Easy Reader 12/14/06

Entertainment News
Music Preview: Latch Key Kid, Part I
The South Bay's Gavin Heaney, aka Latch Key Kid, rides the waves to a global audience

by Mark McDermott

Latch Key Kid was way ahead of the Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq.

Last year, Gavin Heaney, the South Bay trio's singer and songwriter, wrote Coming Home Soon. It might be best song yet written about the Iraq war as viewed from home. Its a reggae-tinged surf song, not so much rabidly anti-war as meditatively so, kind of a cross between Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun and Jimmy Cliff, circa 1972.


Where have all the young men gone?
They're leaving town, one by one
Johnny, come and get your gun
Father give your only son

Fearlessly they lay down their lives
Son, don't be afraid to die
You're fighting for the land that you love
Fighting for your God up above

When the bullets fall around you like rain
And the starry night has burst into flames
Remember you're the few, you're the brave
Remember what you're fighting to save

I know you'll be coming home soon
The war is over, it was on the evening news

Suicidal bombs in their cars
Wrap them up in stripes and stars
Johnny boy is coming home
For a soldier's burial


The song has an unusually melodic mellowness, it's actually a catchy anti-war song and has a slightly Latin flavor, owing to the fact that the music was written when Heaney was working on the soundtrack for Sofia, a documentary by local filmmaker Peter Goetz that tells the story of Peruvian surfer and folk hero Sofia Mulanovich . Coming Home Soon was actually picked up by another independent documentary, Roam (by the British Columbia-based mountain biker/photographer group known as the Collective), and it suddenly found a national, and even international, audience.

Heaney, who wrote the song after his cousin shipped off to Iraq, said his intention wasn't to write a straight-up protest song.

"I just thought about how I would really be pissed if something happened to him, so I wrote this as a way to deal with that fear," he said in an interview this week. "I wanted to strike a chord in a way that it wasn't taking sides so much as it was just a story, kind of like Bob Dylan, he is just there as this timeless voice taking notice of everything as it happens. If you say you are for or against something, you leave somebody out and you start a big fight. Where, if you can present the facts in such a way that that people can empathize and agree and find common ground, its a better way.

The song is available on the band's myspace page (www.myspace.com/latchkeykid1) and can be downloaded on the band's website (www.latchkeykid.org), which is part of the story of how Coming Home Soon has spread. Heaney said more than a thousand people from as far away as Germany, England, Australia, and wherever there are mountain bikers have downloaded the song and continue to do so every day. The music is reaching a global audience, and there isnt a record company involved at any stage.

Both the song and the band's eponymous first album, Latch Key Kid, were recorded, mixed and produced in Heaney's home in Manhattan Beach.

"It's basically like communism for musicians", Heaney said. "We own the means of production now. I'm a total musical Marxist. I can come up with an idea, record it, make it sound like any professionally produced CD, and put it up on the Internet, where people can listen to it and buy it. Its just amazing, the mobility and freedom you know, before, we almost signed onto a record deal, and its such a process. I think more and more band's are going to do this and just be their own producer."

If Heaney and his music have now gone global, he has long been a mainstay of the South Bay music scene. Heaney, 30, has been playing in bands here for 15 years, beginning with the pop punk band AWOL that he formed with some of his buddies back in their Mira Costa days. Latch Key Kid is actually something of a side project Heaney and his old friends, guitarist and singer Eric Lyman and drummer Matt Muir, along with bassist Brett Thomas, comprise the band Slackstring, which has grown from a local favorite to a staple on the jam band circuit (in fact, they are about to release a live album recorded in the famed Burlington, Vt., venue, Nectars).

But Heaney is one of those prodigious songwriters who emits melodies on an almost involuntary basis. He says he writes a song almost every day, and Latch Key Kid provides another outlet for his music.

"I like to have my freedom to do what I want," he said. "But Slackstring is definitely getting traction. We are in a real good position with this band."

Both bands have been recorded on soundtracks. Slackstring was featured on the first, self-titled The Collective mountain-biking documentary as well as Roam and the Fuel television networks Road Trip Nation. And both bands are frequently described as surf music, an ever-widening musical scope that has expanded from it's Beach Boy and Dick Dale genesis to include mellow modern singer/songwriters/surfers such as Jack Johnson and Donovan Frankenreiter.

