Tag: Music

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The way it is now: Bruce Hornsby on sonic evolution and collaboration

Bruce Hornsby performs with his band the Noisemakers on a shared bill with Amos Lee to benefit the Charlottesville Free Clinic on Sunday at the Pavilion. Publicity photo

It’s hard to follow all of the creative turns in Bruce Hornsby’s lengthy career. The smooth-voiced innovator hit it big in the mid-’80s with “The Way It Is,” and his musical path since has been anything but predictable. He’s played in the Grateful Dead, ventured into jazz and bluegrass collaborations, and fostered a partnership with Spike Lee, composing music for a variety of the filmmaker’s projects. Recently his influence has been championed by a range of popular indie artists, including Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, who has a big presence on Hornsby’s latest effort, Absolute Zero, one of his most heady, experimental albums to date.

With additional help from Jack DeJohnette, Blake Mills, Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, and New York-based chamber sextet yMusic, the record, released in April, combines elements from Hornsby’s broad sonic palette into a bold 10-track statement. The versatile pianist/songwriter, a Williamsburg, Virginia, resident, spoke with us ahead of a co-headlining show at the Sprint Pavilion with Amos Lee on Sunday night.

C-VILLE: This record is what I’d call experimental chamber pop/rock. Was that a grand vision or did it come together gradually with help from the collaborators?

Bruce Hornsby: I’d say your description is pretty solid, although I might take the “rock” out of it, other than the Robert Hunter collaboration “Take You There (Misty).” There was a basic vision for the record from the start. It felt cinematic for a good reason—most of the songs started as film cues; film music I wrote for Spike Lee. But the chamber aspect came into full focus with some of the film orchestrations I already had, and the New York recording session with yMusic that featured Rob Moose’s soulful and creative arrangements.

When you’re writing a song, what typically comes first—the music or the lyrics?

There’s no one standard model. Lots of these songs were written, again, with music coming first because of the cues. But three songs were written with lyrics first: “Never In This House,” “Voyager One,” and “The Blinding Light Of Dreams.” Those three songs are extremely musically disparate, stylistically.

“Cast-Off,” which features Justin Vernon, has an interesting kind of self-deprecation in the lyrics. Can you explain what inspired it?

Justin and (music/producer) Brad Cook invited me to come to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to work on new music and play a gig with them in 2018. I came bearing gifts—film music compositions I thought Justin may respond to. One of the pieces he liked was a cue that I called “Cast-Off.” I had decided I needed to write a semi-grand, end-credit piece, so I was listening to the end piece from the Tom Hanks film Cast Away, and got an idea from that. I came up with these words depicting someone who accepts and even embraces rejection; a song about humility and patience in the face of this. Justin added the pre-chorus and we were off.

At points, “Take You There (Misty)” has a throwback feel to your early work. What’s the story behind that one, working with Robert Hunter?

Hunter reached out to me in 2008 asking if I would be interested in writing a song with him. He asked me to send him a piece of music, and two weeks later I received an email with these amazing words syllabically matching my melody. That became “Cyclone” (from 2011’s Bride of the Noisemakers), and we’ve written three more since. “Take You There” took awhile to develop. I added the “(Misty)” to the title because I came to feel like it was my Father John Misty song.

You’ve tapped into collaborations with the likes of Ricky Skaggs, Spike Lee, The Dead, and Justin Vernon, among others. How are you able to gel with such a wide variety of artists?

The four names you mentioned, which happen to be the four deepest and longest-lasting collaborative relationships in my career, have some things very much in common: They’re all extremely high-level performers and creators in their very different fields of artistic endeavor. In every case they were people for whom my music was important, and so they reached out to me. They’re all artists whose work has moved me greatly, so every time my answer was an easy “yes.”

With an extensive discography, how do decide what goes into the current show? I imagine the new album songs will require some interesting arrangements with your band.

