It takes a bit to slow Andrew Castro down. It’s happened (we’ll get to that later), but Castro knows what he wants and isn’t interested in sitting around (though he has, and again, we’ll get to that).
Since 2013, the Sacramento musician has played more than 600 shows, a large majority falling within Northern California/Southern Oregon territory. That alone says something about Castro’s work ethic. Within those performances, he’s sold out Shine Cafe, filled Harlow’s and released a handful of EPs that have made their way to radio stations around the area. His interest in songwriting came out of an all-American combination; a breakup and a lot of Tom Petty. From there, Castro started writing down what came to mind, which ended up being a lot.
“I’m not trying to do anything too fancy. I’m not an insane musician or music theorist, I just write what comes out,” Castro said during a recent interview.
It might be hard to believe for someone who’s played hundreds of shows in the last few years, but not too long ago, in 2012, Castro had some awful stage-fright and couldn’t bring himself to play anything live. Based in the Bay Area at the time, Castro would frequently go to open mics, guitar in hand, but was never able to work up the courage to actually play.
“I’d always go, and then I’d find some excuse not to play because I’d get all sweaty and nervous,” Castro said.
After months of failed attempts, Castro finally felt ready to kick his fear. He’d written a handful of songs he felt confident to play and had worked up the nerve to perform them outside his room. Around this same time, Castro’s other main hobby was playing basketball. One day on the court in the scramble of the game, a rogue elbow landed right on Castro’s throat, completely crushing his vocal cords. The injury was so severe that Castro was unable to speak—let alone sing—for six months. As he sat silently reading Harry Potter books, the aggravation of not being able to sing—of the opportunity actually being taken away—began to transform any hesitation about playing live into a need to do so. During this time Castro took a road trip with friends up to Portland. In the car his friends put on some demos Castro had recorded right before the accident. Hearing those ideas lit a fire in Castro to make it his mission to get back to making music.
Eventually his voice slowly began to return, at first with a very dark, gritty tone (his friends often asked him to quote Christian Bale’s Batman lines). As more time passed, it began to normalize. Castro spent several months getting his singing strength back, along with writing new material as he’d lost touch with his older songs. The main goal was to not waste any more time.
“You gotta do it, you gotta do it now,” Castro said. “The longer you push it off and tell yourself you’re gonna do it, then 10 years from now you tell yourself you’re [still] gonna do it.”
Castro began playing open mics. He decided to set an ambitious goal of 75 performances by the end of 2013. By the end of the year, he surpassed that by playing 125, and recently hit a milestone of more than 600. Though that could be taken as a little overzealous, for Castro every performance counts.
“I’m still the guy at every open mic, playing every show, that’s just the way I approach it,” Castro said. “I’m not famous by any means, so my thought is just get out there and play in front of as many people as you possibly can. Every time I go out and play, there’s always somebody new. If I can reach that one person, I’ve accomplished my goal for the night.”
Castro adapted his work ethic from one of his big influences, Ed Sheeran, the young Grammy-winning U.K. artist who began his career by moving to London and playing more than 300 shows in 2009. Aside from honing his chops, Castro’s biggest gain from playing countless shows has been building a true, tangible community.
“You learn how to network, which helps your fan base grow, which helps the musicians you work with grow, from that it helps with touring; you learn what other people are doing, songwriters who have done this two or three times longer than I have. You learn how to soak that in and make it your own, in a way.”
Castro’s musical style somewhat resembles his path; acoustic folk songs with a consistent pace, minimal arrangements that mostly focus on clean-toned guitar lines and Castro’s pop-pronounced vocals. The mellow essence evokes something reminiscent of Gregory Alan Isakov, specifically coming through on “Little More,” the opening track of Castro’s new EP, Tell Me in Your Words. The four-song EP follows the progression of a long-distance relationship between a musician on the road and his girlfriend back home (spoiler alert, it doesn’t go well). Castro wrote each song with a specific female voice in mind to capture certain moods within the relationship. This is Castro’s fourth EP release within the last year. To some that might feel excessive, but each EP seemed to hold its own voice that conflicted with the next—the softer quality of duets, the unique feel of live takes, the higher energy of hip-hop, and ultimately it felt better to give them each their own space.
“As individual pieces they would hold their own better,” Castro said. “I write a lot of different styles, so I wanted to release four EPs that all sounded different. I think that it’s tougher to do in a single album; nowadays with people’s attention spans, EPs seem to be a very, very common thing that people latch onto because there’s only four or five tracks so they can get into them faster than a full-length album.”
For the future, Castro plans to take his music a little farther, traveling to Nashville in the spring to play two weeks of shows, and a little further, by focusing on new material for an LP (despite the EP preference). Above all, the main goal is to just keep going.
“You can’t take any steps backwards or time off, or else you can just fade away very quickly,” Castro said.
Andrew Castro will celebrate the release of his Tell Me in Your Words EP at Harlow’s on March 12, 2016 at 6 p.m. Tickets for this all-ages show are $8 and can be purchased in advance through Andrewcastromusic.com, which is also where you can find links to purchase his EP.
The Dream Pop Quintet’s Journey, One Firm Step at a Time
We’re in an era when focus is hard to come by. Distractions and obstacles create these invisible piles in front of us, phantom mounds we can’t always figure out how to tackle. It’s challenging for anyone, especially when you’re an artist trying to pull your creation from that thin, blocked air. It doesn’t come easy, but if you’re determined, it’s there. Wild Ones seems to know this.
The Portland-based dream pop band has been making a name for themselves in the last couple years with their strong debut, Keep It Safe, but it wasn’t something that just came easily. Wild Ones didn’t even come together overnight. Members Danielle Sullivan and Thomas Himes have been making music together for the last nine years in various projects, but Wild Ones took shape in 2010, with their EP, You’re a Winner, creating a bit of a Northwest stir. However, in 2012, as the group was getting ready to release their first full-length album, there were financial grapples, health issues and band member fluctuation. The phantom mounds. These huge, and unfortunately common issues for a young band are often enough to dissolve a project. Despite all this, Wild Ones knew what they wanted and kept focus.
“We all have been playing in different types of scenes since we were teenagers, and I think we all just want it so bad, and before Keep It Safe had never released anything that was truly our own work,” said Danielle Sullivan, vocalist of Wild Ones. “There was very little that could’ve come between us putting out our first project that we could truly own.
“Seve our drummer was in the hospital with a collapsed lung,” she continued. “And I think honestly part of his getting better was getting excited about what was coming next, and learning songs, and listening to songs and demos.”
