Tamer animals

The musicians behind I Said Stop! return to Tulsa with new project

Ten years ago, friends Ian Gollahon and Brian Keller played in the foot-stomping indie rock group, I Said Stop! The young musicians eventually moved to Chicago for college, and the band went into a years-long hiatus while Gollahon got married and Keller became a professional audio engineer. 

Now, the songwriting duo has returned to Tulsa with a new project and a new record, which speaks to the story of the younger selves they left behind.

I met with Gollahon and Keller downtown recently to discuss their new band, Animal Names, and its forthcoming album. The pair has the kind of easy wordless rapport people find only after decades of friendship.  Keller told me the story of how they first met. 

“Fourteen years old. Wright Christian Academy. It was crazy. [Ian] was the first student I met when I went there. I showed up in ninth grade with my mom, and he was the guy the administrator told to give me a tour.  Two months later he was like ‘Do you want to play music with me?’ and we started a band.” 

Their first band was an angsty Christian punk rock group with violin and piano called Decorative Destruction. Imagine a group of skinny, fist pumping 14-year-old suburban white kids trying to wax rebellious at a church school in south Tulsa. Keller laughed and shook his head. “You gotta keep in mind we were going to a private Christian school, but we were the students that always got in trouble for not raising our hands in chapel.” 

“When we were still in high school, we were going out and listening to Elliot the Letter Ostrich all the time,” Gollahon said. “Aaron Wesinger, who plays bass [in Animal Names] was also the bassist for Elliot the Letter Ostrich, and so we were like let’s just start a dance band and play a different kind of music. I remember us saying we were tired of playing angsty crap, and we just wanted to play something fun. That’s when we did ‘I Said Stop!’ Then with Animal Names we were in college and I started writing more folky stuff. There were seventh chords and more complex time signatures and it no longer sounded like a dance-y band.

“When I first came back to Tulsa I just wanted to restart I Said Stop,” Gollahon continued. “We tried to make that work, but it became pretty clear that this wasn’t really I Said Stop anymore. It was really time for a new name that described what we were playing now.” 

The group’s new moniker is an homage to the indie rock bands that inspired them to play music in the first place, like Modest Mouse, Grizzly Bear and even Elliot the Letter Ostrich.  The self-titled debut begins with the bright rhythmic picking of Keller’s Rickenbacker swelling towards Ian Gollahon’s improbably earnest voice. The songs teeter between an alt country and a psychedelic guitar rock sensibility that calls to mind early My Morning Jacket and even more obscure sonic voices like The Eels. Wesinger’s fluid, melodic bass and Philip Martin’s tight, straight drumming underpin the album’s rhythm. Tulsa guitar luminary Chris Combs (JFJO, Stone Trio) contributes lap steel to a track while Olivia McGraw adds vocals and violin.

The album was recorded completely in Gollahon’s garage. The entire process was fairly DIY, with Keller and Gollahon acting as both engineers and producers. 

“It sounded horrible at first,” Keller said. “We sound-treated it before we recorded. We bought all of this insulation from Home Depot and treated the garage and left it open and then we wrapped memory foam around the sheetrock and all the corners to help muffle the bass and we created a memory foam floor. We practiced there too which really helped a lot with the drums.”

The pair’s engineering backgrounds—Keller went to school for it and Gollahon interned at Engine Studios under Brian Deck (Modest Mouse, Iron and Wine)—served the band well; standout moments abound on the musically dense album. Gollahon’s lyrics are riddled with ambivalence, loss and longing.     

Recently, Gollahon and his family received the tragic news that his older brother James had passed away. Gollahon told me that the complicated struggle of his brother’s life colored many of the emotions on this record. “Some of lyrics on ‘Greens and Red’ and a few of the songs are referencing my brother’s life and all of those issues in the most honest way I could.” 

On perhaps the album’s most striking moment, the song “Flowers in your hair,” Gollahon sings “You wound me up for hours and the minutes you were there. There’s poison in the flowers and there’s flowers in your hair. Now what do you do when you find someone who’s telling the truth.” Here he writes of a beauty that kills him, catharsis hidden in a parable of regret. Animal Names somehow manages to both mourn and celebrate the power of loss and hope all at once. 

Soundpony Records will release the band’s self-titled debut on vinyl with a release party at Soundpony Friday, August 12 at 10 p.m.

For more from Damion, read his article on Kalyn Fay's album, Bible Belt.