Tag: rock

STREAM: Maya de Vitry, ‘Adaptations’

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Beginning in 2016, The Stray Birds’ fiddler and vocalist Maya de Vitry found herself writing songs that didn’t fit with the band’s aesthetic. At the time, the prospect felt confusing, even a touch frightening. “It was really scary because I didn’t know what that meant,” she says over the phone from Pennsylvania. “The band was all consuming.” De Vitry had been performing with the The Stray Birds for nearly a decade, releasing — at the time — four albums and an EP. What were these songs, if not for them?

As it turns out, her solo debut Adaptations moves away from the sound — and structures — that defined her folk and traditional inclinations with The Stray Birds. Producer Dan Knobler and a backing rock band layer each song with flourishes of electric guitar phrasing and soft brushes on the drum, all of which open the door for de Vitry’s strikingly deep and at times stately voice to infiltrate new spaces. (Stream Adaptations at the end of this story.)

Writing for herself rather than a group, de Vitry’s lyrics lean towards inclusivity, humanity, and other unitive concepts. There are also themes of love, but not exactly the romantic kind. On “The Key” de Vitry writes about the necessity of friendship at a time when romance felt burdensome (she and The Stray Birds’ Oliver Craven had broken up following the release of the band’s 2016 album Magic Fire). Whatever misgivings de Vitry had about walking her own path, Adaptations showcases a remarkable voice set to scale new heights. As she sings on “Wilderness”: “It’s time to leave the trail behind.”

BGS: You’ve said that these songs emerged from a period of self-exile. Can you tell me a bit about that time?

de Vitry: When I first started songwriting when I was younger, it felt extremely vulnerable and scary to me. Around 2010, when I started playing with Oliver and Charlie and we made The Stray Birds, that was a really natural place for me to put my energy at the time.

You had the protection of the group.

Yeah, and I had the camaraderie of the group. I’m trying to figure out how I want to navigate telling the story because it’s hard. The group broke up, and I’m still processing how much I want to share.

So what was it like to write outside the bounds of the group?

In a way, making this record was revelatory to me. Writing these songs, being alone, insisting on space, and insisting on stopping the motion and commotion of being on the road with that band, that’s what I was craving. If you just keep moving, you think that’s the way you’re going to survive, that maybe things will change and you’ll find yourself in the right place. But writing the record and that self-exile took realizing that you can’t just keep moving. Sometimes you have to stop and look inward.

The exile was… I felt like I was doing something wrong by stepping away and doing something creative outside the band. Ultimately, it was a cocoon that needed to be exited. Now I feel really bright and strong — about the record and the place that I’ve come to. At the time, I felt I needed to escape. I was going to a land that was really unknown, which was myself.

There’s a sense of serendipity surrounding this project: You were supposed to go to Nashville and instead retreated to your grandparents’ cabin; then you were supposed to make a demo and instead recorded half of the album. What’s the most important takeaway you’ve learned as a result?

What I’m continuing to learn is that our bodies are at least a few steps ahead of where our brains are. Our instincts and our gut feelings — the way that we’re sometimes physically pulled towards things — you can’t explain it. It sounds kind of out there, but I think I’ve learned to trust intuition a little more. That’s important to me in thinking about being. Paying attention to that.

It gets distilled into that opening line on “Wilderness”: “It’s time to leave the trail behind.”

As much as society or careers or trajectories—the dreams that we have for achievement—might be linear, I don’t think we can get away from the fact that we are actually a part of nature, so therefore we are sort of beholden to cycles, and we might have cycles of rest.

 

You share beautiful and necessary messages on “Anybody’s Friend,” “Slow Down,” “The Key,” etc. Why did these in particular register for you?  

“The Key” I wrote while I was up at the cabin, for that first writing retreat session, and that one was really personal. It was a love song to a few friends of mine. I was feeling really thankful for friendship. It’s a heralded kind of love, but I was forgetting how important it had been to me. With friends you can grow apart and grow together. There’s a lot more gray areas that are accepted in friendship. At the time, I was really disenchanted with any kind of romantic relationship.

I went to Cuba in January of 2017. It was around the time of the inauguration in the U.S. and I was seeing this divisive language and leadership, and power over people. One of my friends [in Cuba] was so patient with my Spanish. I asked him why, and he was like, “I want to know you.” I think the temporariness of that, and “Take a deep breath and try to tell me what you’re trying to say in this language,” was such permission. I felt like I was experiencing the power of listening and the power of vulnerability. I was like, “That divisive power has nothing on this.” I think that’s how I was interpreting the world, in a hopeful way.

That makes sense. Even on “Go Tell a Bird,” it seems like the current political climate influenced those lyrics.

Yeah, and it’s not like I’m a perfect person. I guess I just wanted to challenge the language, and challenge the boxes, and challenge the idea of freedom.