This record, for the most part, is a bit spacier, even trippier, than a lot of my earlier records, so there is a challenge in making all of it blend well together. In some cases we’re beefing up the arrangements so they can follow some of the early work. We’re also quickly finding ways to expand on the original record blueprint with the new songs, which is always enjoyable for restless musical souls.

You’re a Virginia native and you still live here. What keeps you in the Commonwealth?

I love that my mom is still around and I’m able to visit her every few days when I’m home, and that some of my old friends from high school basketball days still live around here and we can hang out a lot. Also, being a sentimental old fool, my sons were able to go to the same elementary school I attended.

Bruce Hornsby performs with his band the Noisemakers on a shared bill with Amos Lee to benefit the Charlottesville Free Clinic on Sunday, July 21, at the Pavilion.

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ARTS Pick: Hubby Jenkins

Hubby Jenkins of the Carolina Chocolate Drops plays The Front Porch Friday, May 24. Publicity photo

It was through busking that Brooklyn native Hubby Jenkins developed his own style, workshopping country blues, ragtime, fiddle and banjo, and traditional jazz in public places throughout New York City. Jenkins took to the road, making a life as a street musician, and in 2010 he was invited to join the Carolina Chocolate Drops, taking on the duties of guitar, mandolin, five-string banjo, and bones for the Grammy-winning group, while still maintaining a solo career.

Friday, May 24. $18-20, 8pm. The Front Porch, 221 E. Water St. 806-7062.

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ARTS Pick: Shagwüf

Shagwüf celebrates five years as a band with a special show at IX Art Park Saturday, May 25. Publicity photo

Sally Rose leads her trio Shagwüf in Sweet Freakshow, an anniversary performance to celebrate five years of stirring up crowds with the group’s psychedelic, retro swagger. “The most punk thing you can do in divisive times is to write music and try and bring bodies together, to sweat and celebrate being alive and compassionate,” says Sally Rose, who promises fire dancing, burlesque, sword-swallowing, and hair-flipping, back-bending rock ‘n’ roll.

Saturday, May 25. $15-20, 8pm. IX Art Park, 522 Second St. SE. 207-2355.

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ARTS Pick: Asbury Park: Riot, Redemption, Rock ‘N Roll

“Something happened here that wasn’t happening any place else,” says Bruce Springsteen in the film Asbury Park: Riot, Redemption, Rock ‘N Roll. “And that mattered.” The newly released rock doc looks at the origins of the significant music scene, dubbed the Songs of Asbury Park, in the New Jersey seaside resort, and its cultural influence in uniting a community divided by race riots in 1970. Director Tom Jones interviews performers from the city’s Upstage Club, including Springsteen, Little Steven Van Zandt, other members of the E Street Band, Southside Johnny, and more.

Friday, May 24. $10.50-14.50, 7pm. The Paramount Theater, 215 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 979-1333.

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Into the fold: Holly Renee Allen builds on family history in Appalachian Piece Meal

Holly Renee Allen premieres her new album, Appalachian Piece Meal, at The Front Porch on April 26. “It’s my coming home record, a project I’ve dreamt about for four years, maybe even a little longer,” she says. Photo by Eze Amos

Around 11 last Monday night, Holly Renee Allen could hear her son playing guitar in his room, picking out the notes to “House of the Rising Sun” and “Dueling Banjos.” As she listened to her 14-year-old work through the classic songs, she thought about the callouses on her own fingertips, the ones she started building as a teenager, holding six strings to her guitar’s fretboard.

When Allen kissed her son goodnight, she let him know she’d heard him. “Okay, I’d like for you to quit school in the eighth grade, take up the guitar, and go out on the road,” she joked.

Allen’s own story started in this same Stuarts Draft home, where she grew up in a musical family. Her father is a third-generation professional fiddler, her mother sang in the church choir, and growing up, Allen and her two sisters quickly discovered that, if you played an instrument, you didn’t have to wash dishes after supper. On Friday nights, Mr. Allen’s country band performed in local lodges and clubs, and Allen would join him for a song or two.

