NEW SINGLE "TOO LITTLE TOO LATE"

NYC-based Children Having Children is emerging from the pandemic with a new single and video for “Too Little Too Late”, available on all major platforms on June 4. The track can be pre-saved at https://show.co/XipooUU.

“The irony of the title and the timing isn’t lost on us,” says frontman Steven Kaiser. “We actually finished shooting the video a week before New York was locked down for the pandemic, which turned out to be a strangely fitting send-off to life as we knew it before we scattered off to our respective bunkers.”

Working once again with engineer Bob Mallory (Kings Of Leon, Bruno Mars), the track finds Children Having Children exploring a new instrumental palette reminiscent at times of Bjork and Tori Amos. The pounding drums and confessional vocals of the chorus hint at the overlap between a crumbling relationship and the looming climate crisis.

As with their previous video (2018’s “Checkerboard Red”), the band chose to collaborate once again with the production team Forte to create “Too Little Too Late.” Director Michael Marabella delivers a visual play on the themes of psychological projection and unhinged memories, starring performance artist Holly Sass as a lone dancer.

Kaiser adds, “Although I can rarely say ‘My song is about this one thing’, it became pretty clear during brainstorming sessions for the video that the climate emergency had been present in my thoughts when I put down these lyrics. I love how Holly and the Forte team were able to convey that visually and emotionally without beating the viewer over the head.”

All streaming proceeds and digital sales for the track will be donated to Extinction Rebellion.

CHC EP ANNIVERSARY (PART V)

by DAVID A. PALATSI (Bass, Keyboards, Vocals)

Years. Miles. Measures. So much has transpired between Children Having Children's first EP and the band's recent music-making that it’s almost difficult to consider the two eras as the same musical entity…but not entirely impossible. So before letting all of you lovely readers get back to your amazing 2020, let me try to connect the dots.

Steve and I started a band back in high school when we were living in Atlanta. The band would mutate through various name changes and a revolving door of members, some of whom are still our closest friends to this day. Others…less so. 

photo by Stephanie Routier

In our early twenties the band would lead us to New York in search of kindred spirits, but our first stop after high school graduation was the music school at Georgia State University. Our plan was to divvy up the know-how. I concentrated on studying the "music business" (in a form that was basically obsolete even then) while Steve learned how to produce/engineer our music. His recording classes offered us regular use of the university's recording facilities and helped him land an internship at Southern Tracks Recording. 

Between those two studios, we settled on the name Children Having Children and recorded the songs that make up the first EP.  There were many all-night sessions in those rooms, eating takeout chicken wings, cramming in an hour or two of sleep on the couches, driving fifteen miles home, and then struggling through a day of classes and jobs. I admit that I have to laugh a bit now as it felt at the time like we were trying to make our Sgt. Pepper's, but I am equally filled with pride that we took it so seriously. 

Even though we never had a full band in Atlanta and couldn't play proper shows, we still rehearsed at least three times a week. Although we had spent years practicing in an airforce-base adjacent, spider-infested outdoor storage unit with no climate control (hello winter!), we decided to relocate to a new space to prepare for the sessions and were immediately greeted by new challenges. Housed in a converted warehouse and shared with a friend's industrial band, the new space had absolutely no soundproofing between units. We were surrounded by punk bands and hip hop producers going full blast at all times, which made it difficult (and often miserable) to practice our intricate arrangements without the power of a drummer. 

I'd go to school all day, go to practice for up to five hours, get home just before midnight, maybe say hello to my girlfriend, and go to sleep just to do it all again the next day. Sometimes with a part time job thrown into the schedule. This is how seriously we took the band and the preparation for the recording sessions that we hoped would change our lives.

The opportunity to record at Southern Tracks was amazing and will always be one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. We had access to world-class instruments, top-notch equipment, great recording rooms, and a totally professional atmosphere. While I think Steve's songwriting and recording abilities are miles further down the road today, it’s still incredible and informative that we recorded in the same room as so many amazing bands and musicians at that embryonic stage. 

A highlight of those sessions and the epic of the EP is “Museums," which still has gravitas today. The heavy distortion at the end of the song is probably the clearest representation of how my musical tastes influenced the record. I'm a big fan of My Bloody Valentine and walls of guitar, so I always loved how the distortion on my bass and the fuzz on the guitars kick in at the song's climax.

