“There was a site you probably remember called MP3.com, it was like pre-social media,” says Jon Ehrens, 41, thinking back to the music he made in high school. “I needed a name fast because I recorded four songs and just wanted to upload them immediately, and I used the name Repelican.”
25 years later, Ehrens has written and released hundreds of songs under dozens of band names, but Repelican continues to be his primary outlet. On Dim Halo, released on his Mobile Lounge label in October, Ehrens recaptured some of the uninhibited creativity and lo-fi immediacy of those songs he made as a teenager. “I think I had this confidence about it, like anything I ever commit to tape is good and going out in the world. And then I started to be like ‘Oh, am I gonna be a real musician, is this gonna be my job? I better be professional about it.’ And now I certainly don’t give a crap, it’s not my job, it’s what I do for fun. So I’m sort of returning to ‘hit record and see what comes out.’”
Dim Halo was recorded at home in Vergennes, a Vermont town with a population of about 2,500, where Ehrens and his wife moved a few years ago. “She had a friend there and said ‘Let’s move there,’ and we did and I love it, I’m never leavin’,” said Ehrens, who wanted a change of pace after living in Baltimore and Philadelphia. He converted a barn on their Vergennes property into a venue, Dense Valley Barn, where he celebrated the release of the album with a performance by Repelican’s new 5-piece live lineup.
Ehrens grew up in the Washington, D.C. suburbs of Montgomery County, Maryland. His father, Art Ehrens, who passed away in 2022, was a prolific musician in his own right, penning memorable ad jingles for countless regional radio and TV spots (“Ourisman Dodge, great name, great cars” is one of his best-remembered tunes). When Jon Ehrens was back in Maryland on Thanksgiving weekend to see family, we hung out at Glen Echo Park, a local cultural district that’s been renovated and revived in recent years. When Ehrens lived here, though, it was just an empty, run-down place where he could hang out with other teenagers.
Ehrens branched out from Repelican in his 20s, starting a long procession of short-lived bands and recording projects in Baltimore, sometimes playing as a sideman for other artists like Ed Schrader or Flock of Dimes. The Art Department, an oddball trio that played fast songs with intricate guitar lines and high-pitched vocals, toured and released two albums that attracted a cult following. Ehrens experimented with more polished synth pop sounds on the 2011 self-titled album by Whife, with his sister Emily Ehrens on vocals, and the 2013 self-titled album by Dungeonesse, with Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner on vocals.
Eventually, though, Jon Ehrens felt like he’d gone overboard with all the aliases and one-offs, and focused his songwriting efforts back towards Repelican. “I started to do that just to stop annoying people, or at least have it on one Bandcamp page.” Last year’s compilation Debris (B-Sides 2002-2008) collected 30 of the best songs from that fertile period when Ehrens had a Robert Pollard-like output of catchy, strange lo-fi records that he’d sometimes crank out in a few days in a fit of inspiration.
Dim Halo has some of the same playful, spontaneous one-man-band experimentation of those earlier records, but there’s a weighty underlying theme of what Ehrens calls, “for lack of a better term, spiritual crisis.” Ehrens, whose family had never been particularly religious, went through a period of pondering big existential ideas over the last few years. “I think I always had a cynical attitude towards things that people describe as spiritual, and then I just sort of investigated it pretty hard for a while and was like, ‘I’m gonna let myself believe the things that I read about mysticism, God, and things like that.’ I was getting into meditation and prayer, just to see what would happen. And things happened, some weird experiences relating to the cosmos or whatever you wanna call it.”
One of Dim Halo’s standouts, “Happily Distracted,” is about the point where Ehrens took a break from the cosmos to focus back on more concrete concerns. “Essentially I got kinda freaked out and decided I didn’t wanna continue. And that’s what that song’s about. I wanna make songs and go to work and distract myself from that stuff because it makes me much happier than sitting around and thinking about the unanswerable questions. I totally would disassociate, It was pretty weird.” In that light, songs like “Umpteenth” and “I Think I’m Thanking God” sound heavier and more meaningful than they had when I first listened to the album.
Ehrens has stayed in touch with a lot of the people he knew during the years that he was active in Baltimore’s thriving underground. Owen Gardner of Horse Lords played in an early Repelican live lineup, and Ehrens was roommates with Future Islands frontman Sam Herring when the band exploded in popularity after appearing on “The Late Show with David Letterman.” Herring and Gardner both appeared on the 2021 album I’m Not One: Vol. 1, credited to Repelican With Friends, along with some other Baltimore luminaries. Ehrens hopes to record more collaborations for a second volume in the series.
Ehrens doesn’t listen to indie rock as obsessively as he did in high school, but he recently stumbled across an old Archers of Loaf CD, and found that he still knew every word. “It all just came back to me, and I’m like okay yeah, this is just what exists inside me. When you’re a teenager you just receive music in this more intense way,” he says. “I guess when I hit record and do whatever I want, it comes out as indie rock. As my friend put it when I was telling her this, ‘It’s the water that comes out of your faucet.’”