By age 17, she had been writing and performing her own songs for a few years, and she decided to give Nashville a go. She left home with her country-folk-Americana songs and a couple hundred dollars in her pocket, and established herself in songwriting circles in Nashville and Atlanta. She recorded with the late producer Johnny Sandlin (The Allman Brothers Band and Widespread Panic) and members of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (also known as the Swampers).

On Friday, Allen plays a concert at The Front Porch to celebrate the release of her fifth album, Appalachian Piece Meal. She’ll be joined by Richard Smith, the record’s producer, on guitar; her sister Becky on vocals; Marc Lipson on bass; and Jim Taggart on fiddle and mandolin. Her friend Susan Munson opens the show.

“It’s my coming home record, a project I’ve dreamt about for four years, maybe even a little longer,” Allen says of Appalachian Piece Meal.

At first, Allen wanted to make it a regional project, almost like a compilation album of songs written and played by local artists. When that didn’t come to fruition, she aimed to do a project with her father, but it quickly became clear that her dad, who is 90 years old and still plays fiddle “wonderfully” at home, could not do an in-studio recording session.

Instead, she brought her musician friends —including fiddler Ted Lawhorn, one of Allen’s father’s fiddle students—into the studio with her. It took about two years to make the album, though some of the songs have been in Allen’s repertoire for decades.

Musically, Allen considers herself a songwriter first, and singer and guitarist second. “It’s the thing that I really enjoy doing. Sometimes it’s really easy, and sometimes it’s really hard…but wouldn’t it be cool to have one of those songs where you have a phrase, and that’s the song, and everybody knows it and sings it?” she asks with excitement.

Appalachian Piece Meal is an album about “bridging the gap” between generations, both emotionally and musically, says Allen. Her dad starts it off, via a recording he made in the 1980s on a 4-track reel-to-reel, when he was “100 percent himself,” says Allen.

She wrote “Matt’s Candy,” when she was 17, based on a family story. Allen’s great-grandfather was going to the store, and found a note pinned to his jacket asking him to bring his daughter some of her favorite confectioner’s treats: “Don’t forget Matt’s candy,” it read.

Hear “Matt’s Candy”

Another song, “Big Piney,” is a favorite of Allen’s. It’s the story of a woman who becomes pregnant after her moonshiner father prostitutes her out to his customers. Allen imagined what this woman must have gone through, and the judgment by the people in her small mountain town. That baby turned out to be a long-lost relative of Allen’s mother, a relative she didn’t know about until recently. It turns out, the moonshiner’s daughter had what Allen calls a “Hollywood ending”: She left the mountains, moved to Richmond, got married, and had more children.

Perhaps there’s something in “Big Piney,” too, about the importance of keeping hopes and dreams alive. Making a life in music hasn’t necessarily been easy for Allen. For one, women aren’t given the same opportunities in music as men, particularly when they’re over the age of 30. And while Allen’s working to change that with her Neon Angel Fest female songwriters’ showcase on May 11, it’s going to take much more to change an entire industry.

As a single mom working full-time and taking care of her parents, Allen doesn’t have as much time for music as she’d like. But she persists, for herself, for other women, for the stories carried on in her songs, and for the songs her son might someday play.

“My dream would be to have a big ol’ farmhouse somewhere, where musicians came and went, and I was steeped in music, and my kid could ride around on a tractor, and play guitar in the barn real loud,” she says with a laugh. “And I could write, and hear other people sing, and sing with other people…when you connect with other people doing it, whether it’s an audience or another musician, it feels like sacred ground.”

Holly Renee Allen premieres her new album, Appalachian Piece Meal, at The Front Porch on April 26.

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Uprooting radio: At WTJU’s new home, DJs spin records to break a record

WTJU began in 1957 as a classical music and education station and now includes jazz, folk, and rock, as well as community stories. The station launched from its new home in Ivy by breaking the Guinness World Record for most simultaneous DJs in a single show. Photo by Eze Amos

The broadcast to WTJU listeners on the afternoon of Saturday, March 23, began with one DJ announcing to a sea of others, “Here’s Ol’ Blue Eyes, spreading the news that we’re leaving today—Lambeth, that is,” followed by a snippet of Sinatra’s iconic “New York, New York.”

