Kevin Devine Band • Page 38

One I’ve always had:

you are notably approachable to your fans, both before & after concerts, and with personal online streaming events you’ve hosted. Does it ever feel like you bite off more than you can chew, to where it sometimes is exhausting? Or do you genuinely get energy and joy from interacting with your audience so much?


Also don’t forget to ask him a baseball question. He loves to talk shop about baseball from when I’ve met him.

 

Kevin posted this essaynovella on Patreon about Brother's Blood since it turned 15(!!!) last weekend:

Last Sunday, April 28th, Brother’s Blood turned 15.

Markers like these are to some degree arbitrary, imperfect indications of how we organize and acknowledge the passage of time, phases, how we see ourselves, and what meant and means what - and why it did and does - as much as of what actually happened, and when.

I sort of can never believe any anniversary.

I meet every interval with a lightly bewildered perpetual wow, a sensation that, as I move through life, I continue to experience an irreversible, low-key disorienting, advancing locomotion that makes everything feel, in equal measure, like it happened 20 minutes ago, or to an entirely different person in an impossibly distant past with whom I share a name and a long list of apparent similarities and about whom I’ve heard an endless list of vaguely relatable stories.

For instance: despite writing the songs between 2003-2008, Brother’s Blood still feels kind of “new” to me. (Actually, in certain bespoke ways, every record does? Definitely every record since.)

Maybe it’s closer to what I mean to say, I can still access the particular sense of “newness” attached to its creation, release, promotional cycle.

Everything begets everything else, and how I cobbled together what became a career in music - which I’m, for our purposes here, loosely defining as a sustained relationship between making music for pleasure and expression, for an audience of whatever size, with whatever shifting series of interactions with a variety of industry-specific infrastructures, to a degree that ultimately enables you to create that music as your sole/primary/majority way of making a living in the world - is very much in my eyes a crust-at-a-time breadcrumb trail going back to being 14 years old in bands in the hardcore scene on Staten Island.

There are larger and smaller bits - slices, loaves - along the way, but I really do sense their inextricable connectedness.

Brother’s Blood arrived at a crossroads/pivot/fork/whatever of some elevated (subjective/relative) significance.

I’d been signed by Capitol, and written/demoed/recorded/very preliminarily begun promoting Put Your Ghost To Rest, an album about which all invested parties seemed happy proud & excited, when myself & a whole bunch of other artists and label employees were guillotined via bloodless/bloodbath corporate merger, sudden, total.

Capitol had facilitated my first-time full-time employment as a musician. The experience had also whiplash-deposited me in a place of precarious uncertainty about the continued wisdom and validity of that still-very-new reality.

I was genuinely confused, and concerned that whatever was happening was over before I even understood it.

What went on between February 14, 2007 (the day I got dropped) and April 28, 2009 (the day Brother’s Blood was released) was my reflexive, intuitive, stubborn, communally-supported response to that initial reaction.

I put Ghost in a backpack and went all over the world with it, continuing to build a relationship with whoever was willing to listen, a handful of you at a time, sharing stages with whichever groups of friends and strangers were willing to have me, on four continents in a comically expansive series of situational and stylistic permutations that are eventually better-suited to book than essay.

Throughout, the group of songs that became Brother’s Blood started gathering itself, and I have specific, resonant memories attached to generative moments with each.

Soundchecking the main riff to “Carnival” on a winter tour with Pablo and Jennifer O’Connor and Koufax, playing it on a loop with the GDB.

Stopping at a pizza place in Bay Ridge later that year to finish the words on napkins after walking around and realizing they were visiting, not wanting them to decide to leave before I had the chance.

Reading Skinner “Another Bag Of Bones” in the back of a car service in Chicago, and him saying, “I’m not sure how you’re going to turn that into a song, but I look forward to finding out.”

Recording a very early version of “Tomorrow’s Just Too Late” with Jesse in a basement on Long Island, and playing that song for Vin in a dressing room in Los Angeles, saying I felt kind of stuck, and him saying if I’d written that, I was going to be alright.

Playing Andy “It’s Only Your Life” in a tour bus lounge at the Reading Festival when he asked, “Have you been writing?,” a conversation we’ve been having for 17 years.

A show with Jaymay in Norwich, England that would end in an alcoholic blackout, where I did “Murphy’s Song,” and she asked if I’d actually written that, said it reminded her of Chet Baker, impossibly high praise.

Writing the first half of “All Of Everything, Erased” on my way to Australia for the first time, writing the rest waking up in a hotel there, dreams and extrapolations of a few things I’d been reading that had moved me, sort of knowing I wanted it to be the first thing on the record, feeling like it was a connective thread to a style of songwriting I had established in my work to that point, but feeling like it was an evolution of that style, and wanting to invite people in to what I was starting to sense was going to be a pretty broad and diverse series of experiments.

“I Could Be With Anyone” attempting to antidote away some summertime blues, feeling like I’d found a fun and propulsive pop song in the spirit of Superchunk, before realizing it had no chorus, was pretty desperate in content, and also, nobody really thinks Superchunk is pop music.

Letting “Fever Moon” happen, gentle and patient, a little scary, moved to write about physical intimacy and its unknowable shadows in a register indicating I was maybe internalizing some Leonard Cohen exposure, wondering if I’d have the courage to even show Bracco & Skinner, much less record and arrange it.