Every song has such a different kind of soundscape compared to what we’ve heard from you before with The Stray Birds. When you got into the studio with your producer Dan Knobler, what was it like building each one?

Working with Dan was probably an interesting choice on my behalf. It wasn’t like I was really attached to some catalog of work that he’s done, though he’s got a great catalog of work as a producer and engineer. I was really just operating on this feeling I’d had. Before I’d asked him to produce, I was doing a compilation CD and The Stray Birds were a part of it. I was singing and the way he spoke to me about my voice and my phrasing, and the way we interacted while I was singing, I felt really heard in a new way. I never forgot that feeling.

How did he push your voice on this album?

I felt freer. The Stray Birds, as much as they weren’t strictly tied to a genre like folk or bluegrass, I think there was a certain dialect of singing that we did. Especially with harmony singing, the blend is dependent on how everyone is singing. With this, I felt the more I stepped into feeling free, the more Dan would be there to encourage that.

Also, with the sonic palette — the fullness that’s around it — that’s not an idea I had going into this. That is something I would really thank Dan for hearing. I was surprised when he said, “I think we should get some strings, and see what Russell Durham has to bring to these songs.” The band that we tracked it live with was pretty much just a rock band—upright bass, drums, and two guitars. Anthony da Costa has really tasteful electric guitar playing.

But there was no genre. There was nothing I was trying to prove. I wasn’t even really trying to make a record — it was supposed to be a demo. So it was very playful. Dan and I are really particular about songs, and I feel more and more if I can trust the song 100 percent and if the song feels indestructible to me and also very flexible then we can go play with it and it’s going to be fun. The studio was such a joyful time.

With The Stray Birds, endings themselves are naturally fraught, and obviously you’re still parsing through a lot of what took place there, but what are you proud of as you begin a new phase of your career?

I’m really proud of what we learned together, and our willingness to take risks together, and our willingness to just show up. Sometimes there was less reflection in what we were doing — there was more action. I’m really most proud of the last record that we made together.

It sounds like it was immensely collaborative.

Yes, that’s what I’m most proud of in that band. It’s a beautiful record. It was so difficult to write it, but it was so fulfilling to write it. Everyone’s voice is present in all the songs, melodically and lyrically. I think that record was the most empowering experience for everyone in the band.

Photo credit: Laura Partain

The Gibson Brothers Still Call It Music, Just Not Bluegrass

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Featuring the stunning blood harmonies of days gone by and an abiding love for classic sounds, The Gibson Brothers long ago earned the respect of the bluegrass establishment – even scoring back-to-back wins as the International Bluegrass Music Association’s (IBMA) Entertainer of the Year in 2012 and 2013. Even so, they’ve always cultivated an adventurous spirit.

Having grown up on a dairy farm in the far north of New York State, sandwiched between the Adirondack Mountains and Quebec’s provincial border, their musical appetite was as varied as their home was removed from the bluegrass heartland – from Flatt & Scruggs to Celtic traditionals, and from Tom Petty and The Eagles to French-Canadian fiddle tunes. Throughout their two-decade recording career, The Gibson Brothers have subtly mixed bluegrass reverence with a hint of rock refreshment, but with their new album, Mockingbird, Eric and Leigh Gibson have taken a bold creative departure – at least for the time being.

Mockingbird’s 11 tracks still feature their celebrated close harmonies, but also pull heavily from the countrified world of late 60s/early 70s rock, all masterminded by producers Dan Auerbach (of The Black Keys) and David Ferguson (Johnny Cash’s American Recordings series). Freewheeling and fun, but also rooted in the crisp refinement of their past success, the boisterous rural funk of tracks like “Sweet Lucinda” stands alongside breezy Laurel-Canyon rock in “Cool Drink of Water,” while “Travelin’ Day” explores a trad-country template and R.E.M.’s seminal 90s hit “Everybody Hurts” becomes a swaying example of country R&B.

“The impetus behind the music was that we had done bluegrass our whole career, and when we got talking about the next record, we really just decided we didn’t want to do the same old thing again,” he explains. “It’s not because we were ashamed of what we were doing. We love what we do. There was no intention of anything. This all really happened naturally.”

“I think people love a band where they found them,” banjo-playing lead singer Eric Gibson adds. “But it was so exciting that we didn’t have time to think about ‘Oh, is this gonna upset people who are used to what we’ve done in the past?’ We just dove into the process and had a ball.”

Speaking with The Bluegrass Situation by phone, The Gibson Brothers dug into the inspiration for Mockingbird – and the creative avalanche that followed.

The obvious question here is “What made you want to get away from bluegrass?” But I feel like being from upstate New York might have had something to do with it. Is your approach to bluegrass a little different?

