of Bell House did some internet research, cut the plant, dried it, hung it up, and smoked it. Shy Boys subsequently wrote a song about this experience. It’s called “Miracle Gro,” and it’s the first track on Bell House, an endearing and imaginative new album of pop songs that in a just world would represent this beloved Kansas City band’s big break — whatever that means anymore.
On the day after the Fourth of July, I visited with the members of Shy Boys — the band is a five-piece now, with the addition of Ross Brown and Kyle Little — at their new base of operations, a house on Holmes near 33rd Street. Brown and Kyle Rausch live here, and the band practices in the basement, which is home to a fairly sophisticated makeshift studio. The boys had just returned from a two-week West Coast tour, and they were gearing up for another two weeks in the Southeast and East Coast. (They’ll be at RecordBar for the Bell House release show on August 4.) We sat around the kitchen table waiting for some pizzas to be delivered, and Brown uncorked a bottle of red wine the band had recently been gifted during a tour stop at the Idaho Botanical Garden, in Boise.
“There was a wine-tasting booth there,” Brown said, as he filled our glasses. “We played right across from the AARP booth.”
He was alluding to a foundational truth about Shy Boys, which is that they kind of sound like a band that your grandparents might enjoy. Not exactly. But kind of: lots of multi-part harmonies, prominent melodies — a workmanlike approach to songwriting, with equal reverence for the British Invasion and the Beach Boys, for church hymns and psych pop. As a result, Shy Boys are uniquely prepared for oddball gigs like that one in Boise. Reading their audience, they dusted off two Gary Lewis and the Playboys covers — ”Count Me In” and “Just My Style” — and watched with satisfaction as the elderly couples rose to their feet and began to dance among the plants.
• • •
At the beginning of this year, Shy Boys signed to Polyvinyl Records, an independent record label home to several well-established acts. (Among them: of Montreal, Alvvays, Deerhoof, the Rentals, American Football.) In recent years, Shy Boys has toured with mid-level indie acts like STRFKR (who is also on the Polyvinyl roster) and Mild High Club. In May, the band opened for Fleet Foxes at an amphitheater in Raleigh, North Carolina. The release of Bell House, on August 3, feels like an inflection point, and they’re treating it as such. Everybody has more or less quit their day jobs. They’ve got a manager and a booking agent. They’re gonna road-dawg some tours and see how far this band can go.
Then again, though, there’s a sense that they’ve been here before. In 2014, after playing around KC for about a year, Shy Boys released their self-titled debut, on local label High Dive Records. Pitchfork, Stereogum, Spin, and a bunch of music blogs wrote about it. Something like 400 people turned out for the release show at Harlings. (RIP Harlings.) The show was wild, the buzz was palpable. And then…
“I remember, after that Pitchfork review came out, talking to somebody in the industry, and they were like, ‘Prepare yourself, people are gonna be banging down your door, you gotta be ready for this and that,’” Kyle Rausch said. “Then, uh, none of that happened.”
Deep laughs all around the table.
Kyle continued: “We did a bunch of short tours — East Coast, West Coast, the Midwest, obviously. We booked all those shows ourselves, or someone from our friend network asked us to hop on their shows, or something like that. And it seemed like that just didn’t really get us anywhere.”
By the time Little came over to jam with the band, sometime in 2016, Shy Boys were in a dark place.
“They were my favorite band in town, so I was super psyched when Collin asked if I was interested in playing with them,” said Little, who’d previously played with local bands Metatone and Palace Neapolitan. “And I got there, and it was just so depressing.”
Little went on: “I mean, they had these new songs, and they were amazing. I knew right away that the new material was good. But it was also like, just sitting around getting baked in this big, thick cloud of depression. I was like, ‘It’s great that I get to play with these guys, but it’s too bad they’re about to break up.’”
Collin Rausch: “We were definitely in a big rut.”
“Our mistake,” Kyle Rausch said, “was getting our hopes up about that first album. We thought maybe our dreams were about to come true — that we were going to be able to play music for a living for a little while. And then nothing happened. And we’re living in this shitty house, and it’s like this ‘no future’ type of thing.”
