'To Ohio, at Last' is the fourth studio album for Daddy's Gonna Kill Ralphie. It wasn't an easy album to title. Internally, the band debated several options, landing on a working title of 'Friends,' the name of the album's second song and a dominant theme in the songwriting. 'So many of the songs are about the way relationships wax and wane, and how distance plays in a friendship,' said Toby Fallsgraff, the lead songwriter and singer for the band. 'But we decided the album really wasn't about what drives us apart, but what connected us in the first place.' Daddy's Gonna Kill Ralphie is an Ohio band. Fallsgraff started the project back at Ohio University, performing under the moniker mostly as a solo act. When he met Rob Zajac through their work at the college radio station, it wasn't long before they started making music together and they were working on the group's first record, 'Letter Carrier (if these buttons control you),' which they self-released shortly after graduating in 2004. Over the course of two more studio recordings (2006's ''Love Sincerely,' Writes the Writer,' and 2009's 'Panic'), the band grew to a four-piece, with Kyle Kilmer on drums, and Corey Salts on lead guitar. Each member of the band hails from northern Ohio -- Kilmer and Zajac from Port Clinton, Salts from Gibsonburg, and Fallsgraff from Berea. They won't say whether it's a requirement, but each of the band's members has an Ohio-shaped tattoo. The name of the new record is actually a throwback to a lyric from their second album. 'We spent more than a year making this record, and it wasn't until we landed on the name that it felt finished,' Fallsgraff said. Part of the reason for that timeframe is that Daddy's Gonna Kill Ralphie, at present, is a long-distance relationship. Even though they've been making music together on and off for nine years, no more than two of the band members have lived in the same ZIP code at any point in that tenure. Fallsgraff moved to D.C. in 2005 and landed in Chicago where he worked on the Obama campaign. Kilmer is in Lancaster, Salts in Whites Landing, and Zajac lives in Port Clinton, teaching middle school math. They only really see each other when they're all in Zajac's hometown. 'Just getting together to try out new songs can be a hassle. Being able to actually collaborate on material is rare,' Fallsgraff said. 'We'll know a few weeks in advance that we'll all be in town, and we'll trade emails talking about what we're going to work on.' Most of To Ohio, at Last started out as demos recorded on Fallsgraff's iPhone, which he'd send to the band four or five at a time before a scheduled practice. The rest of the band will take them and do their best to show up prepared to flesh the song out. When you're not in the same city, even the simplest decisions about album art or what the T-shirts will look like can feel impossible to get consensus on. So they've resorted to communicating through email and online video chats to try to hash out as much as they can. 'For the first time in our history, we're actually having business meetings as a band -- and none of us is actually in the same room,' Fallsgraff said. They finished the album -- the group's most creative and mature output yet. Fallsgraff credits that line from the theme to 'An American Tail': 'Somewhere out there if love can see us through / Then we'll be together somewhere out there / Out where dreams come true'
