“What I could compare it to the most is like the the reverence and the specificity of culture that exists in Rhode Island from an outsider’s perspective — it’s similar to Texas,” says guitarist, singer and songwriter Ian O’Neil, who moved to RI from Western Massachusetts when he was 21 to join Deer Tick. “I think like the biggest state and smallest state mentality is really not that different. I married into this state, my wife’s from here and I have a ton of local friends and everything like that. But as an outsider especially, you can kind of get wooed into the culture of Rhode Island. That is super strong.”

The band, formed more than 20 years ago, will release “Coin-O-Matic” on June 5 on ATO Records, the same day it will start a three-night stand at Ocean Mist in South Kingston, RI. On June 9 it will hit Warsaw in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and will return to Newport Folk on July 24.

We recently connected with McCauley and O’Neil over Zoom to talk about “Coin-O-Matic,” how their religious upbringing impacted them, how a heavy metal song snuck onto the record and how New York City played a role in Deer Tick’s early growth.

How have Rhode Islanders who have heard the album reacted?

McCauley: A lot of people have kind of gotten a kick out of it. I guess if you’re from here, the record just feels that way. The record feels like it’s from here. And I feel like we didn’t really go over the top with Easter eggs and whatnot, but if you know, you know.

O’Neil: It’s funny. We have a friend who painted a sign for us. He’s a sign painter around town in Providence that we’re going to bring out on tour with us. It’s really beautiful. And he hasn’t even heard the record, but he was so charmed by us putting that building on the album cover because he knows the history of the sign painting and everything like that on Federal Hill from that era. So I think just if you’re from Providence specifically, but if you’re from Rhode Island in general, it seems like people are charmed by it.

That said, they could just be fictional characters to someone like me who doesn’t know anything about Rhode Island, so the universal appeal is there too.

McCauley: A lot of, or all of, my characters really on the record are kind of amalgamations.

O’Neil: Archetypes.

McCauley: It’s stuff that people pick up on, though. Like my sisters both independently asked me, “Wait, is ‘Dog Years’ about Papa Billy?”

And is it?

McCauley: Yeah. It’s partially inspired by him.

The song “Mary Singletary” deals with Catholic repression. Were you guys raised Catholic? 

O’Neil: I went to Catholic school up until I demanded I didn’t anymore, which was like fourth grade or something like that. I don’t know about for John, but definitely at that age, weekly church. And then I think as my parents’ life rolled on, they became more agnostic, especially as their parents passed away. I did my confirmation just to please my elderly grandparents.

McCauley: That’s about as far as I got too, confirmation. I went to Catholic school. I was an altar boy. I really bought into the whole thing. And I think it really stunted my growth emotionally for a while. I had a lot of catching up to do when I realized this wasn’t for me anymore.

The video is really fun, with the band dressed in black metal corpse paint. Who came up with that idea?

McCauley: That was our director, Colin Moore, who is a childhood friend of Ian. So maybe Ian could speak on this.

O’Neil: Colin grew up the same way we did, for sure. We went to the same Catholic school. But he’s an old friend. He did our old music videos for “Main Street” and “The Dream’s In the Ditch.”

He’s an art school kid and now he takes opportunities when he can, when he’s given some creative freedom, to try to challenge the conventions of our audience. And I think he always knows that we’re kind of game for that kind of thing because we’re not so keen on doing the most expected thing with the artistic aspect of a music video or something like that.

It seemed to him like he just loves playing with the idea of this type of music and this perception of the band, then flipping it on its head with something as outrageous as wearing black metal face paint. I think it also probably related to the lyrical content a lot. So that kind of repression the character is feeling in that song almost feels like symbolism by using this kind of imagery in a weird way.

I don’t want to get in his head too much, but knowing where he comes from and knowing his love for that culture, I think he just saw a ripe opportunity to use it in a metaphorical way.

And speaking of heavy metal, “Eyelid” is a metal song, lyrically. I know Dennis wrote that one but I wanted to ask about it.

McCauley: Dennis really had to make a case for that one, to me anyway, because I didn’t really see how it fit. He wrote it years before we started putting this project together. But he insisted in his way that it fit the assignment I gave to Ian and Dennis, which was: we’re writing Rhode Island songs. If nothing else, it’s a refreshing moment on the second side of the album where it kind of comes out of nowhere. The song has grown on me quite a bit. I will admit that when Dennis first wanted to put it on the record, I was pretty against the idea.

You’ll be in New York soon to play at Warsaw in Brooklyn. What role has the city played in Deer Tick’s career?

McCauley: I think without New York and without geographically being so close to New York, our career could have started in a very different way or perhaps not started at all. Just to be able to hop in the car and be in New York in under four hours was great for a band like us when we were starting out. That’s where we got our first real record deal, and I met a lot of people we ended up working with for years. It is the place where things happen on the East Coast for music. Now I guess you could be from anywhere and become famous on social media, but when you had to get out in front of people and play, there was no better place to do it than New York. We were lucky enough to be close to that.

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“Paul is a cool motherfucker and hopefully some of his style and ease have rubbed off on me over these years since I met him back in 1980,” Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan, who played with Solger in The Fartz and Ten Minute Warning, says in an email.

McKagan and Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard have helped the guitarist, who is credited as starting the city’s first hardcore band, complete his first solo album, “20 Years MIA.”

Released earlier this month on Gossard’s Loosegroove Records, the album is an aggressive, cohesive blast of crunchy alternative/punk rock shot through with the attitude that has informed the entirety of Solger’s career. He worked with seven different co-writers and lead singers, but “20 Years MIA” truly sounds like an album, not just a collection of songs. The cohesion could be a product of how the LP began — it’s the culmination of the work Solger started with Robb Clark, the Seattle punk singer who died in 2023.

“Robb and I had a set thing right when we started [working on the songs for ’20 Years MIA’], some basic rules,” Solger says. “We couldn’t go back and use stuff from previous bands. We weren’t going to try to reinvent the wheel. I’ve kind of been notorious for being in a number of bands that were ahead of the curve in a way. When that happens, you usually don’t get what you deserve until whatever you were doing happens five years later. It’s a curse and it’s kind of cool. And we were just trying to make music that we like, the albums we liked when we were young and got us excited.  If we could kind of recreate just like even a tiny bit of that, then I think we both felt like we would have succeeded.”

