Lucinda Breeding

When it came time to lay down the tracks for its second album, you might say that Denton band Oso Closo found that it was oh so broke.

The band — Adrian Hulet on piano and vocals, Chris McQueen on guitar and vocals, Danny Garcia on guitar, Andy Rogers on bass and vocals, and Ryan Jacobi on drums — was getting ready to record Today Is Beauty’s Birthday, but first they needed to come up with some cash.

Call it creative problem-solving in a recession-whipped marketplace.

“A friend of mine mentioned that there was some girl in the Portland area that had created a PayPal account and come up with a bunch of different incentives for donating to her new album,” Hulet said, “and that she had made the papers by raising something like $85,000. I didn’t even look her up, just immediately got started on the idea. I really don’t even know her name. I wish I did so I could give her better credit.”

Oso Closo is an entrenched member of the Denton music scene, playing progressive rock that has caught critical praise for making its sophistication sound simple. The band got a rare opportunity last year to play the music for Dallas Theatre Center’s staging of The Who’s Tommy, earning raves from media in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in the process.

Oso Closo has an instinct for lacing its songwriting with a mythic sort of sound, bending string arrangements around powerful guitar chords. The guitarists match power with dexterity, and in terms of lyrics, the songwriters know just when to make the listener work to fill in poetic blanks.

Even with the attention and a regular tour schedule, Oso Closo doesn’t have a record deal that exchanges fat checks for a dozen records.

So the band decided to take a techno-savvy, hat-in-hand approach.

The band came up with a PayPal donation scale. For a $25 donation, you get a signed copy of the CD. The donations levels jump in increasing increments, just like sponsorships for a fundraising ball, topping out with a $10,000 level. The band sweetens the donation deal with gifts — a limited-edition DVD documentary of behind-the-scenes work, bonus tracks and personalized cigar boxes and, for big spenders, a day in the studio and a chance to sing backup vocals.

Has the band gotten good response to this tactic?

“Definitely,” Hulet said. “At this point, we’ve raised just about half of the costs of the entire production, which is an enormous accomplishment. Some have been large donations.”

As is the case for the best nonprofit fund drives, Oso Closo has found that this venture has been fueled by the nickel-and-dime sort of donations.

“The smaller ones really add up,” he said.

Professional recordings require thousands of dollars. A big cost goes to time in the studio, but musicians also shell out untold bills for mixing, engineering and production. The group went into the studio on June 2 and planned to wrap up the recording by the end of the month.

“Then there is mastering, pressing, all that sort of thing,” Hulet said. “It’s definitely a much faster and much more planned-out process than our last one [Rest]. And really will be a better product, I can assure you.”

Hulet said he holed up with McQueen to write the tracks.

“Chris and I actually went to a cabin on Caddo Lake, on the Texas-Louisiana border, during the winter of last year and spent a week writing the whole album,” Hulet said. “Since then, we’ve been playing about half of it live on tour.”

Hulet expects the finished album to be ready for fans next month.

If you want to catch the band before then, be at Hailey’s Club, 122 W. Mulberry St., on July 18.

To donate to the band’s recording effort, visit www.osocloso.com/fundraiser.htm.

LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877. Her e-mail address is cbreeding@dentonrc.com.