Driftwood: Shining bright on 'City Lights'

As synonymous as they’ve become to the Binghamton music community, it’s hard to imagine a time in this town before Driftwood. In the last decade, the Chenango Bridge -bred band morphed from guitarist Dan Forsyth and banjo player Joe Kollar playing old Dylan and Kristofferson tunes with friends in bars and at campfires; to (with the addition of fiddle player Claire Byrne and upright bassist Joey Arcuri) a critically acclaimed, genre blending live powerhouse that sells out clubs and plays to thousands at festivals throughout New England and down the I-95 corridor. They’ve toured the country, released three studio albums and a live recording from the Grassroots Festival in Trumansburg, scored a movie soundtrack, racked up over 150,000 youtube hits on an old video from WSKG Expressions, and put close to 300,000 miles on their big blue van, Sha-van.

Along the way, they’ve helped to define the local scene as one that excels in that kind of music that people who grew up listening to “Ophelia” on eleven while drinking Irish whiskey in dive bars make. If you look at the who’s who of Binghamton musicians—Milkweed, The Lutheran Skirts, Adam Ate the Apple, Bess Greenberg, Pete Ruttle—it all leads back to them in some way or another, whether through shared band members or shared bottles of moonshine around a burning log in someone’s back yard.

You could call them an Americana band, but that dismisses the subtle jazz and classical influences. You could call them a rock band, but that dismisses the traditional Irish and old-time elements. You could call them a bluegrass band, but that’d be because you don’t really know what bluegrass is. They called it “shanty rock” for a while, but that didn’t stick.

I first met the band at a music festival in the summer of 2008. I was the freshman Folk Director of the University radio station, and they were the rabid string band playing old-time fiddle tunes faster than my young ears had ever heard; the same band whose emails about their new album I hadn’t bothered to read and kept deleting. I was instantly hooked, and brought them onto my radio show several times over the next few years. We became fast friends: they even gave me my nickname, thus condemning me to forever be known across Broome County as Rummy. Upon graduation, I hopped in their van for a weekend festival in North Carolina, my first taste of life on the road. After that, they couldn’t get rid of me. I spent most of the following year living out of Sha-van and motel rooms with the band, selling their CDs and shirts at shows up and down the East coast and mostly just drinking too much of their band tab at venues.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Carousel wouldn’t exist without them: the whole idea was conceived in the back seat of that van, on a six hour drive back from Virginia. (I thought I’d be able to run a whole newspaper from the back seat of that van. I seriously underestimated how much work I was getting myself into.) Through the years, Dan, Joe, Claire, and Joey have been my best friends, my favorite musicians, my bosses, and my biggest inspirations. Their drive, discipline, and determination to furthering their music is humbling, and I strive to run this paper with the same passion I see from them. So with a fourth album, City Lights (produced by the band and Old Boy Records founder Chris Merkley at Kollar’s home studio, Yellow Bike) coming out on November 4th, it’s about damn time I sit them down for a proper interview. Here it is, abridged for the sake of preserving a guy named Nick’s reputation:

TRIPLE CITIES CAROUSEL: Your new record City Lights seems to capture the manic energy of your live performances better than past studio releases. It’s a very produced album, but it brings the energy of the live show to the recording better than you’ve done in the past. How to you bottle the live show for the studio? How do you bring elements of the studio back to the live show?

JOE KOLLAR: That’s always been a challenge for us, and probably for any band. That’s why there’s studio musicians that just work in studios. They’re very comfortable with mics in front of them and headphones and all that stuff. They’re able to just focus on their job and do what they need to do. But for us it’s always been a challenge. I’ve always thought I’d love to get an audience and just have them come over here, because just having people, having an audience watching you, changes the way you perform.

But bottling that live energy was definitely the goal. Our friend and co-producer Chris Merkley helped us get that, especially in the beginning stages. We tried to record as much as we could live, unless it just wasn’t feasible or didn’t make sense with the song. But primarily, we would try to get the core gist of the tune done in one take. It was great, because he would just stop us when we got it, when he thought we’d gotten the fundamental energy. And then on top of that, we would stack some more elements to make it big and hit and have a produced sound.

