Gonna jump right in!
Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing a new Americana Roots band, Hotels & Highways, for a local publication, VC Reporter, check it out!
You’ll get some good background info on the band, and a glimpse at the interview.
But only here, at DDM, will you get the complete, uncut version of my exchange with Erin “Syd” Sidney. And the pictures from their cd release show at Zoey’s Cafe in Ventura last Thursday. Check it!!
DDM: So this tour, it’s like you are hitting places in between all of your homes. How did you all meet, given you live in really different places?
H&H: Ok — so Patrick grew up in Detroit and played music there – after college he was in a successful band called the Patrick Thomas Theory, played all over the midwest. At the same time that he was doing that I was getting a pretty healthy national touring solo singer/songwriter career going. I was based out of Boston and in about 2005 he came and played a show with me and a guy named Todd Martin at a now-defunct club in Boston. He mentioned offhand that if I needed someone to tour with, he was my guy.
I called him a few months later when I had a tour going from CA to VT. We were best friends by the grand canyon and somewhere on that tour or another that followed we wrote the song Live Now in a hotel in Ames, IA. We were staying in a lot of hotels. We were driving on a lot of highways. So…..
Lisa, in the meantime, had been called away from her career as an elementary school teacher when my dear friend Gregory Douglass had connected with her at a gig he played at Skidmore college. She could sing with him and that’s a huge deal because he’s amazing and he took her out on the road as his co-singer.
Somewhere in there she asked me to produce a record for her just as I was moving to NYC and thinking about doing the solo singer/songwriter thing less. Patrick and I had been writing a bit in New York and we were doing this semi-annual gatherings called the Who’s That Pack where us a few other kind of notorious solo singer/songwriters got together and played each other’s songs. Chad Perrone, Tim Blane, Todd Martin, Pat & I made up these comedy/party fests. (There is some genuinely weird/funny youtube stuff on that here)
Anyway, she started coming into the city from her home in CT and we were writing together. Then I introduced her to Pat and the three of us wrote together for her record — and it was great.
SO basically. You take all of those experiences and you put them in our back pockets. Life goes on and this past fall I had a string of college dates booked to anchor a tour. I was not interested in going out and playing them alone and doing my solo material. I was over it. And, further, I’d had an incredibly shitty summer with my step mother dying really terribly from cancer. Pat arranged to borrow a friend’s cabin on a lake in New York, we invited Lisa, I flew in, and the whole thing began. We really just went there intending to write in the spirit of the Hotels & Highways stuff we had done before, knowing that a performance collaboration could be as fun as the who’s that pack and that writing together was something we enjoyed.
DDM: You’ve obviously spent a great deal of time together recording the album, Lost River, but now your time on the road…is there some adjusting taking place? I know what a “road trip” for a family of five is like, and I wouldn’t want to do it again for an extended period of time like you all are doing!
H&H: Ah, well, it’s a built in part of our lives my friend. It’s funny — even my relationship with my wife, who I’ve been with for about 10 years, is built around the idea that I leave for weeks/months at a time. And sure, there’s adjusting, but really it’s the beginning and end that’s an adjustment. Once you’re out here, it’s happening, you have a choice — either make each other’s lives easy and comfy or don’t. We have really closely aligned goals desires schedules and senses of humor. So that helps a lot.
DDM: I’m listening to you now, who are you listening to as you drive across the country on tour?
H&H: Haha, this sounds a little like a pervy chat room — well, *I’m* wearing a dog collar and rainbow colored wig… 
This very second Patrick is trying to figure out one of the changes in “Fidelity” by Regina Spektor. Lisa learned it on banjo in the van between Saratoga Springs, NY and Camden, NJ and we just remembered how pretty it is when she sings it.
But otherwise, we’re listening to some standby podcasts – This American Life, RadioLab and some standby records — there’s a fellow named Joe Pisapia who we had the pleasure of visiting in Nashville and singing with. He’s just a true gem. He gave us a copy of a record he made a while ago called Watercolor. Check that out on iTunes. Guy and a girl singing. Just gorgeous. He plays with kd lang now in her band The Siss Boom Bang and was with guster for years. Anyway. Him. And Tony Rice, the classic bluegrass cat. We’re trying to get better at that bluegrass stuff. And then an awful lot of shuffle, which you can actually see by going to my last fm profile and see what I’ve been playing/listening to.