So the group pushed, and health-wise and financially, things fell into place. Their debut, Keep It Safe, was released in 2013 by Party Damage Records and re-released in 2014 by Top Shelf Records. The record embodies dream pop at its sweetest—lush and light synth, simplistic drum beats and Sullivan’s harmonized vocals cutting through like beams of light.
“It’s super layered, and I think we did that because we enjoy that style, but also because I don’t think we felt 100 percent confident in all the parts that we made, that they could really stand alone, so we would just layer five different parts on top of each other,” Sullivan said.
Wild Ones have begun work on their forthcoming, yet-to-be-named record. Though only their second record, Wild Ones have their rhythm down in all capacities, specifically with how songwriting is delegated. In their group, everyone gets a chance to have their say with new songs, regardless of who originates the idea. As a result, the band passes demos from hand to hand, going through a couple rounds until everyone’s given their input.
“Thomas and I have been playing in bands since we were about 18 or 19 years old,” Sullivan said. “We’ve been in other bands where there’s one primary songwriter and it’s more that person coming up with 95 percent of the parts. I think that model works really well for some bands, but I think in order for everyone to feel equally invested and excited every time we come up with something new, everybody has to have their part in it. We’re each gonna write our parts, even if it takes 30 times longer to make a record.”
This demoing process has been going on for several months, with intermittent tour excursions. While some bands prefer to hunker down and finish a record in nearly one sitting, Wild Ones seem to thrive off the live-performance test drive of each new song.
“We went on six tours and played I think 95 shows last year, and it informed so much of what works and what doesn’t work in a song.” Sullivan said. “It’s the best sounding board when you’re playing the new song [live] that you think is the best thing you’ve ever done and you look at people’s faces and there’s a certain part of the song where they’re just not engaged and you lose them for a second, or parts where people fully feel in the moment because of some turn in the song. It’s a very good way of weeding out songs that are just not gonna be engaging.”
The level of strength that transpires through their live set is palpable. Aspects of the first record that feel more angelic and airy become more grounded in their live performances, and new songs show definite growth. The synths feel less forward and more textural, while the bass elements and drums seem to darken and drive the songs. Sullivan’s vocals feel less like a falsetto tiptoe and more projected and focused, a conscious choice in her lyrical approach to new songs as well.
“Of course putting out your first record, those were some of the first songs I’d ever written, so I kind of shrouded my meaning in more general themes that I felt like could be understood in many different ways, and on one hand was like, ‘I like that because it’s dream pop and it should apply to many different ideas,’ then realizing I was nervous to say something so clear and direct there was no way to misconstrue what I was trying to say,” Sullivan said. “Writing this record has been going in the opposite direction, thinking, ‘I’m going to do my best to be a good storyteller, and write stories that people can truly understand.’”
“This record has really been trying to make the simplest pop song, that doesn’t need a million different parts and strange key changes or weird 5/4 timing, that it can be direct and confident, and more simple,” Sullivan said.
The release date of the new record is yet to be determined, though you can hear a few live versions of songs floating around online, and catch them at LowBrau on March 10, 2015. Whatever form you hear them in, it’ll be a breath of fresh, focused air.
Check out Wild Ones live (for FREE) at LowBrau on March 10, 2015, as part of Le Twist Tuesdays. LowBrau is located in the MARRS Building at 1050 20th Street in Sacramento. To see what LowBrau has on tap and on their menu, go to Lowbrausacramento.com, and for more about Wild Ones, check out Wildonestheband.com.
Robin Bacior’s musical migration takes her from west to east and back again
When Robin Bacior made the decision to move from New York to Portland, she considered leaving her life as a musician in the rearview mirror when she left.
The now-28-year-old singer-songwriter had spent the previous four years living in Brooklyn and building a musical following in the city, but after an illness forced her off a tour and into the silence of her apartment, she came to the bedridden realization that she was unhappy and needed to make some changes.
Around the time she swapped New York for Portland, she started having some intense dreams about bodies of water.
“I was having them almost every night,” she said. “Depending on the way the water moves, it’s supposed to reflect emotional changes.”
As those dreams sloshed across her mind from night to night, she pooled them up by day, deliberately assembling what would become her latest album, Water Dreams, which she will release on Jan. 13, 2015.
I spoke to Robin by phone while she was packing for a trip back to Chico (her hometown) for the holidays. Our conversation focused on her migration from Chico to New York to Portland, and the musical evolution that paralleled those moves.
Chico
Bacior grew up in a musical family, but she considered herself a largely passive participant as a kid and in college. Both of her parents play music, and their house would be filled with fellow musicians throughout her childhood. Meanwhile, she took lessons and learned to play piano, flute, saxophone and more.
When she graduated high school she stayed local, enrolling at Chico State, where she studied journalism. She attended tons of concerts and focused heavily on music writing, and was also a DJ for the campus radio station.
Music was a massive part of her life, but she was mostly looking in from the sidelines. She had been writing her own songs for a while, but she was looking at her music without much purpose.
She played a few shows, but performing was a struggle. Her eyes would blur, her forehead would dip toward the microphone, her guitar would slip out of tune without her noticing. She was uncomfortable, in part because performing was still new to her, but also because she was playing to a small-town audience with whom she had grown up.
It wasn’t until she stepped into foreign territory that she made music a priority and came into her own.
New York
Around the time Bacior uprooted to Brooklyn, she was invited to sing on the record of a Chico band called Surrogate. The lead singer, Chris Keene, had extended her the offer.
“I had never really done that before,” she said. “But I went in and sang and had a really nice experience with him. He said, ‘Hey, I owe you one.’”
So she flew back to Chico in 2010 and recorded her first batch of songs in his studio space. That would become the Aimed for Night EP, which she used as a foundation for booking shows as she got her legs in New York.
She was still shy at the microphone, but she channeled her energy into getting over that hurdle. Living in a new space with no real ties to her life up to that point offered some freedom in that development, kind of like the clean slate offered to a graduated high school student upon arriving at college.
And then she met Dan Bindschedler, a New York cellist whose influence would be felt all over Bacior’s next few releases, and especially so on Water Dreams. The two formed a tight musical bond that would even survive Bacior’s westward migration years later.
When the two began collaborating, Bacior had already written many of the songs for her first full-length album, Rest Our Wings. Bindschedler’s cello was laced into the seams of the songs, most of which had already been fully written.
By this time, Bacior had spent a few years making herself a part of the New York music scene, regularly playing shows, booking tours and releasing a couple of 7-inches and EPs in addition to Rest Our Wings.
But then she hit a rut.
She had organized a tour, and on the first day out, she got sick. She tried to grind it out, but five days later she had lost her voice and was knocked out by her illness entirely. She had to go home.
