Revel in night of ‘Front Porch Americana’ at Filler
From the storied music scene of the Upper Midwest comes the cutting-edge “Front Porch Americana” soundscapes of The Last Revel. This powerfully talented collective of songwriters naturally blends the genres of folk, old time and rock to create a sound that is as original as it is timeless. Drawing influence from their salt of the earth Midwest ethos, the band’s songs are roots in the characteristic that has made that region the heartbeat of America.
The Last Revel utilizes their multi-instrumental abilities to bring the full spectrum of modern Americana to life with lush arraignments of three-part vocal harmonies, acoustic and electric guitar, upright bass, fiddle and 5-string banjo to consistently support impassioned performances of their honest and heartfelt songwriting.
With their latest release, Fool’s Spring, The Last Revel further demonstrates their ability to create rich and delicately textured recorded material with a modern “tip of the hat” to the storied history of American folk music.
In anticipation of their Treasure State performances, the Rolling Zone spoke with founding member Ryan Acker about the new album and sonic reincarnation.
Rolling Zone: After a short break, The Last Revel’s fall tour continues with a number of Northwest stops, including a batch right here in Montana. Can you give us a preview of those shows, whether for returning fans or first time Revelers?
Ryan Acker: We released a new batch of songs earlier this year. The album’s called Fool’s Spring and this tour will be a solid amount of that, plus some of our favorite highlights from older material. This is our fourth full-length, which is crazy to think about. You take these little baby steps along the way and look back in a couple years and you’re like ‘Ohh. We have a catalog to pick from now,’ which is really fun. The band expanded a little bit in the last couple of years, so now we’re playing with a full drum set and upright bass player. With the full setup, it’s been fun to pick and choose some older tunes that we kind of restructured for the new band, and then highlight the new album as well. We’re having a blast with these songs.
RZ: Though the band is based out of Minneapolis, you’ve become a pretty familiar face on the local circuit. How do you manage, more or less, splitting that time?
RA: That’s new territory for us. I just recently relocated here, so it’s a lot more concise when the band does get together. This fall tour for example, we have like 12 shows in 15 days. We’re blocking off our calendar in chunks like that versus, for years, doing weekends every weekend and tours in between. Everybody gets together before and refreshes the material, but it’s not nearly as much of the daily thing we used to do. I love Minnesota, and the Midwest will always be where I’m from. There are so many cultural things that translate [to] the Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest, and the state of Montana is practically the band’s second home. We have so many great fans and have toured so much here, it feels very comfortable for the band to come back.
RZ: The new album arrived following a bit of a crossroads for the band. Could you expand on what happened there?
photo by Michelle Bennett
RA: The last few years have been pretty dynamic. Our former guitar player, Lee (Henke), decided to leave the band in early 2018. For a long time we were just a trio, so it was Vinny (Donatelle) and I left standing there, wondering what to do. To be honest, there was a decent chunk of [time] where we weren’t sure if we should continue. The trio was such a collaborative effort, it wasn’t like it was one person’s band and the rest were just backing them up. So, we were at this crossroads. We had a majority of the band’s catalog between the two of us that still survives. We decided to make a big change and invest in reformatting how we do things and see what happens. It was either we try or it goes away, so it was really easy to justify giving it a shot. That’s always been a fundamental aspect of what The Last Revel’s always been. It’s definitely had its moments of being incredibly challenging, but it’s also been incredibly rewarding to reinvent ourselves. Everything feels new again and it’s exciting in new ways. There are exciting and challenging factors to it, but it keeps us motivated and on our toes.
RZ: That’s where Rachel Hanson came in.
RA: Rachel was a longtime friend and confidante of the band [who] we met her through the Midwest music scene. She’s always been really close to the project. She had joined us on tour a whole bunch and helped us with recording projects throughout the band’s history. She’s got this incredible voice and is also a great songwriter. When it came time to mix things up and rebuild the band, she was the first person to come to mind. She was ecstatic, and actually hoping we were going to ask. Collectively, everybody was kind of thinking it. We brought her into the fold, and she’s been incredible to work with. She’s amazingly talented and really inspired. Through her we met Lauren Anderson and Elliot Heinz, who are our bass player and drummer. They’ve also played together for a long time.
