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The Lone Bellow WSG/ Robert Ellis
The Lone Bellow:
Zach Williams, the Lone Bellow's lead singer and principal songwriter, can pinpoint just about exactly when the Brooklyn-based group serendipitously willed itself into being. It was around 9 a.m. one morning in 2010, at Dizzy's Diner in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where the Lone Bellows guitarist and Williams' old friend Brian Elmquist was working a shift. Williams, up to then performing as a solo artist, needed a place to try out some new songs; for a scuffling artist, the diner was as good as any rehearsal space. He asked fellow singer Kanene Pipkin, just returned to New York City from living in Beijing, to meet them at the diner and the trio did more than merely jam. With the beginnings of a repertoire and an already strong communal spirit, that fateful morning they became the Lone Bellow. As Williams recalls, "Three songs in I realized I should quit what I'm doing and just make music with these people."
And that's what he did. The trio's self-titled debut disc is exuberant in its playing, welcoming in its attitude. Though the lyrics have a melancholic undercurrent, the tracks are more often rave-ups than ruminations, with swelling three-part harmonies and rousing group-sung choruses, especially on the electric guitar-driven "The One You Should've Let Go" and "Green Eyes and A Heart of Gold," a we-will-survive anthem that could be about a family or a band. Indeed, there is a strong familial feel to The Lone Bellow, a recurring theme of inclusiveness.
That sentiment lies at the heart of the album and Williams' own career to date. The native Georgian first came to songwriting via near tragedy. While still living down south, Williams' young wife was catastrophically injured in a horseback riding accident. Physicians initially told Williams that, at best, his wife would leave the hospital a paraplegic. But doctors at the pioneering Shepard Center in Atlanta thought otherwise and after months of rehab there she ultimately regained the ability to walk. Throughout the ordeal, Williams had been scribbling his thoughts into a journal; good friend Caleb Clardy, co-writer of "Teach Me To Know," suggested he turn his writing into songs. The couple's friends had rallied around them, practically living in the hospital waiting room with Williams, organically becoming the support group he needed. Williams admits, "That was the first time I really experienced somebody trying their best to carry someone else's burden. It was very moving to me. I was going to classes on how to bathe and feed my wife, and I was trying to process all the fear and anger and the numbness. I started reading my friends these journal entries. I was writing in a kind of rhyming form because it helped to keep my mind focused. Caleb said, these are songs, man, you need to learn how to play the guitar and sing at he same time."
Having experienced something close to a miracle, a revitalized Williams and his wife decided to head to New York City and pursue their creative paths in earnest. Several of their friends, equally motivated, chose to follow, and they reformed a tightly knit community in Brooklyn, where everyone settled Williams initially worked as a solo artist, backed at times by a hired band. Two years ago, following a soul-searching trip he'd taken with his wife, Williams re-emerged with a stack of deeply personal songs -- tender but frank tales of romantic rupture and hard-fought redemption -- rooted in the country, folk and gospel of his Southern youth, and that's the material he brought to the diner.
After a warm-up gig at Brooklyn's Roots Café, Williams got a call from The Civil Wars, the Grammy Award Winning duo that he'd befriended while they were playing at the Lower East Side's Rockwood Music Hall. They asked if he and his new cohorts would open for them in Philadelphia: "We rehearsed for three days straight to try and get our act together and went to Philly and played our first real show as a group. It was so life giving, everything that everyone was playing had the overarching values of honesty, friendship and vulnerability, I felt like we really connected with this group of people in Philadelphia who'd never heard of us before."
Willams met with Civil Wars producer Charlie Peacock when the Lone Bellow played the Bowery Ballroom and took him to the Rockwood, the modest but well-regarded two-room venue that Williams had long considered his musical home: "When Charlie came up, I said, let's walk around the block. I want to show you the venue. The owner, Ken Rockwood, was there and they just hit it off. Charlie was walking around, snapping his fingers close to walls, looking at the glass windows in front of the large room, and he said, 'You should make your record here'. Ken gave us the room for three days and three nights. We lived there. Our eight-piece band recorded twelve songs there and Charlie magically made them something worth listening to. I will never forget that experience."
