Rob Dunnenberger – C-VILLE Weekly

DJ Williams
Short Stories, Projekt Music

For a musician who’s spent over a decade playing countless live shows, teaming up with industry heavy hitters from Questlove to Karl Denson, you wouldn’t think there’d be much ground left to cover. But Williams’ latest project, Short Stories, is something of a rebirth. It showcases his first time mixing and engineering an entire album at home. Across the disc’s six tracks, labeled “chapters,” Williams recorded all of the instruments himself. He bought all the gear and watched YouTube tutorials to achieve the sounds he wanted. Only later did he add appearances by Denson, Deshawn “Dvibes” Alexander (Eric Krasno Band), Kenneth Crouch (Eric Clapton), and more.

In essence, it’s Williams’ first official solo album (and his first release pressed to vinyl). But it’s not chock full of the familiar guitar riffs and solos that fans have come to know and love from him. Instead, each chapter is its own funky landscape with catchy melodies. Playful chapters like “Athleisure Wear,” “Quarantine Dreams,” and “Y’all Accept Bitcoin” boast humorous, good-natured fun to keep you dancing. (Released February 1)

Free Union
Somethin’ + The Other Side, Self-Released

Free Union hasn’t been dormant throughout this elongated season of quarantine. Over the past several months, the band has maintained a Quarantunes Series, releasing live versions of original songs like “Good Day to Cry” and “It Gets Better,” alongside holiday tunes and spirited covers of current pop hits by the likes of Harry Styles and Billie Eilish.

Spearheaded by Michael Coleman and Rob Dunnenberger, Free Union also stayed true to form by digging deep for two new tracks. Released as a double single, Somethin’ + The Other Side, each offers a glimmer of hope in the face of the harsh realities of white supremacy and deep- seated division displayed in 2020. “Somethin’” is the funkier of the two, a bop meant to embolden, while “The Other Side” is a smooth meditation on getting past struggle and strife.

With special guests including Morgan Burrs of Butcher Brown and mixing by Adrian Olsen at Montrose Studios, the Charlottesville-based group looked to Richmond for this release—even the cover art by Spanish artist Fredingrado reflects the changing tides, depicting the graffiti- adorned Robert E. Lee statue on Monument Avenue, which has been the site of public demonstrations and protests. It’s proof that uniting our communities through arts and advocacy paves the way for positive change. (Released January 22)

Lael Neale
Acquainted with Night,
Sub Pop Records

Growing up on her family’s farm in Albemarle County, Lael Neale was a devout fan of poetry, and held an affinity for nature writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson. When she moved to California to pursue music in 2009, her penchant for poems and the outdoors never waned. The up-and-comer signed to indie stalwart Sub Pop Recordsin the fall of 2020, and is making her label debut with Acquainted with Night, a collection that gives as much of a nod to central Virginia as it does to the West Coast.

Last April, Neale returned to her family’s farm to ride out part of quarantine. There, she picked up an old Sony Handycam and began shooting grainy videos to accompany the album’s songs, which were all written and recorded in Los Angeles. The video for “For No One For Now” is filled with Southern imagery: wide shots of an old church, scenes of the countryside viewed from a car window, and a protagonist cutting up peaches and spreading jam on toast. This track, alongside other singles like “Every Star Shivers in the Dark,” has a sonic uniformity rooted in minimalism, harkening back to Neale’s love of poetry. Recorded on a cassette recorder, the songs possess a gauzy, lo-fi quality that features Neale’s voice front and center, accompanied by a drum machine and an Omnichord (an instrument she didn’t pick up until 2019). By channeling the breadth of her surroundings, Neale has crafted a coast-to-coast dreamscape. (Release date: February 9)

Free Union pushes social positivity on new EP

Last summer, Michael Coleman had a realization about the power of music.

The night of August 12—after 24 hours of terror and chaos that included a torch-lit march led by white supremacists and the Unite the Right rally that left three people dead and dozens of community members and activists injured—Coleman took to Facebook Live to play a song to friends and followers.

