Sing it ‘All Together Now’

July 18, 2024 4:00 pm • Last Updated: July 16, 2024 4:25 pm

By Rick Koster
Day Arts/Features writer

Steve Elci (Tim Cooke)

Optimism, thy name is Steve Elci.

Melody, thy name is Steve Elci, too.

This is obvious if one listens to any or all of Elci’s music. Over the course of five albums with his band Steve Elci and Friends, the singer/songwriter consistently delivered wonderfully hummable and meaningful children’s songs — which are, by design, equally catchy to mom and dad. In fact, Elci, a lifelong Waterford resident, prefers the term “family music” when describing his work.

His latest, the 13-song “All Together Now,” is out today on digital platforms everywhere. It’s a start-to-finish masterwork — the sort of thing you’d hope to hear if you showed up on the first day of your sixth grade year and found out classes would henceforth be taught by Cheap Trick.

Whether addressing the simple joys of the natural world — “The Power of the Sunflower,” “Fireflies,” “The Sound of Trees” — or the importance of acceptance, self-belief and empowerment — “We Rise Above,” “Believe,” “Dreams,” “Hey World, This is Me” — Elci imparts his earnest messages with sunshine-and-soda-pop choruses.

While “All Together Now” is obviously a continuation of Elci’s artistic trajectory, part of the record’s consistency might be because, in these truly troubling times, he feels a sense of desperation.

Now more than ever

“I have to hope and believe that our kids are the key to a better world,” Elci said over morning coffee recently on a blue-gold morning at Muddy Waters in New London. “In that way, I try to touch a lot of bases on this album, and approach them with a family-oriented, universal message.” He paused, waiting out the blaring horn of a ferry leaving State Pier. The break seemed to give him time to gather his thoughts.

“I wrote songs for this album the way I always have. But I want ‘All Together Now’ to be more. I feel there’s a need. It’s so sad where we are in the world right now — that we live in a world where all this misery has trickled down to where family artists need to pick up the torch.”

Elci smiled but gave a shrug. He said, “Normally, we’d be singing about the cow that goes moo. But we’ve gone through a lot of changes. It’s a different responsibility now.”

That sort of thought is typical of Elci, who loves his day job as a contract services manager for the New London Homeless Hospitality Center.

“My day job is helping people,” said Elci. “I deal with folks who have so much less than I do — and have always had so much less. If I can help out and provide some happiness, that’s an everlasting source of energy. I take those experiences and cycle them through the lens of family music. It’s an endless cycle of trying to move forward and make things better.”

DIY project

Maybe the intensity of these feelings partially explains why “All Together Now” is only nominally a Steve Elci and Friends album. In fact, except for one violin part and a shared songwriting credit with Grammy winners Alphabet Rockers on “Puppy,” Elci wrote, recorded, performed, produced and mixed the entire project by himself.

The solo aspect came about after a confluence of developments, and it wasn’t necessarily by design.

First, coming out of COVID, Elci decided to purchase enough equipment to guarantee he could record release-quality material on his own regardless of outside circumstances. Once he’d done that, he set out to learn how to use the gear.

At the same time, Elci was serving as an assistant producer on two global compilations of children’s music called “Arise Together — Children of the World.” The albums, organized by the One Little Finger Foundation, featured artists from all over the world and children singers from Ukraine, Uganda and India. One of the songs was Elci’s “Dreams,” which would then resurface on “All Together Now.”

“I already had the songs for ‘All Together Now’ mostly finished, and I knew I had great material, but I wanted to focus on the ‘Arise Together’ project. It was important to me,” Elci said. “And, working on that, I was stumbling along, learning to organize my thoughts and learn how to record and produce.”

Less is more

And when that album was done and released, Elci took his experience to his own studio and began work on “All Together Now.”

“Up until this album, I’d been going, I’d gone to many different people’s studios to record — then take it somewhere else to get it mastered,” Elci said. “I discovered that there’s a very musical aspect to the recording process beyond just the sense of playing a guitar and singing. Using my own equipment, I was able to tap into those possibilities and explore them without worrying about scheduling sessions or budgets. The range of creativity went from zero to 100.”

Elci said that, like many artists set free in a recording studio for the first time, there’s a tendency to overproduce the material and experiment in almost limitless fashion.

“I learned the dangers of THAT early on,” he laughed. “Then I remembered that, in my head, I already knew what I wanted the songs to sound like. I didn’t have to convey that to a producer — who also might have his own ideas of what he wanted. All I had to do was rein in my impulses and find the sound in my head.

“By the end, I realized that the entire album is virtually … well, me.” He shook his head like a can-of-tuna guy suddenly charged with making Thanksgiving dinner for the whole family — and pulling it off. “It was a fun, sort of remarkable experience. The more I worked and learned, the more I was able to settle in and capture the songs and what I want them to convey.”

Over the past few months, in a similarly committed effort to get “All Together Now” heard by as many people as possible, Elci created and separately released videos for many of the songs on the album. There are also several performances scheduled across Connecticut in the next few months, including a solo show July 26 at the Mystic & Noank Library and a full-band gig July 30 at McCook Point Park in Niantic.

“I called the album ‘All Together Now’ because I felt like the topics I sing about — and there’s always going to be that peace and love aspect! — are what the world needs,” Elci said. “We’ll always need that, and my hope is that, in my small way, I can help people find that spark within to carry them forward.”