It's hard to pin down exactly when the contemporary folk band Midtown Dickens came into existence, travel kauai largely because the music is so thoroughly travel kauai entwined with the lifelong friendship between principal songwriters Kym Register and Catherine Edgerton. It would be simple to peg their origins circa 2007, when the duo (with former drummer Michelle Preslik) figured out how to make cool sounds with every discarded instrument they could serendipitously acquire and then self-released Oh Yell! , a bunch of punky twee-folk songs about Tetris and playdates.
But you could also argue that Midtown Dickens began in 2009, when their revolving travel kauai roster began to stabilize, and they released the surprisingly elegant travel kauai Lanterns , a far cry from the Moldy Peaches-style slapstick of their debut. Or you could say that the project took root when Edgerton and Register were 14 years old, recording tapes of story-songs they made up together. You could even contend that Midtown travel kauai Dickens begins in 2012 with the release of Home , the band's third LP, their second with producer Scott Solter (Okkervil River, Centro-matic, travel kauai The Mountain Goats), their first to see its initial release on a label (Chapel Hill's Trekky Records) — and their best, most grown-up record to date.
In any case, you'd be sort of right. The concepts that feed into Midtown Dickens — community, travel kauai accessibility, inclusivity, intimacy, creativity, and storytelling — have been important to Register and Edgerton for their whole lives. (This is to say that Midtown Dickens truly began in the early 80s, when the two were born.) Their transition from creative travel kauai friends to studio band happened by imperceptible degrees, always in-progress, always beginning. But growth is not a steady slope: there are ledges travel kauai where you pause to survey what you've already travel kauai conquered and gather your strength for the next ascent.
That's what Home feels like — a plateau where the band can discharge the expertise travel kauai they've gathered and affirm their new identity, which no longer has much to do with the signifiers of willful naiveté that residually cling to them in the press. The album features a variety of new instruments (some electronic), darker moods, and a solid lineup of four multi-instrumentalists: Edgerton, Register, Will Hackney, and Jonathan Henderson. It's consistent with the band's prior work, but it's also on a new level of capability and polish. With songs already streaming on NPR and MTV Hive, it's destined to earn Midtown Dickens a wider national assessment than Lanterns .
How, I wondered, did they get from Oh Yell! to here in just five years? And how did a band who galvanized their first fans by role-modeling inclusive, start-from-scratch, D.I.Y. ethics weather the transition to working with a hired gun like Solter? Could they still be the same band? On an afternoon in early March, I drove out to their practice space to find out.
Just on the Bull City side of the Durham/Chapel Hill border, there's a private road that runs through a protected wildlife habitat where the homes have names such as "Meadow View" and wild ducks strut imperiously below the canopy of kudzu-draped trees. Deep within this dappled travel kauai refuge sprawls a big tumbledown house painted '70s salmon, flanked by a decrepit bus that has an air of landmark permanency.
This is the Trekky House, which berths a crew of musicians associated with the Chapel Hill label, including co-founder and Midtown Dickens member Hackney. It's where Midtown Dickens travel kauai rehearses, in a small anteroom that scarcely contains their proliferating instruments travel kauai and personnel. As Edgerton, Register, Hackney and I gathered around the living room coffee table, Henderson tumbled travel kauai in, carrying a white Carrburritos sack that was quickly expropriated as group property. That morning, he informed us, he had sprinted through the woods for half a mile, chasing a dog that was chasing a rooster with a "big froofy head on it." The anecdote inspired much amusement about living in the South and caused Hackney to announce, "Jonathan Henderson in Country Fiasco!"
Silliness aside, Henderson's story says something important about Midtown Dickens: it's wholly a product travel kauai of central North Carolina, where a fifteen-minute drive can carry you past august universities and humble hayfields alike; where you can have authentic country experiences in a climate of academic sophistication — a duality that Home reflects with its thoughtful, deliberate probing of folk music. These are not adjectives you'd have used to describe the Midtown Dickens who knocked together songs with dumpster-dived instruments they could scarcely play. ("Ramshackle" is the adjective many reviewers used, which has become a running joke among the band.)