Leigh: We started learning how to play bluegrass when we were 11 and 12, and the guy who taught lessons at our local store played five-string banjo and guitar, among other things. Our father just happened to have both of those instruments, but he didn’t have a banjo because he was into Celtic music. So the guy we took lessons from taught Eric out of the Earl Scruggs method book, and I think that’s what pointed us in the direction of bluegrass.

Eric: Yeah, and once we heard Flatt & Scruggs it really drew us in, but if we hadn’t gotten into the Scruggs handbook, we probably would have played something else.

So what was the idea behind Mockingbird? Do you think of it as a rock and roll album?

Eric: There are definitely elements of rock and roll, but I hear country in it, too. I don’t know where it neatly fits. I’ve heard some people call it an Americana record, but on top of it all I hear the brother harmony. I think it’s that, weaving through a variety of styles.

Leigh: We wanted to do something different, and originally we had some tunes that didn’t fit neatly into the box of a bluegrass band. But we didn’t know we were gonna make a whole album. We were just looking to record some tracks.

Eric: And we ended up not recording any of the songs we were thinking about. We just wrote a bunch of new ones! … When we went to Nashville and started working with Dan Auerbach and David Ferguson, they asked us, “Do you wanna make a country record?” And we said, “Let’s just write songs and see what they need.” They handled the producing chores and did a beautiful job, and came up with sounds that I know I couldn’t have come up with.

You reached out to Ferguson to produce Mockingbird first, and I know he also engineered your first Nashville bluegrass album, Another Night of Waiting. Why was he at the top of the list for this project?

Leigh: [Laughs] Because he’s fun.

Eric: He’s a character and once you meet him you don’t forget him. We’d see him here or there and he’s been doing all kinds of big things in the last 20 years. He’s the one who engineered all those late-career Johnny Cash albums with Rick Rubin. He’s worked with U2, and lately he’s been working with Sturgill Simpson and Tyler Childers. We’d see him and he’d say, “Why don’t you come record some music with ol’ Ferg?”

Leigh: And I’d say “I don’t think we can afford you, Ferg.” And he’d be like, “You’re right, you can’t.” [Laughs]

Eric: But we were riding around DelFest on a golf cart with him in 2017 and he brought it up again, and by fall we were feeling a little restless. We kept listening to records that he worked on in the van, and I think Leigh was the one who said “Maybe we should call Ferg.” I said, “Why do you think I’ve been playing all these albums over and over again!”

So then Ferguson suggests bringing in Dan Auerbach from The Black Keys. Was that a surprise?

Leigh: I was floored, to be honest. Our manager called me and said, “Well, Ferg’s first action as your producer is to bring on another producer, and it’s Dan Auerbach.” [Laughs] So I called Eric and I couldn’t believe it.

Eric: What was funny was Leigh said, “Is this something you’d be interested in?” And I was like, “Duh!” This is the kind of thing that falls out of the sky and you have to go for it.

I read that the whole album was written and recorded in just a few days. Is that unusual for you?

Eric: Yeah, we’ve never worked like that before. … Every day it would be Leigh and Dan and me, plus one other writer. We didn’t go in with any melodies. I had a couple of lines jotted down but we hardly used any of those. A lot of it just came out of conversations we were having at Dan’s studio kitchen table, like “Travelin’ Day.” Dan said, “You know, Ferg lost his stepdad a few days ago,” and we got to talking about that. Ferg said, “He really showed us how it’s done. He was brave at the end.” We said, “Our dad was the same way.”

It’s interesting that you started off with something so heavy, because the album doesn’t come across heavy at all.

Eric: It’s not. That first song is pretty heavy, but there’s a lot of love songs on there, and we hadn’t written a lot of love songs in the past.

Leigh: Dan and Ferg showed us how to love. [Laughs]

“Love the Land” seems like a reference back to you roots on the farm. Where did that come from?

Eric: That was written with Joe Allen.

Leigh: With that song, obviously Eric and I have a background of shared memories, so we’re probably thinking about the same thing as we’re writing it. But Joe’s from Oklahoma and Dan’s from Ohio, so they’re thinking about different things. I remember talking to Dan and he said, “Man, I need to get outside more. I miss it.” It’s kind of funny that it’s wherever your head is at the time. If we sat down with the same guys tomorrow, something totally different would come out.

Eric: Dan loved that we kept showing up early. I’d apologize and Dan would say, “No, no, make yourselves at home.” So we’d go back to that kitchen area and he has this beautiful vinyl collection. We’d put on different records and I think sometimes they would influence the direction of the day. Like, that one has a very Don Williams feel, and I think we were listening to Don Williams that morning.

Why did you pull Mockingbird out of that song as the album title?

