Worldline is a four-piece textured rock band, the brainchild of music producer Andrew Schatzberg who has come out from behind the control board to continue his career as a singer, songwriter, guitarist, and front man. After spending five years in the Chapel Hill music scene, Schatzberg left North Carolina for the West Coast. He thought he’d never return, but circumstances brought him to Asheville in 2002. He built a recording studio and began working with bands from across the region. But Schatzberg never stopped writing. He wrote 60 songs between 2002 and 2008 and wanted to record about ten of them.
“I thought I’d just bring in an awesome drummer,” Schatzberg says, “and play the rest of the parts myself just to capture a group of songs that marked this time in my life. An artifact. But once I started playing with a drummer all those old feelings about being in a band came flooding back, and I started imagining performing again. Once that happened, I couldn’t really turn it off.” Schatzberg formed a band, and as they practiced the songs from Schatzberg’s catalog, he would bring in new ideas for songs. “The new stuff was working really well with the older tracks, and the idea of these ten songs as an album started to make sense,” he says. “I still believe in ‘the album,’ the idea of a group of songs working together to transport you somewhere.”
Through his studio, Schatzberg had worked with some amazing players and wound up recruiting a few to form Worldline in 2011. Worldline features seasoned veterans of Asheville’s music scene: Mark Shaeffer on drums, Art Lubin on bass, and Brian Turner on keyboards and backing vocals. With their varied musical experiences and influences—Beck, The Flaming Lips, U2, Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Led Zeppelin - the four men of Worldline have created a distinctly dramatic sound that rises above the din of typical rock music. Worldline hit the clubs in 2011 while recording their first album, Inside the Noise, released in May 2012.All tracks recorded at Landslide Recording Studio in Asheville, NC. https://www.landslidestudio.com
With their debut album, Inside the Noise, Asheville’s Worldline offers a kaleidoscope of intricate pop tunes, haunting ballads, and gritty, dramatic rock songs that cover the emotional range of lives well spent. Instrumental textures prevail throughout, creating a tapestry that gets richer and fuller upon multiple listens. Unlike the wall-of-sound-approach, Inside the Noise sees Worldline capture moods through instrumentation, rhythms, and melodies that add flavor to the lyrical content. At times hopeful, whimsical, and mournful, the album’s potency lay in song structures and performances that mirror life’s drama and complex subtleties.