“I was sick as a dog, laying in bed,” she said. “I had nothing to do. I realized I was unhappy. I decided to leave New York, and I wasn’t even sure if I was going to play music anymore. I just needed a personal change.”
She decided Portland would become her new home, but before making the move she traveled with her band to an East Coast beach house to record five new songs in live takes. That punctuated her musical stint in New York.
Portland
Of course, it did not end up punctuating the entirety of her musical career. Instead, she released those beach house recordings in the form of the I Left You, Still in Love EP, after settling into Portland.
After that, the next set of songs began flowing, quite literally.
Bacior’s water dreams came on the heels of her huge life transition. Paths that previously felt certain had collapsed and she was once again in a new place. One by one, she bottled up her dreams in song, until the album was complete.
“With this one, the songs were all written to move into one another,” she said.
“Everything was written one after another.”
Her previous releases consisted of individually written songs bundled up and packaged. The songs on Water Dreams, conversely, were written specifically for Water Dreams. Even the track listing came together song by song, until the 10 tracks were stacked atop one another.
The water theme can be felt throughout the whole album, whether it’s flowing in long cello drawls or pattering in sharp staccato droplets. You can also hear it in the words, sometimes in the form of literal references to pools and oceans; other times more abstractly.
Similarly, this was the first time Bacior wrote all of the songs with Bindschedler’s cello at the forefront of her mind.
“We spent one year as a kind of bi-coastal duo,” she said. “I would email him rough drafts of songs and when we got together, we would work out ideas.”
Bacior left a lot of space in these songs for Bindschedler to do his thing. She wanted him to “be a true voice” on the album. Once they finished writing the songs, they ironed them out on a West Coast tour and then recorded them in Portland.
After Water Dreams is released in January, Bacior will head out on the road, passing through Sacramento for a show at Naked Lounge 10 days later on Jan. 23, 2015. The tour will take her through the Pacific Northwest down to Southern California and to Arizona. Bacior says she loves the moment that comes with touring, but that she’s a homebody at heart.
“I can spend days by myself, but it’s good for me to balance that with the polar opposite experience,” she said. “It shakes my brain.”
But her creativity comes when she’s settled in her own space, and she’s happy to call Portland her home. And Bindschedler has since migrated to Portland as well, so the duo is once again sharing territory.
“I really enjoy it here,” she said. “I miss New York because it’s wonderful, but Portland is one of the most healing places to live. I feel like I can play music and work all day and the second I want to be done, the energy allows you to calm down.”
Robin Bacior’s Water Dreams is available for preorder through her website, Robinbacior.com. Catch her live at Naked Lounge (1111 H Street, downtown Sacramento) on Jan. 23, 2015. Also performing will be Grand Lake Islands. For more info, go to Nakedcoffee.net.
Baskery proves the family who jams together, stays together
There’s a certain power that comes from a family band. There’s a strength to their presence on stage; the perfectly parallel harmonies and eerily cohesive movement through songs projects a resonant connection that feels nearly palpable to an audience. It can’t be easy to share that much, but it certainly helps the music and has the benefit of being a bond that started forming long before it was a focus. Such is the case for Greta, Stella and Sunniva Bondesson, a Swedish three-piece alt-country group by the name of Baskery.
“It’s so hard to find a starting point of the band, because some of the songs that we play up to this day are songs I wrote in high school,” said Sunniva Bondesson, the youngest sister in Baskery. “It’s hard in the sense that you can’t see an end or beginning of things.”
The three sisters have been singing together since their childhood and came together first through the group the Slaptones, formed along with their father, drummer Janåke Bondesson.
After a few years, Janåke decided it was time to leave the band and that the sisters should find their own focus as musicians without his influence. This led to the formation of Baskery.
“We [Slaptones] were pretty successful but we didn’t want to play rockabilly and cover songs, so we started Baskery as a new challenge,” Bondesson said. “We call it our first real band because Slaptones was more of our fun project, we didn’t get that serious. We made two records and it was great fun, but we felt we needed another concept for writing the kind of songs we wanted.”
The name Baskery came about from wanting to acknowledge their roots, which lie in the small village their father is from. The town is nicknamed “Baskeri” in Finnish, but the sisters decided to change the spelling to have a more international sound.
The name’s versatility coincidentally reflects the music itself. There’s a sweet melodious harmony factor that lends itself to bluegrass influence, with a more rapid kick that’s reminiscent of punk tempo, plus instrumentation and a sort of group effort that comes from the communal feel of country music. Maybe their hyper breed of sound partly stems from the fact their influences are less music-based and more found through common past experience.
“It’s not so much music, it’s more movies, books, stories that you come across in your regular lives,” Bondesson said. “We have the pleasure of sharing lots of influences since we’re sisters. We have the same references because we grew up in the same house at the same time, but it’s not a lot about music. As kids we sang a lot of classical tunes, folk tunes, and our dad played blues and folk and country and rock, so we had all kinds of influences, that’s why it’s so hard to tell. We’re infused with so many different genres.”
The idea of working with siblings might make a few people uneasy. Working in groups is hard enough. Luckily, it’s something that comes easily for the Bondesson sisters. They’ve found a way to separate their work from their family dynamic.
“We’re pretty blessed in that sense that it doesn’t really influence our structure as a band,” Bondesson said. “When we work together we have a different hierarchy, the songs and the music itself is kind of the ruler. I always kind of curve myself under the power of the music. Even if we had had a fight or something it would never show on stage because that something else comes in and takes over. Also how we’re structured there are certain roles in the family of course and being three sisters, but we don’t have these structures in the band. We have different positions and they happen pretty organically.”
As far as the work itself, everyone naturally takes on flexible responsibilities, with an ebb and flow of who is taking a leadership role. The positioning is constantly shifting, from stage presence to songwriting to business logistics.
“We try to look at it as a democracy,” Bondesson said. “The work share is happening very naturally, we don’t really talk about it, and some days you decided you do more and some less, we don’t really complain a lot about that.”
The three sisters have been living together for the last several months in Nashville, coming together in one home for the first time in a decade. A city as musically established as Nashville can be an incredibly hard market to enter, but so far Baskery has received a good amount of intrigue from listeners.
“People are kind of overfed with music there,” Bondesson said. “We have the pleasure of being different and we peak out, because we don’t make the traditional country music, or we don’t fit anywhere, so people have already started talking about us.”
During this time they’ve been working on new material, working toward releasing a new album here in the United States, touring consistently and playing countless festivals, including the upcoming American River Music Festival. It’s been a blessing for Baskery to help connect to the North American audience through festival appearances, as well as find a community by crossing paths with other artists performing, and learning from their shows.
“Festivals are essential for any band to build their new audience and earn recognition,” Bondesson said.