On the flipside, trying to make that happen in a live setting is a whole different world. We’ve even arranged a tune to work around a single mic because it just wasn’t working how we recorded it. You just approach it song by song, and if it requires arrangement, then so it does. That’s how you have to do it.

TCC: Have you worked with Chris Merkley on a production level before? Recording?

JK: Joey and I worked with him before on a different record he was producing, Quona Hudson’s record. So he played that role, but we’ve always been kind of self-produced. It was nice to have that outside perspective for that reason, not to get too far in our heads about it.

CLAIRE BYRNE: I think it’s been a different kind of battle for us, recording. Partly because of our instrumentation, too. What we hear in our heads really pushes the envelope of what the instruments can do. We tried to do just a live on the floor thing with (2011’s) Rock & Roll Heart, trying to capture that energy you get out front, but we realized that just wasn’t going to do it. Sometimes if we’d have drums or extra things on the album, to bring that back out when you’ve just got the four acoustic instruments, it’s a struggle.

DAN FORSYTH: And we’ve realized little ways of getting around it, little ways of treading that line. The last day that we went into record… Joe and I came down, and the last thing we recorded was a tom drum. We put tom on “Gasoline.” We tried—we played the shit out of it, because we’d have these sessions where ‘it just sounds like we’ve got to play harder.’ Because it’s acoustic stuff, like you said, trying to play rock n roll style with acoustic instruments. And we just couldn’t get it on a couple of parts. So we went in, Joe did a tom, just a couple of takes, and damn it sounded good. So we put it on more stuff! It’s the kind of thing you can just blend in there, and it sounds really awesome and just really suits the tune. But it’s the kind of thing, you don’t really know it’s there, and you won’t miss it in a live tune. Figuring out those tricks, figuring out how to mic things up, that’s the kind of band we are.

CB: A few people have mentioned that we’re getting better at capturing the live show, but I think we’re just getting better at recording, knowing what we have to work with and how to work with it.

TCC: In the most general sense of the same vein of music, the Avett Brothers have added a drummer through the years, Mumford and Sons has drums… the Lumineers. Could you ever see adding a touring drummer into the mix? A Driftwood drummer?

DF: Are you looking for a job?

CB: We recently discussed it- not, like, for us, but theoretically. But some bands bring in a drummer. Personally, I wouldn’t want to bring in anyone else. I like that we have to push ourselves. We’re just four people. We have to think about it more creatively. We’ve added drums with Joe (Kollar), but he’s playing double duty. Not another person, no.

JOEY ARCURI: It would have to be someone spectacular. Anybody I’d want has a teaching job or is already in a band. I hear it a lot, though. My dad is a big proponent that we should get a drummer, and my uncle John is even worse. Maybe more people think it but they don’t want to bring it up. I think though, if you’re on the scene… I hate this. We’re not a bluegrass band. But if you know that genre, that instrumentation, if you’re no stranger to that, then we make more sense. But if you don’t go to shows, you’re not a certain type of music fan, then you think ‘Band. Drummer.’ And you don’t see a drummer with us, like, what are they doing?

JK: I agree with Claire. I think not having a drummer, it forces something out of the band that we have to deal with. It might be on the record but it’s not here. For instance, we rearranged “Skin and Bone.” I love the arrangement. It makes me feel the song. So many things changed about it. We rearranged it so we could make it jive around a mic. And I love what happened to it. It really reinvigorated the whole song for me. And that wouldn’t happen, those kind of things wouldn’t happen without that. It kind of separates you because of you have a drum. Drums, and this is really an overgeneralization, but drums allow people to latch onto a beat, where people might feel it but they don’t know what’s going on. That’s something, for bands without drummers, that without that constant forceful drive, it forces people to engage in the music a different way. It’s a little more intimate, which is a little more of what Driftwood is to me.

TCC: A different kind of dancing that people are doing.

JK: Exactly. And when it grooves it grooves, you know. When we want to rock, we rock. But I like that challenge. It’s a powerful tool for us.