RZ: What would you say the shake-up did for what would become Fool’s Spring?
RA: Even though the new five-piece is a year and a half old, everybody’s been playing together for years in different projects. That personal chemistry is already there, [which made] reformatting the music fun and really easy. The new album absolutely reflects making music with them in a really big way. Where before it was just kind of a folky, bluegrassy trio, now it’s this full band. There’s still violin and banjo, and there’s still upright bass and acoustic guitar, but there’s also these other elements we’re playing with. Full drum set, electric guitar – the textures we can play with now are completely different. We have all these things to draw from and anything is possible. It’s like a whole new palette of colors to play with.
RZ: The album retained many of the stompy, string band elements the early Last Revel became known for, but also broadened its sound. What attributes of the current lineup, would you say, spurred this evolution?
RA: Rachel’s songwriting and her vocal presence changed the way we write. She has such an incredible, powerhouse voice, that that became the tip of the spear. The songs are now highlighting that. Before we were doing more harmonies and it was a lot more focused on the stompgrass thing, and now we’re taking a step back and letting Rachel’s vocal free-form soar as high as she wants. She’s a huge country music fan of all different eras, which is a new influence on the band. Vinny and I aren’t students of country music like she is, so we’re starting to absorb that influence. That opened up the door for me to play more electric guitar. And drums just go hand-in-hand with that Americana/country/folk umbrella, where drums and bluegrass are a little more foreign to each other. The trio sometimes got pigeonholed into a bluegrass thing. Adding the drums helped us migrate a little further from that. The new album explores the other textures of Americana, on the other side of bluegrass.
RZ: Do you think we can expect further evolution on the next set of tunes?
RA: We’re just getting started writing songs together. Everybody has their songwriting pieces that they bring to the group, but now we’re reconfiguring with these new tools, this new angle and trajectory. I imagine it will continue to evolve. Respectfully, Rachel, Vinny and I are becoming stronger songwriters and I think that’s going to show a lot more. I’ve always been a firm believer in ‘a well-written song can move mountains,’ and all it takes is one to change everything. That’s always been the focus of the band, and I imagine that to be the continued focus. I think we’ll dive deeper into the Americana five-piece and see where that leads us. I don’t ever imagine putting down the banjo, I think it’ll just ebb and flow in its focus.
RZ: What’s the status is on the new material?
RA: The band was touring and pushing so hard for so long, everybody’s excited to take a little bit of a breather from it and explore other aspects of life. We’re always tossing around ideas, riffing on songs and trying things out, but as far as studio time booked for anything new, not in the near future.
RZ: This is a band of songwriters. Lyrically speaking, do you guys write independently and then present to the other members, or is it more of a group effort with the songs speaking to collective experiences? Perhaps it’s both.
RA: Specifically, for the new album, everything was brought to the table from a spark standpoint by an individual. With the song “Roses” for example, Rachel brought that to Vinny and I. She had a verse and chorus and that was it. We helped her arrange the song, and she had the vision to finish it from there. It’s a back-and-forth, kind of ping-pong game. A lot of the songs were finished like that. Songs are funny. I’ve been working on some songs for years and it feels like you’re never quite done with it. Then sometimes, you sit down for 10 minutes and it just happens, and it’s done, there it is. It’s a moving target. That’s kind of the fun of it. You never know if it’s going to be the day you write the song. It’s always nice to bring an idea to a group like this that’s not completely finished because it still has room to play and fit the band, versus here it is, let’s play it as is.
RZ: You’ve got to be somewhat comfortable with your bandmates to open up personal stories to critique.