Eric: Just because that kept jumping out of my head. Joe came up with the line, something like “Mockingbird, if you haven’t heard / Never been a sound so sweet.” I loved that, so I actually Googled “mockingbird.” [Laughs] It turns out they can sing a variety of songs. They don’t just sing the same thing every day, and I thought “Wow, that’s kind of what we’re doing here.”

I’m sure you’ve been asked a million times, but did the cover of R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” come out of left field?

Eric: Totally out of left field.

Leigh: Just before the last day of tracking, Dan said, “Think of a song from the 80s or 90s that everybody knows but no one would think of you doing.” So Eric and I talked about it on the way back to the hotel and came up with something by a female artist, and we got to the studio the next day and Ferg is like, “So what song did you choose?” We told him and he’s like, “Oh, I hate that song.” Allen Parker, who is Dan’s in-house engineer, said “Hey, how about ‘Everybody Hurts’?” I had heard the song – you couldn’t miss it if you’re a person my age – but I never in a million years would have thought about doing it. Those guys went and charted it, and it had such a comfortable, funky feel, that we were compelled to learn it.

Do you think your fans saw this album coming?

Eric: No. I mean, it’s a hard question. If they’ve really been paying attention to us over the years, it shouldn’t come as a big surprise because we’ve recorded stuff by Tom Petty and The Band and The Rolling Stones and Mark Knopfler. We have a variety of tastes.

Leigh: I think there are certain fans who see you as one thing, and if you do something else it can be upsetting, but no one twisted our arm to do this. It’s absolutely what we wanted to do and we’re proud of it, but we didn’t do this to offend anybody. If somebody is offended, there’s nothing we can really do about that except say, “Look at our track record and all this other stuff we’ve done that you really love. Why not give this a chance?”

Photo by Alysse Gafkjen

WATCH: Ben de la Cour, “Face Down Penny”

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Artist name: Ben de la Cour
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Face Down Penny”
Album: The High Cost of Living Strange
Label: Flour Sack Cape

In Their Words: “Written with Olivia Rudeen, really the only co-write I’ve ever done. It takes more than one broken spoke to stop a face down penny from rolling on, and it’s never too late or too early to give up hope. A strange fever dream of bad luck gone right, of embracing the long odds and playing them anyway… of playing the long odds BECAUSE they’re so long, of laughing in the face of despair and then inviting her in for a nightcap.” — Ben de la Cour

Photo credit: Stacie Huckeba

Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith, The Over-Sharing Songwriter

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Taylor Goldsmith is done trying to be cool.

“I feel like there’s an aversion to sentimentality in 2018,” the Dawes frontman (pictured far right) says from his home in Los Angeles. “And I think for a long time I wanted to try to figure out a way to play by those rules. I would write the songs in a certain way; I would maybe even carry myself onstage in a certain way because I was aware of that fact. There was a coolness that had always been there I guess to varying degrees, but I feel like now more than ever it’s important that if you’re a guy in a band, you have to not mean what you say, not know what it means, you have to kind of keep your ballcap pulled down as far as it can go and just kind of recede into the shadows of coolness. And as time goes on and when I feel most myself, I find that just not who I am, and I’m never gonna be.”

That self-awareness is evident on Passwords, the band’s sixth record. It’s an outward-looking album, one that deals with modern themes ranging from the current political climate to social media’s effect on our lives, but it also sees Goldsmith stretching his wings as a songwriter by both pushing himself out of his comfort zone and leaning in to an emotionality that has always been a part of Dawes’ oeuvre.

Case in point: the lovely “Never Gonna Say Goodbye,” written for his fiancée, the actress Mandy Moore. That song poured out of him one night while he was on tour in Detroit. (“Songs typically don’t come out that fast for me,” he says. “They take a good month or two sometimes.”) It was meant as a private “I miss you,” and Goldsmith never intended for it to be heard by anyone besides Moore until she and his brother Griffin convinced him it belonged on the record.

“The main thing [I struggled with] really was the sort of lover’s language that’s really nobody’s business, like the way anyone speaks to the person they’re with when they’re going to bed at night or waking up in the morning or the way they look at each other,” Goldsmith says. “That is the most sacred, private world that I would never dream of wanting any access to. So for me, I was like, ‘Man, this is a very vulnerable moment for me, to say “I love you and I miss you.”‘ It was just a quick thing and I didn’t really want everyone to be eavesdropping, you know? But that ended up being what I liked about it. Because it was like, ‘Okay, what is art? What is music supposed to be other than sharing these personal attitudes that can resonate with someone else?'”

Producer Jonathan Wilson, who worked with the band on their first two records and reunited with them on Passwords, helped Goldsmith feel that he made the right choice about “Never Gonna Say Goodbye” when they got into the studio to record it.