JA: We’ll feel it out, show by show. We’ll do theatre shows where everybody’s sitting down, and in there we’ll be prone to do less drum stuff, and the people get into it. The drunken bar shows or the festival shows sometimes, we’ll switch out the set list, throw an extra drum song in.

DF: The van’s too full for a drummer.

JK: He’ll have to ride on the roof.

TCC: Claire, you just got married in September, and Dan, you’ve got a wife and a toddler. Does that change in lifestyle, that kind of maturity, does it change the songs you write? Does it change what Driftwood is as a band?

CB: Well, I don’t have a kid, which I think is a very different thing that Dan’s adjusted to. I feel like that maturing, there’s a bit of nesting that we’ve all done. You stay and home a little bit more. Everybody talks about, like, the recipes they’re making at home. We do that more now than we did five, six years ago. It’s just getting older, blablabla. I don’t know about the songwriting though. I guess so.

DF: The weird thing with songs, you know, you write it and then it’s two years before you record it. I always feel like the songwriting to fruition cycle is so behind. We’re putting out this album now, with these songs—one of them was close to when my son Finn was born, but it’s been so long. Now I listen to the songs on this album and I have a lot of songs I’m working on now that are different, for sure. It changes your state of mind. But it’s not overnight. Just a little bit of a different change. For scheduling, definitely. Everyday life; it’s definitely changed how everything goes down. But, I still have this desire to get out and make music. It’s a different drive than before. Before, one of the questions that people asked on the road that might rub me the wrong way was, like ‘oh, are you guys making a living doing this? You doing alright? Getting by?’ Now, the question I’m dealing with is, ‘oh, you’ve got a son? That must be so hard being away from him all the time.’ I think about it. I think about what he will think. What he’ll think of this life. Being a musician, it’s what we do. You feel like homeless or gypsy people a lot of time. You can feel like there’s something, like, not valid about it. Other people think that, sure. People don’t think it’s a professional job. But I think that’s something that can bring real strength of character to families, to friendships. For him to be able to see this life, to see everyone in the band and know we do what we do, or our friends, to see people getting out there and just following their heart, it really trumps anything. I think about that and I think about— I want to pursue music because I love it. We’re all so tight; there’s no question about why we’re doing it. But for me now, there’s another thing. I’m an example setter all of a sudden.

TCC: Traditionally Dan and Joe have shared songwriting duty, but Claire, you wrote and sing lead vocals on three City Lights tracks. Did you set out to write Driftwood songs, or did you set out to write Claire Byrne solo songs? Is there a difference.

CB: There’s definitely a difference. Two of those songs I set out to write Driftwood songs. I’d consider myself a fairly new songwriter—I’ve been doing it for a few years. And I’ve gotten more of a process, I can think in the right direction now. And my tunes, they’re pretty folky most of the time. So when I set out to write Driftwood tunes, I was trying to make them a little more—I was trying to be more creative than I think I would’ve been if I was trying to write a song for myself. Just approaching the melodies… maybe they’re a little different, or just making sound more unique, I guess. Which now makes it kind of seem like I don’t do myself justice with my solo songs (laughs). I like the folky tunes, the country tunes. But when I want to do something with the band, we don’t exactly want to do a folky country thing. So we’ve got to do it a different way.

TCC: Of all the songs on the album, “Waves” sticks out to me as sounding a lot different than what I’d expect from Driftwood. It’s got the indie rock thing to it, which you’ve done before, but it’s also got more of a—a different kind of dance beat than you’d expect to hear at a Driftwood show. There’s a nostalgia to it, but it’s not the same nostalgia you’d expect to hear at a Driftwood show. Can you talk a bit about it?

CB: That’s a song I’d written with Driftwood in mind, however my guitar skills are also kind of limited. There’s a lot I can’t do on the guitar, which I think leads me to the folky and country tunes. So “Waves,” when I brought it to the group, I just had this raging old-time guitar thing going. It was a really different tune. So we tried it old-timey. We tried it. We were confused, just confused as what to do with it. And so Dan and Joe one day sit down, fingerpicking or something, and Joey brought in this funky bass line, and we finished it, and we’re like, ‘No! Yes? No! What was that? Yes?’ And we listened back, and it’s pretty groovy.

