My elder brother, Rhett (1972-2005), was a musical prodigy who explored and experimented with music from pre-school until his untimely death from blood clots in his lungs at the ridiculously young age of 32. I grew up in his musical shadow and I constantly wonder what songs he would be making today if he was still here to make them.

I will be first to admit that although I loved my brother fiercely, I did not always understand him or where he was going with his music. For almost 20 years he and I formed the core of the experimental art-rock band The Lavone (which rhymes with “the phone” not “the fawn” in case you are wondering) and in that time we recorded 16 albums worth of lo-fi indie weirdo music that, it nothing else, amused the two of us immensely. Rhett and I often worked in a sort of alone/together process. We would independently write songs, sometimes more fully formed than others, and we would bring them to each other for completion and elucidation. I would usually take a guitar, figure out a few chords, write some lyrics, and bring the idea to Rhett who would fill in the drums and the rest of the production. Rhett usually worked in a more, shall we say, oblique way. Rhett would have the whole song in his head and would come to me and attempt, in vain, to get me to hear it too. He would play one or two chords, usually chords involving more fingers than it seemed he ought to have, and he would hum or sing a line or two, and then he would paint a verbal picture of the rest of what he was hearing and I would smile and nod and wait for the core of the recording to appear from one of his solo sessions on 4-track. Then he would play me the fleshed-out version and say “See!” and I would be completely incapable of connecting the thing I was hearing with the two chords I had heard a week previous but I would always be astonished.

Sadly for Rhett, he spent most of his musical life trying to stuff 48-track musical ideas into 4-track recording technology. Many of his recordings sound muddled and muffled, not because he intended them to, but because he had to bounce down so many tracks onto so many generations of tape in order to fit all the parts in his head on to the recording. He only spent the last 6 years of his life with access to modern digital audio workstation technologies and some of what he did with that freedom still gives me chills and I am one of the few people (perhaps the only one) who can hear his earlier recordings on tape while simultaneously hearing his full-color vision in my mind because, well, I was on the inside of his process.

It was recently suggested to me that I should create a curated playlist with commentary for the world and the idea appealed to me (although this is clearly not what Scott had in mind) so I have set myself the challenge of putting together 7 songs that highlight, for me, the things that made my brother’s music so powerful and influential in my life. Why 7? I don’t know. Seemed like a good choice for an arbitrary number. Are these his best songs? I don’t know. But they are songs that I have returned to over and over and over again for many many years.

1. Oh No – When Rhett was 16 he fell in love with a 29-year-old woman and she loved him back. This did not go over well with our parents and they stopped the two from seeing each other. Nothing physical ever transpired between them, but they were absolutely kindred spirits and when Rhett was cut off from her, his heart was shattered. I always found it interesting that as an adult Rhett ended up marrying a different woman who was also 13 years his senior. This first song, “Oh No”, was recorded in 1988 and appeared on one of the early albums by The Lavone recorded on a home stereo before we even had multi-track capability. Armed with only a Moog synthesizer, a guitar, bass, a drumset, a microphone, and a delay box, Rhett created a moody, sad, impassioned, ethereal, poem of a song that captured his teenage heartbreak. He played every instrument on this track via overdubbing, playing the drums first and then playing the keyboards along with onto a second tape, then adding the vocals and guitar onto yet another tape. This song was a staple of The Lavone and we performed it on stage at what turned out to be our final live performance in 2000. At that show, 12 years after he first laid it down, I finally got to play along with one of my favorite early Rhett songs. Years later I would record a cover for myself, but I give you here the original, The Lavone’s “Oh No”.

 

2. Hi, My Name Is Rhett Sutter – My second choice dates to 1991 which, at the time, seemed a lifetime from “Oh No”. “Hi…” appeared on The Lavone’s 1991 album “A Concert For No-One” and featured an older, wiser, 19-year-old Rhett attempting to paint a musical portrait of himself. Rhett started his musical life as a drummer so I always thought it was fascinating that his self-portrait at the time is set to the simple beat of a metronome and focuses instead on a sort of deranged carnival of synthesized sounds while he sings about how he sees himself versus the roles he plays versus how people interpret him and what he wants to be. This song has, to put it mildly, a lot going on. Despite the driving metronomic beat, almost nothing else ever repeats, there are few motifs, and around 6 minutes in the song appears to be fading out before storming back for some discordant piano notes. I remember him working on this one over the course of a few weeks. It is experimental and abstract, hardly a pop song, but it’s original title was “Here I Am” and he was attempting, to the best of his ability, to put the inside of his head on tape and if you surrender to the weirdness, this song is about as honest and compelling to me today as it was the first time he played it for me back in high school.

