Enon Slows Things Down

Eventually, Schmersal headed to New York, settling in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood. He had no intention of jumping into another band, but little by little, he was drawn into the area's music scene. "I had brought all these fucking instruments I'd had from being a pack rat in the Midwest," he says. "I had a lot of them at my house and dispersed them at friends' practice spaces and whatever. It was just playing with a bunch of different people at the time" — among them drummers Rick Lee and Steve Calhoon, who'd previously teamed in a well-regarded, percussion-heavy combo known as Skeleton Key. This trio formed the core of Enon on Believo!, but the lineup was short-lived. "Steve didn't end up staying in the band, or wasn't able to really tour when it started happening," Schmersal maintains.

Hence the addition of Yasuda and Schulz — but this modified roster also proved unsteady. Lee split following the appearance of another first-rate offering, 2002's High Society, and Schmersal still laments the hole his absence has left in the band. Several musicians tried out to fill the slot, but in the end, "we basically decided that we were going to finish working on the record, because we weren't finding that somebody we wanted that quickly. And there are differing levels of desire within the band as far as wanting another person or not. I feel more open about the idea of it than maybe some of the others." Indeed, he's even intrigued by the possibility of joining forces with someone who disrupts the chemistry that exists between the current threesome. "There are tons of bands that have terrible interpersonal relationships that are also great bands," he points out, laughing. "I think that's part of some bands' mojo: their hatred of each other."

These days, the main tension in Enon involves logistics; Schulz didn't follow Schmersal and Yasuda to Philly, choosing to remain in New York instead, and the distance between them cuts back on practice time. For the most part, however, Schmersal and Yasuda are reveling in their new role as homebodies. "I cooked about half the time in New York, and I cook virtually all the time now," he reports. "Food in New York is a really big deal, because it's such good food and the prices are so competitive. But I garden and do things at home now that I didn't have the space or the luxury to indulge myself in before." If he has a favorite dish, it's sautéed greens made with ingredients from his own back yard. "We grow a lot of kale and collard greens," he says. "Swiss chard. Arugula. Dandelions."

Given Schmersal's dietary preferences, his decision to sign the band up for a contest awarding $500 of free grub from Taco Bell seems a bit quizzical — and he confesses that the group's subsequent victory turned out to be a mixed blessing. On the last Enon tour, the outfit stopped at a branch of the eatery and he ordered a cup of beans and cheese — "and I totally had stomach pains afterward," he concedes. "So it's a shame. It's definitely not a great endorsement for my luxury stack, or whatever you want to call it."

Intestinal distress aside, Schmersal continues to pen tunes. Among his latest is "The Little Ghost of JonBenét," which he describes as "a song of pity" about the late Boulder tot; the number's on a seven-inch put out by a Prague imprint called Silver Rocket, and Enon will be peddling copies at tour stops. But he no longer spends every spare minute making music.

"In order to be a healthy human being," he says, "you have to do other things."

Visit Backbeat Online for more of our interview with Enon's John Schmersal.