Bend rockers Goodbye Dyna record new album at Abbey Road Studios

Published 1:00 pm Wednesday, December 11, 2024

In 2020, Andy Jacobs of the Bend rock band Goodbye Dyna found himself stuck at home, making DIY recordings of songs he’d written over the previous few years. Constructed from riffs captured on his smartphone and themed around H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories, the resulting album, “Badlands,” was heavy and highly conceptual.

The next year, Jacobs — a longtime staple within Bend’s music scene — challenged himself to write a song each month, and by August, he was feeling pretty good about what he had.

“I was like, ‘Wow, these songs are kind of good. I wonder if we should record them somewhere elaborate?’” he said. “‘Badlands’ was super low-budget, and I just kept thinking, ‘What if we went the other way with these songs and just did, like, the biggest thing you could think of?’”

Mission accomplished. Over the next three years, Jacobs relentlessly pursued a lofty dream: To record a Goodbye Dyna album at Abbey Road Studios in London — home to the Beatles in the 1960s and birthplace of classic recordings by artists ranging from Pink Floyd and Radiohead to Lady Gaga and Amy Winehouse to Fela Kuti and Glenn Miller.

European vacation

It was an idea that came to him while he was sketching out a European vacation, and he mentioned it to some bandmates.

“Every one of them was like, ‘Oh, that’s crazy. It’s either too expensive or you have to be on a major (record) label or something like that,’” Jacobs said. “I wasn’t to be discouraged, so I went home that night, looked on their website and sent them an email.“

Someone at Abbey Road wrote back with pricing — “a ridiculous amount of money,” Jacobs said. Undeterred, he asked if he could book four days there in October 2022.

“I just thought, ‘What if I put this out there and it ends up coming together?’” he said. “‘How cool would that be?’”

Jacobs’ experience as a musician in Bend stretches back to the ‘90s, when his band Thought Police made some noise in the local punk scene. Since then, he has played in rock bands like Blame Amy, Sons of Dirt and The Color Study, as well as Sublime and Beatles cover bands. But for more than two decades, he has used Goodbye Dyna as a vehicle for his own songs, releasing five albums since 2002.

‘Lava Meets Water’

A sixth, “Lava Meets Water,” comes out Dec. 13. Like its predecessors, it’s packed with hard rock, punk and psychedelic pop that’s sometimes ferociously fast (like, for example, Bad Religion), sometimes gorgeously sprawling (like, say, Radiohead), and always effortlessly catchy. A handful of musicians have come and gone from Goodbye Dyna over the years; on the new album, Jacobs was joined by bassist Robert Wynia (of the band Floater) and drummer Jarred Grant, an old friend from the Thought Police days.

Wynia and Grant were on board even before Jacobs knew where they’d be recording “Lava Meets Water.” Once he had dates at Abbey Road on the books, he started working to raise funding for the project, eventually bringing in more than $20,000 through a Kickstarter campaign — enough to lock down his reservation at the legendary studio.

“I was really humbled by all the support that came out of the woodwork for that,” Jacobs said. “I could tell people still thought it was a crazy idea, but they wanted to see if it would happen anyway.”

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By this point, of course, Jacobs was determined to see it through. Plane tickets were purchased. Hotel rooms booked. An in-house engineer — Chris Bolster, who has worked with Foo Fighters, Kate Bush and Paul McCartney, to name just a few — signed on to record the band at Abbey Road. Jacobs even got to reserve a bunch of instruments and other equipment, some of which had been hanging around the studio for decades.

Jaw-dropping experience

“I was doing vocals at one point and the assistant engineer … was hooking up this super old microphone, beating on it, blowing on it, trying to get it to work, and he said, ‘Oh yeah, this was (John Lennon’s) favorite mic,’” he said. “Every time something would come out of their mouths, we would all be, like, totally jaw-dropped.”

Once the album was recorded, Jacobs returned to the United States and kept pursuing dreams, bringing on A-list mixing and mastering engineers to finalize the sound of “Lava Meets Water.” Now, he’s rolling out singles and various vinyl variants at goodbyedyna.com in an effort to generate excitement about a project that has brought so much joy to his life over the past three years.

“It all felt like a dream the entire time. I remember pinching myself, like, ‘Did that really happen?’” Jacobs said. “Because if you think about it, it’s not really a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It’s like a once-in-a-thousand-lives experience. And we got to have that.”