Last July, Greg Elias, under his musical pseudonym “Greg Islands,” quietly made one of the most audacious moves any Charleston musician has made in a long time: He released an album with 101 new songs on it, aptly titled 101 New Songs.
It was unlike anything that Elias had ever attempted before. What’s more, Elias is the only musician on 101 New Songs, playing guitar, singing and overdubbing everything else.
If you’re wondering what label put it out, it’s Elias’ own label, Academia Tapes, which has spent more than a decade giving promising young (and often experimental) artists like Max Transmissions, Gracefully Aging Hippy Soloists and Eric Gaffney an inexpensive outlet for getting their material released.
101 New Songs runs nearly three hours, but there’s a lot of variety on it, even with the stripped-down settings and relatively brief song lengths. Most of them start with the unmistakable hum of a cranked guitar amp before a dark, chugging riff sets the tone, but then the tune might branch into a dark, murky and paranoid guitar explosion (“One Of Them”), eerie, sparse, searching ballads (“F.Y.E.”) or a subtle, muted rocker (“Silver”).
A musical challenge
Elias released 101 New Songs physically on a triple-CD set earlier this month, and if you heard the initial version that he posted on Bandcamp last summer, you’re in for some surprises, because even after its online release, Elias continued to tinker with it.
“I got it online about a week after I had finished the last bits of recording and mixing,” Elias said. “But for the first few months, I was still tweaking it. I’d get some feedback from people and mix things a little differently and upload those on the sly. So if someone downloaded it right away last July, that’s probably a little bit of a different mix than what’s up there now.”
So how, exactly, did Elias come up with such a unique, and challenging, idea? Turns out it started as these things sometimes do: As a joke.
“When I was in my early 20s,” Elias said, “I was playing in some bands with a buddy of mine, and I would ask, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny to put out an album with 100 songs on it?’ I would joke around about writing songs really quickly. And since then, it’s always been in the back of my mind.”
When 2020 rolled around, Elias began to realize that the riffs and song ideas that he’d been storing as voice memos on his phone might be a way to make his project a reality.
“As I was listening back to these parts, I could hear how they might sound if I fleshed them out. So I started fleshing out my guitar tracks that I had done on voice memos with bass and drums, and I got to a point where I realized that if I had 25 or 30 of these songs, I can easily do 30 more. It became conceivable that I could actually do this thing that I had joked about in my early twenties.”
So Elias set up a relatively primitive recording space, grabbed his guitar and hit “Record,” and the ideas started flowing almost immediately.
“When I sat down, it was like I was just dipping a bucket into the stream and pulling stuff out,” he said. “I got to 100 songs. I wanted to keep doing this but I had to turn back, and that’s when a lot of the real work started with adding instrumentation. Writing lyrics was the last phase, and then it was about dressing up the songs and doing the mixes.”
Now that it’s out on a gorgeously appointed triple-CD set (the cover art is an early portrait of King Arthur on parchment surrounded by French text), Elias has been able to look back on what he learned from the experience of recording 101 New Songs in 35 individual sessions.
“I’m hoping that it’s helping me get to the next stage,” he said. “And I feel great about everything that’s come out of it. And it’s the happiest I’ve been playing music in my whole life. Thinking about things a little differently has really opened my eyes to how to make music in a different way and it’s been exciting and fun. I’m just happy to be able to do it.”
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