Dream-Pop Shoegaze Band Corsicana Releasing New Album Piece by Piece

Ben Pisano is a creative in every sense of the word. He started the Denver dream-pop shoegaze band Corsicana before graduating from high school, and for nearly ten years, Pisano has continued to foster it into a more mature musical expression of his inner monologue and shifting perspectives on life.

“The band was just a vehicle for my songwriting, and I allowed it to be as collaborative or individual as possible,” he says.

Pisano admits that becoming busier and busier with more and more real-world responsibilities naturally meant the band “slowed down a little bit” recently, but the past three-plus years also found him writing a new Corsicana record. “It’s always been there, and something that I want to put more and more of my time into,” Pisano says of the band. “But it’s been a constant. This record took some extra time for a lot of reasons — some of those being entering adulthood and having to work and being in multiple bands, too.”

After dropping the single “Bellwether” in 2021, Pisano, longtime bassist and synth player Jordan Leone, drummer Sumner Erhard and guitarist Nicki Walters are set to release kept on Friday, October 13. While the official album-release show is scheduled for the same day at the Mercury Cafe, with A Place for Owls and Gazes, Pisano and his merry band of music-makers are trying something a little different when it comes to teasing the new tunes.

“Artists are expected to crank out singles and stuff” in this “content-obsessed culture,” Pisano says. “That’s just never been how I operate as a writer. I thought it’d be interesting, essentially, releasing this album song by song. So by the time the release date rolls around, there will only be three songs that haven’t already been released, which breaks my heart in some ways, but in others — I don’t know, it’s an interesting experiment.”

So far, “Egret” and “Holden” are available on all streaming platforms, while the next offering, “Ludlow,” drops today, June 16. “I just wanted to try something different with this one and see how it went over,” Pisano says of the release schedule.

Pisano and Erhard, who also plays with local indie singer-songwriter Isadora Eden, have been collaborating more often, including on “Ludlow,” which has brought a “new sound and direction” to Corsicana, according to Erhard. (Corsicana and Eden previously teamed up for the song “I Wish I Was a Girl.”)

“I had been listening to a lot of Weval and Klangstof at the time and getting into more electronic and synth-pop music,” Erhard explains. “The beat that I play throughout ‘Ludlow’ is a beat inspired from 'Everest' by Klangstof. Ben and I began jamming over this beat and found something undeniable and worth exploring.”

While crafting kept, Pisano found inspiration in the Bon Iver album 22, A Million and the brooding storytelling style of Andy Shauf. It’d be a stretch to call it a pandemic album, as the lyrics are more emotional and personal than documentary, but the music Pisano put together was nonetheless affected by the lockdown; he remembers that time was filled with introspection and pondering the future of everything.

“Sonically, I really was informed by a lot of the emotional cores and subject matters of the songs. I was writing mostly with a nylon-string guitar and my voice. Just focusing on writing good songs that could stand alone in that regard — especially as I was writing during a time when I wasn’t sure when I’d get to perform next or anything,” he explains. “I was never really thinking about anybody else or how it would be perceived. I was just writing to write and work through a lot of things and express a lot of things that I wasn’t sure quite how to put into words.”

The solitary beginnings of the songs, which were officially brought to life once the bandmates returned to normalcy, make for a more intimate listening experience. Pisano likes that this Corsicana record sounds more like a jam session at a friend’s house than an over-produced arena set.

“Does it feel like you’re listening to super-polished songs done in a huge stadium or a multimillion-dollar studio, or does it sound like a smaller group of people playing in a living room? I really wanted to go for the living room thing," he says. "I really wanted to go for a record that sounded, in most ways, kind of homemade and small without being boring or uninteresting or poorly made.”

He calls the latest output “less obscure, in some ways,” noting the inclusion of more nylon-string guitar and “dry live drums.” Plus, he adds, “my vocals are a bit more affected than they ever had been in the past, and there’s a bit more harmonies.”

Pisano hopes people “feel something on a deeper level,” similar to the experiences he’s enjoyed with his favorite bands, but don't get it twisted: Corsicana is an “energetic live act."

“If the music has been able to help me work through some really difficult things and express things in a way that I can’t otherwise, I hope that it would help other people essentially do the same,” he says. "But at the same time, we rock, for lack of a better term, which might be somewhat of a surprise compared to the recordings.”

"Ludlow" is available now on all streaming platforms.