“I was talking to Jonathan about it, and I was like ‘Is this song a little too…much?'” he explains. “I feel like we would all love it if Willie Nelson recorded it in 1973 maybe, but in 2018 is that acceptable now? And Jonathan was like, ‘That’s exactly why I like this song so much. That’s exactly why this should be on the record, because people don’t have the guts to go to this more vulnerable and intimate and earnest place.’ And so that’s something that I used to be scared of because I wanted to be this sort of obtuse artist that was impenetrable because that’s what I’ve always admired in songwriters, but the reality is I’m never gonna be that. The more I embrace what comes out naturally, the better it all feels.”

That approach helped him unlock the album’s themes; though Passwords is not a concept record, its songs share a commonality that make it feel cohesive and uniquely tethered to life in 2018. Goldsmith credits “Crack the Case,” a call for empathy in a time when our country is more divided than ever, with helping him find a direction for the rest of the album’s tracks.

“Oftentimes I find that the themes and ideas present themselves,” he says. “‘Most People’ and ‘Things Happen’ are pretty much about the same thing, and I think that’s pretty cool. I think that’s indicative of a certain attitude being consistent, or something that was really on my mind. Or when I listen to ‘Born to Run’ and ‘Thunder Road,’ one’s almost a continuation of the other, but it’s something that I love about those two songs and that time in Bruce Springsteen’s career, where ‘there’s a better world out there and get on my motorcycle and I’m gonna take you there.'”

He laughs. “In every Bruce Springsteen song, it becomes the identifying mark. It becomes the fingerprint. So with this album, after writing ‘Crack the Case’ and then all of a sudden writing ‘Living in the Future,’ in a way it’s like these songs are about the same thing. One of them comes from a much more paranoid place, but it’s still in the chorus like ‘we’re living in the future, so shine a little light.’ That line could be in ‘Crack the Case.’ So the way that certain songs would bleed into each other and kind of play different angles of the same conversation, that’s something I didn’t think about until it was all written.”

But his plea for entertaining other perspectives on “Crack the Case” isn’t just directed at others. As he gets older, he has challenged himself to get out of his own head and try writing more through the eyes of others, whether it’s the fear and resignation of “Stay Down” or the weariness of “Feed the Fire,” where he’s “working for attention I’ll eventually resent.” (“The song is in this mode of ‘I,’ it’s in first person, but it’s not representative of how I feel,” he says.)

“I think that as time goes on, like anything, anyone who does anything for a living, there become things where you feel like, ‘Cool, I did that and I don’t want to do it anymore because I know how to do it now. I wanna do something that I don’t know how to do,'” he explains. “And for a long time certain approaches to songwriting or to song structures became what I would go back to because that’s what I wanted to learn how to do, especially like ‘Coming Back to a Man’ or ‘That Western Skyline,’ songs that I’m very proud of but also songs that were sort of building blocks for me to take those concepts and then follow into the way I speak as an adult rather than a young guy looking to be a songwriter. There’s a lot of talk of like sunsets and mountains and rivers on our first few records.”

He laughs before continuing, “It is very songwriterly. And that’s because I was learning the language, and as time has gone on, I’ve been trying to figure out how to find the lyrical, find the song in something that otherwise wouldn’t seem like one, you know? When I wrote ‘From a Window Seat’ I was really excited, I was like, ‘This is a song about the weird, obscure metaphysical fear of flying, and it should be off-limits from a band like Dawes, but here it is.’ And I try to keep chasing that down, finding things that just seem like they’re not lyrical and they’re not up for discussing through song. But then more than that, the thing that’s important to me is trying to explore the difference—like when I listen to early music that I wrote, it’s a lot of just me, me, me.”

He adds, “And that’s still the case, and that’ll always be the case, but at the same time, I want to make sure I’m coming from a place where I can adopt attitudes that I don’t identify with….certain perspectives that are not my own, certain narratives that I’m not even a part of, that stuff I feel like is newer. That’s how my writing’s changed. I feel like it’s all as indicative to how I view the world as it ever has been, but trying to take it beyond ‘I love you and you love me, let’s not lose each other, blah blah blah.’

“Because that’s part of what it is to be in your early 20s, but now I look at these songwriters that have these long, rich careers, and a lot of it is because they know how to tackle concepts that are bigger than relationships, that are bigger than self-reflection. They might involve those qualities, but they reach for more ambitious concepts. And so that’s something that I try not to think about too much, but I know that when I sit down to write a song, if it’s going to motivate me to finish it, I want to feel like it’s terrain that I haven’t covered before.”

Even when he doesn’t necessarily agree with what he’s singing, there’s a certain sincerity at the heart of Goldsmith’s songs—perhaps stemming from his ability to place himself in someone else’s shoes sans judgment—that he’s learning to take pride in, no matter how unhip that makes him.

