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Phoenix band Katastro's farewell album pays a haunting tribute to its former lead singer

Katastro
Michael Carter
Katastro

Back in 2022, the Phoenix-based band Katastro was in California, working on songs for a new album. And then, tragedy struck: their lead singer, Andy Chaves, was killed in a car accident.

The group, which had been together for fifteen years at that point, found themselves at an agonizing crossroads. They’d lost one of their best friends, and finishing the album seemed unthinkable.

But two years later, against all odds, the album is complete. It’s called “Until The End of Time,” and they released it earlier this month — with Chaves on vocals.

Katastro will be playing at the Marquee Theatre Friday, Oct. 25, and Saturday, Oct. 26, celebrating their 17 years of collaboration and friendship with Chaves.

Ryan Weddle, bassist for Katastro, joined The Show to talk about how the band to had to completely reinvent their songwriting process to make it work.

Full conversation

RYAN WEDDLE: So generally, our songs would always start music first and then usually at the very, very last minute, in typical Andy fashion, you would write the lyrics in the studio when it was time to record. And he would record these rough takes where it’s just all gibberish and we would change. You’d find the vowels that fit the bass on the right beats or whatever.

And so that’s kind of how it would start, and then at the last minute, we’d fill in the words and we’d find the words that fit the consonants and vowels perfectly to the way that we had envisioned it. And so when we were in California on those last sessions, a lot of these tracks that ended up becoming our final album, like most of what we were left with was gibberish.

And some lines that didn’t make sense, things that weren’t completed. And that was the challenge. To complete this album, we had to reverse the way that we’ve always done things for the last 17 years of being in a band, and we had to write music backwards.

SAM DINGMAN: This is fascinating to me because we’re very familiar with the story of a band where the lead singer is on some kind of big ego trip, and it’s all about, “I got a vision for these lyrics, and you guys just have to follow me,” and what I hear you saying is that the words really had to earn their place in the songs.

WEDDLE: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve always felt, just when I’m listening as an enjoyer of music, the first thing that grabs me is the music. And so, regardless of how meaningful your lyrics are, if it’s not over the right landscape it’s going to fall flat to me. And I know not all people are like that, but I think that that’s just kind of how we had always done it until he had passed away. And then that’s how it happened, was we had to find our way to make what he was saying make sense.

DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, so that brings us to the new record. Obviously, on the record, there are words and lyrics, not just gibberish. So how did you get there? Where did those recordings of his voice come from?

WEDDLE: I believe when we left the studio in California, I think we came home with four or five rough ideas, so we maybe would have the chorus lyrics recorded. But these were what we call scratch recordings. So it’s just, “hey Andy, go in there, do a couple takes, and then we’ll move on, just so that we don’t forget it.”

We were planning, when we got back to Arizona, to go to our studio in Tempe here and have him, like, really work out some of the words, or some of the melodies or whatever, but we just wanted placeholders.

"Until The End Of Time" album cover
Katastro
"Until The End Of Time" album cover

DINGMAN: So these just to make sure I understand these were you had reached the point where he had attached specific words to what was previously gibberish, but they were sort of they were rough recordings of the lyrics?

WEDDLE: Kind of. Yeah. So for instance, like one of the songs when we came back, I believe it’s called “Good Time.” That one, we had lyrics in the chorus were done, but nothing else was really completed. And so we had had all the music ideas for like verses and maybe a bridge, or we kind of knew where we could go with some of that, but we just had, you know, this one line from Andy.

It was a lot of digging through old hard drives, and we’d found songs that we had started for previous albums that were the same kind of thing where he would say a handful of lines, and then we can use that and we’ll just write new music to it, like we’ll scratch what we had before and do a whole new chord progression that will match his vocals better and make his vocals sound better than they did.

And so it ended up being this kind of puzzle. And so we took two years putting this one together, but all of that two years was mostly that kind of work.

DINGMAN: Boy, this is really amazing. It’s kind of eerie, this idea that in previous experiences of songwriting together, he was kind of paying tribute to the musicianship of the rest of you because you had to get, as you put it, the landscape in place before he could add the lyrics to it. And now it’s like you’re giving him that gift back. You’re treating the words as the landscape that you had to build music around.

WEDDLE: Absolutely, yeah. And it was a completely new challenge for us as songwriters and producers, the only song under the last track is called “Muse.” That’s the last song that Andy had recorded, everything all the way through on. But everything else was pieced together and painstakingly picked apart until we were happy with it.

DINGMAN: That’s fascinating, just as a purely creative challenge. And it’s also very moving as a friendship, an artistic collaborator challenge. But it’s also kind of remarkable to me because one of the things to me about the record is how consistent it sounds — not just musically, but thematically. Something that came up for me over and over again as I was listening to it was that it seemed like almost all of the songs are addressing this question of whether or not you can trust your feelings.

We have lyrics like, “tell me I’m OK, I hope you feel the same.” There’s a song called “What You Live For,” that seems to me at least to be asking whether all these years of the struggles of trying to make it as a creative ensemble have been worth it. Is that a theme that you guys were addressing consciously, or is that just kind of a happy accident of this kind of fragmentary process?

WEDDLE: You know, I think it was a happy accident, but obviously, looking back, you’re going to attach new meaning to it after he had passed. But it’s too odd in some of them.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Sam Dingman is a reporter and host for KJZZ’s The Show. Prior to KJZZ, Dingman was the creator and host of the acclaimed podcast Family Ghosts.
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