RA: I feel that for sure, and I’m sure they do too. It feels like it’s a part of you in a song and you’re very very protective of that. You think it’s the greatest thing you’ve ever done, but from the creator’s standpoint, it’s tough to not look at it so romantically. That’s where having collaborators really comes in handy. They can show you the reality of the situation, whether it’s an amazing song or something that needs work. They can help you see it for what it is and that’s really important. You can get so caught up and sometimes need to be brought down to earth.
RZ: And maybe sometimes a song is just not meant for the Last Revel stamp.
RA: A lot of the songs I wrote for the band didn’t make it on this album, and that’s exactly why. I’ve heard bandmates say, ‘this is a Ryan song.’ It’s so close to me that it has to come from that specific source. Some songs are a lot more malleable on who the narrator really is. You have to trust your partners, that they’re making the right call.
RZ: Because you also perform individually, do solo sets provide an opportunity to share the tunes that might not be fit for the full band?
RA: Playing solo or with another group, stepping away from your main project and applying these ideas to something else, it kind of exposes them in a way that’s really important for the process. Some songs that made it on the new album, I tried out solo for months, just threw it out there to gauge the reaction and how it felt. A musician knows when something went well. You can feel it if something goes well and felt right. That’s definitely my staging ground.
RZ: Where do you draw the line?
RA: As far as side projects or solo projects go, I don’t think anything is off limits. There’s something so fascinating and freeing about live music in general because you can get up there and do whatever you want, and in a solo setting that’s absolutely true because you’re calling the shots. If you want to try an old song in a new way or try a new song in some completely different way, that’s totally up to you. That’s where the magic lies, seeing musicians solo. You can do anything.
RZ: After the tour you’re all going to take a breather and live a little bit, but what does the new year look like for The Last Revel?
RA: I think we’re still trying to figure that out. We’ll hit 2020 on a positive note, and I’m sure there will be new material fostered through the time off. I love playing old material because of the connections fans feel to it, and the connection I feel to those fans for their connection, but showcasing new stuff is my favorite thing about this whole crazy trip. The only way we as a band can invest in our transition is to continue making material for people to see where the path is leading. Bob Dylan for example, you can see the evolution through the music he made. I think that’s fascinating. You’re capturing moments within songs, and he kind of mapped out his life in music. Granted, I have favorite little windows of his career, but when you take a step back to look at it all together, it’s really neat to see the line wander. At the end of the day it’s Bob Dylan, and I hope someday that’s what people say about Last Revel albums.
RZ: Did you have a closing thought for those who might come across this?
RA: The number of times the band has played the Filling Station is probably approaching double digits. Our first show there, we opened up for a band from California and we played to like 5 people. That experience was exciting because we were so new and it was the first show we’d ever had outside the Midwest, so it’s always been really near and dear to our hearts. This is a place that has built the band, a place where it’s grown. We opened for the Lil Smokies there, then started headlining our own shows there. Honestly, some of my most favorite musical moments this band has had have been at the Filling Station. It’s institutional and ridiculous. I feel a connection to that place and [with] our fans who have come to our shows there because of the ridiculousness of it, and I think musicgoers in Bozeman feel that same way. It’s a kind of wild and crazy place, but some of the metaphorical barriers you feel at a live music show are not present at the Filling Station. It’s so much easier to connect with somebody musically because it’s so straight from the source, and that’s really cool.
The Last Revel returns to Bozeman’s Filling Station on Saturday, November 9th. Local singer/songwriter Paul Lee Kupfer will kick off the music at 9pm. Advance tickets to this 21+ show are $14 through www.CactusRecords.net, $15.50 in-store, or $18 at the door. Doors at 8pm.
Other regional shows include Billings’ Yellowstone Valley Brewing on Nov. 6th, the Great Northern in Whitefish on Nov. 7th, and Helena’s Lewis & Clark Tap Room on Nov. 8th. Ticketing and additional details can be found on the band website.
Learn more about the five-piece at www.TheLastRevel.com or find them on Facebook and Instagram for updated tour details and other announcements. Their latest release, Fool’s Spring, is available now. Stream on Spotify and Apple Music. •
