Bruce Hornsby and the Noisemakers

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Heavy MakeUp Here It Comes

On stage and on their new sophomore release, Here It Comes, Heavy MakeUp—Edie Brickell, CJ Camerieri (trumpet player for yMusic, CARM) and Trever Hagen (producer, electronic musician and fellow trumpeter)—improvise complete songs, spinning elements of pop, folk, electronic, rock, jazz, chamber music and the avant-garde into two- and three-minute gems that are at once radio-worthy and experimental.

 

The operative word in this high-risk, higher-reward exercise is songs: That’s melody, harmony, rhythm — even Brickell’s lyrics — built from the ground up before your very ears. “A track like ‘Let Them Lie,’ it’s not a jam,” Camerieri explains. “This is a beautifully constructed metaphorical story with concrete sections. I think jazz can get the closest to what we’re doing.”

 

For Heavy MakeUp, improvising songs from the ground up is an exhilarating challenge. “You can express whatever you want, and there’s room for big melodic freedom. I love that,” says Brickell. “CJ and Trever don’t lock you up in musical jail and say, ‘Work in there.’ They create a beautiful horizon, and you can walk in any direction, and they’ll create a wonderland as you go.

“My role is like when someone is writing a score for a film,” she continues, “and they’re

making the sounds that will go with the movie. It’s the same way here, just backwards. I hear the score, and then the pictures come and all I have to do is articulate what I’m seeing.”

 

As unprecedented as the Heavy MakeUp concept might be, the three performers are uniquely up to the task. To say it another way, it’s hard to imagine a trio of musicians with a wider range of professional experience to draw upon sharing the same stage. Camerieri is a Juilliard grad best known as a co-founder of yMusic, the brilliant New York chamber ensemble. The trumpeter has also been a vital sideman to Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens, Ben Folds, Sting and the National, and he released his first solo album as CARM in 2021. Hagen, who joins Camerieri in the CARM project, has led interdependent careers as a musician and an academic with a PhD in music sociology. A consummate scholar with a global purview, Hagen’s achievements run the gamut: a Fulbright Award; works published by Oxford University Press and Routledge; collaborations with Bon Iver, Mouse on Mars and many others.

 

Edie Brickell requires no introduction. Fronting the band New Bohemians, she debuted in 1988 with the landmark album Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars, which went double-platinum on the strength of the era-defining Top 10 hit “What I Am.” Since then, her artistic wanderlust has resulted in more acclaimed releases from New Bohemians, the most recent being 2021’s Hunter and the Dog Star, as well as music by the Gaddabouts, a jazzy, smoky supergroup featuring Andy Fairweather Low, Steve Gadd and Pino Palladino; Heavy Circles, with Harper Simon; and a Grammy-winning bluegrass partnership with Steve Martin that yielded two albums and the Tony-nominated Broadway show Bright Star.

 

Camerieri and Hagen have extensive experience in the jazz avant-garde, and Brickell has pretty much lived her life engaging in spontaneous song, often narrating her day-to-day with intuitive melody. She also points to the genesis of New Bohemians’ psych-tinged folk-pop, when off-the-cuff song creation was a necessity. “We were getting gigs at these little clubs on a Wednesday night at age 18,” she recalls, “and when they said, ‘You can play for two to three hours,’ as a new band we had five songs. So we would go in there and just wing it — do improv and make it sound like songs.

 

“Then, in 1993,” Brickell continues, “I had the beautiful good fortune of working with Jerry Garcia and [bassist] Rob Wasserman. And when we finished our goal of making a song for Rob’s Trios record, which came out of an improv at Jerry’s house the night before, we just jammed and made up songs. And then Jerry had an idea for an all-improv band where every night it’s something different. But it never came to pass, for obvious reasons.”

“I’ll never forget Edie telling us that Jerry Garcia story,” Camerieri adds, relating his own version of how the trio came to be. “We had done four or five of these improvisations, and I was like, ‘So are these songs you’ve been working on?’ Edie said, ‘No, you made a cool sound and it made me think of a picture and I just started improvising.’ Trever and I were like, ‘Improvising songs like that — that isn’t a thing.’ So she told us the story of Jerry Garcia having a similar reaction, and we thought, ‘Wow — this is OK.’”

The trio first coalesced for 2022’s “More and More,” a collaborative track off the second CARM full-length. When they made a video for the song, they quickly realized that what should have been a taxing day — a hot, windy, monotonous outdoor shoot — was instead, as Hagen says, ​​an “effervescent kind of interaction, playful and goofy and fun.” Brickell suggested the three reconnect soon for a jam session, so Camerieri and Hagen, who were on the road opening for Bruce Hornsby, went to New York as soon as they had a weekend off. They set up the gear they use for CARM’s live dates, Hagen laid down a drum-machine beat and Heavy MakeUp was off and running. Evocative synth tones, tasteful brass embellishment and deceptively spontaneous lyrics followed, and about 30 well-shaped songs poured forth. By the time Camerieri and Hagen made it back to the elevator, they were in a state of elated disbelief. “This was just an entirely different way of communicating with music,” Hagen says.

In 2023, Heavy MakeUp made their proper concert debut at the Newport Folk Festival and released a self-titled album. “These are lively improvisational sketches,” raved No Depression, “balancing Camerieri and Hagen’s experimental-jazz blends of synths, beats and horns against Brickell’s playfully rhythmic lyrics and sweetly seductive singing.”

That debut’s brand-new follow-up, Here It Comes, is a collection of 11 songs that represent the continuing evolution of the trio’s clairvoyant rapport. “This record was intentional, and the first one was by accident,” Brickell says with a chuckle. Heavy MakeUp is still by and large an act of impromptu, unfettered musical joy, though the members have firmed up their chemistry, refined their methods and furthered their shared confidence and trust. A two-week writing retreat last year in Texas was especially revelatory. “We played every day,” Brickell recalls, “just allowing the spirit to evolve, getting more and more comfortable with each other. Getting pizza [laughs]. We talked about the process together.”

More than 100 songs emerged, and Hagen pared down and curated into an emotionally sweeping yet rhythmically propulsive set.

From the gently irresistible hooks of “Shoe in the Air,” with its unforgettable opening lyrical image, to the trap-tinged verses of “Under Construction” and the atmospheric rock of “Enough Runnin’ Around,” it’s often astounding to think that these tracks were conjured out of thin air. “To me this is the realest music,” says Brickell, “because music is so much about expressing how you feel. You’re actually feeling it in real time, as opposed to trying to remember what’s in the song.”

“And this project combines all these different skills that we’ve worked on for years,” adds Camerieri, “as jazz musicians, as sidemen, as songwriters, as producers. It’s the ultimate musician’s job.”

“But it’s much more than that,” Brickell insists. “CJ and Trever are very inspiring. It’s the energy in the room. It’s the people. It’s the freedom and the enthusiasm. These beautiful spirits inspire a song every time.”