Written by: Dave Cantrell

INTRO (via guest contributor Mike Turner):

There are just a handful of real underground legends that exist in this place where they are either songwriting geniuses, known for their over-the-top live performances, or a scene generator. These outsiders usually never break through to a large audience, but they influence those who do. These figures tend to be the ones that the record store clerk, the DIY space booker, the countless alt weekly editors or zine scribes will know their catalogs inside out. Frank Boscoe is one of these legends. His bands include Wimp Factor 14, Vehicle Flips, the Gazetteers, and now his new project the Ekphrastics. Boscoe can build novels out of the most mundane objects, be they places, people, or random meetings and turn them into something magical and otherworldly in less than 4 musical minutes. The new album Build Your Own Snowboard (released August 3rd via Harriet Records) is based around the idea of doing your best no matter what you do, from building a snowboard, auditioning for a band, trading records for a boat, and more. Please, do yourself a favor and have a quick listen to the album while reading below the inspirations and stories behind the songs in Frank’s own words, followed by an incisive bio that’s damn near literary in its scope.

“Make Your Own Snowboard” – When Mark Wolfe (guitarist) first told me this story I immediately recognized it as a good song. That is a recurring theme on this album – songs that were not so much composed as heard in the stories of others (see tracks 4, 5, 6). To those who were not alive in the 1980s: snowboards were once considered a threat, in the manner of pinball and comic books.

“Keys (To My Heart)” – Findlay, Ohio, early 1992, as punk was breaking. Somewhere in a closet may still be my cassette recording of this encounter; it’s just that I haven’t had a working tape deck since ’98 (see track 7). By now, that original version would likely disappoint in comparison to the Ekphrastics version. Just listen to Mark’s through-a-garage-door guitar solo at the 1:00 mark. Incredible!

“Buy a House in Italy for One Euro” – Yes, this is something you can really do, though by the time you make the needed repairs it will cost a lot more than that. I’ve been studying Italian for a decade now, including an entire month in a language school in Turin last fall, and this is my first time singing in another language.

“Amy and Jens” – When I heard Amy Rigby tell this story on the radio show Pop Songs Your New Boyfriend’s Too Stupid To Know About, I knew it should be a song. And the music is an approximation of “Black Cab” by Jens Lekman, the focus of her story. A forthcoming episode of the radio show will tie everything together, be sure to track it down.

“The Arrival of the Graf Zeppelin” – The New York Times gave this event 12 full pages when it happened. The lyrics draw upon this coverage, the mostly-uncredited stringers filing their eloquent field reports as the airship glided overhead.

“The Intrepid Concessionaire” – This story was Johnny Lancia’s (drummer), he being the one to splice a potentiometer into his workplace pinball machine and save the day. I had just been to the Silverball Museum in Delray Beach, Florida, where unlimited play on hundreds of pinball machines all day long sounded like fun but their combined dissonance made me nauseous after an hour.

“It’s a Good Day for Sailing” – I think this song speaks for itself, so let me use this space to point out that media mail rates (“Mustering a major media mail mailing”, last verse) have been breaking my heart lately. A special reduced price for newspapers and “bound printed matter” dates to the founding of the republic, the idea its benefit to the commonweal outweighs any fiscal considerations. But mailing a record or a cd is up 47% in the last couple years. Just send them a download code, you say, but it’s not the same.

“Searching for Lillian Gatlin” – All true, this song. Lillian Gatlin does not even have a Wikipedia page. I’d create one, but I’m worried it would run afoul of its circular guidelines for Notability. This song is superior to a Wikipedia page, in any case. Also: I found and purchased a few of her personal items (photographs, a lengthy letter, the rubber stamp of her signature), which was exciting.

