Miracle Sweepstakes

Nancy Reagan’s Enduring Love is the foundation of Miracle Sweepstakes.

Don’t worry, they’re not fans of trickle-down economics, but their story does begin during the George W. Bush administration.

Frontman Craig Heed remembers, “right after Ronald Reagan died, there was a headline and it included the phrase ‘Nancy Reagan’s Enduring Love.’ So, that became the name of our first band.” 

Craig Heed - Guitar, Lead Vocals

The Brooklyn-based psychedelic-pop outfit has come a long way since their early days on the South Shore of Long Island. The group originally formed at Valley Stream High School when guitarist Craig Heed and drummer Ian Miniero met in an art class. The two bonded over a common appreciation for The Strokes, Kid A, and Donnie Darko. Miniero remembers Heed drew a “sick” portrait of Albert Hammond, Jr. smoking a cigarette. Although Heed remembers that Miniero “mentioned that he liked Kid A, or we had both seen Donnie Darko recently and thought that one Echo & The Bunnymen song was good.” Maybe it was a combination of the two. 

Shortly thereafter, Heed and Miniero recruited Doug Bleek, a Syosset native, via Myspace, and the core lineup that exists to this day was set.

Ian Miniero - Drums

The band has evolved significantly since the early aughts.  Though they were never on board with the third wave emo scene that infiltrated Long Island during that period, Heed described their original sound as a “loud hybrid of Guided By Voices and The Velvet Underground.” A pretty mature pallet for a group of teens coming of age in the mid-2000s.

After a revolving door of rhythm guitarists, Justin Mayfield came into the picture in late 2018. Known primarily for his contributions to more math-rock styled projects like Sheen Marina and Brim, Mayfield joined after seeing a posting on Craigslist. “I wasn’t really looking for anything specific. I think I typed some band names on Craigslist to see if any listings had them listed as an influence. I think I typed in Brainiac and The Zombies. I replied, then Craig sent me the music. I really liked it. It’s not math-y, but there are structural tricks and interesting stuff going on. So, it’s a lot of fun to play.”

Doug Bleek - Bass/Vocals

The next chapter of Miracle Sweepstakes is now well underway with the release of their second album, Rorschached, last November. It’s self-described as less of a rock record and sheds some of the slacker-rock influences that the band exuded on their debut, Turn Heel. Instead, you’ll hear more pop-oriented psychedelia along the lines of The Zombies, Olivia Tremor Control, and Brian Wilson. The melodies are rich, the harmonies are smooth, and there’s much less crunch. How’d the band adopt this cleaner sound and ditch the crunch? Heed explained, “I don’t know if you’ve seen those Nugenix commercials with Frank Thomas, but we’re getting to that age. The music is gonna get more mellow unless someone hooks us up with that stuff.”

Justin Mayfield - Guitar/Vocals

The band recorded the majority of the record at the Seaside Lounge in Park Slope with producer Charles Burst.  The record’s warm, vintage sound resulted from recording to tape. Burst hooked up a tape machine to Pro Tools, the band recorded to tape, Burst then bounced it into digital, and then bounced it back to tape.  During our recent chat, the band gave me a track by track breakdown of the album with insights on the recording process, sonic and thematic inspirations, and of course, some fun stories:  

Rorschached kicks off with a bang, immediately accelerating with some dynamite guitars on “Forcefield.” Though this sounds like the perfect way to get the album going, it was actually intended to be the record’s second track. “Initially we had another song called ‘Walking Through The Clouds’ as the lead-off track,” Heed said. “It was more psychedelic and ethereal. We tried the song a few times and worked on different stuff to try to make it work, but it didn’t seem to click. So, we dropped it off the record and bumped up ‘Forcefield’ to the first track.”

A key part of the sequencing and placement of “Forcefield” was the band’s desire to have it transition into the album’s next track, “Flyer Lie.” “They flow into each other,” Heed said. “They were written around the same time and have similar vibes. We tracked them separately, but I wanted them to flow right into each other. There’s no real lead-in from ‘Forcefield’ to “Flyer Lie’ - it’s a seamless transition.”

“Flyer Lie” is one of the earlier songs written for the record and has an interesting structure with lots of musical non-sequiturs. The track slows to a crawl about three-quarters of the way through, only to bubble and burst with energy as it concludes. Lyrically, the song tackles the creative process through a golf metaphor. Heed explained: “A flyer lie is a golf term for when your shot goes further than you anticipated. I feel like songwriting is kind of like that in a way. You can try to force something and sometimes that works, but sometimes you’re not even trying to do something, but you’re able to come out on the other side with a great song.”

The song even draws some unexpected inspiration from the TV sitcom Two And A Half Men. Heed recalls his Dad watching “a lot of Two and a Half Men around that time. I’d be chilling in the living room and I thought the theme music was funny - like that shitty barbershop quartet stuff.”

Next up is “Shoot The Blue,” which is one of the poppier songs on the record. While playing a show at Pianos on the Lower East Side, a tourist approached Bleek and remarked that the band reminded them of the band from the film That Thing You Do. So, Heed went back, watched the film, and wrote a song that “sounds like a hit” in a similar manner to the movie’s iconic title track. “Memory Grain,” the album’s fourth track is the band’s attempt at AM Gold with a Bossanova feel, while “Black Bouquet” was a song that Heed originally intended to use outside of Miracle Sweepstakes: “I was writing Miracle Sweepstakes songs, but I was also writing songs at the same time for the girl I was dating that sounded more like Beach Boys-y pop. This was one of those. It’s a little math-y, but also more laid back and chill.” 

The record then moves on to “Oh My,” a simple, but fresh sounding song with a vocal melody that popped into Heed’s head while he was sleeping before transitioning to the album’s lead single, “Relative Mind.” The song features a lot of fun auxiliary percussion elements, a mesmerizing hook, and an “angry circus” intro and the trippy accompanying video for the song draws inspiration from Roxy Music’s “Jealous Guy” video.

The final three tracks showcase the band’s penchant for experimentation in both the studio and their songwriting process.

Rorschached

“Signs Up And Down” was one of the later songs that Heed wrote. The song was recorded in three different segments and then pieced together. It opens with a “noise section,” which was tracked separately. However, Heed notes that Bleek detunes his bass in the middle of the song to a “KoRn level bass sound,” which needed to be tracked separately. Heed explained, “then there’s an acapella part that builds back into the chorus. We tracked that separately. Then there’s the coda at the end that fades out, which was the final part that we tracked.”

“Mary Where Are You?,” the album’s penultimate tracks almost didn’t make the album.  “We tracked it towards the end thinking that if we don’t get to it, it won’t be on the record. But, it wound up being one of my favorite songs.” Heed performed the three-part harmonies on the song, but subsequently changed the key the song was in by half a step.

The album wraps up with perhaps the band’s most unique track with respect to how it was recorded. “Try,” contains the most tricks, as Heed notes: “We sped it off after we recorded it and sped the BPM up by 2% after the fact. So, it’s technically not in concert tuning. I like the song “After Hours” by The Velvet Underground and how it sounds naive and childlike. It sounds buoyant and brighter.” Miniero played a drum pad with the setting on reverb snare and Heed tracked the keyboards on the song in his parents’ living room.

You can purchase Rorschached on compact disc via Bandcamp.