What’s with the “company” in Kendall Street Company? If you know anything about the local band, an 8- to 9-year-old jam-rock outfit with a dedicated regional following, you know these guys are anything but stuffed shirts. Business casual for frontman Louis Smith and his colleagues doesn’t even come with socks and shoes.
No, Smith says the “company” in Kendall Street Company refers to the company the band keeps, the folks who follow the rockers from show to show and know the words to every song on their eponymous 2014 debut EP, as well as those who’ve shown up more recently.
Over the next three weeks, the band stands to learn a lot about its Virginia-based faithful. Smith and his mates have launched a five-city, 20-concert, in-state tour. In addition to shows in Blacksburg, Harrisonburg, Roanoke, and Richmond, the tour includes four shows at Charlottesville’s Rapture on the Downtown Mall. KSC will start its week on Tuesdays, and wind its way to C’ville on Friday nights, before concluding the state circuit in Richmond on Saturdays.
“We were thinking, we don’t want to plan this giant tour that is going to be going out to places hundreds of miles from home and potentially have cancellations,” Smith says. “We decided, let’s play in our home state, let’s put on some awesome shows for all these people in the state of Virginia.”
Playing four concerts in the same city in as many weeks isn’t without challenges. The big one? Filling the venues. Bands try to space out their bookings in individual locations to keep demand up—play too many times in the same place, and you’ll stop attracting crowds.
But the tour venues were selected with that in mind, and Smith’s confident in his band’s ability to pull off the weekly engagement over the next month. The KSC website says “no two shows [are] ever the same,” and those aren’t just corporate buzzwords. The band’s thick catalog of originals and covers is impressive for an act that’s only been formally touring for five years, and with lengthy improvisations dotting its setlists, Kendall Street Company knows how to keep it fresh.
The group is coming off a nationwide fall tour, which served as a proper promotional effort for 2021’s COVID-driven The Year the Earth Stood Still double LP. But even if fans caught one of the shows on the swing, which included highlight reel performances in Denver, Virginia Beach, and NYC, they’re in for at least one surprise. KSC’s original keyboardist, Price Gillock, will play the 20 shows alongside the band’s five current members: Smith (acoustic guitar, vocals), Brian Roy (bass), Ryan Wood (drums), Ben Laderberg (electric guitar), and Jake Vanaman (saxophones, keys).
So what can Charlottesville audiences expect during the weekly Rapture shows? Intimacy is the watchword, with the smallish venue bringing the band and its company close together. What’s more, KSC has dubbed the in-state tour “Kendall Street Is for Lovers,” and will play songs at least tangentially in line with the theme. That means, in addition to crowd-pleasers like “Wasted” (“your love is tearing me apart”) and on-the-nose title tracks like “Lady I Love,” showgoers will get “Rocky Raccoon,” The Beatles’ ballad about an ill-fated love triangle.
“We learned a bunch of covers and rehearsed over four days before the tour,” Smith says. “We are diving deep into the catalog.”
The band has come a long way in developing that catalog since its 2014 debut. Early on, it might have been easy to dismiss the group as a DMB knockoff. Horns, raspy lead vocalist, jazzy/folky Americana, jams/improvisations. Check, check, check, check.
And while Smith admits it was in part his love for Matthews that brought him to Charlottesville (to study architecture, physics, and music at UVA), KSC has evolved into something more. A Phish-like whimsy, a Widespread Panic-like sense of desperation—all mashed up to make the band one of a kind.
According to Smith, it’s driven by the music his parents listened to when he was growing up—Miles Davis, Talking Heads, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Herbie Hancock—and inflected by modern curios. Think Aussie indie rockers King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, soul singer D’Angelo, and former Roots drummer-cum-late night star Questlove.
Which brings us to where Kendall Street Company is today: a tight jam band, dependent on its members being closely in sync, quickly recovering from a brief pandemic-induced period of alienation.
“Like the first year or nine months, we didn’t get together at all really,” Smith says. “We did a livestream series on YouTube…those were fun, but it was definitely like grasping at something to do and keep creating the art and be the band we wanted to be.”
Smith thinks one of the upsides of playing Rapture and the other statewide venues once a week for four weeks is that KSC will get better and better. And with any luck, the band’s company will also start to feel it.
“We’re hoping the people at the shows are going to meet each other and bond over a love of jam music,” Smith says. “I feel like in Charlottesville, it’s been hard to find the scene, like what is going on? I’m sure it is similar in other cities, coming back and going to see shows. I just want to see live music flourish.”