McKagan sings lead and plays bass on the opening track and first single, “New American,” and appears in the music video. He also plays guitar on two other tracks. The album was recorded at Gossard’s studio, and it was produced by Solger, Gossard and Josh Evans, whose credits include the Atmos remixes of Pearl Jam albums, such as the classics “Ten” and “Vs.”

Gossard also penned the song “Twitch” with Solger.

“He wrote the lyrics, and that was about Robb,” Solger says. “There are a few songs about him. That’s why it’s dedicated to him.”

Solger’s relationship with Gossard is a long one. He wrote “Rehab Doll,” the title track of the only album released by Green River (1988), Gossard and Jeff Ament’s pre-Pearl Jam band. Later, Solger says, Gossard helped him with his band The Passengers in the early ’90s and footed the bill for the recordings.

“We always kind of had this mutual respect for each other. And I remember going over to his parents’ house and teaching him songs from Goats Head Soup and shit like that,” he adds, referring to the Rolling Stones’ 1973 album.

“I started going to see underground shows at clubs in ’84,” Gossard says in an email. “Witnessing Paul in bands like the Fags and 10 Minute Warning was a revelation. He was pure effortless cool. Sneaky, snaky riffs, noise, perfect mistakes, Johnny Thunders slides. He was the James Dean of Seattle rock. Paul played fast and slow and psychedelic. He did it all. I was in love.”

The two didn’t speak to each other for a year at one point, Solger says, because he was under the impression that he wasn’t credited for “Rehab Doll.” One night they sat next to each other at a bar and Solger brought up the perceived slight. “He pulls the album out of the DJ booth. I was credited. Some asshole had told me I wasn’t.”

Solger’s move to Yakima, Wash., to take care of his elderly parents, and his own stomach cancer diagnosis and recovery kept him away from the Seattle scene and making music.

Earlier, when grunge became a worldwide phenomenon, “I didn’t pay much attention to it. I just got clean and sober, so I was fine. I kind of set the guitar down for about nine months.”

When heard his name mentioned as a forefather of the genre, “I didn’t like it at first, because I didn’t see [my influence] or hear it, but after a while, I mellowed to  it. If people are gonna say that I had something to do with the blueprint, I’ll run with it, because somebody else will [otherwise].”

Much of the talk about Solger’s influence on grunge is due to 10 Minute Warning, the group he and McKagan formed in 1982 after the dissolution of The Fartz. With the benefit of hindsight, he can see how the band, known for slowing the tempos of punk rock, set the stage for the multi-platinum bands that would emerge from the Emerald City in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

Looking at old photos of a 10 Minute Warning gig, he saw in the audience Kim Thayil from Soundgarden and the members of Mudhoney.

“Drummers were all watching Greg [Gilmore] and guitarists were checking out me and Duff,” Solger says. “If that inspired them to do something that was successful and made people happy, then I got to be happy about it.  I may have had a bad, not so cheerful [attitude] about it at one point, but I don’t think I was very cheerful about my whole life at that point. So as I got older, I appreciated it.”

At peace with his musical past, Solger is energized about the present and future. There will not be another long layoff until he makes music again, he says, and without hesitation calls “20 Years MIA” “the best thing I’ve done.”

“I like the things I’ve done. But there’s something special about this one,” he says. “It hadn’t dawned on me to ever [make a solo album]. I have to lose one of my best friends for that to happen. I don’t know what to think about it. I don’t know about people in the afterlife or however that goes. But there sure seems to be some other hand at work in this. Things happened that were just too coincidentally perfect, you know? I gotta wonder sometimes.”

The post PAUL SOLGER, WITH HELP FROM STONE GOSSARD AND DUFF McKAGAN, HAS MADE ‘THE BEST THING I’VE DONE’ appeared first on Highway 81 Revisited.

It helps, of course, that the album played from top to bottom at the early-start Mothers Day concert was a standout, the self-titled LP released 15 springs ago on Sub Pop. The stories the band members told between tunes were engaging and sometimes humorous in a way that engaged both die-hard and casual fans.

The brief album opener “Cats and Dogs” works brilliantly as a set opener too, with The H&H’s trademark harmonies deployed on the poignant line “My roots have grown but I don’t know where they are.”

Following the jaunty, piano-driven “Coeur d’Alene” and “Ghosts,” with its “ba da ba da” (the band likes its la las and whatnot), singer-guitarist Jonathan Russell, clad in harem pants and a sleeveless Metallica “And Justice For All” T-shirt, was the first musician to tell a story: He moved from Virginia to Seattle without much of a plan, got a job busing tables, went for drinks with coworkers, got lost in the city and spent seven hours walking home.

“So anyways a song came out of it, or at least the makings of a song came out of it,” he said. Pianist Kenny Hensley worked through the tune at the Seattle Public Library, a makeshift rehearsal spot, and “he took this next song to the way you know it and love it.” Anyone following the album sequence by memory or on their phone knew he was talking about “Down In The Valley,” which traded the stomp of the earlier tracks for subtlety.

RELATED: THE HEAD & THE HEART INTERVIEW

Drummer Tyler Williams was the next to take the mic, sharing that “Down In The Valley” was the first song he heard from the band, when Russell, with whom he grew up in Richmond, sent him a demo from Seattle. Williams’ girlfriend, now his wife, told him: “You gotta move out there.” He did, and they started the band. “Those roads led us to Matthew Gervais,” he said, handing off the narrative to the band’s outgoing co-frontman.

The post THE HEAD & THE HEART EXTOL THE ‘GLORY OF MUSIC’ IN BROOKLYN MATINEE appeared first on Highway 81 Revisited.

