‘Happy’ is a state of mind
Anne Richmond Boston’s ‘new’ album is finally released
One of the more beautiful moments of synchronicity I’ve experienced occurred one afternoon last November when I was making the record store rounds. I heard cuts from Anne Richmond Boston’s long-belated sophomore release, I Should Be Happy, playing over each store’s house speakers, the clerks giving me the “you-gotta-pay-attention-to-this” glance before offering to sell me a copy. I could hear reverence in their voices as they enthused about an album that, for thirty-something years, was more rumor than reality. After all, fall of 2025 was worlds away from the mid-’90s when Boston recorded the follow-up to her solo debut, The Big House of Time, released by DB Recs in 1990. That album was Boston’s signal moment, as she had spent the previous nine years co-fronting The Swimming Pool Q’s, Atlanta’s exploratory purveyors of self-described brain pop. Since unleashing their 1979 double A-side 7-inch “Rat Bait” b/w “The A-Bomb Woke Me Up,” The Q’s had canvassed the possibilities of new wave as they melded realism and surrealism to perfect their own multi-chrome sound. Kicking against the conventional standards that had defined rock ’n’ roll below the Mason-Dixon line, they established themselves as one of DB Recs’ flagship bands with their full-length debut, The Deep End, before making the major label leap to A&M Records.
From the bleacher seats, the Q’s were a success story, demi-legends perpetually on the verge of life beyond the average pop music consumer. However, after 1987’s Blue Tomorrow, Boston announced her departure. She was exhausted and disillusioned by major label realities like image consultants, expense accounts, and crimped hair.
“At that point,” she says, “I had just decided that I needed to take a break. There were a lot of things that happened with that record deal with the Q’s. I was getting frustrated with the whole experience. There were a lot of real disappointing things that happened with that, so I decided to quit the band.”
A chance meeting with Rob Gal, a fellow musician, offered a world of new opportunities. Boston remembers, “We had actually met a long time before at a show in Chicago, when the Q’s played there and his band, The Ones, from Iowa City was supposed to be on the bill as well, but sat it out because the club had overbooked. He and his friend, Jim Musser who had driven together stayed and listened to the Q’s and helped us load out after the show. They knew about us because Musser owned a record store in Iowa City. Later, Rob got back in touch with me after our first A&M album came out. He said he was thinking about moving to Atlanta for the music scene. One thing led to another, and we ended up together. We got married in ’87, so it was right about that time that all of this transition was happening. He's a great musician, and I think after I quit the Q’s, Danny [Beard, founder of DB Recs] approached me about doing a solo record. Rob was writing some songs. DB ended up doing it, and we went into the studio and recorded The Big House of Time with Brendan O’Brien.”
The critical reception was positive, the mood auspicious. “I — for some unknown, inexplicable reason — got my hopes up,” says Boston, “that I would be able to quit my day job after Big House got some good reviews. Rolling Stone published an article called “Hot Picks of 1990” and listed me in it. They even sent a photographer down and did all this fancy makeup bullshit.”
Enjoying life as a solo artist, Boston made plans for a second record, with Gal playing guitar, penning songs, engineering, and producing at his studio, Snack ’n’ Shack. Boston says, “We recorded what became I Should Be Happy. I got some songs from different people. And we did some covers, and I had a little to do with a few of them. We recorded it all and mixed it, and then it just never happened. And that was the end of my solo career.”
For years, Boston remained in the dark as to why Beard scotched the release. “Danny and I remained friends all this time,” she says, “although I have to admit I was just a little perturbed when it didn’t come out. I didn’t really understand why, but somehow I assumed that he just didn't have the money to do it and that DB Recs was on the outs. I've been asked that question by several people in recent interviews, and so I finally had to text him yesterday and asked, ‘Listen, what is the reason that this record didn’t come out?’ He texted me back that he had run out of money and that he had to give up putting out records. And, of course, life goes on. I had a kid, Rob and I split, I ended up moving to Athens, but I didn't really become part of the scene here.”
Boston gradually found her way back to the Q’s. She made the occasional live appearance before returning to the fold as a full-time member, appearing on The Royal Academy of Reality in 2003, a sprawling, capacious panorama that showcases Jeff Calder and company’s previously unexplored psychedelic and prog tendencies. And, while the reborn Q’s seemed capable of anything, Boston was still haunted by what-ifs about I Should Be Happy.
She confesses, “I still was just so bummed that the record was not going to come after we put so much time and work into it. It was a really weird time personally. Rob and I were separated and going through a divorce, but we finished the record, and I was proud of the songs. There’s the song ‘Who Cares’ with Terry Adams — I just couldn't stand the idea of that song never being released. I really wanted it to be out in the world, but to no avail . . . for many years.”