It was the first day of operations in its new Ivy Road home, and local station WTJU packed 82 announcers into the space. The crowd was diverse, composed of both student DJs and locals, but everyone had a common cause—to christen the new location with a momentous, Guinness World Record-breaking feat. Within two hours, each of the participants would sit in the announcer’s seat for less than a minute to introduce themself and play a sample of a chosen song, in a madcap game of music-lovers musical chairs.

Nathan Moore, WTJU’s general manager, admits that the record-breaking stunt was his idea, but the move to Ivy Road wasn’t. About two years ago, Moore was informed by UVA student affairs and housing that the station’s longtime location within Lambeth Commons, a home it had held for 19 years, must be vacated. “We hunted around for a lot of different spaces,” he says, but soon realized that not many spots in the city could accommodate WTJU’s needs. “Where can we find at least 2,500 square feet that we have round-the-clock access to, that students can get to readily, that can be slightly noisy…that has parking, that has visibility?”

Moore was pleased, and a little relieved, to find the Ivy Road real estate, which once housed beloved indie video store Sneak Reviews. Instead of DVDs, the building’s walls are now lined with WTJU’s massive record collection, most of which is housed on the second floor. While Moore is excited about this area, his passion is focused on the first floor, which he expects to be conducive to community building—an essential component, in his opinion, of the station’s future. “We have to be more than just a great place to spin records,” Moore says. “We also have to be a place where people experience music and arts and connection.”

Saturday’s event certainly fit this vision. The DJs took turns jostling their way to the microphone, contributing tunes and cracking jokes. The humor was unfailingly corny, but the music proved a bit more diverse. Aside from Sinatra, everything from k.d. lang to Still Woozy got airtime. The genres spanned classical to K-Pop, and local artists got some love too, whether a classic Landlords track or a song from Alice Clair’s new album—played by Clair’s mother and dedicated to the musician herself, present in the crowd.

The stunt was successful, beating previous record holders by 22 DJs, but it doesn’t erase the fact that some members of the radio community have concerns about the move. Audrey Parks (or DJ Al), a second-year at UVA and a co-rock director for WTJU, says she understands both the student perspective and the administrative side. As a local with a few years of radio under her belt, she also grew to love the Lambeth location. “I feel like the old station had such a personal value for me,” Parks says.

One of the students’ main worries—the distance from Grounds to the new location—is on her mind too. “For the late-night shows…that would be a pretty scary hike.” But even at Lambeth, she points out, “it was also kinda scary going back through frats at that time.” And she’s a fan of the move in that it sets WTJU apart as a community landmark. “It’s an interesting process‚ you know, still making it a UVA space, but being part of the Charlottesville community too.”

The station has become just as essential to the city as it is to students. Professor Bebop, aka Dave Rogers, hosts of one of WTJU’s longest-running shows—he initially got involved in 1973—and has witnessed several moves. “We were in Humphreys, the basement…then we moved to Peabody Hall,” says Rogers. Next was Lambeth, and now Professor Bebop finds himself spinning his signature mix of rhythm and blues on Ivy Road.

He says that the previous location changes “didn’t change the flavor of what we were doing.” Strong leadership is essential to keeping the same spirit, he adds, praising both former manager Chuck Taylor and Moore. “He continues to come up with great ideas that are really amazing ways of reaching out to community,” Rogers says, referring to Saturday’s event. “You’ve got people who haven’t been back in 15 years who came in to do this.”

The station will host its annual rock marathon from April 8-14. This year’s fundraiser T-shirt is a design by award-winning syndicated (and C-VILLE Weekly) cartoonist Jen Sorensen, and fans of Bowie, the Beatles, and Frank Zappa will be happy to hear that entire shows are planned around those artists’ music.