“I played a show in Charlotte and I opened with ‘Medulla Burning Down,’ the first song on the album,” Augustine recalls in a recent phone interview. “I usually play with my eyes closed, and I opened my eyes and looked at everyone in the room, and like they were completely frozen in time. Like they didn’t even applaud. They were just staring, sitting there staring at me, and I thought maybe I was in the matrix and finally glitched, you know? I was like punched out and I waited a good 10 seconds and there was no response. It was just people staring with their mouths open. And then I kicked in to ‘Halfway to Harlem,’ and then they kind of realized that they had not [responded]. And then there was this big roar and they all start laughing and stuff, because we all kind of had that moment together. That was the first time that’s ever happened.”

The moment was notable but not out of character for people who have heard these songs live.

“It’s been wonderful. It’s great. I don’t think they’ve heard this music before, and I don’t think they’ve ever even heard who I am before. I’m kind of relying on the local support right now more than anything. And it’s been awesome. I mean, everywhere I play, they’re kind of  stunned. People come up to me and you can tell they’ve been crying or they want a hug.”

Augustine wrote most of the songs after he returned home to care for his sick mother and grandmother. His mom, a devout Catholic but one who let Augustine’s death metal band rehearse in the basement, got caught in the web of the US health insurance crisis.

“There’s kind of a thread there with how our health care system works, especially in ‘Philadelphia Lights,’ which kind of touches on that a little bit. There were moments where she was being well taken care of. There were moments where she got her insurance, and there was a fundraiser at the Knights of Columbus halls to pay her hospital bills.”

Augustine spoke fondly of the way his mom was initially cared for in Philadelphia, where she was being treated.

“She was being flown down to a cancer center there for some time, and her insurance company basically dropped her. She really enjoyed how she was treated down there in Philly. They’d pick her up in a limo at the hospital or at the airport, and they’d drive her to her treatments and they’d have classical pianists inside the building waiting for the patients. It was kind of a pleasant experience.”

Growing up in tiny Lincolnville, Maine, Christianity was everywhere. “There’s one street they call the highway to heaven. And it’s just church and church and church and church, and it’s like evangelical churches and Pentecostal churches. And those are really strict. So we always saw those kids and felt sorry for them because they weren’t allowed to listen to a Metallica record. They kind of had a sheltered life. So in some way, I did identify with being Catholic growing up because I was proud that we were able to live and be ourselves.”

A dark side emerged, however, when an elderly priest — “he was kind of like our pal and our youth adviser” — “was preying on children the entire time,” Augustine says. “So that was like a real head fuck.”

Augustine, who now calls vocal stylists like Frank Sinatra, Ben E King and Antony as some of his favorites, says: “I was a hardcore punk metal kid growing up. I used to play CBGB’s a lot and around the corner from there on Bowery, it was a record store and it had all these really obscure, cool things in there. I started to discover really old Delta blues music, and I started to learn to cover Robert Johnson songs. That’s when I learned that I could actually sing, sing to a tune.”

Another important voice on “I Love You Forever” is the pedal steel guitar, played by Hamilton Belk, which at turns envelops, supports or interacts with Augustine’s singing.

“Once you get in the room with pedal steel guitar, you never want to be in a room without a pedal steel,” he says. “They’re  just beautiful. And so I wanted something that would complement the vocal. like a kind of a call and response, but something that was also kind of a soaring kind of sound, because there’s a lot of sustain and I sing with a lot of sustain. I guess I don’t think it’s an angelic voice, but a lot of people say stuff like that. So I feel like that pedal steel helped quite a bit. And also because I’m from a very rural conservative place, and for some reason, that kind of pedal steel vibe fits for a lot of the songs, which are stories coming out of that place. So it kind of gives a bit of a backdrop to the subject content off like rural, conservative, white America, MAGA America or whatever.”

The album is Augustine’s first in more than a decade, following the period when he was caring for his mother and dealing with his own issues.

“A lot of the big hiatuses I took is because of health struggles, and I never knew what it was. I just felt like I was a total fuck-up, you know? Especially after losing mom, I built a little tiny house somewhere and I just disappeared off the face of the earth for a long time. I didn’t know why. It seemed like everyone else was handling the grief better than I was, and I didn’t really know why. And then eventually I finally went to a doctor and I was like, I think I have  ADHD or something. And they ask me a bunch of questions and said have you ever heard of bipolar disorder 2 before? I was like, yeah, sure, but that’s not me. Over time I understood it more and I learned more about it, and I’ve got to a point now where I don’t take meds for it or anything, but I’ve gotten to a point where I really like govern it quite well and manage it quite well.”

Calling music-making “a life of service,” he hopes the long gaps between records is over.

“No, I think I’ll be right at it. We actually have the next album, the bones are already recorded for it. So I’m kind of way ahead. I’m writing the third album from now and the second one’s already down. If everything goes to plan, I plan to drop an album every year.”

Jacob Augustine with Tuxi Giant and Noble Beast, Friday, May 15, 8:30 p.m., Footlights Presents at The Windjammer (552 Grandview Ave., Ridgewood, Queens), info here.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

The post JACOB AUGUSTINE TACKLES BRUTAL TRUTHS AFTER LENGTHY HIATUS appeared first on Highway 81 Revisited.

Performing with both groups on those momentous occasions was Oteil Burbridge on bass, the multi-instrumental virtuoso who got his first big break in the 1990s with the eccentric but influential Col. Bruce Hampton‘s Aquarium Rescue Unit before landing gigs with two of the most important bands in rock history.

“I realized that my karma for my mission for this life, in addition to having my prayers answered and making a lot more money than I would have made playing fusion, was to walk these bands home,” Burbridge says in a recent interview. “To give them the last half of their hourglass from 50 and Bob [Weir’s] case 60, or maybe he was a little older [when Dead & Company formed]. It was the last 17 years of the Allman Brothers. But the last 10 years of playing for Bill [Grateful Dead and Deadco drummer Kreutzmann] and Bob, that’s kind of a sacred thing.”

In addition to his bass guitar duties at Dead & Company shows, Burbridge sang lead on a handful of Garcia-Robert Hunter ballads, like “China Doll” and “Comes a Time,” as well as the more uptempo “Fire On The Mountain.”

