Jason Balla finds space to wander in Accessory

For Jason Balla, Accessory exists as a space in which he can explore wilder, more untamed musical frontiers, the project’s dense, shoegaze-y compositions better lending themselves to onstage experimentation than the comparatively taught songs he crafts alongside his bandmates in the Chicago trio Dehd.

“This band is built to be a little more improvisational, and it’s something that feels a little more alive and ephemeral than just being up there playing this tight song,” said Balla, who will be joined by a small army of musicians (the lineup consists of four guitarists, a pair of drummers and a bassist) when Accessory visits Cafe Bourbon Street on Tuesday, Feb. 4, supported by Gamma Ray and Hi Helen. “I have [an Accessory] record that I’m sitting on, and some of the songs we’re playing off of it are entirely different live. … It’s been refreshing to take those songs and sort of wander and process the emotions of the day – especially with everything that’s going on right now. Having these improvisational sections in the set as a conduit for getting some of that stuff out has really been cathartic.”

Balla referred to the live takes of these unreleased album tracks as “the XL versions,” describing the woolier songs as increasingly shaped by the tastes and talents of the crew he’s currently touring alongside, which includes members from the bands Deeper, Ulna and Meat Wave. “It’s sort of a who’s who of the Chicago music scene that I came up in,” Balla said. “So, rather than bend everyone to sort of hit this blueprint I made in my room, it’s nice to let everyone develop their own interpretation. It’s always going to sound better if they’re doing what comes naturally, what comes from the heart, rather than just trying to fit to some cookie cutter, paint-by-numbers thing.”

These developments have coincided with a stretch in which Balla has increasingly treated Accessory as a primary outlet as opposed to a sporadic side project more in line with its name. “The last six months or so I’ve taken more of my free time out to discover this world,” he said, “rather than just fitting it in wherever it’s convenient.”

Balla couldn’t explain what led to this shift, only that it “felt intuitively right” in this moment and benefited from a stretch in which he and his Dehd mates were finally able to take some time off the road. This needed pause followed a couple years of relentless touring that coincided with the end of the pandemic lockdown and afforded Balla the chance to spend much of last winter holed up at home in Chicago. There, the musician began to craft a series of dense, dark soundscapes, tapping into a moodier side that he said has always existed within him (“I was born with that internal landscape”) and that was helped along by the enveloping blackness afforded by the season. “Weeks at a time without any sunlight doesn’t really do anything to turn that around,” he said, and laughed.

Over these months, Balla’s songs began to take on greater structure than they had in the past, the musician recalling an earlier camping trip when someone handed him a guitar and he struggled to think of anything he could easily transpose to the instrument. “I had never really written a song on an acoustic guitar or a piano, where it’s just words and this really basic musical outline under it,” he said. “And I’ve been trying to do more of that while making sure it doesn’t sound like Jack Johnson or something. And that has been liberating, in a way, because once the road map is there you can dress it up in any way you want.”

Witness the most recent Accessory song to see release, “Chain Link,” a haunted, wintery number layered thick with gauzy guitars, snow-packed drums, and dreamy vocals, but underneath of which exists a more stripped-down melodic skeleton. Lyrically, the song is rooted in loss, Balla unpacking the death of a family member whose pride led to them “passing away in a really lonely way,” he said. “And the song was my way of trying to wrap my head around how things could get to such an extreme place.”

While the music in Accessory has long tended toward more shadowy realms, Balla said his lyrics have continued to evolve in meaningful ways, drifting from earlier, more insular turns to outward-looking tunes on which he takes stock of the world and how he can best inhabit his corner within it. The musician attributed this shift in part to the natural maturation process – “When you’re younger … you really are the center of your own universe,” he said – and in part to the different ways he has begun to engage with his city since moving into a new apartment roughly 18 months ago.

“To get almost anywhere, I need to ride my bike, and I’ve been passing through all of these different places. And I think that’s given me more of a sense of space, or more of that idea of place and of fitting into something,” said Balla, who has also started to hew more closely to community in response to the increasingly harsh political and social realities of this current era. “Over the last year, there’s been so much pain in the world, and also anger and helplessness. And I know that music isn’t necessarily going to solve any problems, but it certainly is a way I can at least try to make sense of it and to interface with it, in a way. Overall, in Chicago, there’s been an emphasis on getting together. … And I know this idea isn’t new, but time and time again the systems are presenting themselves to us, like, ‘Yep, we’re still broken.’ So I think there is this circling of the wagons that happens, because your community is one immediate thing you actually have some influence and control over.”