Heaney calls surfing and music his double passions, and while little of his music is directly about surfing, there's something about it that somehow always comes back to the beach. Its a certain indefinable quality that most bands considered surf rock share.

"There's harmony and balance, rhythm and tempo" Heaney said. "Surfing is a lot like music. It has to do with waves of energy. Riding them."

Heaney has followed the classic surf curriculum, graduating from Mira Costa to attend UC Santa Barbara. He was an English major and obtained his teaching credential, working for a while as a substitute teacher in local schools after graduating. While he has left his teaching career behind to focus on music, his education in classical English literature frequently informs his lyrics. He cites Dante as a songwriting influence in the same breath he mentions the Grateful Dead, and the opening song on the Latch Key Kid album, Made of Light, follows the journey described in Dante's Divine Comedy.

Stranger yet, the song was written as a Christmas carol. Sort of.

"I wrote it a few years ago," Heaney said. "I was a little short of cash so I thought, Oh, I'll write a Christmas carol and send it out. There is so much Christmas music, you've heard it so many times and it just sounds so cheesy. I wanted to write a Christmas song that was more like a hymn."

"It came from Dante's Divine Comedy," he added. "I just love Dante, I love Milton, I love Shakespeare, that's the poetry that is just brilliant to me. As a kid, I wanted to be the poet, and nowadays, what better way to do poetry, than to put it to music? And I can't write long things. I've tried writing a book but could never get past the first five pages."

Another very evident influence on Heaney's music was Elliott Smith, the airily melodic songwriter who combined dark subject matter with a Beatle-esque musicality.

"He was definitely a huge influence on me," Heaney said. "I mean, I was just blown away by his harmonies and songwriting. When I found out he was dead [Smith died of two stab wounds to his chest that may or may not have been self-inflicted], it was just mind-blowing. I couldnt even believe it."

Like Smith, Heaney writes sweet music to lyrics that sometimes probe themes of darkness and pain, often regarding love or the lack thereof. "There is a quote I love by Percy Bysshe Shelley, "he said. "It says, The sweetest songs tell of saddest thoughts. That has always struck a chord with me."

A typical Latch Key Kid show is likely to explore just about any musical direction imaginable. Heaney says the band, which includes Thomas on bass and drummer Taylor Kennedy still plays classic covers from time-to-time, although his growing musical catalogue, and an audience that is all too familiar with his changing tastes, makes such performance less and less frequent. A list of tracks Heaney has compiled on his website includes brief musical descriptions that are indicative of his range: fairy tales gone wrong w/trumpet, slackstring wiggle w/harmonies, sitar/Indian groove, funky wah, surfy Spanish lullaby, southern rock road trip, classic Bob Marley soul reggae and even rock anthem.

"I'm interested in all styles of music," Heaney said. "I love doing everything, and that's why it's sometimes hard to focus. Sometimes I wish I was like those musicians who do one thing and do it really well, but I think this is probably better in the long run. There's more variety and depth."

The Los Angeles area can be discouraging for a musician it is, after all, one of the few music scenes where bands are sometimes asked to pay to play at certain venues, and the competition for paying gigs is fierce. Heaney still works on the side giving guitar lessons, but Latch Key Kid has also landed gigs at such Hollywood hotspots as the Viper Room and the Whiskey a Go Go, and Slackstring has toured nationally. He says teaching helps him keep the stoke that first drew him to music, and he isnt particularly concerned with achieving rock star status.

"There is something magical about music," he said. "It's that rock and roll dream. Everybody has it. The reality of it is not for everyone, and it's not exactly what it seems to be, either. I don't have to be rich and famous to be successful at what I do. I just really love music and I'm stoked I can do this for my job, I'm paying the bills and touring the world. Surfing everyday. Life is good, man.

Latch Key Kid plays Kilkennys at the Redondo Beach Pier Friday, Dec. 15, starting at 9 p.m, and at Patrick Malloys Acoustic Sessions on the Hermosa Beach pier on Dec. 19 at 10 p.m. ER