Songs For Edna

A sit down at Clinton Street’s Donnybrook pub with Ghost Ghost guitarist Karl Ward and bassist Kevin Peckham is as much a lesson in literature as it was in lyrical composition.

Over drinks around the corner from the band’s Lower East Side rehearsal space, the guys are as eager to discuss Kurt Vonnegut as they are their other more musical inspirations. For the guys in Ghost Ghost, being part of a band is as much about books as it is about making music. “One thing that’s true about both of us is we need to be reading books to write songs” Peckham says of the band’s songwriting method. “There’s a lot of music I love, but a very small amount has inspired me to write a song; a large amount of literature has.”

The ability to blend the line between literature and lyricism is what brought Ward and Peckham together in the first place. The two found their creative connection in 2008 and after a long-distance song-writing exchange, Peckham decided it was time to relocate from San Francisco to New York. “We’d been swapping songs for years,” Peckham says. “I moved here with the express purpose of starting a band with Karl.”

The two originally met passing off apartment keys for a summer sublet in the city back in 2004.

It’s not surprising then that two years after forming Ghost Ghost with drummer Tim Ireland, when the duo decided to write its first album, its members found their inspiration in a book: Savage Beauty by Nancy Milford, a biography about Pulitzer-Prize winning New York poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her morphine addiction, sexual trysts and tragic end—when she was discovered dead at the bottom of her stairwell—are the imagery rock music is made of.

“I feel she’s almost totally unsung as far as poets go,” Ward says. “I studied poetry and never read her in any class. Almost no one ever mentioned her and now I think she’s one of the best poets in the English language, whose life happened to be as, if not more, interesting than her writing, and I think she’s due for a renaissance.”

And why not a rock renaissance? Ward and Peckham penned the 10-song tribute to Millay one day shy of her 118th birthday on February 21; yes, the whole thing in just one day. The resulting record, No Clothes on Ragged Island, was released March 1, on the same day as the band’s second EP Of Innocence and Experience. No Clothes gets its name from an island off the coast of Maine where bathing suits were banned and Millay spent her summers swimming naked. And while Innocence is in line with the high energy, hard rock aesthetic that’s gotten Ghost Ghost a regular rotation at venues like Public Assembly and Webster Hall, No Clothes offers another side of Ghost Ghost. It’s a combination of country and folk that puts the band more on par musically with bands like Counting Crows than, say, Fugazi crossed with Bruce Springsteen circa “Thunder Road,” which is how the band describes itself.

“This is the first time we’ve really been able to stretch out into the areas in which we haven’t done before because it was less organic,” Ward says. “If you don’t have a deadline you just keep screwing around. It opened up venues that we thought about but never tried.” It’s fresh, enthusiastic and a credit to how passionately the band approached the challenge of portraying Millay’s life from her birth in 1892 to her death in 1950.

However, this doesn’t mean that the band is dialing down its live show any time soon. “We’ve never tried to step back. Our shows tend to be pretty upbeat and loud—[there’s] a lot of jumping around,” Ward says. It took me two trips to the bar at a recent live show to understand that you don’t set down your drink at a Ghost Ghost show; the reverberations alone are enough to knock it over. This progression from the band not only promises less glass breaking, but also a chance for Ghost Ghost to get recognized for something other than erratic onstage antics.

“There’s a lot more to what we can do, and this is the first time at least on record where we’ve said ‘yeah we can do that too.’”

>Ghost Ghost

June 21, Public Assembly, 70 N. 6th St. (betw. Wythe & Kent Aves.), Brooklyn, 718-384-4586; 4, Free.