“Small Craft Advisory”- “All of my life I’ve been surrounded by crafts” is somewhat of an exaggeration, though just the other day I was walking through my town during a craft fair, passing booth after booth of airbrushed foxes superimposed over other airbrushed foxes; sunsets and flags woven from cast-off fishing line; repurposed coffee sacks with sewn-on wallpaper remnants (repurposed for what, I could not tell); typical landscape paintings of the area, but with ghosts and witches added in, for Halloween – and I got the same feelings of claustrophobia, confusion, wonder and heat stress I remember as a child.

“A Word from Morris” – This song continues the story of Becky Jane Joplin from the first album (“Special Delivery”, “The Ballad of Becky Jane Joplin”). Dormitory fires were a lot more common a hundred years ago than today, my research shows. And let’s also have a word about how good this album sounds. Paul Coleman (bass guitar, mixing) is such a virtuoso at this, I’m in awe. I’ll say, “Could we have more blimp hangar, less tarmac on that guitar?”, and even though that’s unhelpfully abstract, he’ll get it, or have an even better idea, in no time.

“Whatsoever Thy Hand Findeth to Do, Do It with Thy Might” – This song was improvised when a winter squall sent a haunting oboe-like sound through the thick oak door of the former church we were recording in. The title is from the text in one of the stained glass windows, kind of a King James way of saying make thine own snowboard.

“Superbarista” – Of the nearly 200 songs I’ve written, this is the first one exceeding five minutes, though it could be heard as a 4-minute song spliced to a 2-minute song. I am pleased to have gotten an eight-syllable word (“indistinguishability”) to scan. Not as a gimmick – it has such a nice meter, it falls right in place.

BIO: 

For years, whenever Paul Coleman would see Frank Boscoe, he’d ask if he felt like playing some music together. Frank always demurred, having moved on to other things (raising a son, adventure racing, learning Italian) since his days fronting Wimp Factor 14 and Vehicle Flips. But there was that brand-new left-handed Eastwood Warren Ellis tenor guitar he bought in 2014, which he was going to have to play sooner or later.

Fast-forward a few years and Frank had semi-retired to a former army barracks on a small island off the coast of Maine, with music-making never more remote. Then came the pandemic. With no reason to leave the island (ferries down to three a day, nothing to do on the mainland), he took the still-new guitar from its case, only to discover he had forgotten all his old songs. Time for some new ones: “Ghost Apples”, “Making Fun of Bitcoin”, and others that would find their way onto the first Ekphrastics album, 2023’s Special Delivery. Many of these were debuted live on Instagram as part of a Friday night concert series hosted by his friend Andrew Kaffer (Kissing Book). One of these virtual bills featured Frank, Paul (as Sinkcharmer) and Johnny Lancia (as Huron, also ex-Vehicle Flips). The three made a promise to reprise the evening in real life once the world was back to normal.

That evening would come in May, 2022, in Troy, New York. But instead of an evening of solo performances, Paul and John took it upon themselves to learn all of Frank’s songs, enlisting Mark Wolfe as a lead guitarist. Frank Boscoe became Frank Boscoe and the Ekphrastics and then just the Ekphrastics, ekphrastic a useful albeit obscure word referring to a “clear, intense, self-contained description of an artwork”.

Make Your Own Snowboard, the band’s sophomore effort, is a collection of short stories about doing one’s level best, whether that’s making your own snowboard (title track), auditioning for a metal band (“Keys (To My Heart)”), hacking a pinball machine (“Intrepid Concessionaire”), or trading in your Mountain Goats records for a small sailboat (“A Good Day for Sailing”). The tone is warm, the production bright, the delivery deadpan, inspired by The Clean, Karate, Lou Reed, Richard Lloyd, and forgotten 60s one-hit wonders, for reasons both sonic and economic.

Make Your Own Snowboard was recorded at a former church in a remote corner of the Catskill Mountains. With its high, concave ceilings of warm wood, it was the best-sounding room any of the players had ever experienced. (They’ve booked it for another week in 2025; the exact location shall remain a secret). A mid-session snow squall found a chink in the massive oak front door that produced an oboe-like squall; listen all the way through and you’ll hear it.