Also I posted my year end wrap up for music I’ve been liking at my blog.
DDM: Who are some of the band’s influences (probably some you mentioned above)
H&H: It really has to do with a feeling more than anything. We like feeling like we’re playing with a sort of adventurous and comfortable at the same time feeling. Like we’re following something and we don’t know where it leads but it feels really familiar too. We have had a lot of fun listening to Fleetwood Mac and various other artists a lot of fun just trying to play our instruments the way we play them and not think too hard about it.
Along with feeling, it’s sound. What happens when you just play and the tape is there to pick up what you are capable of playing, not what you could play if you were…a robot. Hahah.
DDM: Anyone at SXSW who you are all excited to see/meet?
H&H: We have some really good friends down here in the business or on the outskirts of the business. Actual, real, friends, not “biz” people — those are the folks we’re excited to see. The first night we were here though we had a fantastic and totally typical SXSW night — Devotchka in a giant theater, then this woman Hazel Dickens in a cozy room where this 90 year old woman sang her ASS off over classic bluegrass. Then over to see Young The Giant, a way sexier and groovier and spacier and more natural Killers/Coldplay. I love them and the band did too. We finished the night with our hands in the air at a Talib Kwali show.
(DDM drools here…)
Tonight was mellower — saw the strokes at a giant outdoor stage and then I caught up with an old friend named Matt Duke while Patrick saw Portugal. The Man at Stubb’s.
Tomorrow we just chiiiiilllllll out and prep ourselves mentally for our show. I’ll go for a run, Pat will go into town. Lisa will go for a walk, make some lunch. Just a normal day at home on the road.
DDM: Speaking of the tour…It seems your taste in music, and food, are delicious! You’ve got me drooling with your blog posts of tour meals! Are these friends or fans that are treating you so well? And are they competing for “best meal”?
H&H: Ha, no competition. Many of them don’t know we’re doing that. We’re just, you know, trying not to come home and get sick immediately from all the shit we’ve been ingesting. Trying to check each other before we fall off the healthy food wagon. It’s working generally very well, though today I almost made us late for a show by wandering the aisles of this insane organic grocery store and trying to pick up tons of stuff. Pat snapped me out of it.
The folks we featured are part of what we refer to as our fan-mily. I recently had someone introduce me at a party as “a guy that has been a fan of mine for a long time” and that statement just gave me the creeps. So — we blur the line a bit I guess. People are people. Whether they’re on stage or in the crowd.
DDM: Let’s talk about the album! I love it! You recorded it at a cabin in upstate New York! Where? (I have lots of family all over upstate NY) Tell us about the experience of delving into the music for 10 days straight. Does it get much better than that?
H&H: The experience was totally unlike any other, and yet drew from previous positive stuff. I had done a record in a barn in the woods of Vermont in the dead of winter a few years back. Patrick lived in his home studio and Lisa had always dreamed of a cabin recording experience. We all had. So it just came together — we set up Patrick’s home studio, we lived there. We went kayaking, running, walking. We tried to just devote every moment to nurturing creativity. We didn’t drink or dull our minds, we stayed sharp and focused, and we had fun. Every day we’d run the “tape” and play a few blues songs, covers of our own stuff, whatever, get loose, and then explore the latest idea.
After we left the house and came home from tour, Pat took the tracks back to his studio and added some pieces to the songs and started the long process of mixing.
DDM: Is the album what you hoped it would be?
H&H: Oh, beyond. Pat did such a great job mixing it. It’s a headphones record. It’s a good driving record. I mean, I’m really truly proud of this thing. None of it feels forced or contrived at all to me. It feels like a record of people making music in a room together. That’s what it is.
DDM: Any favorite songs for you from the album?
H&H: That is very difficult to answer. I like the album! I like it as a whole. “Night Song” is pretty special to us all. That was a song we had come up with, tried to record and couldn’t quite capture. It came to us in one take after a day of preparation doing other stuff, little stuff. That song is take 1 on a warm summer night with the cicadias humming away in the background. What a gift.