Weir, the Dead’s rhythm guitarist and vocalist, died this January after a private battle with lung cancer.

Burbridge, who just released a duet album with Lamar Williams Jr, is touring with his band Oteil & Friends, which will play a pair of shows at Brooklyn Bowl this week. Most of his “friends” should be well-known to jam band fans: Williams on vocals; organist Melvin Seals, known for his work with the Jerry Garcia Band; keyboardist Jason Crosby (Jackson Browne, Phil Lesh); guitarists Steve Kimock (The Other Ones, Ratdog, Weir’s Campfire Band) and Tom Guarna (Blood Sweat & Tears, Branford Marsalis, Stanley Clarke); and drummer John Morgan Kimock (Mike Gordon).

Now that Burbridge has helped guide the Allmans and Deadco to their finales, the Boca Raton resident has shifted his focus to nurturing a new generation of musicians.

“I love pro wrestling,” he says. “It took me a long time to get into it. But one of the things that I love about it is that at all times, everybody in the company is all working to put one person over, and they’re going to get to be the star at that point. But you’re going to get your chance. We’re all in it to put this one person over, and that’s how it continues.”

Burbridge mentions Roots Rock Revival, the camp in the Catskills he cofounded in 2013. “You know, we had [original Allmans bassist] Berry Oakley’s grandson and [The Band drummer and singer] Levon Helm’s grandson doing double drums. So when you talk about legacy and going for it, we’re doing it literally, but also spiritually like Taz [Niederauer] and his brother Dylan that plays. Dylan is such a badass, man. So these are kids that were coming to our camp for 10 years.”

He also points out another camper, the young guitarist, singer and bandleader Lara Cwass, who he says has been coming there since she was 15. “And I got her to sit in at The Capitol Theatre. Now she’s gigging with Grahame Lesh, right?

“They have the talent. I’m just putting a spotlight on it, and then they’re running to the end zone. They’re up and at it, man. It’s so beautiful.”

It is a “pay it forward” approach borne from his formative days with Hampton in Atlanta.

“For me, that’s what the Colonel did for me. I met him when I was 24. … And then Widespread Panic and Phish and Blues Traveler put our whole band over, because they loved Aquarium Rescue Unit and took us out on the Horde tour. And then when my opportunity came for the Allman Brothers Band, that’s how they knew about me.”

Nearly 40 years later, Burbridge is allowing himself to think about his legacy in practical terms, like who is going to run Roots Rock Revival when he no longer can? “You get more conscious after you pass 50. Definitely after you pass 60, you’re like, yo, when I joined the Allman Brothers, I looked it up. I think Butch [drummer Trucks] was 52. Now I’m 61. So you get conscious of like, yo, I’m on my way out of here.”

Does he think there will be more shows for the surviving members of Deadco, minus Kreutzmann, who he said is fully retired from playing?

“I have no idea, man. I never was told that kind of stuff,” he says. “You know, we did the final tour like years before that, right? So I don’t know, man. And I have been told nothing about any future plans.”

When Burbridge walked off the stage at Golden Gate Park on Sunday, August 3, finality wasn’t on his mind, because he had already mentally laid the band to rest after the final tour in 2023.

“They made jackets and shirts and all kinds of stuff,” Burbridge says. “I still like go in the closet and I pull out final tour stuff, and I’m like … So when that happened, that was it for me, right? I was like, because I walked the Allman Brothers home, and we said, this is it. And that was it. So when I got the jacket, I got the T-shirt, it was over. And then we did more. Now Bob’s gone. Now Bill is not playing anymore. It’s just like, you know, it’s done. So if something happens in some form, great. But you know, that’s done. We are very lucky. We got 10 years. They did Grateful Dead 50 and we got another decade out of it, even with the pandemic.”

As he waxes philosophical, he reaches for a line by lyricist John Perry Barlow in the Weir-sung Dead tune “Cassidy.”

“I kind of live by that Grateful Dead line. ‘Let your life proceed by its own design.’ And now I’m living the whole thing, you know? ‘Fare thee well now/ Let your life proceed by its own design/ Nothing to tell now/ Let the words be yours, I’m done with mine.'”

The post OTEIL BURBRIDGE WITH DEADCO & ALLMAN BROTHERS: ‘MY MISSION WAS TO WALK THESE BANDS HOME’ appeared first on Highway 81 Revisited.

Burbridge, who like many in the genre got his start playing with the eccentric and esoteric Col. Bruce Hampton, went on to hold down the bassist role in the Allmans from 1997 until the band’s demise in 2014, and was a founding member of Dead & Company. Williams’s father was the bass player for the Allmans in the 1970s, as well as with Sea Level, a jazzy offshoot project. The younger Williams plays with Allmans legacy groups Trouble No More and the Allman Betts Family Revival.

A duo that seemed fated to form, Burbridge and Williams on May 1 will release their debut album, “The Offering,” which draws from the same pool that spawned their earlier work with legacy bands and beyond, but it is its own animal. With elements of trance, Gospel and Southern rock, the duo, with the help of some friends, including producer Alan Evans of the band Soulive, recorded in the Icelandic isolation of Flóki Studios.

The seed of the album was Burbridge’s loneliness while his wife was away during their first year of marriage.

“She left to live in Africa for like a year, and I was super depressed, and she was trying to learn the banjo,” he says. “And I picked up her banjo and just got on YouTube and then kind of went down the banjo rabbit hole. And I started working on these exercises to try to figure out the tuning and also playing with three fingers instead of with two, like I normally do on the bass. And so finger picking was completely new. The tuning was completely new. And I was just trying to orient my brain as to what it actually was. And when I started to see things, I kind of made up these little exercises to learn chord shapes and to learn how to play rhythms, how to play odd times. And then these things kind of turned into the beginnings of songs.”

He sent the songs to Williams. “I was like, hey, do you think you hear lyrics? Do you think you could sing over this? Like, I know it’s out of left field, right?”