When the original version of the EP came back from mastering, Steve and I were both unhappy with the results. We decided to get it remastered and I also convinced Steve to replace two of the songs on the original tracklist with newer recordings that were intended for a future release: “Film” and “This Certainty”.  

“Film” was my favorite of our songs at the time and still sounds exciting to me. My vocal part was more prevalent than on our other songs and I love my bass line. The arrangement builds and builds with a guitar solo that Steve meticulously composed. I remember our guitarist Matthew practicing that solo over and over during our rehearsals and when it clicked, I really felt like we were a rock band.

As a listener in 2020, my favorite of the batch and the song that means the most to me is "This Certainty." I'm glad that I fought for its inclusion on the EP. I have a 4-track cassette tape demo Steve recorded in high school that includes this song, which was the first he'd ever written. The demo version has an alternate title and different lyrics, but musically the song is incredibly unchanged. Pressing record in the Southern Tracks control room as Steven played the mellotron part out in the live room is one of my favorite moments of the whole process, and I think this track holds up with anything CHC would play today. 

I felt slighted at the time for not having any songs I'd written included on the EP. I thought of the band as a partnership between Steve and myself with our revolving cast of bandmates that would hopefully stop revolving at some point. But the band consensus was that the songs on the EP should have a cohesive voice. The five songs that ended up on the record are better than any songs I had at the time, but I still felt unhappy that my voice wasn't a part of it in the way that I wanted.  I thought our situation should be more collaborative like Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, or The Beatles, bands whose records featured multiple songwriters and singers. Instead we ended up taking an approach closer to The Smashing Pumpkins, with a more linear sound and voice. I didn’t admit it to myself at the time but this realization sowed the seeds of my departure from the band a few years later.

 After leaving the band and putting down the bass, I took up the camera as my primary form of expression and feel like I'm much better as a photographer than I ever was as a musician. Even back in my band days I was always attracted to striking images and the cover of the EP is one of its strongest assets. It’s like a great Storm Thorgerson cover (shot by our friend Ali Kesner) and I’d credit it with setting me on my path as an image maker, a  blessing that's allowed me to continue collaborating with Steve and allows me to still be a part of the group in a certain way, lending my vision through the lens. 

If you've never heard the first EP, then you have no idea what I've been rambling on about. So take twenty minutes and give it a listen. I can hear all its flaws and imagine how we would have made decisions differently today. And I hear the sound of the two most important relationships in my life other than marriage and fatherhood. Steve and Matthew are the brothers I never had and my time in Children Having Children is a core and cherished part of my being. This EP was a milestone for me and I still love these songs, like postcards from a very different time in our young lives.

***

photos by Matthew Fugel

CHC EP ANNIVERARY (PT IV)

by ADAM BAILEY (DRUMS on “FILM”)

While my intersection with Children Having Children was a concise one, I would like to think it was as duly formative and exciting for the band as it was for myself. I was recruited by my friend Matthew Fugel, whom I had forged a friendship with through our band classes in middle school and had maintained through high school, mostly through irreverent side splitting half-hours in the cafeteria during lunch. It was that shared sense of humor coupled with a love for music, specifically the Smashing Pumpkins (devout Jimmy Chamberlin worshipper here) as one of our all time favorite bands, that provided the galvanizing force for us through the years. Fast forward to 2007, I’m in my junior year at University of Georgia when I get a message from Matt, gauging my interest in coming in to record the drums on a track for the band he is playing rhythm guitar for in Atlanta. 

I jumped on without hesitation. I had never (and to this day have not again) recorded a track with a band in a recording studio situation as a drum set player (no, I do not count recordings of my high school jazz band). I was excited not only in a creative and musical sense but for the opportunity it presented to reconnect with Matt and bridge some of the distance that the college years naturally bring about. I trusted that any group that he was playing with would be worthwhile to be a part of despite having not heard a note -- our aligning musical sensibilities would be enough of a bedrock to jump into this project without hesitation. As I understood it, the need was dire for a drummer that had the musical aptitude to come in and record not only an intricate enough arrangement to satisfy the song but who could record it all in the small window of time we would have together. 