JK: Just grinning, ear to ear, like whaaat?

JA: We didn’t want to accept it, though, because we knew it stuck out in a way.

CB: And that continued with the mixing, we’re just fighting it, adding the reverb and hoping that it’s not too ‘clubby.’

JA: Now we’re coming up on it, we’ve never played it live, but that comes back to needing the drums.

TCC: Claire, Dan, and Joe, you all came of age playing music in Binghamton, and Driftwood’s been, maybe the cornerstone of that scene for some time now. How have things changed in the last decade? How much of a part of that do you think you play?

DF: I’m not in town anymore, so I don’t see it like Claire and Joe, but it seems there’s something just awesome about seeing, like—to see a band like Milkweed, just hitting it, and being as damn good as they are, as effective as they are. To see them making music like that, it’s really exciting for me. Or, like, a band like East Coast Bigfoot out there doing it. I got their CD a few weeks ago, and it’s great- to hear that music and know those people and know that Binghamton connection. It’s cool. I don’t know if any of that is us, or if it’s like, the Belmar scene, stuff like that.

TCC: Joey, you’re the only member of the band that’s not from the Binghamton area. You come from Syracuse, the land of salt potatoes and Dinosaur BBQ. What are your thoughts on Binghamton’s greatest culinary export, the spiedie?

JA: I didn’t know about the spiedie at all. At all! It’s similar to-- Utica has their chicken riggies and the greens. I don’t know if people from around here know all that… probably the best spiedie I ever had, our friends Mike and Greg made these venison spiedies for Dan’s bachelor party.

TCC: Of all the cover songs you’ve cycled through your sets through the years, are there any you miss playing?

DF: I used to like doing- this goes before Claire being in the band. The last time we played “Tennessee Jed” was Claire’s first show.

CB: That’s because I ruined it. I ruined “Tennessee Jed.”

DF: It was on its way out anyway.

TCC: I spent some time on the road with you a few years back, selling t-shirts and dancing in the mud and camping on floors. Best year ever. But it’s an exhausting lifestyle. How do you sustain? What tricks have you learned to stay healthy, to stay friends on the road?

CB: I should say, since you were on the road with us, we’ve gotten a lot healthier. We don’t smoke in the van anymore. We don’t chew in the van anymore!

JA: They’re clichés but they’re so true. Eating right. Hydrating right. I fell in love with running. Claire and I run when we’re on the road. It gives you more energy. I get to the venue and I’m more active and stuff for load-in. And I’m not as tired by the end of the night. No matter how much you do all that, whenever we’re in the van we’re exhausted. An hour, I just want to take a nap.

JK: We do a lot of funny stuff on the road to entertain each other. Joey’s brought a lot of humor to our van rides: interesting trivia that only we’d know, games where we have to make gas station clerks say certain things. It spices up the general vibe.

DF: We finally got a CD player.

CB: And we’ve been learning a few barber shop tunes.

TCC: Congratulations on your first FCC warning label!

JK: We rerecorded a song so I could drop the f-bomb in it.

TCC: One time on a run with you, we stopped at a gas station in Virginia that was attached to a Baskin Robbins. I used the bathroom in the gas station, the wall of which was adorned with one lone piece of graffiti, that stated simply: “I fucking hate ice cream.” What’s the best piece of graffiti you’ve seen on the road?

CB: I got pickles on the fiddle, man, at the Southern in Charlottesville, VA. It’s a picture of a pickle playing a fiddle. Does he have a boner, too? He’s got a top hat, and it says ‘pickles on the fiddle.’

JK: I never knew like, the green room penis phenomenon. Just like, dicks everywhere. I didn’t know that was a thing, just—drawing penises.

DF: I still like the Belmar classic ‘dirty for life.’ Is that still there?

TCC: Anything you want to add?

JA: I love spiedies.

City Lights drops in stores and online on November 4th. Be sure to join Driftwood (and special guests Bug Tussle and Next to Kin) for two nights at the Ransom Steele Tavern in Apalachin, November 25th and 26th, to celebrate that release. Full list of tour dates and more info at driftwoodtheband.com.