It was during a hot, unemployed August four years ago that novice singer-songwriter Bill Ricchini recorded the songs that would become his self-released debut album, Ordinary Time. In his south Philadelphia apartment, Ricchini used everything from glockenspiel to cello and sleigh bells on the album of dreamy, Sixties-style folk-pop. Its homespun production is apparent in the sounds of the city that made it through his window: the local bus, church bells and shouts of his old, Italian neighbors. This Tuesday, Ricchini releases the studio-recorded follow-up, Tonight I Burn Brightly.
While Ordinary Time is composed of eighteen musical vignettes, little slices of life, Tonight is full of memories, a kind of vigil for the departed. "The first record is sort of wonderfully fractured in a way," Ricchini says. "But I figured out how to mix up the melodies and arrangements by emulating stuff I liked, like the Beach Boys, the Kinks and the Beatles."
Tonight, produced by Ricchini and Bryce Goggin (Pavement, the Lemonheads, Luna) and featuring former Luna drummer Lee Wall and ex-Spacehog frontman Royston Langdon, continues to pay tribute to Sixties pop while also reaching even further back in time. Nestled between the lullaby "A Cold Wind Will Blow Through Your Door" and the Thirties-style show tune "People" are nine, shimmering pop tunes haunted by lovers, friends and family with stories to tell. "For the protagonist on the record," says Ricchini, "it's as if he's looking at things with clear eyes this time."
"I like doing records that have musical and thematic unity in some way," he adds, "because I love books and I grew up Catholic, and I'm a sucker for a little drama."