With little sense of the sisters’ true musical beginning and no end in sight, what’s left is the present, which Baskery has devoted to working as one.
“That’s something you refine a lot when you have time to really only work with music,” Bondesson said. “We’re on the road two thirds of the year, and we’re constantly together; sometimes we have a little time off too, but mostly we’re on the road, and living together now. It’s definitely making the unit stronger. We have found this common way to express ourselves. I think our sound is more refined than ever. It’s definitely an advantage to do this, and I’d recommend other bands if they can to get more time to live together and get the music, make it a part of everything you do.”
This year’s American River Festival takes place Sept. 12 through 14, 2014 at Henningsen Lotus Park in Lotus, California. Sharing the main stage with Baskery (who perform on Sept. 14 at 12:15 p.m.) will be Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash, Whitewater Ramble, The Bills, Tommy Malone of the Subdues and more. For a full schedule and camping particulars, go to Americanrivermusic.org. Baskery will also perform the night before their main stage performance, Sept. 13, at the Sierra Nevada House at 8 p.m.
The passive music listener can easily recognize punk music. Quick, driving rhythms, an undertone of chaos, and above all, a lot of fast emotional expression. The sound is as distinct as harmonica and lapsteel crooning out an old country tune or the synth-y blips bouncing out of electronica. But it takes an active music listener to take the next step and begin to differentiate between the sounds within a genre like punk, and find what makes each group unique. Groups like Fugazi, Minor Threat and Bad Religion all brought punk to the larger audience in the ‘80s and ‘90s, followed by more mainstream sensations like Green Day, and helped listeners begin to differentiate between styles like hardcore, pop-punk, post-punk and emo. It’s a strong community, full of diverse sounds and talented musicians like the Bay Area’s Heartsounds.
So, how do you describe Heartsounds’…sound?
“It’s faster and a little bit more going on than the punk you hear on the radio,” said Ben Murray, one of the guitarists and vocalists of Heartsounds.
The band started in 2009, with Ben Murray and Laura Nichol as the sole members. The duo wrote the first album, Until We Surrender, in Murray’s apartment. They began playing the material live, and shortly thereafter through the circuit of live shows and the punk community they met their future drummer Trey Derbes and bassist Kyle Camarillo (later replaced by Bobby Taul). Once formed as a full band, the foursome began touring frequently and started to gain momentum, which eventually led to being signed to Epitaph, who re-released the first album in 2010, along with their follow-up, Drifter, in 2011.The group gained popularity fast with their blend of metal-influenced technique and punk buoyant tempos, with both Murray and Nichol switching off singing lead; the sound of tight-knit electric guitar riffs seemingly scratching grooves in the airwaves for Murray and Nichol’s voices to flow evenly through.
“We’re a fast band… We play pretty fast, faster than most, [based on] ideas of punk bands you’d hear on the radio,” Murray said. “It’s faster and has the male and female vocal tradeoff. I feel it’s unique to us. Laura and I have a heavy metal background so there’s also a bit of technical precision focused riffs.”
The band has spent the last four years gaining a fanbase worldwide. Touring with bands like Strung Out, Heartsounds has made their way through Japan, Mexico, Europe and the United Kingdom and most recently Australia. Throughout the continents the audience response has varied, but remained positive.
“It’s definitely vastly different from one to another,” Murray said. “Some people are just more expressive than others. You play in Mexico City they go absolutely apeshit because they don’t get a lot of punk bands down there from the U.S., and Japan’s kind of the same way, but I feel like in Europe and the U.S. it’s a little more tame reactions.”
In the past, Heartsounds has received a lot of comparisons to ‘80s/’90s/early ‘00s punk icons like Hot Water Music and Bad Religion.
“Brett [Gurewitz] from Epitaph helped produce vocals for Drifter. There’s definitely a lot of Bad Religion influence; I love that band,” Murray said. “I’d compare it more to bands like Strung Out, bands that do a bit faster stuff that’s still really melodic.”
As the band has progressed and grown, the project still seems to be led with Murray at the helm.
“All the actual music writing is usually just done by me in my apartment,” Murray laughed.
Murray crafts the songs, then works the instrumental arrangements with Derbes, and the vocals with Nichol.
In the past, albums like Drifter had a much more distinct metal direction within the sound. For their newest release, Internal Eyes, the group tried to streamline the sound a bit and put more energy into simplified melodies.
“We tried to step it back for this one and concentrate more on the chord progressions and not having so many technical parts,” Murray said. “It’s just as emotional as the last two in terms of the lyrics and content, but this one I feel is a little more lighthearted.”
For Internal Eyes, the instrumental precision from the earlier material is still present, but there seems to be more space in the sound. The guitar riffs sound less linear and more melodic without losing their impressive quickness. Derbes’ drums still keep high adrenaline rhythm, but with more slight pauses that give the listener more time to catch up, and give the songs a more recognizable body.
Another conscious change Heartsounds made for the record was putting more emphasis on bringing the main vocals to the forefront of the songs, and equalling out the male/female vocal leads.
“We were more concerned with how the vocal melodies could be more dynamic and compelling. The one thing we did way differently on this record was the tradeoff between mine and Laura’s voices is a lot more frequent. In every song we’re pretty 50/50 on that.”
The band chose to release Internal Eyes through Murray’s own label, Creator-Destructor. Murray started the label as a side project, a way to release Heartsounds’ material and help friends out as well.
“It’s kind of just a fun project for me,” Murray said. “But it’s cool to be able to sustain it and keep putting out records, and putting out your own record is really nice… It’s kind of a labor of love.”
Murray does his part to help out the punk scene as a lot of other musicians do within the community, which is full of “a lot of tight knit bands,” Murray said.
“It’s cool because [the punk scene] doesn’t feel very judgmental or clique-y. I think a lot of bands get along with each other because they’re just punk bands, they can respect one another and be cool to each other. There’s not a lot of division within punk, which is super cool,” Murray said. “There’s no one gunning for massive success… They’re just doing their thing.”
Heartsounds will be playing the third annual Punch and Pie Fest (Aug. 14–17, 2014), kicking off the event on Aug. 14 at The Press Club with The Civil War Rust, The Shell Corporation and D-Cent Jerks, who’ve made the trek from Puerto Rico. For a full list of bands and venues, check out Punchandpiefest.com. Internal Eyes can be purchased through Creator-destructor.com.
The bizarre worlds conjured by visual artist Erik Hosino
There’s something dichotomous about visual artists. Take for instance, art displays in coffee houses. The artist comes in and revisualizes the space, and patrons have the opportunity to scan each piece as closely as they’d like. But the artists themselves needn’t be present. On one hand, their work is upfront and exposed. But if the performance doesn’t need the performer, there lies some mystery. From the viewer’s perspective, it can seem as though the artist might feel isolated from new audiences, but it’s quite the opposite.
