“‘Wires’ was the first song we worked on for this EP,” says singer James Harker in a recent phone interview. Spirit of the Bear performs with Who Saved Who on Thursday, June 16, at House of Blues Cambridge Room. “It kind of influenced the direction of the rest of it. That was the first demo we had for the record. Once we got our label involved, that was the song we started with. For the past couple of records, there has a subtle ’70s influence on a few songs. ‘Wires’ really leans into it. This is full ’70s pop, and we wanted to explore that for the new EP. After this EP, we figure we can move onto the weirder side of our sound.”
Harker’s father played the woozy saxophone solo that takes over near the song’s conclusion.
“He’s an awesome saxophone player,” says Harker. “He plays with the Vindys and with a lot of Youngstown and Cleveland bands. He taught me everything about music that I know.”
Initially, the group came together in Youngstown when band members were still in high school. While the city isn’t known for producing national acts, Harker says he has developed an appreciation for the working-class town.
“Now, looking back, Youngstown has something special about it,” says Harker.
“There’s this strong vibe amongst all the people I know who are from there.”
Several years ago, Harker and keyboardist Ethan Schwendeman moved to Columbus for college. The two stayed there and continued to write and record with keyboardist Danny Svenson, who stayed in Youngstown, and drummer Jamie Vitullo, who moved to Cleveland. The band’s sound slowly developed as the group merged its various influences. Harker, for his part, says he took inspiration from Radiohead as well as the late Jeff Buckley, a singer known for his remarkable vocal prowess.
“I knew I wanted to have a falsetto because of Thom Yorke, but my favorite vocal influence is Jeff Buckley,” he says. “[Buckley] was a huge vocal inspiration for me. I don’t think I necessarily sound like him. He’s just a vocalist that I admire.”
Harker, who runs Moonlight Audio, a recording studio in Columbus, says the forthcoming EP was something the band completed without help from an outside producer or engineer.
“It’s an in-house operation,” he says of the EP. “I produced and recorded everything in the studio, and I mixed it and Jamie, our drummer, mastered it. We have had some collaborators in the past for mixing and mastering, but for this EP, we wanted to do the production side on our own. That afforded us the budget to get sax players and string players and a percussionist and different people to do background vocals. There’s a lot of outside people on the record that wouldn’t have necessarily been possible if we had been working with a different producer.”
Though the upcoming House of Blues show precedes the EP’s release, the band will work four of the EP’s five songs into the set.
“We’ve gotten a lot tighter, and our live sound has started to mesh better,” says Harker, who said the band has played Cleveland regularly over the years and has performed at places like the Grog Shop, the Beachland and Mahall’s. “We’ll have this preprogrammed light show so that will tie everything together visually.”
This article appears in Jun 1-14, 2022.