DDM: You funded the majority of the album through Kickstarter.com, with great success! That is good news, Not all bands/songwriters have been as successful. Tell us about how that worked for you.
H&H: When you have an album, that’s just step one of a possible….hundred…infinite! Steps. We knew in order to bring this record to life we needed:Great artwork, physical product, a decent length and size tour, and PR. So we turned to our fans, asked them for $10,000 in exchange for goods and they met our goal and exceeded it. We raised $13,000 and now I write to you from a hotel room at SXSW, one of the most prestigious festivals in the business, and we have a showcase tomorrow that is listed on the back of every program. I mean, it’s a little mindblowing. We were given a gift from our supporters to be able to get in the van and go where we were needed rather than try to chase dollar signs.
DDM: There is a big difference, I’d think, from working intimately in a beautiful cabin setting to playing gigs in different cities each night. What is like to go from one to the other?
H&H: It’s a good point. I like to call it “getting my head together” before we play. A run, the gym, meditating, just getting my shit together and remembering why we began this journey and where it began and then stepping onstage and trying to honor those core principles: Explore, Say Yes, Don’t Push.
The stages and crowds are different but we try to extract that vibe from the room.
DDM: You’ll be playing at Zoey’s Cafe, next Thursday, for a CD release show. Coming home after being gone how long?
H&H: I left town on 2/24. And it’s home for the blink of an eye, the next night we’re in San Fran and then up the coast and over through Chicago back to the northeast for the big release shows.
DDM: This will be your first “hometown” show with the group?
H&H: Yes!
DDM: Syd, how long have you lived in Ventura? How has the music community in the Ventura area inspired you?
H&H: 3 years, about. I came here nearly every summer through college. Polly and Steve and what they’re doing at Zoey’s as well as all the touring musicians and friends I have that come through are great. Even greater is that I can play in a band like The Pullmen with former members of Shim Come Quick and the MIssing 23rd and get this instant entry into a scene I never would have seen if I didn’t play music. To be in a band with guys that grew up surfing every day, that understand California culture, that understand PUNK ROCK culture and it’s significance, that’s huge for me, it’s such an education. Not to mention a blast.
In it’s own way, it’s a vibrant scene. Not too big, not too small, and it’s growing. I have high hopes for a place like Ventura and you know, I’ll always be a Vermont kid at heart, but I miss it right now! I miss that weird little quirky sweet town. It’s got a real character. It’s a damn shame that the character in most towns gets completely overrun by the soulless mall culture that infects the US like a cancer, but Ventura is putting up a decent fight trying to keep it’s soul. As a guy from the only state without a McDonald’s in the state capital, I respect that 100%.
DDM: What is your connection with Zoey’s?
H&H: Steve and Polly are like family to me. And to so many other musicians around here. I worked there this past summer, got to meet lots of musicians from the area and touring through. Doing sound there is a lot of fun AND really tough. It gave me a whole new level of respect for the guy on the other side of the board. Anyway, for years and years I’ve been coming through and playing there. Now that they’ve moved I feel like the possibilities for what the venue can be have expanded and they’re starting to do more and will expand with the space.
DDM: After the tour, do the three of you go back to your “previous lives”? Are there any plans to continue with more recordings?
H&H: I’m as committed to this band as I ever was to my solo career and I can speak for the band when I say they are too. When I get back I plan to hit the phones and the airwaves putting the plans together for the next steps. We’ll be conference calling, group emailing. It’s amazing, having three band leaders working simultaneously — we get a LOT of shit done and we keep each other honest. We’ll be ready for more! We’re already planning more touring, and we’ve written some songs on the road. This is far from over. That being said — I’m Erin “Syd” Sidney, Pat is Patrick Thomas and Lisa is Lisa Piccirillo — we always have that forum for creative expression if it demands to be put into a different context. But Hotels & Highways is a band, no matter where we are.
Pictures from Thursday night’s cd release show
Zoey’s Cafe, Ventura CA
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