Finishing “Hand Of God” towards the very of end of the harvesting process, bits of which had existed in nascency since summer 2003, realizing its seeds had more in common tonally with the group of songs establishing itself here then at any time prior, which revived and clarified it, showed me how to tell its story, and sighed into existence its parenthetical instrumental passages, half-step chord movements I find very satisfying still.

Taking the first verse and B-section of “Yr Husband,” which had existed for some time, and building it out, falling in love with the bridge, which kind of reminded me of Pixies or the Breeders in a song that felt more to me like Wilco or something like that, and the truly triumphant moment in band practice where Skinner suggested the ending of the song become some circle of chords, “you’ll figure it out,” and my sketching that circle, and everyone doing the magical things they did with and around it, delivering one of my favorite passages of music we’ve ever recorded in this project.

Starting the title song on the subway in 2005, a little drunk, writing the first two verses, eventually recording a now-lost-to-history, much more mannered folk version with a totally different B-section and without the climactic final verse during a demo session at Capitol Records’ studios in Los Angeles.

Having the inclination to transform and extend the song in the spirit of things like “Cortez The Killer” by Neil Young, and jamming on it at a super poorly attended show in an Austrian airplane hanger (or what felt like it) during a spring European tour with Skinner and Strandberg, feeling like we’d stumbled into a blueprint.

Playing it live solo for the first time at The Space in Hamden, Connecticut, and leaving the lyric sheet onstage, feeling like maybe there was something special in it, and a few months later at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, at a show with Jesse & Bonz & Strand, stepping away from the mic to shout the last verse, and feeling it move around the room.

And on and on and on.

Bracco sleeping over my apartment and starting the acoustic demos that we’d end up sharing on MySpace.

Getting into the real meat of preproduction with Chris and Skinner and Strand and Bonz and Russell. Demoing, recording. The genuine and convivial thrill building the songs out with them, the breadth of their creativity and contributions, how fun and exciting it was. Each step could be its own essay, its own chapter.

The abiding sense, for me, was: I have no idea if I will/we will ever get to do this again. Every experience arriving there dictated, “no guarantees,” and so, let’s just put everything in, try everything, and whatever happens, we made this.

15 years later, it is clear that whatever career I have continue to have, whatever explorations I have been afforded the opportunity to make, and whatever artistic inclinations I have been encouraged and allowed myself to develop and engage, owe a great debt to that time and that record.

I could truly say endless unedited things about the energy around putting the album out, the touring, the festivals, how it was met, the sense that in some meaningful way, a threshold had been crossed where, for the time being, the efforts of the years prior had resulted in something like a modicum of stability, an audience that was present and committed, a feeling that at least a bit of that precarity post-Capitol had burned away into a sustaining model more suited and suitable to my particular particularities.

And being here today connects to that.

I’m also moved to say: no one wants to write some of the songs on that album and understand that they still feel timely, and in fact, in some ways, maybe even more relevant to the present moment 15 years later.

My hope is that listening to them through that lens maybe provides some sense of community and comfort in a strange way, some value, a version of what I feel singing them, which is that everything exists on a collapsible continuum, and maybe the wheel of history turns a lot slower than the arc of one independent musician’s fitful career.

All of which is to say: happy birthday, Brother’s Blood, thank you for being born, thank you for continuing to be again and again since, thank you for what you teach me and how you found people.

And thank you all for reading, as always.

Xo,
KD

 

Selling my vinyl copy of We Are Who We've Always Been for $15 shipped if anyone is interested

 

This is hyper-specific, but I have this memory of a photo being posted to either Kevin Devine, Bad Books, or Manchester Orchtra's social media of Kevin looking real uncomfortable holding a baby and someone photoshopped Andy Hull's face on the baby. Does anyone know where I could find it?

 

https://imgur.com/gallery/kevin-devine-holds-fans-baby-after-show-faceswaps-galore-occur-kLXxF

 

THANK YOU. Since Apple Music added the function to add art to a playlist, I've been trying to find this photo for the Manchester Orchestra and Kevin Devine playlists.

 

KD mentioning Brand New tonight at the Ryman in a positive manner was a bit jarring.

 

Yikes.

 

Interesting. Was he talking about their music or their band members?

 

Having previously played the room with his friends.

 

Did he specifically mention his friends in Brand New or just friends in general? Feel like he's probably opened for several bands there. I guess hearing the name Brand New is kind of weird these days, but I don't think Kevin ever stopped being friends with Jesse.

 

He also played with Manchester there.

 

It was the same show.

 

“My friends in Brand New and Manchester Orchestra”

 

I don't think it's a secret that he stayed friends with Jesse and I also think that's a complicated issue because we always talk about how abusers need someone in their life to help keep them accountable and to reflect and grow with. I don't know the specifics of their relationship, so him vaguely referring to "my friends in Brand New and Manchester Orchestra" feels a lot different to me than him like, actively promoting Jesse as a good guy or making excuses for him or playing a show with him. But that's just me

 

Could definitely understand even just hearing the name in that context being jarring, though.

 

Yeah, that's about how I feel about it.

 

Yeah, just not something you ever really hear anymore.

 

Did KD mention anything about new material coming our way? It's been a bit since Nothing's Real, so Nothing's Wrong.

 

Has he been playing solo on this tour? Just got in and SoCo’s gear is already set up.

 

I saw him in April and he mentioned it would probably be next year before a new record is out.

 

Solo yeah

 

Yep, solo.

 

Thank you Kevin for writing this balm of a song in Negative Conviction.