The reason for the time constraint was simultaneously a personal additional motivating factor for coming onto the project. We would be recording in the quickly legendary Southern Tracks Recording studio, a boutique production “house” that was literally just that -- a house nestled in northern Atlanta that had been converted into a state of the art music recording studio that now churned out a bevy of commercially and critically successful albums for world renown acts. I would have been happy to record the track in a storage unit wrapped in sound blankets. But this? Getting to lay down my first drum recording in the epitome of a professional setting was the cherry on top of a sundae I was already very eager to eat, regardless if that meant we would only have one full night to pull it off. 

The studio space was accessible to the band in the first place because their founder, Steven Kaiser, earned an internship at the studio, and so this one singular weekend of allotted studio time was the culmination of his hours of devoted hard work during his tenure. This would not be a creative venture that could sprawl across multiple nights and days, free to tither along with no hard out time -- we had hours to minutes to work with. I would have it no other way. 

I met up with the band to have a practice in a storage unit that was their usual area for rehearsal. I met Steven and David Palatsi for the first time and after some quick getting to know you time we got right to it. What I knew immediately about this collective was that everyone involved had a shared passionate intensity for music coupled with that certain vulnerability so identifiable in artists across every medium. I trusted Matt to bring me into a project that was dynamic and engaging, but it’s every drummer’s fear in the back of their mind that they’re just needed at the end of the day for 2’s and 4’s slapped on the snare with a palatable, top 40 radio bass rhythm. 

To my delight it looked early on that this arrangement was going to be challenging not only to play but to flesh out completely with Kaiser’s collaboration. I was not simply being dictated to what the part would and should be, I was being cited to bring my own ideas and bridge the gap with what I brought to the table as the percussionist on the song. This was all the equity I would require as we moved through the recording process. 

A few weeks (months?) after our one practice session it was time to record. I was home from UGA on fall break coincidentally to when they would be recording for the EP so the congruency was perfect for me giving the night of recording my full attention. I navigated the northern Atlanta streets winding along a part of town I had rarely gone to but felt indistinguishable to the suburban streets in the outer city limits that I had traveled down thousands of times before until I finally came to my destination. The sun had just set so the early nightfall only added to the inconspicuousness of the building I was examining for the first time. The house off the nondescript road that countless drivers had passed on their daily commutes, never truly knowing the iconic figures that descended upon it in repetition to record their latest musical offering for the world. I was enthusiastically greeted by the band and brought inside.

Even with the prior knowledge of the pedigree of artists that had made music at Southern Tracks, to step inside and immediately be surrounded by plaque after plaque of platinum after gold after platinum record completely filling the walls was completely flooring. Acts like Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, Bruce Springsteen, Stone Temple Pilots, and Train to very literally name a few were smattered across the walls. The nu-metal loving preteen in me couldn’t help but be giddy to see plaques for Korn and Limp Bizkit’s “Significant Other” also adorning the space. The prestige was instantly upon me and I hadn’t taken 4 steps into the place. 

As I was getting the tour, we came into the main recording room and I realized that I actually recognized this space on a documentary I had seen on the recording of one of Incubus’ most recent albums and was blown away where I stood all over again. I would be sharing a studio space with some of my favorite and biggest bands in the world. We had a coffee in the kitchen to chat about the game plan for the evening but all I truly remember was trying to contain my excitement from bubbling over about getting to play in a space that had been shared by some of my most personally formative influences. I could tell that excitement was providing an energy that the band was happy to attach to, as they had no doubt overcome the base novelty of working and recording in a place that was such a fixture in the music industry. 

The actual recording process itself was a bit of blur. Everyone was working with the knowledge that we in essence had until sunrise to get what we needed so we kept a steady albeit frenetic pace. This was a creative energy that I would come to experience in a similar way again and again on various film sets and projects that would fill my time as a graduate film school student in Savannah, GA -- the hopeful yet focused grind of creative endeavor having only a finite amount of time to amass it’s final result through a tapestry of rolls and takes.

The pursuit of my MFA in film marked in my mind the closing of the chapter of my life of playing music. I had filled my years at UGA playing in various drumlines both at the college itself and in independent competition ensembles -- groups that practiced every day of every weekend from November to April until world finals were held as a culmination to the “season.” I would spend thousands of dollars in member dues, gas money, food, all for just the possibility of performing during Finals Night and competing for a world title in this incredibly niche albeit devoted subculture. 

