Author: Stephen Deusner

Cory Chisel knows his rock-and-roll history, so he’s well aware of the significance of the Levitt Shell, where he and three other acts on the Wild Rovers Tour will be playing.

“That’s the very first place Elvis Presley got paid to play — on that stage!” he exclaims with rock-nerd awe. “Johnny Cash and that Sun Records crew all came up playing that stage and others like it. You walk into that kind of place, and you feel like you’re connected to something that is bigger than any one band. It’s hallowed ground.”

The Wild Rovers Tour is a throwback of sorts to the old revues that saw Presley, Cash, and others sharing the same bill and occasionally the same band. Chisel will be backing and backed by the Candles, Space Woman, and Adriel Denae (of Chisel’s backing band, the Wandering Sons). Of course, none of them have illusions about their popularity compared to that of their local forebears, but that’s beside the point. As Chisel remarks, “It just seems like this stage was meant for this kind of party.”

It’s far too early to tell, but to hear him talk about Wild Rovers, it may end up becoming a turning point in Chisel’s career — that moment that inspires him not only musically but also professionally. He has spent years on small labels and a few more on a major but is getting his head around a slightly more DIY approach. “After a while, you start thinking your music is a product,” he explains. “It’s supposed to be a gift from a very sacred part of yourself. I need to get connected to that again.”

Hailing from Appleton, Wisconsin, Chisel grew up in a Baptist church, where his father served as preacher and his mother pianist. Rock-and-roll was largely forbidden, but as a teenager he discovered bluesmen like Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf, not to mention folk-rockers like Bob Dylan and the Band. When he was 15, he formed his first band, a punk outfit called Breathing Machine, which eventually transformed into the Wandering Sons. He kept that moniker for years, even when he took top billing and even when the lineup continued to revolve. (These days, Denae remains the only permanent Son.)

With each subsequent album, Chisel refined his mix of earthy rock influences and hymnal melodies. He may have strayed far from the church, but he does not avoid spiritual matters in his lyrics. His characters, whether identifiable as Chisel or not, find themselves torn between the worldly and the otherworldly, awaiting a salvation they might not even recognize. That stark yearning, combined with a voice that sounds like Elvis Costello as a Packers fan, has established Chisel as an original voice in the roots-rock scene.

A hard-touring musician who typically spends more time on the road than off, Chisel says the Wild Rover Tour grew out of backstage jam sessions while he was opening for Norah Jones. Her backing band, the Candles (who just released a solid second album, La Candalaria), would hold impromptu get-togethers, with Chisel and Denae joining in.

“We’d be playing songs together before and after shows,” Chisel says. “We all love the same bands, so we’d be playing Dead songs, Tom Waits songs, stuff like that.” Rather than part ways after Jones’ tour, the crew decided to head out on their own. “We decided we would go to the big cities and play the tiniest rooms we can, and then we’d go to the strange little towns off the highway and play the biggest show we can.”

For Chisel — who released his third album, Old Believers, last year — the tour has resurrected some old songs he had either forgotten about or grown tired of. “You look at your songs differently when you’re playing them right next to a bunch of your friends’ songs,” he says. “Some of them are rewriting themselves. This type of collaboration just gets every creative synapse in my brain firing.” In particular, songs from his earliest releases — including Cabin Ghosts in 2008 and Little Bird in 2006 — are getting dusted off and reinterpreted among friends. “I fell out of love with a song that I wrote called ‘My Heart Will Be There,’ but the rest of the team love that song and demanded it be on the setlist. Now it’s back in my life again.”

Chisel has few concrete plans beyond the Wild Rovers Tour; in fact, he’s not sure when it will end or whether they’ll document it via a live album or concert film. For the moment, he’s satisfied to enjoy the show.

“I’m enjoying the freedom of not having a label look at me and demand a plan,” he explains. “It’s up to us to find ways to have fun with each other and really give the audience an experience they love. I’m still learning how to love making records. I don’t like playing for microphones. I like playing for people.”

The Wild Rovers Tour, featuring Cory Chisel, The Candles, Adriel Denae, and Space Woman

Levitt Shell

Friday, August 16th

7:30 p.m.