“There’s this coolness that exists right now, and when we come across people that stand up against it and just say how they feel and they don’t mind being emotionally available and earnest and clear and proud, it’s an inspiring attitude,” he says. “I mean, that can come from a person like Bruce Springsteen or it can come from a person like The Rock. His attitude and his sense of gratitude and the way he presents himself in this world, I think there’s something very deep and enlightened about it. He has transcended coolness, and that’s amazing because he’s not here to pretend like he’s some impenetrable artist. He’s not here to pretend like he doesn’t care. He definitely cares, and he’s definitely grateful, and he’s definitely proud, and if we all took a bit of a tip from that attitude towards life, I think it would actually edify us. It would motivate us.

“And so I think for me as a songwriter, after all this time of not knowing where I stood, like, ‘Well, how do I be the cool guy? How does David Bowie be David Bowie? How does Father John Misty be this kind of enigmatic Father John Misty?’ And the reality is that’s just who those people are. And I am the person talking to you right now; I’m the over-sharer. And me coming to terms with that has been kind of the best feeling I’ve had as a songwriter in a long time, like the more I embrace myself directly corresponds to how true I feel my music is. It should be a simple enough lesson to learn pretty early on, but it’s not. It’s really hard. There are few things harder than getting to know yourself and then committing to it. So if someone heard this new album and felt like ‘I’m more willing to be myself. I’m more willing to be open and earnest and share the way I feel,’ I dunno, it sounds cheesy saying it out loud, but I feel like if that were to be something that someone was left with, that would mean a lot.”


Photo credit: Magdalena Wosinska

The War on Drugs, ‘Strangest Thing’

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My mother just doesn’t get the “electronic” songs, as she puts it. Never did, really, especially when things started getting really wispy, super synth-y, shoegaze-y to the nth degree: Growing up on Janis Joplin and the Rolling Stones, she likes her music with an emotional drive that makes the bones rattle, not one that shoots you into the clouds. And it’s true that, sometimes, heavily electronic music can be difficult to make a visceral connection with, especially if you are used to the organic reverberation of real drums and wood instruments — or especially if you don’t have any hallucinogenic substances to nudge you along on the way to submission.

Part of what has always made the War on Drugs so powerful is the way they bridge that modernity — particularly dreamy splashes of synth — with the organic core of rock and folk (Bruce Springsteen and ’80s Bob Dylan are common references). Lead by the voice of Adam Granduciel, the band’s newest single, “Strangest Thing,” sounds like a song made for those who enjoy being both grounded to the earth and united with the air. Rolling in to a slow, plaintive beat with synth and keys that ring like darts of sunlight, Granduciel asks questions that transcend those generational splits: “Am I just living in the space between the beauty and the pain?” he sings. From their forthcoming release, A Deeper Understanding, it’s the perfect swirl of acoustic and electric to reflect a time obsessed with the past but raging fast into the future.

The Producers: Andrija Tokic

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When he modified a shotgun house in East Nashville into the “analog studio wonderland” known as the Bomb Shelter, Andrija Tokic wanted to bring the outdoors inside. He decorated with wooden slats and rustic stonework, creating something woodsy in the middle of a busy neighborhood. “If you’re going to be in one room for 10 hours, why not have something to look at?” he says. “For me, it’s stuff that’s usually outside — trees and rocks. There are other studios using wood as an acoustic treatment, but I just feel better being able to sit on something like a porch. It just takes the pressure off.”

If he feels any pressure, it doesn’t show. Over the past few years, his name has become synonymous with a rough-and-tumble branch of roots rock, ranging from the raw blues rock of Benjamin Booker to the scorched-earth Southern soul of Alabama Shakes to the tightly wound garage pop of Denney & the Jets. Although he works in no particular genre, Tokic’s projects are bound by an essential grittiness, an urgency that lends everything a live dynamic regardless of how it was recorded.

The son of Croatian immigrants, Tokic grew up in Takoma Park, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., and found a job manning the boards at a neighborhood studio. He recorded anyone who walked through the door, which gave him a strong grounding in a range of styles: gospel, rock, world beat, even go-go — that spry local sound that remains unsung outside the Mid-Atlantic. The experience also gave him the confidence to move to Nashville, although he found Music Row too restrictive and regimented for his tastes.

At his first studio, located in his home, he recorded the Shakes’ career-making debut, Boys & Girls, then moved to the Bomb Shelter’s current location. In just a few years, it has become a waystation for an array of artists who don’t fit easily into any one particular category or scene, who thrive at the fringes of rock and country.

A lot of people I talk to for this column were musicians first who then migrated into the producer role. But you’re a different. You wanted to do this from the beginning.

I grew up playing music at a very young age, but I got into recording as a teenager and preferred it to playing. I liked the diversity in what you do all the time. It’s cool to get involved with more instruments rather than just playing the same old guitar part. You’re able to do different kinds of projects and different kinds of music. It’s like playing in a whole bunch of different bands. That variety is really what got me excited about it. It’s not about how you play the part, but about how you capture it. How do you create an image in a record or a sense of time when the music was being played? How do you convey how that music was being played?