Change is inevitable, it seems, especially for a media outlet that wants to remain relevant and available to the community. And if their record-breaking event is any indication, the DJs of WTJU aren’t going to let a detour down Ivy stop their weird, eclectic mix of music from reaching Charlottesville. As Moore said near the end of the 82-person broadcast, “There are scant few institutions that still bring people together in genuine ways, in genuine community connections—and we’re that. We’re one of them.”

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Essential voices: VA book fest panel looks at music as a change agent

Jesse Jarnow, Imani Perry, and Tim Mohr will discuss the influence of music on social movements during a Virginia Festival of the Book panel moderated by A.D. Carson.

About 100 miles outside of Berlin, Germany, author Tim Mohr stood in a snowy field gripping an axe in his hands. He’d borrowed a friend’s car to get there, and, anticipating neither the sub-zero cold snap nor the fact that he’d have to chop frozen wood in exchange for an interview with a former member of the East German punk rock scene, he wore fingerless gloves. Once Mohr had cut enough timber, the punk rocker spoke with him for the entire day and into the night.

That bit of hard labor was well worth the contribution to Mohr’s book, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

Friday afternoon, Mohr, along with Imani Perry (May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem) and Jesse Jarnow (Wasn’t That A Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle for the Soul of America), will discuss the influence of music as part of the Virginia Festival of the Book’s Political (Dis)harmony: Music & Social Movements panel moderated by rapper and scholar A.D. Carson.

But this isn’t a panel about protest songs. Protest is part of it, says Jarnow, but, “to boil socially conscious music down to protest songs is a disservice to the power of music.”

Jarnow’s Wasn’t That A Time is a biography of folk-pop band The Weavers, whose music was the soundtrack to Jarnow’s childhood in a politically progressive household. The Weavers were “the first huge left-wing pop stars of the 1950s,” says Jarnow, and the members of the band—Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hayes, Fred Hellerman, and Pete Seeger—“were subsequently blacklisted and had their careers destroyed,” during the red scare of the early 1950s.

The Weavers’ songs, “Goodnight Irene,” “If I Had A Hammer,” and “On Top of Old Smokey,” were enormously popular for past generations. David Crosby, whose father was a blacklisted cinematographer, told Jarnow that he didn’t think about politics while listening to The Weavers—it was the harmonies that got him.

And that’s the point, says Jarnow: The Weavers’ goal “was to code all of these beliefs about race and social justice, and fold them into these musical arrangements,” says Jarnow. “The message just kind of sinks in.”

The power of people singing together is what Imani Perry looks at in May We Forever Stand, a cultural history of a single song, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

Written in 1900 by brothers James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson to honor Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” became a major “part of the history of the cultural and social institutions that flourished in the segregated South,” says Perry. Sung during formal rituals in black schools, churches, and meetings of social and political organizations, the song eventually became known as the “black national anthem,” and held particular significance for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.

Martin Luther King, Jr. discussed the song in his first public speech, delivered when he was just 14 years old, and continued doing so throughout his political career. Maya Angelou described singing the song in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Perry says she aimed “to distill a story from the meaning of the song, the function of the song,” how it was used to deliberately unite people in community, thereby showing “what the conditions were that allowed for the civil rights movement to happen.”

Similarly, the East German punks of the 1970s and ’80s profiled in Mohr’s Burning Down the Haus knew that in order for change to happen, they had to make it happen as they spray-painted “don’t die in the waiting room of the future” all over the walls of East Berlin.

Dissatisfied with the Socialist Unity Party of Germany’s authoritarian rule over the German Democratic Republic, the East German punks sought to resist by writing and performing music, influencing people “to get off the beaten path” and think for themselves, says Mohr.

The Stasi (the GDR secret police) saw this influence and tried to stop it, throwing punks in prison for the lyrics they sang, for the music they played. A punk would go to prison for two years, then sing the lyrics again as soon as he got out, to the same end, says Mohr. But once people saw it was possible to resist and survive, protests and dissident movements spilled out of the music venues and into the streets, he says.

