Pants party

If one were to liken Alan Singley to an animal it would have to be a bat.

Not only does Singley have the nocturnal leaning of his winged counterparts but, as he told the Vanguard, “I can’t see at night and can’t drive at night.”

He is a man sending his lushly arranged sound waves out for all the night to hear, while simultaneously claiming to be the boy-pop-genius that touts Burt Bacharach as his main influence. This shows in his music as the bulk of it is sunny, breezy and speaks of a time that many are no longer familiar with.

That is perhaps how far the bat metaphor stretches, however the ingenuity and organic nature of his songs puts Singley and his band, Pants Machine, at the forefront of musical innovators in Portland.

Alan Singley and Pants Machine are not a throwback act or stuck in an age from before most of them were even born; they play contemporary pop steeped in the tradition of lush orchestration.

“When I was in fifth grade,” Singley says, “I fell in love with the Jurassic Park soundtrack and have been hooked on orchestral stuff since. I love ’60s pop and how they have big orchestrations, like Phil Spector and my boy Burt Bacharach. So, at Portland Community College I learned how to write music and do it all by hand.”

Relocating to Portland from Orlando, Fla. in 2003, Singley and the Pants Machine lineup began falling into place.

“We are a total of seven,” Singley touts. “It’s fairly standard pop—we have a few streams everyone came down. The one stream is Gus Elg, Leb Borgerson and Scott Hayden (bass, guitar and drums respectively); they are all friends pretty much since middle school and that’s, ahem, a looong time.”

The four together could have just formed another indie band, but Singley goes on to illuminate the full scale of Pants Machine.

“Then there is the orchestra,” he says, “which is Teri Untalan (viola), Reed Wallsmith (sax) and Jenelle Burd (vocals, tambourine), who was a friend from Orlando.”

Untalan, Wallsmith and Singley are all from the Ethos Music Center, or “fame” as Singley puts it. Ethos is a nonprofit music school where Singley teaches after-school music five days a week.

Listening to any of the three albums Singley has put out one could see how teaching children has rubbed off on him and his songwriting as well. There is a youthful exuberance and immediacy of connection with the tiny brilliances of the outside world that only someone so close to the ground could observe.

Whether it’s singing around a campfire: a scene so cleverly evoked in “These Trees are for Resting,” or bare-footing through the dreamscape beaches of “We’ll Become Sand,” Singley grabs listeners by the hand and extends the offer to join him wherever he may roam.

“I hand the rhythm section lead sheets,” says Singley, on how the parts of a song come together, “and I hand the orchestra their parts. And that’s how everything can happen so fast. What takes a long time is the writing. It’s what I struggle with most. I have a tape recorder and I sit at the kitchen table in the morning and write little bits of things, sometimes it comes out as a sung sentence and then I just press record. Then at the end of the day, after work, I listen back. Then some time goes by and I take this bit and that bit and stick ’em together ’til I have a song, hopefully. Then I make the music for the band.”

Singley rarely misses a note, even though it is often hard to place the key that he sings in. What some might call inconsistencies in musical style, Singley sums up as his great stylistic strength.

“There is a time for funk and country and folk songs and jazz waltzes and hip-hop and psychedelia,” he says. “And you gotta mix it up, even if it makes people call you unfocused and inconsistent. Sometimes you have to dance and sometimes you have to mope around in your long johns and wonder what’s wrong with you.”

Singley is proving that he’s perfectly comfortable with either, and is more than capable of perfecting his craft in whatever style he chooses.