The Lone Bellow

That's not the whole story of What a Time to Be Alive, The Lone Bellow's sixth album, but it might be the most important part. For the first time, the band wrote collaboratively with their full touring ensemble, holing up in a converted firehouse in Henderson, Kentucky, and treating the whole thing like a week-long hang. The inside jokes stayed in. The laughter did, too. The cowbell that may or may not be a spiritual successor to the Home Depot theme song remained as well—as the opening track, no less.

The result is the most freewheeling record founding member Zach Williams, Brian Elmquist, and Kanene Pipkin have made (alongside drummer Julian Dorio and multi-instrumentalist Tyler Geertsma). We caught up with Williams to hear all about the fun of the new album, the sometimes problematic choices for the live show, and why he’s decided to give up more control than ever.

Analogue: I caught the show in Indianapolis and loved that the set was so front-loaded with new material. Was that a deliberate call?

Zach Williams: Yeah, it was purposeful. There are these ambiguous rules that kind of float around the making of a set list—nobody ever wrote them down, but it's like a quiet, understood thing. And it leads to a lot of arguments because there's no right answer. But we wanted to represent the new album as much as we could. We were basically just trying to see how much we could get away with.

We did like six new songs, which, if you're looking at the whole pie of the set, is a big piece of the pie. And especially it being our sixth album, it was just like, okay, this means we're not going to be able to play this song that people like, or this one. So it was great that it was well received. The crowd was so fun. I remember that night. It was a wild night.

Analogue: A song like "Say" seems like a real risk in a live setting.

Zach: People that come to our shows are usually drawn to the harmony and then to the way that we write lyrics and story. "Say" has 18 words. It's a five-minute song. I really wanted to try to capture the vibration of the very first moment that I wrote it.

I was singing at a friend's wedding—these two actors—and they paid for us to go all the way out to the southern coast of Italy, to some 500-year-old estate where inside the property there was this beautiful little old clay chapel, probably about the size of the room I'm in right now. The whole ceiling is arched and curved, and the stucco is hundreds of years old.

So this room had its own living, breathing echo—like a beautiful echo chamber. And I was in there learning "Muskrat Love," this silly song about two rats falling in love, and started working on "Say." I had the recording in my phone for a couple of years, and I'd go back and listen to it and be like, man, this song doesn't have that many words, but it says something to me.

Once we started working on the record and everyone felt really safe in what they were doing, we finally got to "Say"—it was like the tenth song, so we were already just humming. Then Tyler James pulled out that trumpet and did his counter melody. And honestly, after hearing that trumpet, I was like, 'I think this is a song for space.' I never thought we'd play it live.

Then we started doing it live, and the room just became this moment of exhale. Some nights it totally bombed. We tried to play it in some seated venues that had like zero vibe, and it sucked. You really need the whole room. Everybody needs to be able to move a little, and it needs to be very dark. A disco ball goes a really long way in a moment like that. It's one of those things where it's like, 'Okay, this isn't just going to be the music. It's going to take the group of people that are in there with us. Are we all going to go into this moment together or are we going to reject it?' And sometimes it was rejected, but not in Indianapolis.

Analogue: You've always had that signature you mentioned—the harmonies, the storytelling. I've spoken with other bands who talk about trying to get outside of that or away from it. I'm curious if this record felt like kicking against that a little.

Zach: Yeah, absolutely. When we first got started, it was all love. Just love for the game. I think there were like eight people in our band, we were all broke in New York, like out of a made-for-TV movie. Then you put out that first record and it's well received, and immediately the pressure of the second record comes—do we just do more of what we did? And the people in charge of helping us make money were probably like, please stop scaring yourselves like that. Can you dumb it down just a little bit? And we would try, I swear we would try, but we would always just get bored with it.

With this record, before we even went in to write, we were like, let's go to our friend Peter Barbee's studio in Henderson, Kentucky. Peter bought this dilapidated old firehouse that had been abandoned since the 1950s—didn't even have a roof on it. He lived in a school bus outside for two years and redid the whole inside with Tyler James and made it a studio, just the two of them.