“It feels interactive to me and helps me get my artwork to such a wide array of people, just to see what they think of it,” said Erik Hosino, an artist nearly native to Sacramento who’s been displaying his work at Temple Coffee.
“One of the great things about hanging art at a place like a coffee shop, especially in a place like Midtown, is you really get a slice of the population. You get everybody from lawmakers, people at the capitol, to young hipster kids and everyone between,” Hosino said. “I’ve been flattered to see people who buy my artwork are not just this age group, this type of person, that I’ve actually sold artwork to young people, old people, white collared, all over. So in that sense I get that interaction.”
Hosino has been living in Sacramento since before he turned 1, and has been drawing throughout his entire life.
{“Release” Pen & Ink/Watercolor}
“The extent of my formal art training honestly doesn’t go too far beyond high school and a few classes at the junior college,” Hosino said. “I think the fact that I took to art at such a young age has kept me inspired to keep doing it.”
A huge part of that inspiration has come from studying well-known artists like Edward Gorey and his masterful pen-and-ink illustrations. Hosino’s work has been compared to Tim Burton’s numerous times, both sharing a similar darkness, also found in Gorey’s work.
“I’ve had people look at my artwork and think, ‘Are you depressed? Because you paint a lot of stuff about death and skeletons,’ but honestly it’s quite the opposite for me. I think that by sort of accepting death and celebrating it as a part of life has made it less taboo, and therefore it’s never felt weird to depict it whether in an explicit or more symbolic way. But because I am sort of drawn to the mysterious, I think that darkness and dark subject matter does lend itself well as fodder for my artwork.”
{“Awkward” Pen & Ink}
Since an artist is rarely present if you by chance see their work hanging somewhere like Temple, the next inevitable step a curious viewer would take would be to look up the artist online. If you search Erik Hosino, one of the first things you’ll come across is a website called Superheroes for Hire, or as Hosino puts it, “The thing I’ll look back on my death bed and kick myself for.”
The idea started out as a project for a class. In his late teens, Hosino had this idea for creating an agency of B-rated superheroes, banding together their lackluster talents to try to find work. The project was praised by his teacher, which inspired Hosino to develop the idea a little more. He sent the piece to Comedy Central and a few other networks. Comedy Central got back to Hosino and asked him to redraft the idea a bit. At the time, Hosino was about 20 years old, and with the motivation level of a 20-year-old and some unexplainable hesitation, he let the opportunity slide and never followed through.
“Now that I’m older and take my art more seriously in a lot of ways and am a lot more disciplined and passionate, I hate that I did that,” Hosino said.
While it was a heartbreaking setback, Hosino has kept the project alive in a smaller capacity. The website has an interactive feel to it, allowing the visitor to scroll through the various superheroes for background on their minimal capabilities, and a comment section for superhero service requests.
“It was a total lesson learned. I try not to beat myself up for it because I was young and I was straight-up stupid about it, but inspired me to keep the idea up,” Hosino said. “It only exists in that incarnation now, but in some ways it gives me some happiness to know it’s not totally dead.”
{“Mother Mary” Acrylic}
A good starting point to get a broad sense of his style would be checking out his collection called Strange Places, a book released in January 2011.
“I’ve had people come to me and say they want to buy either a print or original, and maybe they couldn’t afford the original or the one that they wanted was sold. Strange Places was partly a response to people’s desire to have a collection, just a sampling of my artwork,” Hosino said.
Hosino’s style is a blend of odd, imaginative and eerie. Bodies with bulky shoulders and torsos and pencil-thin arms and legs; dark scenery with curled tree branches or cavernous dark spaces. A mix of imaginative and morbid—all very slight, enough to set a somewhat creepy tone but not fearful. The book gives a good example of his versatility. Each style requires a different medium to create.
{“Breakfast, Interrupted” Pen & Ink/Watercolor}
“If I want something chaotic or fluid, that’s where watercolor comes in; and if I want something really controlled, really tight pen and ink lines help achieve that,” Hosino said. “By day I’m a graphic designer, although I’ve been drawing a lot longer, the designer in me informs the way I work as an illustrator. It’s kind of a blessing and a curse. The illustrator in me often longs to be more spontaneous and organic, but the graphic designer in me longs for structure, planning and cleanliness and often times gets the better of me.”
It seems almost as a way to subconsciously merge both sides that Hosino gravitates most toward watercolor.
“I love the organic way, when I work with pen and ink and watercolor—which is a common combination for me—I’m very controlled with my pen work, and I let the watercolor play as much of a role as I do,” Hosino said. “I spent a long time trying to get a good command of watercolor, and it’s only recently I grew to accept it’ll kind of do its own thing. Not only did I accept it, I embraced the fact that I can control what I can control when I’m drawing, but when I put down that watercolor it adds a whole organic way to my illustration.”
Letting go of a little control has become one of Hosino’s main strengths within his artwork.
{Chalk It Up Square 2013 Sponsor: Raley’s}
I’ve found those kinds of pieces that people gravitate mostly to of mine are the ones where they are interacting with it and filling in the blanks,” Hosino said. “That’s one thing people enjoy about my artwork and wasn’t intentional at first, but when I omit certain details to appease, people have come up and said, ‘Oh man I’ve been staring at this piece forever and trying to figure out what’s going on,’ and sometimes they fill in the blanks on their own, other times they like the fact that it remains unknown to them.”
See Hosino’s art for yourself at Temple Coffee’s downtown Sacramento location (1010 9th Street). It will be on display now through Dec. 12, 2013. Peruse the artist’s Web presence at Erikhosino.com.
Dead Winter Carpenters show persistence and touring pays off
With any musician’s path, the road is always subjective. These days, more and more musicians holding down day jobs or stretched too thin with the multi-tasking whirlwind of DIY music are turning to the Internet and its boundless connections to gain their audience and expose their songs. That’s one path. But another is the old fashioned way: the wanderlust, rambling, troubadour adventure. The tour-til-you-drop. Sure it’s exhausting and labor-intensive and involves a lot of sleeping on floors and foreign beds, but rather than hoping the Internet will carry your message to unknown listeners, you go straight to the source.
“I think there are a couple ways to go about it,” said Jesse Dunn, vocalist and guitarist of Dead Winter Carpenters, the Tahoe-based Americana outfit that’s been picking up attention through touring. “Get your music out there in recorded format and spread it through social media—or there’s the touring route, and we tried to start it off touring hard… We’re going for the more grassroots approach; just get out there and play and get in front of as many people as possible. Gotta get the word of mouth going beside the social media.”