So I try to treat every project individually. At my studio, we don’t resort to the same setup every time for every band. Some places are like that, but I think it’s about how you can get the most out of every project. So I try to vary everything and customize the process for each specific artist and their strengths and weakness. Maybe a lot of people feel like the foundation of every song is the same: “Alright, let’s start with the drums and build from there.” But some things start with the vocals. Or a guitar. Or even a piano part.

When you started out, was there a song or an album that made you aware of the production?

The Beatles was the first time. I was rifling through my parents’ record collection, and there was a weird Yugo Tone version of Yellow Submarine. God knows what kind of editing or recutting happened with that record, but out of all of these records in this collection, it was the one that sounded like color, where everything else sounded like black and white. It was recorded with creativity in mind. I would go back and forth between that and Queen. And I remember loving the Queen record, but it didn’t make me want to grab my four-track.

When I would put on Yellow Submarine, all the parts just had so much character. To this day, the Beatles stand as a new approach to recording music. There’s still something about it that’s never been done the same. There are all kinds of things in their songs that make me excited about making music. How do you make guitars sound like that? What are all these instruments popping in and out? There’s no telling what the long-term impact of that record has been for me. But ever since I started playing around with a four-track, whenever I listen to a recording, I always picture what could be happening in the studio.

You got your start in D.C., a city that I think many people associate with punk. Did you have any connection to that world?

I feel like that was already long gone by the time I got started. I’d heard stories about how cool all that stuff used to be. But there was not a lot of rock ‘n’ roll music to record. Definitely the minority of the work I was doing was band-oriented, and a lot of that was jazz and gospel. Only the smallest bit of it would have been rock. There just wasn’t that much to be found, but I think there’s been a resurgence since I left.

D.C. is such a busy place, though. All of the best musicians I knew were these incredible players who played with all of these great people and had long histories and all had day jobs. There weren’t very many people who were only musicians. It was more like, “I’m a musician, but I also work on the Metro.” I didn’t see much opportunity when I was there, but there are more art spaces opening up, and I think things have gotten more affordable. Bands I work with will tell me about playing such-and-such place in D.C. and I’ve never heard of it.

It sounds like that experience gave you a good grounding in a lot of different types of music.

Definitely. I was able to get very, very hands on. There was definitely a good variety of stuff, some jazz and some world beat with a lot of hip-hop in between. We used to do restorations of old recordings — old reel-to-reel and really old records. We had all kinds of strange players that could play weird speeds with different head configurations. It was all kinds of audio — whatever came through the door. These days I’m working with musicians, and it’s more like curating a sound or working on a project from the ground up.

What kinds of conversations are you having with artists before the sessions start?

The first thing I like to do is try to get a feel for the music in its rawest form. Does the artist write on piano or do they write on guitar? Just hearing how they wrote the songs is helpful, so I love getting an early demo. What are the things they’re hoping to capture? How do they want to record the music and have a great time working on it? So, if I can hear a song with nothing added to it and not really stylized in any way, I get to think about what it could sound like in the studio.

It’s about trying to figure out the vision. If it’s a band, do they want to create a new sound and get studio heavy, or do they want to maintain a sound they’re already performing? I’m just trying to collect as much data before we set off in a particular direction, because that just makes everything more fun and more productive. But if I hear something and I want to go left and the artist wants to go right, that’s cool. I want to try what they’re thinking, or maybe it’s not going to feel like something I can help with.

You have a reputation for working very quickly in the studio.

I would say I work very efficiently. But it’s such a relative thing. You think about a place where they’re pounding out publishing demos and doing more songs that I’d even consider starting in a day. They have to work quickly. I do think it’s healthy for everyone to get a lot done and always be moving forward, even if there are projects where it’s not necessarily a good idea to set aside however many days to knock out the record. Sometimes you need to spread things out so you can readdress things or reapproach certain parts. Nobody wants to be sitting there running up the clock and not moving forward. You’re going to get burned out and frustrated.

There have definitely been projects where we knew we were going to have to try a bunch of different things. It’s going to be a much longer project. And then there are projects where we know exactly what we’re doing and we have it all mapped out. I always believe in letting the studio be an instrument, as well. I like to get things about 80 percent dialed in before we start, but leave a certain amount of openness to see what happens. You get everybody in a room playing together and sometimes things take on a new life that you never envisioned. “Hey, this is working well. We didn’t think to go in this direction, but it’s working. So let’s not be afraid to go off course a little.”

It also sounds like you’re playing a lot of different roles on these projects — not just what we think of as producing, but engineering, mixing, a little bit of everything.