The conclusion they drew from the experience was that success in the music industry was impossible for a band of nobodies from Kansas City. So they gave up that dream. There would be no more national tours. There would be no big label interest. Best to just hang out with your buddies in a basement and have fun making music for each other. Both Ervin (formerly of the ACBs) and Brown (who leads Fullbloods) were still actively writing their own songs, and the band slowly morphed into something like a songwriting collective.
“For a while, our plan was to release a three-LP package,” Collin said. “A Shy Boys record, a Ross record, and a Koney [Ervin] record.”
“We were going to call it The Suicide Pact,” Brown said.
“It had just been so many years of working hard on music and seeing no real success,” Ervin said. “I think we were all just so tired of trying to make a go of it. I know I was. It seemed like the thing to do was just make the best music we can and ignore everything else.”
Shy Boys continued to play occasional shows, though. And when bands they admired came through the area, Kyle Rausch made an effort to reach out and see about hopping on the bill. Shy Boys opened for Chris Cohen in Omaha, then Mile High Club in Sioux Falls. A year later, Mild High Club — now headlining its own tour — asked Shy Boys to be the opener on a run of dates. Meanwhile, Mike Nolte, a sound engineer who recorded the first Shy Boys record, had moved out to Portland and was now running sound for Polyvinyl acts like STRFKR and of Montreal. When Shy Boys finished Bell House last year, they passed it to Nolte, who passed it to the folks at Polyvinyl.
They dug it. The Suicide Pact would have to wait.
• • •
The original idea for Bell House was to do a Beach Boys’ Party type of record: “Have our friends over, record in the living room, get the sounds of Bell House baked into the recordings,” Collin said. “But it was going to be a logistical nightmare. And we were running out of time, because we were all moving out.” (Collin was getting married — he now lives in Lee’s Summit — and both Ervin and Kyle Rausch moved in with their girlfriends.) The Party idea was shelved.
Instead, they ended up with an ode to Bell House and the years they spent there. Some of the tracks, like “Miracle Gro,” are literal, a touch goofy. But several others seem to reckon reluctantly with ideas about moving on, growing up, not being able to hang with your buds as much anymore — and how horrible that all can be. Take the title track: It’s been a long time coming / This house was falling down / It can be the end / We’ll split apart and still be friends / Don’t be sad, don’t be blue / Don’t gotta talk about what we do. Is it nostalgia if, deep down, you know you don’t want to go back to Bell House? Or is that precisely what nostalgia is?
“I don’t want to sound like a sad sack, but I was certainly very depressed the entire time I lived at Bell House,” Kyle Rausch said. “But I also look back on it as one of the most beautiful times of my life.”
On “Basement,” Collin ponders what’s next: I’m hanging with my brother for an evening in / If you wanna know the truth of it, it’s looking grim / Got a wife and a dog and I’m living in my mom’s basement.
“I had just gotten married, and we’d had to move in with my mom because we didn’t have any money,” Collin said. “It was tough. You’re out there, living in the house you grew up in, you’re in your thirties and married. And nothing there you reminds you that you’re an adult man. Everything there is telling you you’re a fucking child. And here I have a wife, a dog, I’m trying to grow up. And literally where we slept, above us on the wall, there was a painting of me as a baby.”
Then there’s “No Fun,” the entirety of the lyrics are which: Can’t keep up anymore / Having fun was so easy / Don’t care what level that you’re on / Think I’m better on my own.
Is this starting to sound like a depressing record? It kind of is, if you choose to dwell on the words. Musically, though, it’s joyous. The songs are taut, short, chiseled down to their core ideas, which more often than not are sturdy, melodic hooks surrounded by jangly guitars and angelic, hard-won harmonies. It is all cattle, no hat.
But there’s something else embedded in the mix — a beauty that is less definable, more abstract. Having listened to Bell House dozens of times, and having watched this band practice and perform and mature over the last several years, I’ve come to believe this sacred quality is fellowship — a friendship rooted in the pursuit of pure songcraft.
The pizzas arrive, and Collin takes a stab at it: “It’s like, why write songs? Why bother? And for me, it’s mostly just to keep up with these guys.” He gestures around the table. “I’ve listened to Konnor’s music for years now. Ross is making amazing music. They’re the biggest influence on Shy Boys. That’s what Shy Boys sounds like to me. It’s these guys.”
♦
Shy Boys’ Bell House release show is this Saturday, August 4, at RecordBar.