Williams says: “From the beginning of hearing all of this music, I was instantly hearing lyrics before he even said something. So we were on the same page. And a buddy of mine, Victor Clark, we both heard them at the same time, and we just were enthralled with it and we just dug right into, and it just kept flowing. We didn’t rush the process. We were just kind of leisurely writing with each other, you know? And we throw it back to Oteil, and he’s like, wow, that’s great. So we’re like, OK, we’re onto something. We write another one. Send it back to Oteil again. He’s like, wow, that’s great again. And so we just kept doing that over the process of hearing the tunes. And, you know, they kept developing and this is the outcome pretty much.”

The pair met in Boca Raton, where Burbridge lives, to rehearse, but the pandemic scotched any further plans. In the meantime, Burbridge released his Jerry Garcia-Robert Hunter tribute album, “A Lovely View of Heaven.”

At the Dead Ahead festival in 2014, Burbridge’s band Oteil & Friends, featuring Williams. played one of the tunes from their back-and-forth writing sessions called “Love and War,” “and the crowd went nuts, man,” he says. He released the live version, “and people went berserk. And I was like, wait a minute. I said this is like 10 years old, you know?”

Burbridge and Williams trekked to Flóki  in Iceland, where he made “A Lovely View of Heaven,” to record what would become “The Offering.” “Love and War” made the cut.

“It’s amazing out there on this peninsula with the ocean, and it’s such a tranquil place to write in or to just produce in,” Williams says. “So you’re there locked and loaded, you know? You’re there for that specific reason, so your brain doesn’t go anywhere, but you’re ready for it. It really prepares you. You zoom right in.”

Burbridge chimes in: “When you walk out of the studio, I don’t think it’s even 50 yards maybe that you’re in the Arctic Ocean. And 60 km from there is the Arctic Circle, so you’re with Santa Claus and the elves. Like straight up. And now after being there, I think Santa Claus and the elves are all real. I don’t know about the elves and the Huldufólk and the hidden people, because we were all kind of deep with it. It’s an incredibly mystical place.”

Oteil & Friends, which features Burbridge, Williams, Melvin Seals, Jason Crosby, John Morgan Kimock and Tom Guarna, will tackle some of the songs from “The Offering” on a run of shows that includes two nights in Ardmore for the Unlimited Devotion festival (May 9 and 10) and two at Brooklyn Bowl (May 13 and 14).

“It’s going to take us a while to get to all of [songs from ‘The Offering’] because, people might not realize this, but setlists to me are all about tempos. Well, it’s all about contrast. So you gotta realize I have a bunch of my own songs from way back, going back to the Oteil and the Peacemakers Days, which is like 1998, right? Then I have Allman Brothers stuff. I’ve got Col. Bruce Hampton and The Aquarium Rescue Unit stuff. Grateful Dead stuff. Jerry Garcia Band stuff. Then I have our new stuff, stuff from my album that I did before. Then I gotta do some ‘Lovely View of Heaven,’ but I can cover that. If I do some of the ballads from ‘Lovely View of Heaven,’ I’ve covered Grateful Dead, right? We also want to give the fans more. You gotta give the fans what they want, man.”

For many who come to see Oteil & Friends, that means Dead songs, “and I love it,” he says. “I never get tired of Allman Brothers tunes. I never get tired of Grateful Dead tunes. Somehow they wrote all this timeless stuff as very, very young men. My voice works better for singing Garcia-Hunter stuff than even my own songs. That’s why I got Lamar. Lamar sings my stuff better than me. That’s why he’s here.”

The post OTEIL BURBRIDGE AND LAMAR WILLIAMS JR: FROM THE ISOLATION OF ICELAND COMES THE COMMUNION OF ‘THE OFFERING’ appeared first on Highway 81 Revisited.

Bluegrass-flavored Americana group Railroad Earth brough its 25th anniversary tour to the FM Kirby Center in Wilkes Barre on April 23.

The New Jersey band has come a long away from its early days, when it performed in rooms like the since-shuttered Murray’s Inn in Wilkes-Barre and has since sold out Red Rocks and launched its own festivals.

In 2019, the John Denver Estate tapped RRE to put music to Denver’s lyrics for the EP “Railroad Earth: The John Denver Letters.” NPR said of the band: “Well-versed in rambling around, as you might expect from a band named after a Jack Kerouac poem, the New Jersey-built jam-grass engine Railroad Earth has let no moss grow under its rustic wheels.”

RRE’s upcoming shows include an engagement at Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock on Sunday, May 10.

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“There’s a lot more progressiveness,” he says. “We’ve sort of moved the goalposts of what Venom can do. There’s a lot of anthemic songs on it. There’s a lot of epic songs on. There’s sort of different avenues of songwriting on this album. There’s a lot more ambient sort of bits, like the spooky bits are spookier, the faster bits are faster. I think we’ve sort of unleashed what we can do as songwriters.”

Founded in Newcastle, UK, Venom burst onto the scene with its debut album “Welcome To Hell” in 1981 and the following year released “Black Metal,” which gave the genre its name and ratcheted up the Satanic content that was the bane of ’80s parents and churchgoers the world over. It underwent a series of lineup changes before settling on the current configuration of Cronos (bass and vocals), Rage and Danny “Dante” Needham (drums).

“Into Oblivion” was only announced in March, along with the first single, “Lay Down Your Soul,” before the second one, “Kicked Outta Hell,” came out in mid-April. It will be less than two months between the announcement and the full album release on May 1, but the LP has been a long time coming. “Storm the Gates” was released seven and a half years ago, before COVID shut down the music industry.

Additionally, Rage says, “Round about the end of the recording of that, Dante actually ended up having to go and get spinal surgery. So we ended up getting a young gentleman called The Jackal in to fill in and do some gigs that year. So we sort of didn’t get enough time to maybe change things, because obviously [Dante] was incapacitated on the drums.”

With Dante back in fighting shape, the trio was able to experiment on the new album, both sonically and lyrically. For example, on “Nevermore,” the work of Edgar Allan Poe is explored.

