Liteweight Champion wants to make you levitate

Sean Gleeson started work on the songs that would become Liteweight Champion’s self-titled debut more than four years ago, originally intending to release them with his previous band, Campbell, which has since entered into hibernation. 

At the time, Gleeson was deep in a period of transition, adjusting to a move and a career switch while navigating the end of a romantic relationship and the dissolution of two bands. “And I felt like I was trying to grasp onto something to help pull me forward,” said the musician, who turned to songwriting as a means of reestablishing a sense of footing. “A lot of things in my life that were happening ended quickly. … And it became like, ‘Okay, what do I do now? Because this is what I was planning to do with the rest of my life, and now none of it is happening anymore.’ And in grappling with that, I responded with a lot of these songs, where I’m addressing those situations but also trying to find confidence in myself and a belief I can keep doing it, and keep writing good music.”

In contrast with the last Campbell record – an outward-looking turn rooted in the sense of institutional abandonment and fury Gleeson felt in the early stages of the pandemic – Liteweight Champion songs stride a more inward course, with Gleeson parsing these shifting realities and the various ways they’ve upended his sense of identity. Recorded alongside Colin Giacalone, the resulting album arrives awash in lines that suggest a person for whom the ground has suddenly dropped out, Gleeson singing: “Can’t stop thinking ’bout the way I feel”; “In the wintertime/You can burn alive”; “If you have a heart/Don’t let it fall apart.”

Rather than wallowing in these sometimes-heady emotions, Gleeson and Giacalone employed them as tinder, transforming the bulk of the songs into fiery conflagrations that nod to everything from My Bloody Valentine (the swirling, oceanic “it is always”) to Hawthorne Heights (“PLIGHTS,” a thashier punk ripper). “In the rooms where we were recording, it was so loud all of the time, because we were just trying to make as much noise as possible,” Gleeson said. “I’m very inspired by the specific sound that can be made in a space, especially with electricity, with amplifiers, with drums, with vocals going through a PA. It’s about creating a sound … so loud it makes you want to laugh, that it makes you want to cry, but you’re elevated. I want to make people levitate with pure volume.”

Recording sessions took place in Gleeson’s Southern Orchards apartment over a couple of months in the early winter of 2022, with the resulting album temporarily shelved as Gleeson wrestled with the release. Initially conceived as a Campbell record, Gleeson scrapped those plans when people moved away, sending the band into chrysalis. Gradually, Gleeson said he embraced the moment as one in which to launch to launch a new project, Liteweight Champion, reeling guitarist Elijah Jones, bassist Casey Costello and drummer Sam Gilton into the fold.

Rather than having these new bandmates learn the recorded versions of the songs, Gleeson has instead treated the album tracks as loose frameworks, describing them as untouched pages in a coloring book that his bandmates are now free to paint in vivid shades. “I’ve never put a band together like this, where it was like, ‘Here’s the record. Let’s learn it and then try to do something else,’” said Gleeson, who will join his bandmates in celebrating the album release at Ace of Cups on Thursday, Nov. 14. “And everyone has spun off of that to do bigger things and kind of change the pace of it, to where the live show is now almost completely different from what the record sounds like.”

Gleeson said he has undergone a similar transformation, at multiple points in our conversation describing himself as a completely different person now than he was at the time these songs emerged. How he’s changed, though, is something more challenging to pin down.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m older,” he said, and laughed. “I know I’ve been saying I feel different, but I don’t quite know how to articulate it. … I was a musician then, and I’m a musician now. I was writing songs then, and I’m writing songs now. I just want to mean it when I say it now, and for a lot of my life I feel like I’ve had a hard time getting to that point. … When I was writing this stuff, there were all of these big life changes, and I feel like now I have it a bit more together. I have this vision now, and I want to keep adding color to this canvas. I want to keep driving into this space that in a way feels like an endless well.”