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SANDEN TOTTEN: The Rowe Family Singers are at the 331 Club in Minneapolis. They play here every Monday night, but tonight is a little different. Quillen Rowe, the founder of the group, is meeting with each member of the eight-piece band. He's giving them the words and chords to his version of Afternoon Song. Rich Rowe, who plays the dobro, is squinting at the music sheet.

RICH ROWE: I should have brought my glasses. I don't even know if I can read this, to tell you the truth. I'll just play a G note all the way through, and I'll probably be fine.

SANDEN TOTTEN: He and the rest of the band don't seem worried at all about playing a song they've never heard before in front of a crowd. In fact, they're not even really looking at the music sheet.

DAN GORDER: I'm better off on a song like this, just closing my eyes and tuning in on what Quillen is doing and hopping on the bus.

SANDEN TOTTEN: That's Dan Gorder. He plays the guitar.

DAN GORDER: Just by looking at the chords, I can't really tell what the melody is going to be like. So we're going to be riding by the seat of our pants when he start singing it tonight. So that's the fun of it. That's the beauty of music.

SANDEN TOTTEN: A few minutes later, the band takes the stage.

QUILLEN ROWE: We're going to do a new song now that we more or less just wrote about a week ago. It's called just simply the Afternoon Song. Queue the G, boys.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SANDEN TOTTEN: At first, the members of the band are silent. They're listening to what Quillen Rowe is playing. But as the song carries on, they figure it out, and they start to fill in.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

QUILLEN ROWE: Thank you very much, friends.

SANDEN TOTTEN: After the show, Rowe is glowing with excitement.

QUILLEN ROWE: I loved it. They're all excellent players, but I was not prepared for as well as they did with it.

SANDEN TOTTEN: From the start of the project, Rowe felt that the song's lyrics were too sunny for the band's style. And even though he feels like they got it right, he's still not ready to abandon his darker sound.

QUILLEN ROWE: There's nothing wrong with writing a happy song. It's something that I wish I could do. I wish that there was a part of me that just said, OK, let's write a happy song and let's be OK with it now.

SANDEN TOTTEN: Quillen Rowe says, for him, afternoon song's not really done. The band has settled on a structure, but it'll change a little bit week to week every time they play it live. Now Larissa Anderson is in the studio with me.

LARISSA ANDERSON: Hi, Sanden.

SANDEN TOTTEN: Hi, Larissa. So how did songs come together for the Owls?

LARISSA ANDERSON: The Owls approach is a little more deliberate. They're meticulous collaborators.

ALISON LEBON: I think that why is still a little awkward for you to sing. And I wonder if one of us should sing.

LARISSA ANDERSON: The Owls are at their Saint Paul practice space a week before the project's deadline. They're almost done writing their version of Afternoon Song, but they struggle to get there. One of the main rules of the project is bands can't cut words from the lyrics. So when Bryant Tyde brought his song to his bandmates John Jerry, Maria May, and Alison Lebon, the first task was to make the sheer volume of words more manageable.

SPEAKER 1: And that was where Alison's suggestion of having a countermelody over the chorus where she took over the chorus. I was singing before.

ALISON LEBON: Brian was singing all of these. Take one, take two, and then take ten. We made construction paper chains. But now it's like he skips this line and we sing it. All the lines are in there, but musically it condensed the chorus.

SPEAKER 1: And that worked.

(SINGING) Take two, and then take ten

Take five, take six from eleven and ten

LARISSA ANDERSON: Well, it was a start. Lebon still had to make the lyrics match the structure of the song.

ALISON LEBON: I want to fit the lyrics into the chorus. That's like,

(SINGING) Take one, take two, and then take ten

But it's the wrong length. The line is the wrong length.

LARISSA ANDERSON: So still sticking to the rules, Lebon manipulated the words like magnetic poetry on a refrigerator.

ALISON LEBON: That's what I was thinking. I was like, if I scramble them around, I can get the right length lines for the musical part that we have.