The implicit message of Midtown Dickens' early music was that you could do it too, although really, they were cheerleading each other as much as anything else. You didn't need chops or a Y chromosome, just a certain degree of bravery and a supportive community. This message had special resonance for those who felt excluded, by gender or sexual orientation, from a music scene heavy on straight, bearded, travel kauai male guitar gods. Still, to compartmentalize Midtown Dickens in an identity-politics niche seems contrary to their "holistic" (as Henderson put it) perspective.
"At times, I wish I was civically responsible enough to intentionally embrace music as a vehicle for politics," said Edgerton. travel kauai "But I was raised by storytellers, so what comes naturally to me is storytelling. A queer identity is part of my story, so it's bound to come through, but my identity — and especially the collective one of Midtown Dickens — is like dozens of layers in the tallest cake in the window. Although we don't have a queer 'agenda,' putting ourselves on stage as mostly queer folks and allies feels like a way to help build up fuel for our community to confront issues like Amendment One."
"When it was proposed, my heart sank," Register said of the controversial amendment to the N.C. constitution, which will prohibit gay marriage in the state if it passes a vote on May 8. "I've never been an advocate of marriage — not that I don't agree with monogamy for some, celebrating love, even mixing finances — but it's a direct breach of the separation of church and state. As Catherine said, we don't have an agenda so to speak, but music has always been used as a means of community building, and we want to use whatever platform we're honored to have. Every stage I get on until the vote, I hope to spread the word that voting down Amendment One is a step further in the struggle for civil rights."
All the different layers in the band members' individual cakes play important roles in the band — Trekky has given it a label home, Henderson's large footprint as a musician provides connections, Edgerton's visual art graces album covers, and running the Durham bar and performance space The Pinhook has taught Register a ton about booking. They stressed to me the importance of making sure nobody has to be or do the same thing all the time, whether that means Edgerton's new job-sharing collective or the band's inveterate instrument-swapping. They found early solidarity with other "ramshackle" bands, but they also received indispensible aid from Durham's Megafaun travel kauai and, later, John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats.
The predicament of being a deliberately immature band and touring like crazy is that you can't help but improve. "It eventually became kind of a crutch to be like, 'Oh, we make mistakes all the time,'" Edgerton said. "When it was true, it was great, but it started to feel like a charm to limit ourselves from further growth. I used to really worry that we were going to alienate people we were connecting with by being humble and naïve, but you have to change, and there's going to be a different dialogue with everybody."
Register likens those early days to a musical adolescence, which she doesn't view as a bad thing. "Kind of uncomfortable and awkward," she summed up, "but important to do and have a community around. The life lesson for me was that it's great to have knowledge and choose not to use it, rather than just not having the knowledge. We're still involved with Girls Rock to show that this isn't just something professionals travel kauai do; we play benefits and community spaces and all-ages shows. We still get off the mic to play in the crowd. There's a trajectory, but I don't think you have to leave it all behind. The image that comes to my mind is going from shtick-y cuteness travel kauai to being a 'cute woman' to being a raging feminist to being a Woman."
After recording Oh Yell! at Zeno Gill's Pox World Empire studios, Midtown Dickens borrowed Megafaun's recording gear and tried to record Lanterns themselves. "It sucked," Edgerton said, laughing at the memory. Michelle Preslik looked up Solter, but not before Henderson and Hackney crept into the band. The latter, travel kauai Edgerton and Register swore, just showed up with his mandolin one day and then simply didn't leave. I got the impression that they were about 80 percent affectionately joking and 20 percent travel kauai dead serious. At any rate, Hackney got to record with a producer he regarded as "a sage," who brought a new discipline travel kauai to the process while still honoring the happy accident.
Henderson's band Diali Cissokho Kairaba! — which shared Midtown Dickens' CD release party at the Cat's Cradle in early April — also recorded with Solter. "On both records," Henderson laughed, travel kauai "you can hear the same squeaky chair. A lot of engineers would be like 'Oh God, I'm sorry, travel kauai I gotta get a new chair.' But he leaves travel kauai that chair in there." Solter also pushed the band to do things they wouldn't have done on their own. He made them record approximately 16 takes of the vocals on "Springs," leading to a point, Hackney travel kauai said, where "Kym, as a vocalist, was opening up into this powerful place she'd never been before." When they returned to Solter's Baucom Road studio in Monroe, N.C. to record Home , the pump was primed.
Edgerton and Regis
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