It’s always a gamble, but in the case of Dead Winter Carpenters, touring consistently seems to be working. When I was asked by my editor to interview DWC, I was already familiar with them, having seen their performance while covering last year’s High Sierra Music Festival. Later that evening I asked my boyfriend if he remembered the show, and he held up his water bottle, which had a big DWC sticker, red and blue with antlers.
“Our style of music plays well to the outdoor festival crowd. It’s a pretty upbeat, high energy atmosphere,” Dunn said. “Kind of what we thrive in, especially in the mountain communities where we really feel at home. We’re really looking forward to this festival this weekend out here in Missoula.”
While we talked, DWC was up in Missoula, Mont., sitting in the smoky haze flooding the downtown [Missoula] from nearby forest fires. The band was gearing up for the outdoor River City Roots Festival that weekend. The group is on the road for the next few weeks, bouncing back and forth between the Northwest and California, including dates at the American River Festival in Coloma, Calif.
“The whole downtown—it’s crazy—a cloud of smoke has settled over. It’s pretty wild looking,” Dunn said.
From the start, DWC has been consistently on the road. The group officially formed in March 2010 in the North Shore of Lake Tahoe. The name Dead Winter Carpenters comes from Tahoe folklore involving a story of a few carpenters working on the railroad by Donner Lake and running into some trouble with a party of travelers, which turned into a bit of a gruesome end. The project started as a casual few shows around the Tahoe area (specifically at their home base, the Crystal Bay Club), and quickly picked up steam, becoming the main focus for each member.
“[It was] a project to pick up some gigs and have some fun, and it evolved from there into our main concentration, and we’ve been going strong ever since,” Dunn said.
Each of the five members (Dunn, Jenni Charles, Dave Lockhart, Bryan Daines and Brian Huston) brought their own influences to the table, such as New Grass Revival, Old Crow Medicine Show and the almighty Neil Young, and from that formed their own Americana style. They blend elements of blue grass fiddle shredding with country vocal inflections, bright guitar chords and chugging snare, held together with the communal feel of alternating male and female vocals and sing-along harmonies. They have that special quality of creating an atmosphere, a fun one. They’ve had success at festivals like High Sierra Music Festival, Strawberry Music Festival, Joshua Tree Roots Festival and Yarmony Grass, to name a few. They also put a bit of energy into their message as well. DWC describes their sound as reflecting the American West.
“To me I think it relies strongly on songwriting and storytelling, that kind of troubadour aspect of the whole thing, relaying stories from generation to generation,” Dunn said.
DWC recently finished recording a new EP. The three-song EP (yet to be titled) spans old rowdy country to male/female duets to a pirate-ship shanty tune. It’s still in its raw, recently recorded form, but they’ll be mixing and mastering it over the last months of summer, and DWC is aiming to release it by mid-October. This release will be the first installment of a string of EPs. DWC is hoping to put out a new EP every few months.
“We’re excited about getting these EPs out, and want to see where that leads us,” Dunn said. “We went with something that’s a little more creative and a way to get the music out more often than just doing a straight up album, and see how that goes. I think it’s gonna be a good thing.”
There will be a cohesive nature to the project, but DWC is brainstorming on the trajectory.
“We’re trying to shoot around ideas for that whole release program,” Dunn said. “We’re working on an overall picture and scheme for names of all of them. We haven’t settled on anything yet, but we’re going to try to put some sort of common thread between.”
While they’re figuring out their process, DWC will still be playing live. As for their next run through Sacramento, they’re hoping to return in November. If not then, they’ll surely be through again soon,; there are no plans to slow down their touring speed. Although each musician has their own method, be it endless touring or endless press, there are a few objective and important tips to go by.
“Stay creative, keep putting out new music and don’t get stagnant,” Dunn said. “Try not to get frustrated, because it can be fairly frustrating; the whole process, really.”
Shortly after Dunn offered that honest token of advice, we thanked one another for the time and both hung up; Dunn disappeared into the tour ether, the smoky Missoula streets, and DWC’s own special road.
What went into Mia Dyson’s newest album, and how it feels to finally be present
The future is bright. Or at least we all hope it is, so we tend to put a lot of pressure on it and think about it. A lot. One could even say we look forward to a fault, nearly forgetting about the present altogether. This is the case of Mia Dyson, the Australian singer/songwriter who’s currently in her musical prime, all thanks to finally letting go of the future.
But to begin talking about Mia Dyson, first we have to talk about her past. The Australian native has been playing music since her teenage years. Around 14, she picked up a guitar and started learning covers and gradually starting to write her own songs.
“It took many years before I actually wrote a song I liked,” Dyson said.
During her early musical development, her dad was playing her a lot of American artists like The Band, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt and Lucinda Williams. Those influences can be heard throughout Dyson’s music, most prominently in her gravelly yet soulful vocals that tend to feel like heavy, strong steps over big percussion, moaning guitar and saloon-y piano chords, all with a strong Americana essence.
Not only did this play a big part in shaping her own musical style, but it gave her a strong desire to eventually make her way to the United States.
“Not only music, but so much American culture, the good stuff, the great American soul and literature, it all treks to Australia, and I grew up on all of that,” Dyson said.
She spent nearly a decade building her career through a breakthrough debut, Cold Water, followed by four ARIA nominations and one win, opening tour slots for Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt and Stevie Nicks and incredible praise from the press. Even with all this acclaim, Dyson’s goal was still to get to America. In 2009 she finally took the leap and moved out to the States, choosing Boston as her East Coast landing point.
“I kind of came over without a plan and essentially without a budget,” Dyson said.
This is where things quickly changed for Dyson. That lack of planning took its financial toll, which caused Dyson to lose her band and soon after go broke. With things rapidly going sour, Dyson heard about some industry opportunities in Los Angeles, so she made her way west.
“That was kind of a crazy red herring, because they really wanted to change my image, change my name, sort of re-market me,” Dyson said.
Despite the continued difficulty, Dyson went along with it for a while and tried to work with the re-branding, but the process felt unnatural. At the time, she was barely recording or playing shows, and until that point a majority of her musical career had been built around creating a fan base from her live performances.
“That time felt kind of wasted and out of my hands,” Dyson said.
Just when it seemed like coming to the United States might have been the worst decision Dyson could have made, it wasn’t. She started meeting new people in L.A., going through the trial and error process of finding new bandmates or bill mates for shows around California. Slowly, she began building a community of inspiring friends, including her producer Erin Sidney. The two started swapping old favorite songs and suddenly developed a musical camaraderie. From there, Dyson began working on new songs under Sidney’s guidance.
“It just organically happened that we started to make this record together,” Dyson said, “I just lucked out.”