He’d written “Good Day to Cry” in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, downtrodden by the polarization of the United States, by the hatred, the anger and the deepening divisions among people. Coleman began to wonder, “What happened to all of the good things that made us [as a country] who we are, in terms of being welcoming and being understanding of differences?”

Free Union
The Southern Café and Music Hall
May 25

But on that rainy August night, Coleman says the song evolved in its meaning. It was no longer about the United States; “it was specifically about Charlottesville,” a song for “realizing that, as a city, we’re pretty broken. And it’s just calling it out in the hopes that we’ll start a discussion about it,” he says. What’s more, the responses that the song received made Coleman see the ways in which music can “shape opinion, facilitate discussion” or make people “forget about anything else,” if just for a few minutes, he says.

“If I could push a little more, maybe we’d come out as equal,” Coleman sang. “’Cause love is not dead, it’s just missing all of the people.”

“Good Day to Cry” became the closing track on a recently released five-song EP that Coleman—who played drums in local folk acts The Hill & Wood and Nettles before picking up guitar and lead vocals for his eponymous soul-rock act The Michael Coleman Band—recorded with the musical collective Free Union.

Free Union EP by Free Union

The group celebrates the record’s release with a show at The Southern Café & Music Hall on Friday.

Free Union is, in some ways, The Michael Coleman Band evolved. Coleman sings and plays rhythm guitar in the new collective, which he leads alongside drummer Rob Dunnenberger, who has supported various other artists in town, including Devon Sproule, Post Sixty Five, Dillingham, David Wax Museum and The Michael Coleman Band. Other members of the collective—keyboardist Butch Taylor, bassists Parker Hawkins and Jon Markel, vocalist Carrie Coleman and producer Devonne Harrison (of Richmond-based band Butcher Brown), have equal influence on Free Union’s rock-soul-R&B-pop sound, even while not being present at every performance.

Free Union stands for collaboration, for “positivity and community,” says Dunnenberger. It’s there in the sheer act of playing music that’s been collectively written, and it’s in both the musical and lyrical content of those songs too.

“While we present something lyrically, we also play music that sounds good, has a groove that you can move to. But we’re also trying to present ideas on top of that, that get you prepared for change, or wanting change,” says Dunnenberger.

You might get lost in the music, adds Coleman, but at some point, there’s going to be “a line that’s going to wake you the fuck up.” Perhaps it’s one of the lines from “Free World”: “Elaborate illusion / Is that what you meant when you said everyone’s included?” or “Watch what you do and where you step, they’re listening / Watch where you go and who you meet, they’re judging. / And if it’s all a dream, then why am I not awake?”

It’s “showing Charlottesville a mirror of itself,” says Dunnenberger of Free Union’s music, as it asks us all to take a long, hard look at our shared reflection and see the ugliness, the beauty.

Free Union also asks Charlottesville to take a look at what’s present—and what’s absent—musically. Free Union isn’t your run-of-the-mill energetic singer-songwriter stuff that people have come to expect from a place where the specter of the Dave Matthews Band hangs over just about every stage in town. Free Union combines soul and R&B with catchy pop sensibilities and a funk-ish groove, and while the music sounds familiar—it’s also fresh growth for Charlottesville’s musical landscape.

In “recognizing multiple perspectives lyrically and stylistically,” the collective can inspire change in a variety of ways, says Dunnenberger. Playing and “listening to these tunes makes me want to go out and do something bigger than myself, and I hope for other people, it brings that same emotion.” He says Free Union’s “Survivor” gets him particularly excited for that: “Maybe I will be the one to change the world / and if I can, you can too. / You and I will be the ones to risk it all, / because it’s who we are,” the song goes.

None of this is to say that Free Union has all the answers—Coleman acknowledges this outright. “We’re posing questions; we’re figuring this out at the same time as everyone else,” he says.

But what the collective’s emphasis on collaboration and communication does promote is “the idea that we can all work together to make something beautiful,” says Coleman, “whether it’s music, or art, or this town.”