A wild rock duo from Wisconsin, the Hussy have released three LPs, four cassettes, seven seven-inches, and a lone 10-inch over the past two years — all of which they engineered and produced themselves in their tiny Madison practice space. Each subsequent release has revealed new facets of the Hussy, new technical skills as well as sturdier musical chops, culminating in Pagan Hiss, released in May on Southpaw Records. It’s a sharp blast of surprisingly sophisticated rock-and-roll: loud but austere, funny but never ironic, blunt yet nuanced. This band plays loud, blistering punk, which, especially during their live shows, achieves a sweaty physicality as Bobby Hussy flays his guitar and Heather Hussy pummels her drums. But underneath the noise lurks sharp hooks and emphatic lyrics about alienation, despair, bad blood, and good weed. The Hussy strike a fine balance between brute force and measured subtlety, mixing hardcore, surf rock, ’60s pop, power pop, and even classic rock into a head-banging, arms-flailing, guitar-burning mix. It’s hard to imagine just two people churning up this much noise, but it’s even harder to imagine three or more musicians playing together with such intensity. The Hussy plays the Hi-Tone on Thursday, August 15th, with the Sheiks. Showtime is 9 p.m. Admission is $7.

The husband-and-wife DIY country duo Shovels & Rope — known to their parents as Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent — got off to a nice start with their “first” album, last year’s O’ Be Joyful, which proved to be something of a surprise indie hit. The band landed a track on the television series Nashville, an appearance on David Letterman, and the album on several year-end lists. In fact, Hearst and Trent have been touring for years, both separately and together. They met while playing in different bands, fell in love, recorded together, got married, and formed their own band. They each have released solo records, plus a joint album under their Christian names called Shovels & Rope. The duo’s live shows tend to be long, sweaty, lusty, rambunctious, and completely unscripted. Even though it’s just two of them onstage, they make a mighty racket, trading off instruments between almost every song. Hearst plays guitar and sings, then switches to drums. Trent often manages to sing, drum, strum, and blow a harmonica all at once. Shovels & Rope play the 1884 Lounge at Minglewood Hall on Tuesday, July 16th, with locals Star & Micey. Admission is $12. Showtime is 8 p.m.

On “Stoned and Starving,” a standout cut from the Parquet Courts’ first proper album, Light Up Gold, singer Andrew Savage wanders around the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens trying to score some munchies. He flips through magazines, scratches lottery tickets, reads ingredients and warning labels. “I was debating Swedish Fish, roasted peanuts, or licorice,” he sings in a deadpan. “I was so stoned and starving.”

As he visits one bodega after another on his quest for the perfect snack, Savage’s narcotized state leaves him both hungry and unable to make a decision on how to spend his crumpled dollar bills. As it crashes into its closing chords, the song remains unresolved — a miniature epic through the outer boroughs, Sisyphus rolling a giant Hostess Ding Dong up a hill, Ahab after the Great White Swedish Fish.

Savage’s expertly arch delivery gives “Stoned and Starving” its wry comedy, yet there’s a strange sadness just below the surface — the melancholy of a young man in a big city trying to find something he can’t quite name. The guitars — courtesy of Savage and fellow singer/songwriter Austin Brown — whiz and stomp, as though both desperate and easily distracted, but the tight rhythm section of bass player Sean Yeaton and drummer Max Savage (Andrew’s brother) keeps the band on mission. The song burbles with jittery energy, its gleeful amateurishness recalling Ramones and its deliberate groove reminiscent of Marquee Moon by Television — both, not coincidentally, New York bands.

The Parquet Courts is a New York band, but like all New York-based musicians these days, its members hail from elsewhere. Savage and Brown met at the University of North Texas in Denton, which is home to an indie scene (Will Johnson, Baptist Generals, Midlake) that bears little resemblance to the Courts’ indie punk. The two met at a record-listening club called — seriously — Knights of the Round Turntable. Max Savage is another Texan, while Yeaton grew up in Boston. Brown is quick to point out that “the band started in New York, and most of the songs were written in New York. So we’ve always identified ourselves as a New York band, and I think that comes through on the sound of the record. I think a lot of our influences are New York bands, but that’s not something that’s new.”

Light Up Gold (their second, after a debut, American Specialties, that was essentially just Savage screwing around) conjures visions of young people in New York, non-natives channeling the city’s native energy. The quartet generates a frenzy that’s equal parts invigorating and intimidating — an energy that sounds like it’s being imposed on them, as New York will do. If it’s the perfect backdrop for a carefree pot odyssey, just don’t call the Parquet Courts stoners — or, worse, slackers.