LARISSA ANDERSON: And even though the lyrics were difficult to deal with, Lebon and Tyde agree that struggling with them was an important part of their songwriting.

ALISON LEBON: It definitely gave us more challenges, but maybe it made us write a more interesting piece.

BRYANT TYDE: Yeah, because it forced us to write a whole new melody, and maybe that made the ending more exciting.

LARISSA ANDERSON: For Lebon, this project was about more than just putting words to music.

ALISON LEBON: What was so fun about this was getting to see the Owls as this machine almost, this kind of machine that's, hey, it's working pretty well.

BRYANT TYDE: (SINGING) We we're happy on the same beat

Same that made you start to cry

LARISSA ANDERSON: So Chris Roberts.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Larissa, hello there.

ALISON LEBON: Sticking to the rules helped bring the Owls together. Now, Matt Wilson--

CHRIS ROBERTS: Had a problem with the rules. In fact, he broke one of the primary ones when he cut out the lyrics from Stephen Burt's song. Matt is over this. This is ancient history, man. He is long gone as far as that's concerned. He's at the studio phase of his particular journey. And in the studio, he has four hours to craft this song. And so he is both worried about that and psyched.

MATT WILSON: It's fun to have a gun to your head and just record it now.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Wilson called on an all-star cast of local musicians to back him up, including Adam Levy of the Honeydogs on guitar, Eric Fawcett on drums, and former Trip Shakespeare and Flops bandmate John Munson on upright bass. The song Wilson brought to the studio was the same one he hammered out at home, but with one new wrinkle. He recorded friends and relatives reading the words he had originally eliminated and created a spoken word montage to be inserted on the fly after the first chorus.

SPEAKER 2: Crisp pollen interference patterns--

SPEAKER 3: I was the boy to be congratulated--

SPEAKER 4: Kids on skateboards--

MATT WILSON: I felt like I just grabbed the lines that I just didn't feel like I could say.

CHRIS ROBERTS: The musicians didn't hear the song until they came to the studio and listened to Wilson map it out.

MATT WILSON: The chords on that B section, it's a F major, F dominant, B flat.

CHRIS ROBERTS: After learning the chords, they started adding their parts. Wilson was probably most surprised by what drummer Eric Fawcett came up with.

MATT WILSON: Eric played this really authoritative, simple part. And I was expecting something a little more ornate and diddley, but it was very convincing, and so I went with it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

CHRIS ROBERTS: The other member of the rhythm section, John Munson, gave Wilson what he wanted, a steady, deceptively simple bass line. Meanwhile, Adam Levy experimented with guitar leads almost right up until the last take. They settled on a straight ahead, uncluttered, mid-tempo rock song, and they all liked it.

MATT WILSON: (SINGING) Take a blade of grass between your teeth

Check the sun

All alone in--

CHRIS ROBERTS: Wilson says the project didn't inspire any revelations, but he says it reminded him of how he's loosened up as a songwriter. Years ago, he probably would have been too self-conscious to take part in the project. His feelings are mixed on the actual song he came up with.

MATT WILSON: I write lots of songs that are kind of like this one where I'll finish it to a point where I can say, yes, that's a song, and I can sing it through and it kind of has some internal sense to it. But is there something there really? Or is it just kind of a nice scribble?

CHRIS ROBERTS: Wilson says his Afternoon Song is more than just a scribble, it's a shiny object. He says he'll put it away for a few weeks before he decides whether to polish it into a gem or just leave it alone. With Larissa Anderson and Sanden Totten, I'm Chris Roberts, Minnesota Public Radio news.

[MATT WILSON, "AFTERNOON SONG"]

(SINGING) There's a perfect world that we left behind

I don't care

I'm the one with screen off my one-way mind

I see you there

So we walk up town

Listen to hear a black bus coming from a million years

Fifty-fifty, it'll go our way

Take a one, take a two, take a three, take a four

Telling all the people who you adore

Take a five, take a 6, take nine, or a 10

Clear my sky, it's falling down again

Fifty-fifty, it'll go our way

Fifty-fifty, it'll go our way