3. Gossip Gossip Gossip – I cannot even begin to describe how much I love it when Rhett growl-screams “really gets on my nerves / it’s cheesy / it’s lying and vain / all the stupid people / got nothing better to say / than gossip!” at the beginning of this song. It was the early 90’s, he was maybe 20 years old, and he here is just spewing beautiful venom at the top of his lungs over a sequence of truly diabolical chords that I could barely play. This song was recorded as part of our short-lived band Purple Triangles which brought Rhett and I into recording partnership with Chad Astleford and Sy Park. Unlike on most of the previous Lavone recordings, PT generally recorded as a foursome and so Rhett had to teach us to play his insane chords which he wrote on a piano and then looked up how to play on the guitar. This session he was a mad conductor, counting us in, writing out our parts, and literally guiding us through every twist and turn of the mini-symphony about the shallow vapidity of “all the stupid people”. All the Triangles sessions were fun, whether we were recording Sy’s brokenhearted power pop, or Chad’s blistering guitar solos, but the Gossip Gossip Gossip session was for me one of the purest joys of that year of recording. Rhett was so into it, such a studio tyrant, and I had no idea what the end result was going to be, only he did, and the final song still rocks my socks, I still think this is one of the quintessential Rhett vocal performances, and I’m still kinda mad at him for bending my fingers into all of those unnatural shapes.

4. Spiritually – Of all the fan mail we ever got back when NuclearGopher.com was a thing, two stick in my mind. The first favorably compared my brother Reed’s song “Melinda” to the Indigo Girls, which infuriated Reed to no end (he hated the Indigo Girls) and made me laugh hysterically. The second called this song, Spiritually, “the best song I have ever heard”. If I were forced at gunpoint to pick the most Rhett song of all the Rhett songs, this might be the winner. Recorded for his first released solo album “Rhett!”, this song has it all. Marvin Gaye-esque vocals, synth strings, slide guitars (I get chills around the 3-minute mark when they sweep in), unexpected chord changes, funky drumming, discordant soloing, and a surprise ending. I consider it all the more impressive when I consider that he wrote, performed, engineered, mixed, and mastered this thing all by himself using only a four-track tape player. Rhett was a deeply spiritual person who believed wholeheartedly in God. He didn’t usually write directly about this because the religion we were raised in frowned on that sort of direct messaging but he put it front and center on this track and that too, was Rhett. These songs are supposed to demonstrate some of his many different facets and so many of them are on display in Spiritually it really is quite a perfect showcase of who my brother was.

5. Floatin’ – On the final Lavone album, 2000’s Isotope, Rhett was finally unleashed from the confines of the 4-track and given all the tracks he could eat and he responded to this suddenly broad canvas by cramming 40+ tracks of audio into a pop symphony that weighs in at just over two minutes long. Saxophones, flutes, bass harmonicas, walls of voices, layers of percussion, banjo, this is the full Brian Wilson, the full Phil Spector, the full Polyphonic Spree, you can listen to it 30 times and find something you missed on every listen. I have now been listening to Floatin’ for 20 years and I still feel like the song is a rushing river that is pushing me, lifting me, tearing through a canyon, on-rushing, overwhelming me. He spent months on this one, bringing various people into the basement studio, teaching them the parts he needed them to play, borrowing instruments from friends, all to finally record that epic, towering, spectacle he had been aiming for all those years but lacked the technology to execute with this clarity and focus. He was so happy working on Floatin’ and he made a point of having each of us Sutter boys take a verse. Reed goes first, then Rhett takes the second verse, and then I get the third verse. I was honored.

6. Blues Around My Soul – If “Oh No” is representative of the early days of The Lavone, “Blues Around My Soul” is the perfect representative of the end. The final Rhett track on our final album, I have always thought of this song as the closing statement from The Lavone and therefore the end of an era of my partnership with my brother made all the more poignant for me by the fact that we had no idea that would be true at the time. Yes, we recorded a little more Lavone music over the next couple of years (one other song completes this list), but we never released another album together and most of our final recording sessions were lost to history. BAMS is a beautiful song with lush arrangements, beautiful harmonies, stirring chord changes, and an amazing vibe that makes me tear up every time I hear it. In this song Rhett was writing about his sadness over our mother’s deteriorating mental and emotional state at the time and the heavy toll it took on her relationships with us kids. He had long told me that he felt he was unable to connect emotionally with her, always felt abandoned and unloved, and he poured that into this song. It wasn’t his only work on the subject, but this one came at a particularly tough time for us all as she was beginning to suffer from the delusions and issues that would ultimately cause her to leave for parts unknown, never to be seen by any of us again. I don’t actually know where my mother is or if she is still alive and I can’t help but think on that while I listen to this one, knowing I will never hear either of their voices again.

7. Keep On Receiving Joy – Last but certainly not least, I choose “Keep On Receiving Joy”, from Rhett’s final album, Londa, recorded and released in 2004, the year before he died. This song was originally recorded as The Lavone and is actually the last released song that he and I worked on together. I contributed guitar and some backing vocals and the rest is pure Rhett. This song turned out perfect, IMO, but it’s development was a long and winding road featuring at least three alternate versions with completely different vocal and lyrics and at least one alternate title, Omens and Signs. We put in a lot of session time trying to get this one to match the picture in his head and when I edited together the photo montage for his funeral service, this was the song that concluded it. I really could see no better choice. This is a perfect song from his final album that perfectly reflects his tastes, his talents, and his beautiful soul and loving heart. Rhett could never have known that this would be among the final acts of musical creation of his life, but I know “Keep On Receiving Joy” encapsulates what he would want for anybody. Love. Joy. Peace. And harmony. Always harmony. Keep on receiving joy.