Inchworm is the novella you’ve yet to write, the bedtime story you will one day tell, and the fanciful version of your life that you live only in your head. Culled from the hearts and minds of Chicago’s most underrated tavern troubadours and best-kept secrets, the group’s inception itself is the stuff of dusty legend.
In the summer of 2003, guitarist and vocalist Matthew Baugher was given a son's nightmare of a summer job: travel deep into the Southern Illinois valley to restore and renovate his father's ill-purchased Lake Paradise cabin. Fearing years of hard labor on his own, Matthew enlisted the help of three trusted friends from the Chicago independent music scene: Brian Morrissey, Mike Holtz, and Dan Ingenthron. With implements and instruments in hand, the wrecking crew rock band that would become Inchworm was born somewhere along a desolate stretch of I-57.
The boys spent the entire summer of 2003 hammering and harmonizing, composting and composing, scrubbing and scratching together the kind of music that the time-forgotten cabin seemed to be longing for – organic, folk-laden pop with reverent undertones of ragged blues and barroom psychedelia. With the established pattern of long working days and longer jamming nights as comfortable as their worn-in jeans, the quartet soon neared the end of the summer and the completion of their task.
Only one area on the property remained untouched, and for good reason: it was rumored that the cabin's attic was haunted by the ghost of a pianist who had entertained patrons at the Green Parrot Saloon in Paradise Township. Sometime during the years following prohibition, the pianist was murdered in the cabin by a jealous lover and the soul of the place seemed to die with him. The musty room sagged with sorrow; a melancholy, tuneless song on a decrepit piano. In respectful silence, the boys attended to their task. They opened windows, swept away decades of dust, and let the sunlight shine in on a half-century of darkness.
In the bottom of a steamer trunk, they found a sepia-toned photograph of four men proudly holding their instruments in the parlor of the Green Parrot. At the center of the photo, the ill-fated piano player's sly smile was framed by the group's name on the drummer's bass drum: Inchworm. Slowly, smiles crept across the young men's faces and Baugher cautiously hummed a melody. Morrissey and Ingenthron soon joined him, Holtz tapping out a beat with a pair of old coat hangers on that old trunk in the corner of the room. The song swelled louder and louder with all of the heart and pride and joy that had been locked up in that room for so many years, and somewhere in the background, each man agreed that he'd heard a honky-tonk piano.
Almost 5 years later, the DIY spirit that incubated that long-ago summer remains alive and well in Inchworm. Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing was written and recorded by Inchworm in the places that inspire them most – their homes, hangouts, and the habitat they call Chicago. Creating a mood is as important as crafting a melody to Inchworm - soaring harmonies and atmospheric tones color songs like “Simple Days Without Money” and “Learn to Grift,” while “Green House Grown” saunters along like a Tom Waits melody with a Bourbon Street hangover. In just six songs, the band proves that the ability to translate one’s ideas from the rehearsal space to tape is a skill that’s all to often overlooked in today’s world of pricey studios and sound-altering producers. When a band can express itself as intimately and completely as Inchworm has on Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing, the result is a cohesive, translatable, and memorable musical statement.