“Cronos has been trying for quite a while to try and merge that in without it sounding cheesy and a little bit predictable,” says Rage. “And ‘Legend,’ that song’s about a legendary tale up here in the northeast of England where these two giants who were brothers used to battle each other on the River Tyne. So we’re trying to just expand songwriting, expand lyrics, expand what we can do as players. So it’s a bit night and day really.”

Rage adds with a laugh: “I wrote more songs on this album than I did on the last one. So personally, I obviously enjoy it better.”

On Thursday, free, pre-release listening parties will be held to celebrate “Into Oblivion,” featuring giveaways, including the chance to take home a signed set of test presses at every event. New York City’s heavy metal headquarters, Duff’s, in Brooklyn, will host an event at 9 p.m., while the others will be held in London, Milan, Paris, Sao Paolo and Hamburg.

Rage, who has attended similar events as a fan, including for Slayer’s “Diabolus in Musica” in 1998, says Venom will not attend any of the listening parties, saying it is more fair to not show up to any rather than just one. However, the band will sign records at an in-store event at Raven Records in Camden, London, on Saturday at 1 p.m.

Especially in the ’80s, metal bands faced pushback from religious groups for alleged Satanic content, which often was absent or barely hinted at. Venom, however, has written pro-devil, anti-God songs for decades. It’s 1984 album “At War With Satan,” whose cover is festooned with an upside-down cross, is based on a story Cronos started when he was in school, in which the dark side prevails and throws God into hell. The record was pulled from the shelves of the UK music retailer HMV.

Satanic heavy metal is less shocking today, when reality — videos of school shootings, brutal car accidents and war readily accessible online — is just as scary. But issues do crop up for Venom from time to time.

“Well, we just did a photo shoot down in London and we weren’t allowed to say what the band was called. It was in a crypt and you weren’t allowed to have blasphemy or anything like that. So the record company were like, yeah, if anybody asks what the name of the band is, just say it’s called Into Oblivion.”

The jovial metalhead takes a live and let live approach when it comes to people’s beliefs.

“There’s a lot of religious bullshit going around, you know?” he says. “I don’t believe in any of that. I’m a staunch atheist. If people want to believe in whatever, the Spaghetti Monster, to make them get through the day, [that’s fine]. But it’s when they start to press it against people, that’s the bit, you know what I mean?”

Growing up near Newcastle, Rage and his music-obsessed friends who wanted to start bands were told “oh, you can’t do that. You’ve got to go to London.”

“And then all of a sudden you had Venom, Tygers [of Pan Tang], Raven, there’s all these bands. There was a massive explosion of metal bands in the Northeast,” he says, noting they’d see Cronos drinking at the Mayfair Rock Club,  “but we were far too polite to speak to him. We used to walk past and go, ‘Hello, Cronos. Are you all right?’ And then just disappear.”

Like a lot of metalheads, Rage still wears his influences on his sleeve — and on his walls. While we chatted via Zoom, he proudly pointed to his “wall of fallen heroes”: posters of Paul Kossoff from Free and Paul “Tonka” Chapman from UFO. “And then I’ve got Rory Gallagher, Gary Moore, Slayer and all that.”

While Rage makes a living playing extreme metal, he also indulges in some surprisingly lighter fare, like the Carpenters, the former American sister and brother duo, and the Cardigans, the Swedish pop group known for the hit “Love Fool” (“They’re absolutely awesome, and the guitarist has got one of the really old Marshall amps, which is amazing.”)

Rage says Venom is working on finalizing festival dates, starting in June. Coming to North America will be a challenge, however.

“The visa problem, you know, we’ve noticed there’s a lot of bands having trouble. I think there’s another British black metal band who had to cancel some dates at the start of their tour because of visas, and I know it’s happening with you guys over that side. Anthrax had problems years ago, Forbidden just canceled their European tour. It’s becoming profitable for governments, but not for bands. It’s like nine grand for three visas.”

The guitarist says Venom’s record label, BMG, is being “very proactive” with album promotion and he hopes the band and label find a way to make a US tour feasible.

“We haven’t really played the States as much as we should have. And yeah, we’ve got a lot of fans over there, but like I’ve been saying in interviews, we’re just like vampires. We need to be invited. We can’t just come in, you know, we need someone to say you can come over the threshold, and then we’ll come in and drain your blood.”

Photo by Necrohorns

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The Hip Snacks, together only since 2022, have already released their second album, “Out On A Limb,” last week. With new songs in the mix and a show booked in NYC, we thought it would be a good time to check in with Ben Suarez, the bassist who started the group with lead singer Kara Durante, now his wife.

How would you describe this era of the band as you are transitioning from a successful regional act to a bigger national footprint?

It’s exciting! This period in our lengthy tenure as a band (three years next month!) feels full of change. We’ve taken a big leap forward bringing our music to new cities, spreading the word about who we are and what we’re about. There are more shows. New music. About a year and a half ago we started seeing people at our shows singing our lyrics even in a town we’d never been to before.

We’ve also taken on tons of new roles and responsibilities as a self-managed, independent act. Since releasing our first record, “What Lies Ahead,” Kara and I got married, bought our first house. Now, a few of the lads are getting married soon, and we just welcomed a new drummer, Dave Auerbach. He rips! Our first larger tour outside of Colorado last summer helped us realize we had an audience developing around the country that really wanted us to come play for them. Some experiences we’ve had since releasing our debut album have been surreal, and we wanted to get right back into the studio with the fresh batch of songs we’d been cooking up. Playing festivals like FloydFest, stages like Levitt Pavilion in Denver, seeing the country because of music is something I’ll never take for granted. The opportunities we’ve had over the past year are what we’ve always wanted out of careers in music.

How do you strategize about where and when to play, and with whom?

Our approach of where and when to play is still evolving, but it starts with our community. At least half of the support acts on this tour were recommended by friends currently living in those cities. They heard we were coming, or coming back, and texts started flowing in: “You gotta team up with these guys”… “You HAVE to team up with HER,” etc. We have plenty of Midwest, East Coast and Mid-Atlantic roots among our members, so we started in the markets where each of us got our start before moving to Colorado. We started the band with backyard BBQs and free shows, and we just want to take that feeling of community and getting together around the country with us. I started this band with my now-wife so that I could keep getting everyone I loved together for good times as long as we possibly could.

