When it comes to making music, rising St. Peter funk fusion band Pocket Lounge embraces the strange and the spontaneous.
There is perhaps no better case study for band members Shailin O’Brien, Jack Sherwood and Charlie Kotasek’s love of musical improvisation and experimentation than their debut album “Walleye Denial.” Peppered with inside jokes, erroneous lyrics and oddball sounds like slide whistles and accordion solos, the project released on Aug. 12 is every bit as eccentric as its playful title implies.
These whimsical moments never feel out of place in the eight varied tracks that make up the album. Between the bluesy, energetic sounds of the album’s opening track Labracadabrador, the smooth bossa nova of Doodle Dee, the groovy swamp rock of Walleye Denial’s titular song and a funk-infused cover of Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, the selections stand as an eclectic tribute to the joys of jamming.
The album has been a labor of love for the trio of instrumentalists behind Pocket Lounge, who have spent the past year recording the work all on their own in a repurposed hog barn 3 miles east of St. Peter. It’s a modest space equipped with a laptop, microphones and patches of gray sonic panels lining the walls, and while the sound may not always come through perfectly, the humble studio is more than enough for the band to record themselves with authenticity.
“I really think there’s a loveable charm in the imperfections in the album,” said O’Brien.
“I think we found the balance between having it sound somewhat professional and just having fun with it,” Sherwood added.
Pocket Lounge, consisting of 21-year-old St. Peter musicians O’Brian and Sherwood on drums and guitar respectively, and 19-year-old Kotasek of Le Sueur on bass, strived to create a record that captures the joy and fun found in their collaborative process, Kotasek said they were deeply inspired by acts like The Band, who were known for their self-recorded projects that showcased the rock and roll artists as they were.
“You listen to those songs and you can hear the mistakes. You can hear somebody laughing in the background,” said Kotasek. “They recorded it at Big Pink, it was just a basement garage at this place out in Saugerties, New York. They recorded it themselves and did it all and to have that feeling is pretty cool.”
All on tape
Lifting inspiration from Prince’s vast collection of unreleased songs, Pocket Lounge has gotten in the habit of recording anything and everything they do. A desktop microphone sitting in the corner of the studio has captured more than 40 hours of band practices, allowing the band to keep track of little moments and memories and work them into their singles and live shows.
The young instrumentalists’ penchant for experimentation can be traced back to their upbringings in musical families, where they were exposed to a wide variation of genres at an early age. O’Brien picked up the drums and followed in the footsteps of his father, formerly a drummer for Shakti and Mankato fusion jazz band the Quantum Mechanics. It was O’Brien’s father and two of his uncles who refurbished the old hog barn on Lake Emily into a recording studio more than 20 years ago.
“He’s always been a super wild drummer. He doesn’t play that much anymore, but I remember thinking how cool it was growing up watching him play drums and so I would start playing,” said O’Brien. “I remember when I was young I would play along to Beatles songs. My biggest influence was John Bonham of Led Zeppelin kind of stuff and I kind of ramped it up from there.”
Sherwood took a similar path into music, first getting into drums as a metalhead before picking up one of his father’s old guitars.
“I just started getting really invested in it. I would play two hours a day on guitar and I think drums help me a lot because I feel like I’m a rhythm guitarist and drums are a lot of rhythm,” said Sherwood.
O’Brien and Sherwood, coming from similar backgrounds, became fast friends as classmates at Henderson’s Minnesota New Country School. In their high school years, the duo formed their first band together with some of their other classmates. But while O’Brien and Sherwood worked with each other in-sync, finding another person with a similar knowledge and taste in music was hard to find.
That was until they found Kotasek, a fellow MNCS alumnus just a few years their junior. The son of Tin Can Valley store owner and Depot Creek String Band guitarist Craig Kotasek, some of the Le Sueur youth’s earliest memories were dancing in front of the stage at his dad’s shows. His parents bought him an electric keyboard at the age of two, and it wasn’t long before he had developed a musical ear.
“I could hear something on the radio and play a melody, pick it out,” said Kotasek. “So they started sending me to lessons to learn how to play sheet music and I took eight to nine years of piano lessons and it was alright but I wanted to do more jazz, a little bit less rules, a little less classical stuff.”
Kotasek eventually found his calling when he plucked a ratted old bass off the walls of MNCS’ modest-sized music studio. He plucked the strings while learning from music tutorials to classic rock songs and it wasn’t long until he came home and announced to his dad that he was a bass player.
“On the wall of his shop was a bass in this case, and he brought it down and told me, ‘Do not break this thing.’ It’s a nice bass, not like the one you’ve been playing at school,” Kotasek recalled. “I just started practicing on that. I set up an amp outside and just blasted Led Zeppelin and all these different old rock and roll and funk tunes and started learning.”
Forming the band
O’Brien and Sherwood had taken notice of Kotasek’s understanding and feel for music while hearing him play in the school’s music room, and they eventually invited him to join them for their then-untitled band’s for first gig, a free-form improvisational jazz set at the MNCS chili cookoff in February 2023.
“[Kotasek] had a great feel and a great understanding of music. I don’t. I’m a drummer. I don’t need to, I just play with the drums,” O’Brien laughed. “These two have a really strong grasp of those and we just vibe.”
The trio continued to work on writing songs together and stretching their musical boundaries with cover songs, before holding their first set of original songs opening for the Quantum Mechanics at Mankato Brewery. The band was still without a name at the time, though Sherwood had written down plenty of ideas for it.
“He had a notes app with 50 different names on all these different strange creations,” said Kotasek.
“Most of them were pretty horrible,” O’Brien laughed.
Why the name Pocket Lounge? To Sherwood, it was a succinct representation of the band’s sound and approach to music.
“We can get in the groove, which is also called the ‘pocket’, and then, for the lounge, we have a jazz, loungy sound,” said Sherwood.
The band continued to open for the Quantum Mechanics until November of last year, when Quantum Mechanics’ frontman and Mankato Brewery booker Eli Hoehn offered Pocket Lounge a chance to perform their own two-hour set at the brewery.
The gig led to Hoehn inviting the band to play at Patrick’s on Third during the Minnesota Original Music Festival earlier this summer. The fun-filled showcase of Pocket Lounge’ eclectic funk stylings was an immediate hit with the crowd, and opened many more opportunities for the band.
“We’ve heard it said that we are entertainment, instead of just being a live music band,” said O’Brien. “We embrace being weird and strange and having fun and trying to look like we’re having fun if we aren’t.”
Following the release of Walleye Denial, Pocket Lounge aims to stay true to themselves while honing their talents for the creation of a future album to come.
IF YOU GO
Funk fusion trio Pocket Lounge is celebrating the release of their debut album “Walleye Denial” with special guests Soul Funk Union at Patrick’s on Third in St. Peter on Saturday, Aug. 31 between 8-11 p.m. The event will feature live performances by both bands as well as copies of the album and merchandise available for purchase.
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