The groups at the highest level have an “age out” that keeps the participants in the activity to age 22 or younger. I had amassed a small collection of medals from being fortunate enough to perform with one of the most successful and acclaimed of these groups, Music City Mystique. I would come to march Mystique the two years after I recorded on “Film” for Children Having Children, but my previous years of experience with the marching activity had kept my hands progressing even if my drum set skills had atrophied ever so slightly, given that my kit was not with me in my college town.

When the time came and I could no longer participate in an art form that had become my biggest passion for the previous six years of my short life, I figured I could transition from my undergraduate years fueled by music to my graduate years filled by film making. I figured I would simply trade one passion for the other as my driving creative undertaking -- as if passions are the kind of things that can just be compartmentalized and put in a box, stored away like an old sweatshirt you can’t bring yourself to part with. 

Not so fast. 

About 2 years past my “playing days” I was starting to get an itch to play music in a group again. Turns out holding a camera and editing a sequence, while exquisite fun in their own right, are simply not the same as a unit of people locking in to a tempo and key to create something that so wholly ties everyone to the singular moment that it links everyone involved for life. 

The universe must have received my exasperated transmission, because I was approached by my buddy Jeff who I knew in the student film circle and who also played bass guitar in a local band called Word of Mouth. Their original drummer was off to music school for the foreseeable future and they needed someone who could fill in. Finding a replacement drummer was no easy task given the type of songs this band wrote -- genre-bending to an eclectic fusion of multiple stylings replete with meter changes and sweeping transitions found in every song. Whoever was to come in needed to have the ability to keep up with the song writing. Jeff was privy to my marching background and knew I was literally just sitting on a drum kit with no one to play with (living in a house for graduate school meant my kit was now under the same roof as me). 

I would play in that band for the better part of two years. These would be some of the best years of my life as I experienced fully the joy of playing music in ways I could have never expected. I was now outside of my usual forum of the marching activity -- where you meticulously rehearsed and refined one show over five months to culminate in one final performance to an audience of thousands in person and thousands more online. The slightest misstep in execution not only in your playing but in your marching or coordination could result in deductions that separate ensembles by hundredths of a point, sometimes determining who takes gold back on their bus ride to their normal life or who takes home silver, or nothing at all. Playing in a “gee-tar band” was a freeing experience musically in a way that I had not anticipated, and it breathed new life into my passion for music. 

The band’s run would in essence come to apex as the headlining act for a music festival generated specifically to feature the band as the main Saturday night act. It was an apogee of the traction the band had gained through playing countless shows across Savannah and neighboring towns. The festival was held in the main park of the city, which boasted a large outdoor stage that had become the de facto outdoor venue in Savannah. 

As we played our first song, I was too shrouded in the stage fog to accurately gauge how big the crowd that stood beyond might be. I had modestly estimated a few hundred people were filling the park to see us. When we hit the final note of the first song I was floored to be met with a WALL of sound from what turned out to be thousands in the crowd roaring their approval. It is a sound I will never forget. I had played in front of crowds of thousands with Music City Mystique, but at those events I was one of roughly fifty people -- the goal was to move as a unit rather than draw individual attention. Never had I ever played drum set as the one and only percussionist on stage for such a large crowd. 

After that show the band’s original drummer returned, and they would go on to record an album in Nashville. What they believed to be the next step of the band’s evolution turned out to be the final moment of the ensemble's creative offering -- as it seems to happen in life, members would start to be taken in new directions, to new cities and new projects. I myself was completing said MFA and was too immersed in getting across that finish line to feel the sting of once again missing playing music, this time freshly off the heels of one of the most engaging and energizing chapters of my life. 

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I’ve never consciously linked that night recording at Southern Tracks with CHC as the seed planted for wanting to one day play drums in a band. Sitting here writing this though I realize that it can't be overstated how much getting to step into that prestigious place and make music lit a fire for wanting to replicate that same experience, however modulated. The constraints of time and rapport with most of the band members only added to the zest of the pressure cooker. 