“It tends to be a common misnomer for us,” Brown says, “and it’s kind of insulting, really. We all work really hard, and to have someone say they love what you do and in the same breath call it slacker rock, it’s like, hey man, I’m probably spending more days on the road than I am at home this year. We play a lot and write a lot of material and work really hard at this. But people relate to it any way they can, and I’m sure bands like Pavement and Sonic Youth were probably called the same sort of thing.”

They may sing about smoking pot and scoring Swedish Fish, but they doesn’t approach music as a lackadaisical pursuit. Instead, they labor at these songs; they work diligently to achieve that tossed-off complexity. Before recording a single note, the group released a mixtape that showcased their influences, featuring songs from Guided by Voices, Napalm Death, Faust, Butthole Surfers, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard. It played less like a mixtape than a manifesto. After touring heavily and working out songs in front of live audiences, the band transformed their small practice space in Brooklyn into a makeshift studio, then recorded Light Up Gold in three days:

“All the instruments the first day, vocals the second day, overdubs the third day,” Brown says. “It’s a pretty intense pace regardless of how familiar you are with the material. We just didn’t try anything that we didn’t think we could handle.”

Their efforts are paying off: After they self-released Light Up Gold last year, the indie label What’s Your Rupture? signed the band and gave them a wider release, and the album has become one of the most hyped debuts of the year. The band doesn’t — or can’t, or won’t — see it that way just yet.

According to Brown, he doesn’t pay too much attention to things like album sales or rave reviews: “It doesn’t have much to do with anything I can control. It does help our shows attract more people, which is good. But I don’t know what to make of it. It was never anything that we sought out or expected.”

The Parquet Courts may view this kind of success — modest compared to mainstream expectations, yet gargantuan in the indie realm — as something they stumbled across while stoned and starving, but actually it’s something they’ve been looking for all along, as they enlarge the scope of their quest from Ridgewood to the whole world.

Parquet Courts, with Total Control, UV Race, and Sharp Balloons Murphy’s, Tuesday, May 28th 9 p.m., $10

When Zach Williams burst a blood vessel in his voice box earlier this year, the Lone Bellow’s career nearly ended before it had begun. Just days before the Brooklyn country-folk trio was set to release its eponymous debut, which they’d been working on for more than two years, Williams lost his voice completely. “I wasn’t used to singing numerous times in a week, and I really hurt myself,” he recalls. “I couldn’t speak for six days.” It couldn’t have come at a worse time for the rising stars: Not only did they have a new album, but the band had to bow out of a show with two of their heroes, Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams.

Fearful that the injury might be permanent and his career might be over, Williams began working with a vocal coach to relearn his craft from the ground up. He became a student of the Alexander technique, a strict regimen for reducing mental and muscular tension during everyday activities. It’s commonly used for patients with Parkinson’s disease, but it proved helpful to the singer as well.

“I go in and this lady teaches me how to breathe, how to stand, how to talk, where to focus,” Williams explains. “Instead of pushing on my vocal box and out of my chest, I think of sound coming from behind my ears. There’s a little pocket of air right behind your ears that you’re supposed to push out when you sing. If you push from anywhere else, you’re not stewarding your muscles very well. I haven’t nailed it down yet. I’m still learning, but I can do shows again now.”

Williams blames the predicament on “poor writing,” by which he means he wrote too many throat-straining choruses and too many exultant sing-alongs without realizing the toll it would take on him. That, however, is exactly what has drawn so many fans to the band in a short time.

The trio — which also includes multi-instrumentalists/singers Brian Elmquist and Kanene Pipkin — has been making music together since 2010. Williams and Elmquist were old friends from Georgia, although when they first met Pipkin, she was living in Beijing. Eventually, she relocated to the same Park Slope neighborhood, and the three discovered a shared affinity for old folk and gospel music. To record their debut, they raised money via Kickstarter, although Williams says the band moved forward cautiously: “I wanted to steward the music, so basically it took us two years to put together a team. We took our time.” The Lone Bellow refined their songs, signed with upstart Descendant Records, and hired CCM-artist-turned-Americana-auteur Charlie Peacock (the Civil Wars, Holly Williams) to produce.

During those two years, the band also watched as a movement of new artists — most notably, Mumford & Sons and the Lumineers — reintroduced acoustic folk music to the mainstream, playing emotionally intense sets of rousing anthems. Williams is aware that the Lone Bellow will be lumped in with the new crop of revivalists: “People are intrigued by storytelling music right now,” Williams says. “I’m very grateful that the average listener is listening to stuff like Mumford & Sons, the Civil Wars, even the Tallest Man on Earth, but I also think it’s kind of funny that we made the record a few years back.”