Dyson took her new songs to the studio, and her newest album, The Moment, was born.
The keyword for this album is strong. It begins with “When the Moment Comes,” a song jam-packed with incredible momentum and Dyson’s dynamite belting, followed by the equally fantastic “Pistol,” a heartbreaking number with choppy chords and loud drums, slicked over by guitar licks, all still overshadowed by Dyson’s howling chorus. The album keeps its strength all the way through with anthemic Americana pieces like “Cigarettes,” having a sing-along feel to it powered by the highlighted organ noise. The real heart of the album for Dyson, is to be present.
“It’s about being in the moment, and how there’s only the moment, not one, but this continuous—that kind of crazy—how do you describe it? There’s always a moment,” Dyson said. “I’m trying to live my life more like that now, and that’s what the record’s about.”
The process of making this album was a huge growing experience for Dyson, one that involved her letting go a little bit.
“That came only from having grown up a bit in the last few years,” Dyson said. “To realize I don’t have to have total control, it doesn’t have to be all about me. I think I had some ego in there when I was younger that meant I didn’t really want anyone helping me.”
This is the first collection of songs that Dyson has allowed this level of group involvement on, allowing more hands on the writing process for a more powerfully crafted album.
“More could be accomplished by bringing together people to share the vision. I had never experienced that before,” Dyson said. “It came at the right time and I was ready to do that.”
She brought the record back to Australia in August 2012 where it’s been well received. Going back to Australia gave Dyson a chance to reflect on her last few years in America.
“I think I came over pretty scared and pretty desperate to make it work, and, yeah, certainly with leaving my home country I have to make it and return triumphantly,” Dyson joked.
However, Dyson did realize her goals. Through her tumultuous years in the States she met bandmates, realized her potential, and developed her strongest catalogue of sound. After all that, she was proud to go back to Australia, of “being able to return, maybe not with fanfare, but with a record I was really proud of,” Dyson said.
But what about the career she already had in Australia? The whole decade of her career when she was opening for artists like Chris Isaak? Wasn’t she already successful?
“I didn’t necessarily appreciate that when I got to play with some of those artists, of course it was a huge honor to me, but there was always that sort of ‘what’s next and what’s the next thing,’” Dyson said. “Now instead of looking down the road to what is coming along, which may not come, I’m really enjoying it and grateful.”
Her past is packed, and her future with this new album seems successful, but for now, Dyson is going to put her attention into basking in the new present.
“A fresh start was January last year, and this is now the next chapter of that,” Dyson said. “It was definitely a lengthy career, a real change and a fresh start.”
Mia Dyson will perform in Sacramento at the Torch Club as part of their second annual Torchfest May 26, 2013. Dyson is scheduled to play at 8 p.m. Torchfest is a two-day event that begins on May 25, 2013. For more info and for a full lineup of bands, go to Torchclub.net.
Pop duo Kisses explore Los Angeles when it’s seemingly shut down
When you think of a band, you might not think that visuals would be the first thing to pop into your head. But subconsciously, maybe. Musical presentation has significantly changed shape with the birth of online media, and suddenly artists are building social media empires with aesthetics to match the sound. Some find this a burden (they’re aural, not visual!), but others take to it, use it to their advantage. This seems to be the case for the duo, Kisses. The Los Angeles couple/group Jesse Kivel and Zinzi Edmundson have a clear, L.A.-centric image, packed with visuals. If you’ve visited any of their websites, you’ll notice minimal information given regarding the band’s background.
“I just think personal band website bios are cheesy,” Jesse Kivel said. “You’re trying to tell your fans to like you instead of letting them buy into what you’re doing.”
In lieu of a bio is the one-line banner, “Always leave a little to chance.” The cheeky saying comes from Kivel having lunch with a friend, and was said off-handedly about giving a tuna melt a try at a dive-y restaurant and ending up finding a great spot.
“I thought it was a silly but profound thing,” Kivel said. “That’s essentially what our plan would want to be, is to make music that’s inspiring but also has a lightheartedness to it.”
Instead of written information, there’s a strong sense of attention to aesthetic—sun-bleached coloring, clean white background bedding old magazine covers, sound clips and wallpapers—a visual collage of L.A. cyber artifacts, which is somewhat the motive of Kisses’ sound.
“The intention lyrically is to make L.A. seem iconic, not in the Hollywood cheesy way but in an almost historic way,” Kivel said. “I think L.A. doesn’t get credit as being a historic city since California is known as the place with no history.
L.A. is Hollywood and fake and whatever, but if you look closely there’s a lot of interesting things that have been around for a long time in the area, and that’s the iconography we’re working with.”
Kisses materialized out of songs Kivel was writing that weren’t fitting the mold of his initial project, Princeton.
“It wasn’t like I brought them there, and we were like, “These aren’t good.’ I was just writing a bunch of tracks,” Kivel said.
He took them to his girlfriend, Edmundson (keyboards), and the two turned them into a duo project dubbed Kisses. They quickly drummed up some online curiosity, which went from buzz to recognition with their debut album, Heart of the Nightlife. The LP focused on the glimmering post-nightlife haze of Palm Springs, Calif. The result was a clean, glittery feeling album; upbeat lilts with droning undertones. Kivel’s vocals move slowly over fluttering drums, electronic pulses and keyboard accents, tying together a nice pop package with heavy ‘80s influence.
When it came time to make the next record, there were a few slight detours.
“I’d originally written a bunch of songs that were going to be the next record, but they just sounded like the 2.0 version of the first record,” Kivel said. “It seemed like it was going to be the same old thing,” Kivel also had another batch of songs in the works for yet another potential group, but “I was realizing they could be adapting,” he said.
Once the songs were settled, recording began, but the process ended up spanning more than a year and a half.
The first record was recorded in Kivel’s garage in a quick month, but Kids in L.A. was a little more piecemeal. The skeleton was initially recorded over a month’s process in another garage space, but the production wasn’t right, so the next year was spent reshaping the songs when time could be found.
“That was just frustrating as an artist to sit around and wait for your record to be done, knowing you’re writing these new songs and moving on,” Kivel said.
From patience and time came their newest, Kids in L.A., a natural evolvement and transition from the debut’s focus. Rather than the endless summer appeal, Kids in L.A. focuses on the abandoned winter feel of L.A., glamour coated in a little rust.
As a result of that, there’s a sort of hollowness to the tracks, intermittently filled by Kivel’s quicker vocal melodies and some brush of electric guitar, but an overall more stark feeling. It still maintains the same spirit of Kisses—pop structures mixed with late ‘80s freestyle (head nod to Lisa Lisa and Debbie Deb)—but rather than feeling that juxtaposition of nightlife energy and winding down all at once, it comes off more as cruising through deserted beaches with knocked over umbrellas, portraying “that off-season thought, ” Kivel said.
