If your songwriting partner were also your significant other and the two of you had a nasty breakup after nearly eight years, nobody would be surprised if you dissolved the band you’d been playing in together. In the summer of 2003, Joseph Costa and Lindsay Anderson, the core of L’altra, had been split up for more than three years without either one quitting the group–but their infighting had decimated the rest of the lineup and cost the band its relationship with longtime label Aesthetics. The future looked bleak.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Anderson and Costa met on their first day at Cleveland’s John Carroll University in 1992 and soon started dat-ing. Shortly after they arrived in Chicago in 1997, Costa answered a flyer posted by bassist Ken Dyber, who was getting his Aesthetics label off the ground and looking to join a band. Dyber introduced the couple to drummer Eben English of Del Rey, and the new quartet–with Costa on guitar, Anderson on keyboards, and both on vocals–played its first show in summer 1998.
Late in 1999, three days before the sessions for L’altra’s first full-length, Music of a Sinking Occasion, Anderson broke up with Costa. “Dumped me just as we were recording the first fucking record,” he says, laughing. “That was really cool.” In an effort not to upset the group’s delicate balance, the couple kept the split secret from their bandmates; Dyber and English didn’t find out until weeks later, when an engineer let the news slip.
Costa came back to Chicago in August 2003, and he and Anderson began work on a new L’altra album with Joshua Eustis of Telefon Tel Aviv producing. Eustis gave the music a bigger, cleaner sound and expanded the group’s palette considerably: Different Days leans more heavily on atmospheric digital processing and programmed percussion, including beats by TTA’s Charles Cooper, and features horn arrangements by Bright Eyes trumpeter Nate Walcott, bass clarinet from Zelienople’s Brian Harding, and cello from Fred Lonberg-Holm. (Hellner and English also came back aboard for a few songs.) “In the past Joe and I have struggled with each other and our ideas of what the music should be,” says Anderson. “But this time, Josh was able to act as mediator.”