Even so, the revivalist label is not a perfect fit for the Lone Bellow, who boast a broader palette than most of their peers. Steeped in the same folk harmonies popularized by the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, their debut draws from contemporary country and even classic rock. The opening “Green Eyes and a Heart of Gold” sounds as large and as propulsive as a Fleetwood Mac hit, despite being unplugged and much more romantically generous. “You Don’t Love Me Like You Used To” could have been a hit for country singer Lynn Anderson circa 1970, and “Bleeding Out,” with its blood-vessel-bursting climax, is the Arcade Fire gone Nashville.

Perhaps most crucially, the Lone Bellow’s fervency is born from — and perhaps represents a triumph over — adversity. Never mind Williams’ vocal cords. He started writing songs in a hospital room, where his wife lay paralyzed after being thrown from a horse. While he was taking classes on how to feed, bathe, and care for her, Williams started a journal detailing some of his darker thoughts, which eventually became his first batch of songs. His wife made a full recovery, which made those songs easier to sing.

The songs on The Lone Bellow are born from similarly traumatic experiences, which make them emotionally as well as physically painful to sing. “These songs aren’t from the time when Stacy had her accident, but they’re from another sad season in life,” Williams explains. “Some are personal, and others are story-songs about really close friends of mine. I’m grateful to be able to relive those hard moments night after night. It’s one of those things that reminds you that you’re alive and you can feel, that you’re not numb.”

The Lone Bellow with Marcus Foster and Ruston Kelly

1884 Lounge at Minglewood Hall,

Sunday, April 7th, 7:30 p.m., $12

Several years ago, the husband-and-wife DIY country duo Shovels & Rope — known to their parents as Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent — were getting ready to play a small town somewhere in Texas when they heard the emcee shush the audience like a cowboy librarian. “It was a listening room,” Hearst recalls, “and this fella calms this audience and broke it down for them how they like to do things. He’d never heard of us, but it was a really earnest and loving Texas introduction. And then he says, ‘Without further ado, Shovels and Ropes.'”

“We weren’t bothered in the least that he added an extra ‘s’ to the band name,” Trent adds. In fact, they were so charmed by the moment that they used a recording of that intro on their new album, O Be Joyful. The unnamed emcee prefaces “Kemba’s Got the Cabbage Moth Blues,” and you can hear Hearst and Trent giggling in the background. But Hearst makes clear that even though he got their name wrong, “I hope he knows that we included it completely out of love.”

Shovels & Rope won’t have to endure too many more cases of mistaken identity or mangled names on club billboards (a favorite: Ladders & Ropes). Released on the new Nashville label Dualtone (which, “like us, is small and mighty,” Hearst says), O Be Joyful proved a surprise hit, not only landing a track on the television series Nashville and the band on David Letterman but building up enough steam to land on many year-end lists. “It’s been a slow and steady climb for us,” Trent says.

“It feels better that way. We may not have a hit song on the radio, but I feel like the people at our shows are actual fans who will hopefully stick around.”

In fact, Hearst and Trent have been touring for many years, both separately and together. They met while playing in different bands, fell in love, recorded together, got married, formed their own band. They each have released solo records, plus a joint album under their Christian names called Shovels & Rope. Eventually, they took that as the name of their band, but at that time “neither one of us had a way to tour or get our records out there,” Trent says. “So we ended up playing bar gigs, three or four hours long, just the two of us. We started working up renditions of each other’s songs, and I felt like we got good at it. We certainly weren’t planning for anything. We were just trying to get by.”

That barroom internship still informs their live shows, which are long, sweaty, lusty, rambunctious, and completely unscripted. Even though it’s just two of them onstage, they make a mighty racket, trading off instruments between almost every song. Hearst plays guitar and sings, then switches to drums. Trent often manages to sing, drum, strum, and blow a harmonica all at once. The album-opening “Birmingham” spins their origins into something like a personal mythology, or at least a musical philosophy: “From the Crescent City to the Great Salt Lake, it ain’t what you got, it’s what you make!”

