by John Hayes, City Paper

Bill Deasy crouches on a stairway back stage at Nick's Fat City, his bright eyes glowing with enthusiasm, hoping I ask the right questions, hoping I write something encouraging. A folk singer wails a few feet away on the stage of the rapidly filling club. Outside, The Gathering Field is at the top of the marquee. That means it will be a sellout.

"I guess I'm older now," he says. "Maybe a little deeper." He glances in the direction of the young kid on stage. "On the other albums, I though I had a lot to say, but now I don't think I did. Now it's a whole band and it's much, much different."

Months of touring and recording with band members DAve Brown, Eric Riebling and Ray Defade have given Deasy a new perspective on his songs of loss and disillusionment. It's a "steady evolution," he says, that traces back to his first band at the turn of the decade.

At the end of the '80s, Deasy was the darling of the local open stages, stomping his foot and exposing his deepest regrets and inspirations on acoustic guitar. His blue eyes sparkled; girls loved him; he threw together a band. Shiloh was more or less the musical accompaniment for Deasy's songs, but through it the young singer/songwriter discovered that Brown was a phenomenal guitarist and one of the best producers in town. And riebling, still playing bass at the time with theAffordableFloors, was seeing what he could do with the electric guitar.

The Gathering Field, the eponymous album that charted the first real collaborations of Deasy and Brown, was lush in its spirituality but occasionally sparse in presentation. "They were all great players and we got a good vibe," he says shaking his head, "but they were really just playing songs they had just learned a few days before."

This time out, Deasy is part of an actual band - a touring entity that works the regional club circuit, lives together on the road, holes up for weeks in recording studios. Some bar crowds have been hesitant; others have been, well, disinterested. "That sounds bad," he says, "but it is really good for a band. You learn to look out for each other, protect each other. When I'm writing, I still write by myself, but there are all these other influences. That's what being part of a band does, it makes you write like you're something larger than yourself."

That's how Deasy wrote "Lost In America," a rocking road ballad that invokes Kerouac and rambles across dark declining states of disillusionment. "I've learned to love the guy in the song," Deasy says, looking away. "My wife and I argue about it - she sees him as more heroic, facing an empty world with some kind of courage. I see him in a more negative light, but the more I sing it, I sense the beauty of his life."

The band was so damned proud of the song, they had it made into a CD-single and shipped off to WDVE months before an album was written to surround it. It generated some airplay, but without additional tracks to pull, the band suffered from a lull in attention before the Lost in America album was ready. "That probably wasn't a great idea," Deasy now says, laughing, "but it really felt like a breakthrough for us. Like we were finally a band. I'm still glad we did it."

The Gathering Field pulled a few strings and traveled to upper New York to record in a pristine, state-of-the-art private studio that, says Deasy, was only used once before. With Brown at the controls, the band was free to experiment, to stretch and mold the songs. At the core of each tune, Deasy's personal (or impersonal) torment is laid open, but the songs resonate with the rich harmonies of a group effort. Brown, as usual, has a knack for stripping out the superfluous and making every tone count. Defade is a rock-steady drummer who understands the subtlety of underplay, and Riebling (back to the bass) has rediscovered a level of creativity which he last touched in studio sessions with the Floors.

"It used to be just me, and then Dave would do some production thing," Deasy says. He's excited, emphasizing every word with his hands to exaggerate every point over the amplified stage sound. "But now, we're like, a band. On this one song, 'Middle road,' Eric came up with this harmonic hook. It's something only Eric would think of, and now Dave does it with him [on guitar]. I wrote the words, but that harmonic note became an important part of the song."

Lost in America contains all the Deasy trademarks - the implied loss of salvation, the desperate metaphors, the often-repeated choruses. But most of all, it contains his stories: a lost and frightened girl at the dawn of the nuclear age; a passionate tryst that ends in murder; an unauthorized biography of his hero, Kerouac. Listen closely and discover an unannounced romantic trilogy: "And I Wanted," "The Soul is Human," and "One Way or Another." I said listen for that last one because it's a "hidden" track tacked onto the end of the previous 11 songs. On stage, it becomes a 15-minute electrical jam, devouring parts of Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" and Young's "Down by the River." "It's sort of a ripoff of all of them," Deasy laughs, "but it's so over the top. Dave and Ray really let go. Me, by myself, it just sounds like a folk singer. But now with the band, it sounds like - I don't know - the 90's."