We were each of us in our own capacities swimming in the deep water -- my inexperience with playing record drums and for them trying to bring their first EP to a concrete medium using state-of-the-art equipment that everyone was doing their best to navigate properly.  Each party did their best to come to a collective syntax where I was playing what Kaiser was looking for while simultaneously being able to provide revisions and suggestions. 

It was a collaborative process I would come to emulate many times on various film sets -- the free flow of creative input with the impetus of time never being on your side, forcing the train to move along the tracks.  We pushed and scraped and clawed our way across an entire all-nighter of work but left the studio feeling like we had done exactly what we came to do as we greeted the morning sun with our exhausted, over-caffeinated faces. 

I would come back to Southern Tracks one more time before it would shut its doors. This time to film a friend and one of the best drummers I personally know, Darren Stanley, for a YouTube series featuring him playing along to a track in the exact same room I had recorded with CHC those years before. It was still a Mecca though clearly a shadow of itself in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. 

As I pushed my camera along it’s dolly slider tracking shot after shot, I couldn’t help but think about the irony that both of my main art pursuits brought me to the exact same place, the exact same room -- separated by years and fine arts degrees. I thought back on that night when a few young men converged to try to produce a musical offering that would end up linking us even almost a decade and half later as I draft this. It is still the only recording of myself playing drums on a full blown find-it-on-a-Spotify-near-you track. 

For me, this is a beauty that both film and music share -- that souls converging for even one evening can create something that, whether to the world at large or to they themselves, can last throughout the rest of our lives, becoming snapshots in time that link us to a sense memory and remind us of who and what we were.

***

CHC EP ANNIVERSARY (PART III)

by MATTHEW FUGEL (Guitar, Vocals)

As I witnessed the craft and creation of Children Having Children (2007), I glimpsed within the mind and heart of a friend and bandmate, to a pool of sentiments so deep that words alone would never suffice to convey meaning and gravity. As Steven helmed the studio console for a few intense weekends during the creation of this album, the dedication to his craft was as apparent as ever. 

I began playing with Steven and Children Having Children as a casual endeavour, just making music with friends. But the deeper I went, the more connected I felt to this writing, these beautifully intricate instrumental melodies, and Steven’s nuanced attention to tone. To this day, few people come to mind with Steven’s degree of obsession over continuous self-improvement and attention to detail. We weren’t ready to approach a studio with such seriousness for many months - not until we were all ready and the music was right. 

photos by David A. Palatsi

When the time came, the band descending on an actual working professional recording studio, I was all nerves. 2.5 days of studio time, no more. Sleep when you can, where you can - but we have work to do. We were a revolving door of multi-instrumental talent, vocalists, console operators, guitar tuners, runners. Our focus was fueled by countless pots of coffee and the best of the local taqueria. We had access to the finest professional equipment, to a fleet of legendary and priceless instruments the likes of which I’d never handled. A live room that had seen true legends of modern music stood like hallowed ground. Having spent countless hours working sessions for well-known bands, Steven navigated every bit of the facility with confidence - from the patch bay to Pro Tools down to the tape machine onto which we recorded drums. We continued to tap every resource available to us - a Mellotron (whose sound needs no introduction, nor has any substitute), pump organ, grand piano, racks-full of effects.

We were underway. Raucous percussion filled the drum room. Guitar amps were driven so hot and loud, microphones needed to be isolated from bleeding over into each other with makeshift baffles. A cacophony of countless distorted, altered, warped instruments and other “sounds” were layered upon each other like stacking plates - it felt numbing and confusing and overwhelming - we played on a ‘hurdy gurdy’, for god sakes, I’d never even heard of this thing before - and yet, we returned to the mixer and played back what we had just created and I was overcome. My skin tingled, my neck tensed, a catharsis set in that made it all make sense - this was something unique and special and otherworldly; this was an art.

Today, my life has taken me to a place far away from music. But the songs I touched, the melodies I played, the guitar leads I sweated and obsessed over, as I knew Steven had done before me in crafting them, stick with me to this day. When I listen to Children Having Children I hear ambition. I hear confident sophistication. I see a band holding its head high with an aspiration to be something all its own, an uncharted sea of sound full of experimentation that still sees joy and fun and life and feeling, and knows what the hell it wants. As I’ve watched Steven move the band forward since the release of this 2007 record, I’ve admired his ability to stay consistent while pushing himself and his sound in new directions. He has accepted the risk and the challenges of being a musician and his art is thriving. I have always felt honored to have been a part of his journey, the band’s history, and this album.