Hearst — who some alt-country fans might recognize as Hayes Carll’s duet partner on his song “Another Like You” — may have one of the best voices in country music today or in any other genre, for that matter. If you can imagine Loretta Lynn singing in a rattletrap country band, the Sex Pistols on her iPod and fresh from throwing a drink in some dude’s face, you can imagine the grit and soul she projects. Her vocals are lively and boisterous, conveying randy glee on the title track (about an unusual romance between a wooden-legged woman and the “young man that she plays with like a toy”) and fiery devotion on “Hail Hail.” And when she and Trent sing together on the simmering “Tickin’ Bomb,” it’s like hearing an intimate moment broadcast at high volume: “All bottled up, a begging dog with my tongue out/I’m in my shell and only you can make me come out.”

“Something that Michael and I both do as writers is stash a moment that’s personal in a psychedelicized or cartoonized version of the truth,” Hearst explains. “I think it gives us a certain amount of natural emotional separation from the songs that we sing night after night.”

The album closes with the devastating love song “This Means War,” which Trent wrote about the unthinkable idea of losing his wife. It ends with another sampled recording, this time of a conversation Hearst had with her grandfather when she was only 4 or 5. Early one morning, when they were the only two people awake in the house, she sat on his lap and told him she wanted a “fifi dog” — a cute poodle with a bow in its hair. But her grandfather tells her, “You need a good dog that can stay outside and protect ya.” It’s a small moment but surprisingly powerful in the way it draws the album to a close and perfectly sums up the band’s ramshackle aesthetic: While country music produces one fifi dog after another, Shovels & Rope are small but have a mighty loud bark.

Shovels & Rope

Hi-Tone Café

Friday, February 8th

8 p.m., $10

Live from Alabama, the first concert album from Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit, is bookended by two very different versions of the same story. “Tour of Duty” kicks things off with the tale of a soldier returning to his small town. It’s not specific in its setting, nor is it triumphant. But the song is cautiously celebratory as Isbell evokes the soldier’s jittery nerves as he tries to make himself at home: “I promise not to bore you with my stories/I promise not to scare you with my tears,” he sings. “I never would exaggerate the glory/I’ll seem so satisfied here.”

Later on the tracklist, Isbell performs “Dress Blues,” a standout track from his 2007 solo debut, Sirens of the Ditch. It’s a very different homecoming from the one he describes on “Tour of Duty”: The soldier is returning home for burial. “Dress Blues” is mournful without being manipulative, funereal without being dour. “Mamas and grandmamas love you/American boys hate to lose,” Isbell sings by way of a eulogy. “You never planned on the bombs in the sand or sleepin’ in your dress blues.”

Despite the heightened emotions that necessarily accompany the subject matter, neither of these songs is especially concerned with the politics of military spending or foreign policy. They’re not anti-war songs or protest anthems. Rather, they’re about the real people who go to war and how they return. Because Isbell maintains such a disciplined and ultimately compassionate focus on the character rather than on any particular cause, “Tour of Duty” and “Dress Blues” hit hard. Their placement on Live from Alabama grants the album an emotional heft greater than anything he’s done since he left the Drive-By Truckers five years ago.

“I try to write as much as I can about the effects that war has on people and their communities back home,” Isbell says. “I understand that a little bit better than I understand actually being at war, since I’ve never done that. It’s hard for me to put myself in that place. But I do know what it means for a small town to lose somebody or to try to adjust to kids coming home.”

As much a storyteller as he is a songwriter, Isbell majored in fiction writing at the University of Memphis, where he learned the basic tenets of how (and why) to tell a story. He also immersed himself in the work of writers both literary and musical — not just William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Barry Hannah, but Randy Newman, Bruce Springsteen, and James McMurtry as well. While some writers go straight from college to an MFA program, Isbell joined the Drive-By Truckers, which taught him the importance of setting, tone, and — most important of all — character.

“If you’re writing a story-song, you have to create a character and let that character behave as he or she naturally would,” he explains. “They will do some squirrelly things on you, but that’s the only way to portray them with precision. Ultimately, it’s not what they’re about but who they’re about.”

Live from Alabama closes a year of hard touring for Isbell, during which he and the 400 Unit traveled almost constantly. In February, he’ll start recording his fourth studio album, after which he’s getting married. Such a busy schedule doesn’t leave much time to write fiction; most of Isbell’s creative energy is channeled into writing songs.

“I still practice those things and try to keep myself fresh,” he says. “But pretty much everything lately is going to be in song form, because I need all the songs I can get.”

Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit will play the Hi-Tone Café on Thursday, December 20th. Show starts at 8 p.m. $15.