The music more or less disappeared as soon as the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, says Mohr. There was a show that night, and when one of the bands came off stage to the news that the border between East and West Berlin had opened, its members broke up the band that night. The East German punks hadn’t wanted a dictatorship, but they didn’t want reunification, either—they wanted an independent state. But all was not lost. “These kids created a blueprint for resisting authoritarianism,” says Mohr.

Art, and music in particular, “bolsters courage, deepens your sense of trust and connection to the people who are singing along with you,” says Perry. It builds community and begets change, “and is an essential piece to building a new society, or transforming the society in which you live.” All of this, through music.

The Political (Dis)harmony panel takes place on Friday, March 22 from 2–3:30pm at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.

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Wild ride: Buckle up, The Falsies are back

After a five-year hiatus, The Falsies return with more outrageous and insightful theatrical punk on Saturday at The Southern. Photo by Rich Tarbell

It’s hard to decide what deserves your attention at a Falsies concert.

Is it the music? The musicians themselves, constantly swapping guitars for saxophones, for drums, for keyboards? Or is it band founder Lance Brenner in his yellow chicken suit, gesticulating wildly while shoving a microphone into the beak to sing? Maybe you’re wondering how hot it is inside that chicken suit, or caught up in the anticipation that comes with knowing—once Brenner sheds the faux-feathered fowl—he’s likely to reveal at least two other costumes underneath.

Is it the song lyrics? The choir of a dozen-odd characters singing and dancing behind the band?

The answer is all of the above, and now that Charlottesville’s absurdist rock band is back in action after a five-year hiatus, we’ll all have more chances to hunt for meaning in this musical wilderness.The Falsies—Brenner, along with multi- instrumentalists Carter Lewis, Morgan Moran, Corinna Hanson, Katie Albert, and Sophia Mendicino—play the Southern Café & Music Hall on Saturday, and whether or not Brenner will don his “FUCK YOU” candy heart costume from Valentine’s Day hangover shows past remains to be determined.

Photo by Rich Tarbell

The Falsies began as concept. “It was a joke, really,” says Brenner. He’d been playing in power poppy rock band The Naked Puritans with some success—the band toured up and down the East Coast, and in 2004, Village Voice music critic Chuck Eddy said the band’s three-song EP “exudes more power and pop than most powerpoppers’ entire careers”—but at some point, it stopped being fun.

Brenner mentioned to a friend that he dreamed of playing drums (not his primary instrument) in “a band of neophytes that would eventually end up with an album” perhaps one titled Greatest Tits, full of songs that seemed ridiculous on the surface but had depth to them.

Brenner put together a band full of people who he clicked with socially, and they started writing songs. Songs like “Fuck,” which uses the titular word in every way possible. “Maybe it’s overtly aggressive, but the spirit of it isn’t aggressive at all,” says Brenner of that particular Falsies classic.

It turns out, Brenner says, that everyone he recruited for the band was a pretty good musician. The more they practiced, the better they got, and the more The Falsies’ catalog grew. And the more complex the songs (written by Brenner and fine-tuned by the band) have become.

The Falsies have this “fuck you” energy combined with “quite a bit of camp,” says Brenner, and the careful steps required in walking that fine, sometimes moving, line is what makes the spectacle that is The Falsies more complicated than one might think.

The Falsies played their first concert in five years last November, at Live Arts. Photo by Rich Tarbell

Brenner hesitates to explain the concept of the band—”theatrical punk” is as far as he will go—or the songs, too deeply, lest he ruin the fun of discovery.

But he will talk—briefly—about the four new songs the band will debut on Saturday night.

There’s “Get It On & Get Along!,” “a Falsies prescription for world peace,” and “My Balls!,” a “body-positive song” on which Hanson sings lead, often to the audience’s surprise. “(But Then) I Stuck It In the Wrong Hole,” is another, one that started off with a bass guitar and amp plug-in blunder during practice. And the “OMG, You Dirty Talker,” a song with a conceit based in mystery and mundane objects.