Where to play comes down to where we’re seeing that community grow online. Toledo and Columbus, for example, have held us down since we started, with music fans who first supported Ricky’s former touring act, Conscious Pilot, and then were so supportive of The Hip Snacks when we toured there for the first time last year. We’ll go anywhere, though! We’re hungry, and we hope our listeners all over are coming out for fresh snacks!

Finding bands to work with exposes us to so many great acts. The live music scene at the independent level is a challenge, but it’s still thriving. There will always be killer acts coming up in every city looking to team up and throw down an amazing show for a reasonable ticket price. We look for people that have that same spirit we do.

What was the band’s intention going into making “Out On A Limb”?

I wanted to tell Kara’s story. She didn’t start singing for other people until five years into our relationship. Seeing her perform with such passion and confidence on stages nationwide, you wouldn’t believe she used to freeze up if someone asked her to sing in front of them. She’s always been an amazing singer and supported my independent music dreams while I toured with previous projects. The album’s title track is about Kara making her decision to share her voice with us.

When she stepped up to the mic on a tiny island in Panama in 2018 and blew the guests away for her first-ever live performance, I knew she had this incredible side of her that should be shown. Fast forward to today and everywhere I turn her loose on an audience, she’s winning them over with the first few notes she sings.

We also had such an amazing response from “What Lies Ahead” that we couldn’t wait to get back into the studio with our producer Steve Avedis and do it all again. Seriously, without budget constraints, we would live in Colorado Sound Studios and track songs every single day.

Who writes the songs in the band?

We all do. A lot of times, one person or a pair will have an idea, work it up into a groove or come up with a hook, and then we turn it over to the band to be interpreted. For lyrics, we tend to write them in the same smaller groups, and when we turn them over to Kara, we mostly let her run with it. She and I have been together for so long that I can just suggest a theme to the song, give her the lyrics, and get out of the way. She always seems to interpret the words and how to phrase them just as I intended.

After working closely with Felipe (Cantuaria) and Ricky for the early stages of the songs on our first record, an exciting change this time around was getting to write more with Adam (Schini). He and I collaborated on “Out On A Limb” and “Can’t Without You.” We also welcomed more nearly fully written songs from Adam and Ricky.

Adam brought “Easy,” “Counting On You” and “Never Getting Back” to the band nearly fully written, and Ricky brought us “When You’re Around.”

How have the singles been received by listeners so far?

Really well! Getting messages like “This is my favorite song of the last five years!” is cool to experience. Sending those texts out to the band to let them know we’re actually hitting with people all over the world is crazy. I’ve been DM’ing with people in Portuguese in Brazil who rock hard with us (shout out to Felipe’s roots!).

How do you think the album compares to your debut album?

I’m really proud of what we accomplished. It’s more cohesive. Layered. The percussion added by our good friend and Denver legend Will Trask is just one of the many additions that took these songs to new heights.

Everyone contributed more to the whole. Our producer Steve knew how each of us operated and how to get the best out of us. It features more of our individual influences, rather than being a reflection of the collection of song ideas I had when we set out to write “What Lies Ahead”.

How would you describe your live show?

Explosive. Sweaty. In your face. We lure you into a groove, woo you with love songs, and then start blasting emphatic guitar, synth and organ solos to achieve our nightly goal: to give your hips a snack. We want you moving at our shows. Getting lost in the moment. We sure will be.

At your shows, do you build in some room to improv? Do you change setlists up?

Always! We’re all live music and music festival lifers, and we want our shows to reflect what we’ve enjoyed over the years. Fresh approaches to our catalogue each and every night, debut originals, covers with a twist. We’ve worked hard to earn our descriptor as “Jam-Adjacent,” and we love to build the moments in a song up to thundering peaks.

We are always changing setlists. We always write them, too, but if we get into a room and need to make a change, we’re not afraid to switch up on a dime.

When you met Kara, what were some musical interests you had in common?

The Motet, The Allman Brothers, Tedeschi Trucks Band, Lotus, The Bridge/Cris Jacobs, The Dead, JJ Grey.

Similarly, what drew you two to connecting with the other bandmates as they came along?

We moved to Denver to form this band. Thanks to a dear friend, Tara, who had already been living in Colorado for years, we were introduced to Felipe and our former drummer Dylan (French) early on in 2022, met Ricky (Feria) at a church gig we all had, and met Adam at the local Denver jam. We all shared similar interests and after our first show, we knew we had something special on our hands.

What are some of the more memorable moments the band has had, whether a certain show or getting to play with a certain musician you admire?

Every chance we get to perform with Maggie Rose is a treat. She and her team treat us so well. FloydFest was a beautiful experience, performing live for so many engaged music lovers. Supporting Andy Frasco to close out the ski season at Copper Mountain ’25 was a trip. Following it up with opening day at Vail supporting Blu DeTiger really had us pinching ourselves.

What are some things you’d like to see the band accomplish in the next few years?

We really want to get our music to the western side of the US, take our music to the international markets where we are getting listened to like Brazil, Italy, New Zealand and more. It’s still crazy to see just how far all over the world there are people enjoying our music. Most of all, we want to keep making the kind of music that people take to heart and enjoy in simple moments.

The Hip Snacks ‘Out On A Limb’ Tour w/ Emily Clark, The Bitter End (147 Bleecker St.), Saturday, May 2, 9 p.m. Ticket info here.

Photos by: Jessica Dnea

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“Of course, all of these songs are pulled from stories in my life that I relate to personally, but I am hoping that other people can relate to them in their life in the same way that I could relate to it in my life,” Davis says during a recent Zoom chat. “Everybody goes through obstacles in their lives. But if you think about it, at the end of the day, we’re all connected and we all have these similar struggles that that we can relate to.”

