Heaven On Their Minds: Cue
As a rule during an interview with a rock band, if talk turns to their love of musicals, it’s time to ask for the check. If that musical happens to be Jesus Christ Superstar, you may be praying for lightning to strike. But when that band is Cue and their appreciation for it is oh so sincere, it’s kind of awesome. The instrumental Austin quartet has no shame when talking about their influences, misconceptions about their sound, or their love of religious rock opera.
Cue began as a twopiece, with just high school friends Jason Brister and Clarke Dominick. “Jason and I started playing together almost exactly 10 years ago,” says Dominick, lounging in the garden at Spider House. “In ’97, we started playing as a duo; one of our first shows was at [former Austin punk bar] Bates Motel. Then came Colin, who was living in San Marcos at the time. We had just moved to this one house and Colin was like, ‘I just want to come live with you guys in Austin for a while.’ We had this ping-pong table set up in the garage, and he slept under it.”
“It was awesome,” says guitarist Colin Swietek, who also spent time in local electro-pop group the Octopus Project. “They were practicing as a duo, playing acoustic guitars, and I’d have all these ideas for what I could do on guitar.”
As a trio, Cue released its first LP in 2001 before adding Stacy Meshbane, violinist since the age of 4 and previously of Austin’s psych-lullabye band TunaHelpers.
“I was really scared because I’ve done classical my whole life, and they were all loud boys,” Meshbane laughs.
The current incarnation of Cue was born. At first listen, their lyric-free approach to songwriting seems scene-driven, expressionist, orchestral. Brister insists that’s just the way it happened.
“Clarke and I were weaned on a lot of the same music, and a lot of it was lyrical,” Brister says. “Fugazi, and … well, I have this renewed obsession with Jesus Christ Superstar. It’s all very lyrical, but I just don’t know if we have anything to say.”
“The way the songs are written, they don’t need any vocals,” concurs Swietek. “When we’re writing something, whatever sounds good to everyone is what we’ll run with.”
“When someone says ‘cinematic,’ I think of something grand,” hedges Brister about the most common label attached to Cue. “I don’t think we have those grand concepts in our songwriting. [The songs] might be more based around the ideas of relationships, us getting together, getting excited about something, than grander ideas like war.”
“We started using ‘chamber rock,’ but I don’t really feel like that’s so accurate,” Dominick says. “There are so few instrumental bands, so there are all these default labels. You want to think that you’re doing something original, but for this kind of music to be a genre right now, that’s fairly new.”
April’s Bring Back My Love (austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2005-04-22/music_phases2.html) was recorded at Sweatbox studios over the period of approximately two years. The combination of Dominick’s piano and glockenspiel, and Meshbane’s violin create a static mix and flesh out stories where Swietek’s guitar and Brister’s drums are free to crawl or run to the surprise ending.
“We recorded it like four times,” Brister says. “It finally worked. We were also very, very done with it.”
Discussion again devolves into talk of Jesus Christ Superstar, it’s viable, catchy numbers and brilliant subtext. The band quotes lines from it and sings choruses.
“Whatever people say about Andrew Lloyd Webber or the musical, it was just so awesome to me,” says Dominick. “It was big and thematic, but still kind of rock & roll. I loved the rock music context.”
“I’m obsessed with it right now, again,” Brister says. “I can’t get it out of the CD player.”
“It’s just … the best story!” Dominick exclaims.
Just as he says this, a young man wearing sunglasses, flip-flops, a button-down shirt and only a towel around his waist stumbles up to the table. Even though it’s after 10pm, he insists he just woke up from a “nap in the park” and asks for a cigarette. Battling hiccups, the man tells us he’s an artist and stares off into the distance before snapping back to reality and alerting us that he’s “going to play some basketball.” He stumbles away and the band stares at each other before bursting into laughter.
“Keep Austin weird!” smiles Swietek. 
This article appears in July 15 • 2005.