Brenner knows not everyone is up for this level of absurdity. More than anything, Brenner’s happy that his band members—and those who come to experience The Falsies—are more than ready to join him on his “conceptual playground.”

The Falsies play The Southern Cafe & Music Hall on Friday, February 16.

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Status update: Dawes scrolls past the SoCal sound on new album Passwords

Dawes expanded its sound for the new album Passwords, but remains true to its musical roots. “We never really sat down and said, ‘Let’s make a record that sounds like The Band,’ but whatever you listen to as a kid is just kind of knocking around your head and forms your intuitions as a musician and a songwriter,” says bassist Wylie Gelber (second from right). Magdalena Wosinska

The age of social media is rife with oversharing; dominated by a virtual playground where foodstagrams and political Facebook fights abound—and any semblance of privacy is tenuously maintained by CAPTCHAs and digital passwords.

Los Angeles band Dawes explores this concept on its latest album, Passwords, by examining how the sociopolitical climate and our personal relationships are filtered through social media. “It’s the battle of the passwords, it’s the trumpets on the hill, it’s that constant paranoia, it’s the final fire drill / And if you won’t sing the anthem, they’ll go find someone else who will,” lead singer/guitarist Taylor Goldsmith delivers in the opening track, “Living In The Future.” “Telescope” details the perspective of a politically disenfranchised trailer park resident through an empathetic lens, and “Feed the Fire” laments the duplicity of a public life when coping with fame.

Bassist Wylie Gelber met Goldsmith in high school when he auditioned for, and ultimately joined, Goldmith’s band, Simon Dawes. After that group disbanded, Gelber and Goldsmith moved forward with a new iteration—Dawes—and recruited Goldsmith’s younger brother, Griffin, to play the drums. Keyboardist Lee Pardini rounds out the band’s current lineup. Upon the release of its 2009 debut, North Hills, Dawes became synonymous with the sound revival of laid-back California rock, yielding comparisons to their self-proclaimed heroes Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon, and Crosby, Stills & Nash.

“We obviously all grew up with music that we love and some of that was like, The Band, or Jackson Browne, and all that stuff that we often get compared to, but we also grew up listening to Motown and James Brown and Steely Dan and other stuff that isn’t necessarily California-sounding,” Gelber says. “We were all raised on that kind of music, so it informed the type of musicians that we became.”

While Dawes may not have been able to escape the SoCal label in its early days, the latter half of the group’s output finds them waving goodbye to Laurel Canyon in the rearview. That’s not to say Dawes has lost its essence. Passwords may brim with electronic touches and saxophone runs, but it still places Goldsmith’s signature heart-on-your-sleeve lyricism front and center. “Crack the Case” is a piano-driven meditation on miscommunication: “I wanna call off the calvary, declare no winners or losers and forgive our shared mistakes / You can pick the time and place, maybe that will crack the case.”

Goldsmith writes all of the band’s lyrics, but once the other band members get ahold of the acoustic version and lyrics, they work together to flesh out each piece.

“There’s no sense of what the tempo or what the feel of the song is going to be when he writes it, necessarily, and then when he brings it to us, we all write our own parts for it, which then, in turn, shapes what the song will become,” says Gelber.

As a songwriter, Goldsmith has been know to draw on individual experiences—from heartbreak to professional aspirations—but on Passwords, he inhabits characters and tackles political divides.

“Our [philosophy] has always been that we just have to have trust. …So, for Griffin, you’ve got to trust that he’s gonna know what the good drum part’s gonna be and similarly for Taylor, if that’s the song he wrote, we’ll do our best to make that sentiment known in the song and be okay with it,” says Gelber. “We’ve never really had any songs that he’s brought to us where we’re like, ‘Whoa, man, I don’t think we can relate to that.’ We’re all on the same page. If that’s the song Taylor has in mind, we’re down to go there.”