“Graceland Way,” out April 24, is an easy listen, but its sonic palette is broad — it ranges from “Junk Love,” which would be at home in a pop starlet’s catalog, with its flirty voiceovers, to “Wrong Way,” which channels Bonnie Raitt. Not surprising, considering Davis’ omnivorous musical appetite: classically trained on piano and harp, raised on ’90s artists like Fiona Apple and Vanessa Carlton and a direct line to two legendary members of the Grateful Dead.

Davis cowrote the album — music and lyrics — with her longtime partner John Lee Shannon, a member of Circles Around the Sun and Grateful Shred, two groups she has contributed to. They recorded in Glendale, Calif., at the studio of Dan Horne, a member of both bands. The mystical imagery and gentle psychedelia on the album is a product of where it was tracked.

“It definitely had an influence. Most of the songs were written and recorded at Dan’s studio in California, so it was in the air. California is magical and it’s the most beautiful state, and being surrounded by the canyons and the desert and going outside at night to take a break and hearing the coyotes howl. … And there’s an owl that lives near Dan’s house, a couple owls that were very prominent that would make their appearance quite often to say hello. Just being surrounded by all that was very inspiring.

“And that’s how we came up with the term canyon country to describe this record.”

Davis, who lives in the Hudson Valley, invited a who’s who of indie-folk for guest slots on the album, including Madison Cunningham, Neal Francis, Karly Hartzman (Wednesday) and James Felice (Felice Brothers).

She had known Cunningham for a while but hadn’t met the standout California singer and guitarist until it was time to record her parts.

“I really wanted the duet part in ‘Rose Colored Glasses’ to be a prominent, recognizable voice,” Davis says. “And so she came over to Dan’s house, and she actually came over the day she announced her album, which, of course, I had no idea that was going to happen that day. I mean, I’m a huge fan of Madison and I was just thinking, oh my God, I can’t believe she’s coming over later to sing on my song. This is crazy, right? So that was pretty cool. And she’s awesome. She’s so funny and an amazing singer. As soon as she went in the booth and started singing, me, Dan and John were like, yes, this is perfect.”

An unexpected guest is Tim Heidecker, one-half of the comedy duo Tim and Eric, who is also a musician. Davis says Heidecker, who lives in Glendale, “has been a buddy for a minute.”

“I had been posting some cryptic stories about how I’m working on the album, and Tim said, ‘Hey, I want to come over and listen to what you’re working on.’ So he did, and I didn’t really have the intention of having him play on anything, but he made a comment saying, ‘Oh, what am I going to play on your album? I gotta say that I’m on this album.’ So I said, ‘OK, if you’re serious, actually, that would be amazing.’

“I mentioned that Madison Cunningham had just come in a week prior to sing on a song, and he happened to have just met her recently and discovered her music and was a big fan. So I decided, OK, ‘Rose Colored Glasses’ is the perfect song for you to sing on, because I already had this idea that I wanted him to be in my music video as the rodeo clown and I was trying to muster up the courage to ask him about that when he was over. But once he was on the song and sang on it, it was a no-brainer.”

Another prominent musician who played a role on “Graceland Way” is the indie folkster Cass McCombs. Horne and McCombs are part of the supergroup The Skiffle Players, and Horne has produced some of McCombs’ solo material. The latter’s track on “Graceland Way,” “Mizmoon,” fits so well there that it’s hard to believe it wasn’t written by Davis and Shannon.

“When I was starting to write this record, I mentioned it would be really cool to write a song with Cass,” says Davis. “So Dan set up a hang and me and Dan and Cass and John hung out and just played some music together. We didn’t end up finishing any songs. But a week or so later, Cass sent two or three unreleased songs, demos recorded of some songs for me to choose from if I wanted to record one of them on my album, and ‘Mizmoon’ was one of them. And as soon as I heard it, I knew that was the one that that would be perfect on the album. I love it, it’s so dark and it’s cool on the harp, because you think of the harp as this beautiful instrument, beautiful, bubbly glissando, you know, fairies, but on ‘Mizmoon’ it’s really  dark and unexpected. And I’m playing in this really low register.”

“Graceland Way” will be released on Kill Rock Stars, the Pacific Northwest label known for Riot Grrl acts like Bikini Kill, as well as the beloved, late Elliott Smith. Davis says, “I totally weaseled my way in with Kill Rock Stars,” but she has a history with the label. She was invited to contribute to label insider Mary Lord’s version of the Smith tune “Some Song” for a compilation and later got a call from Chris Funk of The Decemberists to work on his Dungeons & Dragons soundtrack on Kill Rock Stars.

Davis and her band will perform at Goose’s Viva El Gonzo in Mexico on May 7 along with My Morning Jacket, Cory Wong and jam band favorites Eggy and Kitchen Dwellers. She’ll play a set in her hometown of Rochester’s Lilac Festival on May 13, then tour the west coast before hitting Johnny Brenda’s in Philadelphia on July 17 and TV Eye in Ridgewood, Queens, the next night.

The harpist first came to the attention of many listeners when she sat in with Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros in 2018, opening the door for further collaborations in the Grateful Dead universe, including as a sometime member of Phil Lesh and Friends. Since Lesh’s passing in 2024, she has also collaborated with his son Grahame. Shannon and Horne’s Circles Around the Sun has roots in the Dead world, and Grateful Shred, not surprisingly, is a band that covers the Dead.

“I never expected myself to end up in that world, but I’m sure glad I did because the fans are are so great,” Davis says. “They come out and support and they just love music. They’re just music lovers and love anything you do. I mean, once you’re in with the Grateful Dead, everyone in that community just embraces you.

“Looking back at playing with Bob and Phil literally feels like, was that a dream, you know? Because it was, in the grand scheme of life, it was a pretty short amount of time that I was involved with those guys playing with them. You know, I played with Bob in 2018, and then I think the first time I played with Phil was in 2022 maybe, but it’s just the best music ever. Grateful Dead is my favorite band. Learning that song book, learning those songs is life-changing. The music is really deep and I’m happy to be a part of that world.”

Photo by Bobbi Rich  

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