Conditions

Long before streaming algorithms and Spotify DJ , there was word of mouth. Back in 1985 or ’86, my friends’ older siblings came home from college talking about this band from Charlottesville called Indecision, and sometime around 10th grade my friends and I discovered them for ourselves. The music was great - and their logo absolutely ruled!  From that point forward, they became the soundtrack to our high school and college years.

Indecision wasn’t just a band we listened to in the background — we went to every show we could in college towns and festivals all over the region. They played brilliantly obscure covers, and at first I didn’t know these songs were covers at all. I thought Medicated Goo (Traffic), Animal Zoo (Spirit), Jump for Joy (Kingfish), Instant Armadillo Blues (New Riders of the Purple Sage), Hocus Pocus (Focus), No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature (The Guess Who), Murder (Pink Floyd), Feel the Groove (Little Feat), Let It Rain (Eric Clapton), Right Place, Wrong Time (Dr. John), Setting Me Up (Dire Straits), and Humanoid Boogie (Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band) were Indecision originals and couldn’t believe they had written so much great music.

And then there were the actual Indecision originals: Take It All In, Just a Little Bit, Ponder Yonder, Poison Age and two of my all-time favorites: Mixed Up and That Feeling — songs that lived somewhere between jam band improvisation, progressive rock, jazz, folk, and whatever mysterious category existed only in Charlottesville bars and fraternity houses in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

There were also some rare songs that I only heard once and was lucky enough to capture on my Denon cassette deck plugged into the soundboard: Breathing of Earth, Here I Go, Lady of the Nightlife (I might be making some of these titles up because they were never printed anywhere).

Indecision even played my high school prom in 1988. Unfortunately for our dates, most of us guys spent the night hanging around the soundboard with our tape decks recording the set.

Outlook

Aaron Evans is an incredibly accomplished songwriter and guitarist, a founding member of Indecision and one of my biggest musical influences. I wanted to write songs like him and play guitar like him since I was 16. My own high school band, Delusion, was essentially an Indecision cover band playing their originals and their cover songs. 

Over time I became friends with Danny McCrystal, the band’s soundman and Shawn the bass player’s brother, and through him I accumulated a stack of live cassette recordings that became some of my most prized possessions.

I had tons of shows on tape from fraternities, private parties, The Mineshaft, Trax, The Last Call, Club Metro, The Jetty and The Boathouse but it was the rare acoustic sets like TripFest from some farm in Warrington, Va in the summer of 1989 that fascinated me most of all. 

Aside from Magic Hat from their independently released debut album, none of these acoustic originals were well-known at all --- so I often didn’t even know the titles of the songs I was hearing. The lyrics on my fourth-generation dubbed cassettes were sometimes impossible to decipher, so sometimes I had to invent words just to learn the songs.

I tried to keep up with Indecision over the years after college, catching them once every several years. I loved their classic originals and some of the “newer" material like She Ain’t No Betty, Meet You in the Middle, and All I Need — with Aaron’s ripping slide guitar. And Big Bright Light from 2004’s The Great Road features one of my favorite guitar solo intros ever.

And I still feel like they played the definitive version of every cover they did.

Advisory

Years later, Facebook performed one of its rare miracles.

A little notification popped up suggesting that I might know Aaron Evans. I clicked on his profile and saw that because of the pandemic he had started offering Zoom guitar lessons. I reached out immediately, still more than a little starstruck.

When we finally connected, Aaron asked what I wanted to learn.

I said, “Some Indecision tunes.”

He said, “Like Just a Little Bit?”

I told him I wanted to start with some of those long-lost acoustic songs — things like Won’t You Come Over, Lady of the Nightlife, and Endless Way.

Aaron paused and said, “You must be thinking of another band.”

I assured him I wasn’t.

So I dug through my archives, converted some of those ancient cassette recordings to MP3s, and sent them over.

A few days later Aaron replied: “Holy cow… that IS us.”

Even he had forgotten some of these more rare songs.

What followed felt less like guitar lessons and more like a weekly archaeological dig. We kept uncovering songs that had quietly disappeared from Indecision’s setlist decades earlier. Aaron would rediscover them in real time, sometimes remembering that he had written a particular tune while studying a musical concept in college — experimenting with things like Mixolydian modes and incorporating them into his songwriting without fully realizing at the time how lasting those songs would become for a handful of devoted fans.

Extended Forecast

When I began recording Make Your Own Weather, Aaron was one of the first people I wanted involved.

We recorded Aaron’s tracks at the Charlottesville Music Resource Center with Orion Redwolf at the controls.

Aaron digs in like nobody’s business and delivers a masterful electric lead guitar performance on Stroke of Dumb Luck, adds mandolin to State of Mind Line,  plays evocative slide guitar on In Case the Joke’s on Me, and even sings beautiful harmony vocals on Puddle Jumper.

For someone whose music shaped so much of my own musical identity, having Aaron become part of this record feels less like a collaboration and more like one of those incredible full-circle moments that music occasionally gives you if you stick around long enough.  

On top of that, he's simply the nicest dude ever.