*** 

CHC EP ANNIVERSARY (PART II)

by EVAN ROBERTSON (Cello)

photo by David A. Palatsi

My role in Children Having Children’s first EP is fuzzy. The recording coincided with a time in my life when the world had opened to me with all its possibilities and grandeur. Overwhelmed, I had retreated into myself and constructed an intricate shell to abide in. Part of this shell was to minimize anything with which I engaged. To render something meaningless and trivial made it seem approachable, achievable. An unfortunate consequence was that if my own actions had little meaning, I also perceived a similar lack of meaning in the activities of those around me. 

So, when Kaiser had asked me to record cello on the track "Museums" in spite of the fact that I parted ways with the formative band about a year earlier, my automatic reductionism kicked in. I had approached the recording studio, nestled in the caverns of a building on Fairlie Poplar Street in Atlanta, with a mantra repeating in my mind: "It is only a few notes, a few moments of music." Anyone who has absorbed in a creative endeavor with Kaiser knows the mantra is antithetical to his approach to music and to life. 

I remember sitting down in the studio, ready to play my cello part without vision or desired outcome, as the entire recording process unfolded around me in a loop. Kaiser would enter the studio, shift a mic, go back to the control room. Ask me to play again. Come in, reposition a mic. 

His voice came through my headphones: "Again, but louder. Again, but softer. Again, but crescendo into the G-sharp note. Again, but don't stress the A note. Again." 

Kaiser had foresight; he had a sound for the song locked in his mind, which was trying to get out of its shackles and onto tape. What I was playing was central to its emancipation. I vaguely recall his detailed explanation of the grainy sound he had heard on another album by another band which escapes me now. How he needed to set up the microphones in an exact arrangement to achieve that sound, how I needed to attack and release the notes in a particular way to produce that tone. 

photo by David A. Palatsi

Some takes were raw screw-ups, others were different variations on a mystical sound Kaiser wanted but had not yet considered. A few hours had passed by the time I finished. The result: a few seconds of cello by yours truly. I was in, out, and sipping a drink at the bar around the corner before midnight, but I would learn later that Kaiser and the band's co-founder David Palatsi had loftier aims and continued working in the studio until sunrise when they had to pack up and drive to their respective day jobs. 

Over a decade later and a little less reductive in my approach, I meditate now on this question: "What did it take to get to those few seconds of cello?" It took more than the time spent in the studio. More than Kaiser's meticulous attention. The whole creative endeavor is a profound ensemble of equal parts skills, abilities, and passion accumulated throughout one’s life.  Those seconds were the culmination of a complex karmic chain that only a monk in contemplation could work out. 

I, for one, had to walk into an orchestra room in middle school and decide that the cello was for me. I had to stick with it, take lessons, and audition for music school. David had to stop me on a train platform and ask, as I was carrying a very cello-shaped case, “Hey, do you play the cello? And do you want to play in my band?" Which brought me to Steven’s apartment for an audition. 

photo by David A. Palatsi

And then there is Kaiser, who had to collide and form a lasting friendship with David, to develop his musical skill set over years, to put in the time and energy to figure out every piece of equipment in that studio – manuals and all – in order to realize those seconds. 

And such as it is with all creative endeavors. We spend a lifetime developing, molded by that inner voice that pushes us to produce minutes of song, hours of film, a gallery exhibition's worth of art, whatever the pursuit might be. And all that goes into it, an intricate web of support. The people who made the tape, who programmed the editing software to splice different cuts of music, who assembled the electronics to achieve a sound that only sentience could produce. Further still, back to Pythagoras who noticed that the clanging of a blacksmith’s hammer differed on various sized anvils. The insight would spawn a golden era of music instrumentation that would lead to the creation of the Viola Da Gamba, the cello’s precursor. 

It is easy to undercut the lifetimes it took to generate those seconds. It is easy to reduce those forces. But when you take it all in, stare into the improbability of it all, then the entire causal chain that brought Steven Kaiser, David Palatsi, and myself to that particular point in that particular space at that particular time for those hours can only be described as miraculous.

***