I guess it’s all so connected! I’ve been hired to make something, so I just use the tools to my utmost ability. Whatever the project is, I do what sounds and feels right to me and to the artist, as well. Those lines get crossed a lot. I can produce this record, but I might as well engineer it, too, rather than run it through a different set of hands. I’ve worked as an engineer. I’ve been hired as a mixer. But I guess I’ve always thought that those jobs crossed each other a lot. After all, arranging a song is just as much about mixing it as sitting down and working out the parts. Some mix engineers spend a long time cutting out parts and moving parts around and rearranging the structure of the song. For me, that’s just part of the production: “Oh, we need something on the second chorus. It doesn’t sound big enough. Let’s throw another guitar in there.”

There are still a thousand definitions of what a producer does and what an engineer does. It’s comes down to what people individually feel. Especially with all of the changes happening in the recording industry, the roles are becoming harder and harder to define. I think they come down to individual people making their own definitions. Also, genre is a big thing, too. If you’re producing a jazz record, it would be closer to arranging, whereas if you’re doing a psychedelic rock record, you’re going to be doing a lot more with microphones, adjusting flangers, messing with gear. It all demands different knowledge and a different role.

You work primarily in tape instead of digital. Does that change your approach?

I think so. I can work on any format, but I find myself most fluently working with tape. I think it’s because it’s the format that I started on. It means more work on the front end and maybe less on the back end. You have to work out the parts and figure out what sounds best in a different way than when you’re working on a computer. Then the big thing is editing. It definitely affects the process, but the thing I’m thinking about is what suits the music the best.

Looking over your discography, I noticed a lot of bands seem to come to you when they’re recording a debut or making a big album, like Alabama Shakes or Hurray for the Riff Raff.

I’ve wondered if that’s the case. Maybe that’s part of my path or something, I don’t know. I definitely feel like a lot of people approach me looking to try something different or take a new step. It’s not always somebody’s first record. It’s hard to say. But I do enjoy developing something new from what’s already there. I like hearing demos and thinking about what we can do with the material. “What can we do to grow this into something new?” That’s always on my mind.

I wouldn’t attribute this to being someone’s first record, but I definitely like recording something where there are no expectations that you have to guide an artist toward. “Okay, we can stay in the same world as this previous record or we can change things up this way or that way.” My favorite people to work with are the people who are uninhibited about the music. I guess people tend to come to me already in that mindset.

3×3: Jimmy Lumpkin on Zeppelin, Norway, and Southern Manners

Posted on by Amy Reitnouer

Artist: Jimmy Lumpkin
Hometown: Fairhope, AL
Latest Album: HOME
Personal Nicknames: JL Fresh

 

Bombarded by beach buzzards! Cute though, huh?

A photo posted by Jimmy Lumpkin (@jimmy.lumpkin) on

If you had to live the life of a character in a song, which song would you choose?

"Ramble On," Led Zeppelin

Where would you most like to live or visit that you haven't yet?

Paradise, or Norway maybe

What was the last thing that made you really mad?

Myself

 

Dangerous Alligators

A photo posted by Jimmy Lumpkin (@jimmy.lumpkin) on

What's the best concert you've ever attended?

New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, Van Morrison — in the rain.

What's your go-to karaoke tune?

Sorry, don’t have one; would probably be “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd

What are you reading right now?

Nothing at the moment, but I love the bookstore and the familiarity of the written word. I am always seeking that spark.

Whiskey, water, or wine? 

Whiskey, and water. And Wine. 

North or South? 

Wherever you’re at, there’s always an upside — and down. Whichever invites me back. Still, I’m Southern in manner and heritage. Without bias.

Facebook or Twitter? 

All my Facebook posts are Tweeted, I believe.

3×3: Lola Kirke on Frank Sinatra, Morning People, and Working Girls

Posted on by Amy Reitnouer

Artist: Lola Kirke
Hometown: New York
Latest Album: Lola Kirke
Personal Nicknames: Lo, Lols, Lolita

 

A photo posted by Lola Kirke (@lolakirke) on

What song do you wish you had written?
"That's Life" by Frank Sinatra

If money were no object, where would you live and what would you do?
Somewhere in the past, but I would also time travel!

If the After-Life exists, what song will be playing when you arrive?
The entirety of Grateful Dead, Go to Heaven.

 

A photo posted by Lola Kirke (@lolakirke) on

How often do you do laundry?
Monthly.

What was the last movie that you really loved?
Working Girl!

If you could re-live one year of your life, which would it be and why?
18, so I could be badder and pick up the guitar sooner.

 

A photo posted by Lola Kirke (@lolakirke) on

What's your favorite culinary spice?
Cayenne.

Morning person or night owl?
Ew … I'm becoming a morning person.

Mustard or mayo?
Both!