Peacock captured the spirit and the sound of these individuals, both at their most confident and their most vulnerable. Their recording of "Teach Me To Know," an infectious folk/gospel sing-along, was the by-product of some spontaneous late-night carousing, according to Williams: "We were ten songs in, I was exhausted, my vocals were completely gone, it was like one a.m and it started pouring down rain. Our piano player Brian ran outside and lied down on the sidewalk. So we all ran outside. Two of the band members started dancing in the rain and the rest of us started running around Allen Street with our shirts off. It was a beautiful moment. And while we were out there being dumb, Charlie set up the mics completely differently. When we came back inside, soaking wet from the rain, he said, we're recording 'Teach Me to Know' right now. And we laid it down. And that was the way it was making this record. It was all about capturing moments. We didn't play to a click; we were just in it. It was absolutely wonderful. I felt like the city just soaked through the windows into the recording."
Afterwards, Williams, Kanene Pipkin and Elmquist joined Peacock down in Nashville for overdubs and fixes with some additional players at his studio, the Art House an abandoned old church he had retrofitted on a small piece of land and that location proved to be as well-suited to the band's sensibility as the Rockwood. The results of their efforts, the Lone Bellow's debut, are earnest, inspiring and fun. Everyone listening and undoubtedly singing and stomping along will surely feel like part of the family too.
Robert Ellis:
ROBERT ELLIS, The Musician's Biography
The Lights From The Chemical Plant
"I want this record to be more about the Paul Simons and the Randy
Newmans and the other half of my upbringing,
which is very much rooted in pop." Ellis recently told Rolling Stone
Robert Ellis is the kind of songwriter who only comes along once in a great
while. With his first two albums, a promise was made. With his new
record, The Lights from the Chemical Plant, that promise has been delivered
and fully realized. The music, like the artist, refuses to accept the confines of a
box, and burns white-hot from the inside out. But what seems even more
striking about this record, this musician, even at a first glance, is that feeling
of unyielding authenticity.
With every remarkable cut, with every twist and turn, Robert's life and his
experience, shine through. His days growing up in a small industrial town in
Texas, his move to Houston, and now as a 25-year-old man, when not on the
road performing around the world, living with his wife in Nashville.
The Lights from the Chemical Plant, produced with great care and precision by
Jacquire King (Tom Waits, Kings of Leon, Norah Jones), and recorded at Eric
Masse's Casino studio in East Nashville for New West Records, is an album
that has a way of grabbing you by the hand and pulling you in so that it can
play with your soul. Alive with memories and innovation, you become
absorbed in the world Robert paints with his smoky lyrics, his hypnotic voice,
and his masterful work on the guitar. But then something happens. Something
new. Something special. And it begins with the very song for which the album
is named, "Chemical Plant." You realize that Robert's building layer upon layer
of different sounds from different places and different times. A synthesis of
sounds and textures that pick you up and pull you in even deeper.
R&B, bossa nova, fusion, free jazz from the rousing beat of "Good
Intentions" to the floor stomping bluegrass anthem "Sing Along," you've
bought your ticket and you're in for the ride. And so it goes, the floodgates
standing wide open. The quiet, unexpected feel of a jazz guitar in perfect
union with a steel guitar in the ballad, "Steady as the Rising Sun." And so it
goes. The soulful wobble of a saxophone in "Bottle of Wine," and the dreamy pedal steel that draws you into "TV Song." These are songs about love gained,
about love lost, about growing up in a place where nobody stands too tall for
fear of being knocked down ("Sing Along"). These are songs about lives
broken, lives healed, and moving on.
As if that weren't enough, Robert gives us his interpretation of Paul Simon's
classic, "Still Crazy After All These Years," which is pure elegance, cut against
the song "Only Lies" with its quiet pulse, its dusky blue lyrics, and the story of
a man trying to help a friend who refuses to believe that her husband is
cheating on her
Only lies can comfort you,
Only lies will see you through.
Just because a thing's convenient,
That doesn't make it true.
Only lies can comfort you.
Ellis' growth as a man and musician is clear on The Lights From The Chemical
Plant. And while some may call it a musical departure from his past, The
Houston Chronicle best explains: "Ellis doesn't place limitations on his music.
Any perceived departure is just part of an ongoing creative journey."
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LocationShakespeare's Lower Level (View)
241 E Kalamazoo Ave
Kalamazoo, MI 49007
United States
Categories
| Minimum Age: 21 |
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
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