And we said, 'This is going to be a full band album, and we actually want everybody to have equal say in the songs,' which is not the norm for us. Usually, I'd be like, 'Hey, here's all my songs. Here's me playing it on guitar. Please make it better.' This time, everybody came in on the same level. The record was more of a time capsule of a group of friends hanging out for a week than anything else.

Analogue: You described that shift pretty casually, but giving up that kind of control sounds like it came with some inner wrestling.

Zach: I definitely had that inner wrestling going on. But I think everybody knew that I had it, so everyone was cool with it. We've been touring together so long, we're like a family—we read each other really closely. Everybody knew I would end up concentrating on the lyrics a lot. So melodies would be flying around, and everybody else had an instrument and I was just sitting crisscross applesauce on the floor with a notepad. It was so fun. I'd never done it that way before.

And then, like playing the record live, it's no longer just a band playing songs that they believe in. It's also a band reliving this intentional getaway time. We get to relive it every night when we play the shows. And then the hope is that we subconsciously invite everybody into that together.

Analogue: Is there a song on the record where you got out of your own way the most?

Zach: The song that Kanene sings ["No Getting Over You"], that melody came from that same little chapel in Italy. I had a few words, I had a map, brought it to the table, and immediately Brian came up with this hook. And then Kanene really took the words and ran with it and made the verses her own. I really got out of the way for that one.

And then there's "After the Rain." I usually make things really serious and heavy, and I really wanted to try to get out of my own way on this record. We had Jack White's longtime engineer out on the road with us, this guy named Josh Smith—super eccentric, beard down to here, says weird, random jokes all day long. But every soundcheck, the sound man usually plays a song to check the speakers, and the song Josh would always play was the Home Depot theme song. It became this really fun joke. We'd be at a venue, and the lighting guy we'd never met would pop up and be like, 'Bro, is this the Home Depot theme song?'

So then, when we started messing with "After the Rain," that cowbell and that vibe felt like maybe the Home Depot song and "After the Rain" were swimming together. There was a moment where I was like, 'Hey, this is too much of an inside joke, like nobody else is going to get that.' This is really fun for us. And Julian, the drummer was like, 'But that's the point.'

Analogue: [Laughs] What I love is that you're not talking about some hidden track at the end of the album.

Zach: It's the first track, baby. [Laughs] This record has so many inside jokes. And I love that. People will be like, 'Yo, that was really funny when you started laughing in the second verse of "I'm Here for You". What was going on?' And I'm like, 'Yeah, Kanene and Brian were making stupid faces at me in the vocal booth because they decided it sounded better if I laughed than if I didn't.' Even if the record totally flops and doesn't do anything commercially, I don't care. It's just this gift that we gave ourselves of a little living, breathing time capsule.

Analogue: The album title—What a Time to Be Alive—feels like it's carrying a lot right now.

Zach: We made the record a couple of years ago, and then we put together our own record label, so it took forever to release because we had no idea how hard that would be. Right before we released the record, we were like, 'What do we want to name it?' And we landed on What a Time to Be Alive because the song is shining light on a couple of different stories.

One of my favorites is Brian wrote the first two verses about the very first time he genuinely let himself receive grace—or love, whatever word you want to use—just let himself be loved. And then he ended up falling in love with this person that he's married to now. And then Kanene wrote the third verse about putting her son to bed, and just that sweet, quiet moment that doesn't happen enough in our day-to-day life right now.

I hope that this art just helps people maybe slow down a little bit. Truly just go for a walk, maybe without a phone, just go and be for a little while. Because we're getting so purposefully slammed with all this information, all this complete chaos. And I just worry. I worry that all of our ability to remember things is taking a beating right now. And I hope that this album helps people just redeem whatever it is that used to help them remember the things that matter most. Maybe that could replace the doom scrolling, or being angry at things we have no control over, or reading news that's 30 seconds old that hasn't even been filtered yet.

VISIT: The Lone Bellow

Photo: Debbie Ewing