When recording Passwords, Dawes reunited with musician/producer Jonathan Wilson, who produced the band’s first two albums. During those earlier sessions, Gelber bonded with Wilson over another shared interest: instrument building. Gelber grew up tinkering with tools and building furniture with his dad, and he started building his own bass around the time he met Wilson.

“Any time you see me playing with Dawes, I’ll be playing a bass that I built, for sure, and then a lot of the guitars that Taylor plays are ones I made as well,” says Gelber. “I try to build as much gear for everyone in the band as I can. Everything on stage is generally built by me or modified out; I endlessly tweak everyone’s stuff and try to build things specific to us.”

By teaming up with Wilson for its sixth album, Dawes has come full circle. But that doesn’t mean the guys will stop branching out any time soon.

“The more records we do, we just go in and we’re not afraid to get weirder or stray from the things that people would think that we would do on a record,” Gelber muses. “If we don’t change our own aesthetic, then it’ll get stale for us, and in turn get stale for everyone else. We always try to look at it as the life-long catalog, and if every record sounded like North Hills, I don’t think anyone would listen past record number three.”

Dawes plays The Jefferson Theater Friday, February 8.

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Arts

Intellectual harvester: Farmer-musician Gregory Alan Isakov finds his own creative vocabulary in songs and seeds

When he’s not on tour, musician Gregory Alan Isakov divides his time between songwriting and growing produce on his Colorado farm. Image: Rebecca Caridad

One of the first things to know about Gregory Alan Isakov is that he finds inspiration everywhere, from seeds to refrigerator magnets. For the singer-songwriter, who pulls double duty as a full-time farmer in Colorado, it’s all about creating with the tools you have. In the years following his 2003 self-titled debut, Isakov has become known for ruminative songs woven with narrative detail.

“I think as writers, we have a vocabulary that we love,” says Isakov. “There’s certain words that are sexy, you know, words that sing well, or they just work. I love refrigerator magnet poems, where you’re given a bunch of words and you just kind of have to make something. And I do that a lot with old sci-fi book books from the dollar bin or trashy romance novels. I’ll just rip out a page and cut up some words and put it together as a new vocabulary that I’m working with.”

Isakov was collecting material for his latest adapted vocabulary when he came across the word “berth” on a page of a discarded book. He thought the word (a place to sleep on a vessel, like a ship or a train) would lend itself nicely to the song he had been working on with his brother, Ilan, about immigration.

“My whole family’s immigrants and I grew up with a lot of immigrants,” he explains, recalling the Pennsylvania apartment building where he was raised. Isakov was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and his family emigrated to the United States in the mid-’80s.

“What was happening in the news even just right after the [presidential] election was really heartbreaking and that really affected me,” he says. “I’ve never gone out to write a political song; that’s just the way the song presented itself. I pictured these characters that were immigrant angels kind of flying over this harbor, and that’s where the song opens up and then it takes this journey into New York, you know, essentially throughout time.”

“Berth” is the opening track on Evening Machines, which marks Isakov’s first album of original material in five years. He wrote a majority of the record at his home studio, in a barn on his Colorado farm.

While touring for his 2009 release, This Empty Northern Hemisphere, Isakov ran a small seed business on the side that inspired him to dig in and get involved with the entire growing season.

“I would say that touring’s a little bit more demanding than farming six days a week, but I think it helps to take some time off and to do something different, and I find that [farm] work has been really good for my [song]writing,” he explains

For the past five years, he’s been running his farm outside of Boulder, producing salad greens, turnips, radishes, and beets for local restaurants, along with heirloom corn and beans—while often crafting songs in the barn at night.

“Farming has been really good for me in connecting with my community and really just meeting people, whether it’s chefs or at markets or whoever I’m growing for,” Isakov says. “I feel like, [with] music you think of [it] as being a really extroverted experience, but you’re alone a lot of the time. And there might be all these people there one time…but it just feels hard to connect with one person. And so farming’s been a really healing thing in my life.”

Gregory Alan Isakov plays The Jefferson Theater Tuesday, January 22.