Most of the band’s attention went into the production of the record, but lyrically the album has some themed focus as well. As mentioned earlier, the intention is to highlight the L.A. setting and history, but the songs also follow the path of a few high school kids, all fictionalized.
“The characters aren’t based in any reality—although, I mean they’re just caricatures of people and events that have taken place in my life, there’s not any one thing I can go, ‘OK, this happened to me in 11th grade,” Kivel said.
As for upcoming plans, the two will be zig-zagging through the continents on tour, starting with a West Coast string of dates, heading to New York for L Magazine’s Northside Festival, then heading overseas to the UK and Japan. Keep an eye out, and of course, an ear as well.
An infamous problem among artists–musicians specifically–is a lack of motivation. Sure, they love to play, but that’s the just tip of the iceberg when it comes to the workload of a musician, and not many are willing to put in the effort. There’s show-booking, recording, media management and of course, practicing. That’s what makes ambitious artists like Quinn Hedges so celebrated. Not only is Hedges a hard-worker, he’s well mannered. During Submerge’s interview with the singer/songwriter, he was attentive and focused, modest about his music and generous with his pleases and thank yous. He seems generally grounded about being a musician–another rarity. Maybe that’s because music was always something that’s been second nature for him.
“Ever since I’ve started gigging, I’ve wanted more. I’ve wanted to get better. I’ve wanted to be playing all the time,” Hedges said.
Hedges grew up in a musical environment and picked up the guitar by the time he was 15. After his father was relocated by Hewlett-Packard to the West Coast, Hedges left his home in Delaware and settled into Northern California. Shortly after, Hedges went to Sonoma State for a degree in Music. During his time in the Music Department he learned the basis for his work ethic. Hedges reflected on the head of the jazz department saying that if someone wants something bad enough, they’ll get it.
“To hear someone like that, so overly critical, say something like that, it kind of stuck in my brain,” Hedges said.
Clearly that advice was taken to heart, because Hedges has been persistently working on music since. After graduation, he began slowly working his way into the Sacramento music scene, starting with small acoustic shows at wineries throughout the area. Finding a steady community through these shows proved to be a bit of a challenge.
“It was a struggle trying to find a place that would regularly hire you,” Hedges said. “I’ve paid my dues in the last seven or eight years, and I’m seeing the pay-off now where places are booking me as a regular.”
While it’s been a bit difficult, Hedges’ hard work over the last several years has finally begun to show. He has worked his mailing list up to nearly 1,000 people and has started to be really embraced by his community of listeners. His consistent effort has also helped him to develop strong relationships with venues throughout the Sacramento area. He now regularly plays happy hours and night time residencies at well-known establishments such as The Torch Club, Pizza Rock, Hyatt Regency and Davis’ Bistro 33.
“It’s cool because if someone catches me playing at The Torch Club, they’ll come back to The Torch Club,” Hedges said. “I’m starting to see more familiar faces at those venues where they saw me first.”
From these types of interactions and regular performances, Hedges has started to build a solid fan base, which helps him to feel like his persistence has been worthwhile.
“Although it’s been a lot of hard work, it’s starting to pay off with the following,” Hedges said.
These shows are normally solo performances, but Hedges plays with a full band as well, consisting of bassist Jamison Aguirre and drummer John Yessen (also a former member of Hedges’ previous band, Fair Trade).
The group plays officially under the name The Quinn Hedges Band, and over the last three years the trio has taken Hedges’ sound and accessorized it, going from more acoustic skeletons to full-bodied bluesy rock songs. Bassist Aguirre provides a strong underbelly while drummer Yessen keeps a steady pulse that tends to brighten the mood of the songs. Playing solo can tend to be more limited in terms of sound experimentation, but having that group support has given Hedges a chance to try out new ideas and sometimes play a more aggressive style.
“Playing with a band allows me to let loose on the electric,” Hedges said.
The result is their upcoming release, Step Outside. While Hedges is still the solo songwriter, the album is a group effort and marks Hedges’ first full-band release. The individual tracks are versatile, going from more jam-based energetic numbers like “Crazy” to scaled-down, nearly ballad-esque tunes like the title track. The trio’s rootsy feel provides a solid base for Hedges breathy, easy listening vocals, similar in sound to other smooth vocalists like John Mayer. The band manages to mix a sensual intimate feel (thanks in large part to Hedges’ voice) while keeping things fun and lively with mid-song jam sessions. Those interludes also show that this is a tight-functioning band working as one unit, which Hedges hopes comes across to listeners.
“It’s been a long time coming for the band, it shows that these aren’t just a bunch of songs thrown together,” Hedges said. “It also shows a maturity in my songwriting from my previous album.”
Hedges has been releasing material since 2006. This newest album (his third release) gives fans a chance to see Hedges step away from his softer, solo-based style and play more rock-based crowd pleasers. Maybe even a little more cheery.
“My last album was solo acoustic. It was fairly dark, but this has some more upbeat stuff,” Hedges said.
Lyrically, the album follows suit with Hedges’ previous work and focuses on his own experiences, varying from individual relationships to larger universal curiosity.
“There are a couple songs just reflecting on life, there are definitely a bunch of songs about women,” Hedges said. “I kind of tend to write from a personal standpoint.”
His vulnerability is highlighted on songs like “Feel This Way,” which reflects Hedges’ personal questions, complemented by bluesy instrumentation with a strong interludes of electric licks and splashes of cymbals that help the song maintain an intimate feel.
The album is not only aided by the help of a band, but family as well. Hedges’ father, Bernie Hedges (who plays in Sacramento-based The Blues Hounds) plays pedal steel on the title track. Hedges’ sister Hilary Hedges (who plays in the cover band, The Hits) also added to the record, along with drummer Yessen’s father, John W. Yessen.
After the release party on Aug. 15, 2012 at Harlow’s, Hedges plans to continue playing consistently around Northern California, keeping up with his current residencies and focusing on getting the album to a wider audience. Hedges even has additional material that could lead to “possibly another album on the horizon,” Hedges said.
Bottom line is, Hedges will keep moving forward.
“Just pushing as hard as I can,” Hedges said.
Quinn Hedges is true to his word with shows lined up in various venues around the Sacramento area throughout August and beyond. His CD release show, however, should not be missed. You can catch Hedges and his band at Harlow’s on Aug. 15, 2012. Go to http://harlows.com/ for more info. Davis music lovers can also see him on Aug. 17, 2012 as part of his residency at Bistro 33. He’ll be back in Sacramento at Torch Club on Aug. 21, 2012.