Fast-forward a few decades. Beard approaches Boston about finally releasing I Should Be Happy, making it the first DB release since the Labrea Stompers’ Funzo’s Knuckle Room in 1992. Beard says, “We did one solo record with Anne in the early-’90s, The Big House of Time. She’d recorded some extra stuff that was supposed to come out, but my label took a thirty-something-year-hiatus. Her record was sitting around. I’d always liked the stuff. I had some money I inherited from my mother when she passed on. I loved it and decided it should come out. Anne decided she wanted to work with David Barbe and Jason Nesmith at Chase Park Transduction in Athens. David mixed, Jason mastered.”
When Boston revisited her batch of tapes, she made a surprising discovery — a number of recordings that she’d forgotten about.
“When I moved to Athens all those years ago,” she recalls, “I did meet a few musicians, and we ended up recording several of the songs that are on this new version of I Should Be Happy at Rob’s studio a couple of years later, these almost-live versions of a few songs. When I got the tapes back after they’d been digitized, and I was listening back to all the songs, I was like, ‘Oh, I didn't even remember doing that.’ I really liked those songs, so I ended up substituting them for several of the songs on of the original. Nothing on the final version of I Should Be Happy was re-recorded. Everything was recorded between ’92 and ’95. Once I got the go-ahead to make Happy happen, we added a few overdubs to some of the songs.”
For Boston, the chance discovery ensured the album was the tonal opposite of its predecessor. Whereas The Big House of Time was vim, gloss, and electric guitars, I Should Be Happy is wistful and lithe, at times quietly devastating. Consider songs like “Torn Apart,” “Gone,” and “Carry Me” — which she performed at the funeral for Beard’s mother — where her voice is as radiant and soaring as ever, yet an imperishable gloom lingers.
“Once I’d added the later songs to the record,” Boston says, “and took some of the originals out, it seemed to have more cohesiveness as a real longing-and-loss kind of record, so it actually worked out pretty well. The songs that I took off of the original I Should Be Happy were more rock ’n’ roll with dense production, and that’s just not what I wanted this to be. When we took the whole thing in for remixing, I was really able to pull it back and make it into something that was lighter instrumentally. Some songs are layered, but the record is quiet, not as far as volume, but just quieter in the sense of it.”
And what of “Who Cares,” the duet featuring Terry Adams’s Sun Ra-infused piano that left Boston starstruck?
“Oh my God, starstruck is exactly right. I was such a huge NRBQ fan. Plus, he’s just a larger-than-life personality. At the time he was friends with David Greenberger, who also wrote ‘Speedboat’s Wake,’ for the record. He’s a graphic artist and did a lot of record covers for NRBQ. He and Terry had written ‘Who Cares’ as a demo for someone else, and they ended up not doing it, so he sent it to me. Of course, the minute I heard it I was like, ‘Oh my God! This is fantastic.’ I really wanted to do it. The piano part is totally Terry. I was like, ‘How are we ever going to make this happen?’ I think Greenberger told me that NRBQ was coming to Atlanta. He got in touch with Terry and Terry said he would record it with me if I could book some studio time while he was in Atlanta. And I'm like, ‘What?’ We had never met, and I ended up picking him up at the airport and driving him out to the studio located outside the perimeter. They had a beautiful piano. Rob was there as ‘producer’ or just to give his two cents. When we got to the studio, we went into a room with a beautiful piano. I sat down on the bench next to him. I mean, we’d talked a little bit, obviously, on the way from the airport because it was quite a long ride, but I was just like a freaking nervous fangirl. In the car, I guess we’d talked about the song a little bit. I don't even remember, but when we got to the studio, I’m sitting there next to him thinking, ‘What am I doing sitting on this piano bench next to Terry Adams?’
“We went over it a couple of times, just to make sure that we understood the timing and the phrasing and all that kind of stuff. Then I went into another room where I couldn't see him at all. And so I was just like, ‘Oh my God! This is crazy.’ I don't know how many takes we did, but the version on the record is just one take, one solid thing. It’s not punched in and punched out. At the end, when he says, ‘Well, it had its moments, didn't it?’ I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s so great. We got to keep that on the record!’
“But it was, it was freaky. I loved it so much. It was one of these things where I just couldn't believe that it was happening, and I think it turned out pretty well. And so I thought this record’s got to come out; it’s got to come out. And here we are, finally.”
Finally.
Finally, Boston has the chance to release an album on her own terms. “This record,” she says, “was a first for me in so many ways, because I'd never really had any say in anything that I’ve ever recorded. I just thought that wasn’t my role, or I was never really invited to do it or anything. With this, I felt like I was having to make a lot of decisions, and I’m proud of the way it turned out.” —CL—
Check out Anne Richmond Boston, alongside Neil Golden, John Neff, Sam Webber, and Bob Elsey, playing in support of her new album, I Should Be Happy, Monday, April 27, in Athens at The Rialto Club/Hotel Indigo and Wednesday, May 20, in Atlanta at Eddie’s Attic.