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Mountain Alibi

~ Kelly Wolf ~ 2 Comments

I’ve written about being in a band a couple of times: first when describing how I felt about a wonderful group of folks who supported my writing, and the second when describing my actual, music-based band, Late Night Revelations. LNR started playing together just before COVID lockdown, then practiced on Tuesday evenings for the next six years, providing a consistent space in our lives for creativity, catharsis, companionship, and lots of laughter. We performed for groups of friends on four occasions (we weren’t big on playing out) and recorded two albums.

JR (my husband/bassist) and Brevis (guitar/vocals) wrote our second album’s title track while hanging out on Brevis’ land in Marshall, North Carolina.

Pretty inspiring spot, right?

When they returned from their jam session and played the riffs for me, they let me know the track was called Mountain Alibi. I think they’d hoped I would write a crime-based song to match the title, like an old timey country murder tune. Instead, I wrote an anthem for introverts, describing excursions into nature as a go-to excuse for avoiding social situations. It might not have been what they’d expected, but the subject matter made for a really pretty music video.

The month before JR and I moved to California, LNR played our final show to about thirty people at our friends’ farm. Despite my aversion to playing anywhere outside my own house, it was really fun. And how often do you get to dress like this?

Boxes of Sofia water were on prominent display at the show, both to offer refreshment and as a nod to our song Sofia, written about the effects of Tropical Storm Helene on Western North Carolina. After the storm, much of our region didn’t have running water for weeks, and potable water didn’t come out of our taps for months. Sofia’s cardboard boxes of water were a welcome alternative to the hundreds of thousands of plastic water bottles that were distributed during that time.

A Sofia box also came in handy when one of our speakers went out during the show, and Brevis and I had to share a mic to harmonize on her song Virginia Blues.

I call this photo “B on a Box”

It hurt my heart to leave LNR when we moved to California. After six years of Tuesdays, I’d come to rely on my band and bandmates as a regular source of support, encouragement, and inspiration. Through extreme joys, extreme hardships, successes, and failures, we grew as people and as a group. I’m so grateful for that time. In my adolescence and early adulthood, as I moshed my way through life, I always figured there’d be no experience quite like being in a band. And I was right.

[If you’d like to hear Mountain Alibi, you can download it off Bandcamp or stream it on YouTube, Apple Music, Amazon, Pandora, Deezer, Tidal, or probably wherever else you look (except for that one place that rhymes with modify). Again, here’s the lovely Mountain Alibi music video that JR made. And huge thanks to Matt Williams at The Eagle Room for being our producer on both albums – it was truly awesome to work with him. 🕺🏽]

Late Night Revelations

~ Kelly Wolf ~ 4 Comments

I started writing songs in my late-teens. Without access to a band or any instrumental prowess, I just sang them a cappella, dreaming that one day, they’d bloom into legit songs. Somehow.

Not long after JR and I started dating, I wrote a song for him titled Mi Rata Podrida (I meant it in a loving way). I gave him the song for his birthday, along with printouts of others I’d written over the years. He was appreciative but didn’t quite know what to do with them, so he signed up for guitar lessons.

About twenty years later, we started making music with our friends Chris and Brevis.

When we first got together, the country was in lockdown. Weekly band practice was pretty much our sole in-person interaction outside of grocery stores and our homes. We’d often comment on how we lived for Tuesday nights – a bright spark in an otherwise dreary, worrisome time. Throughout quarantine (and a variety of other unpleasant life events in the coming years), I found infinite catharsis in the simple act of screaming into a mic while engulfed in a sea of pounding drums, driving bass, and power chords.

Our first practice space looked like a haunted kill room. (Note the stained plastic sheeting behind Chris in the photo below.) From my position at the mic, I’d stare across the room at creepy portraits of little girls who were definitely ghosts (you can see them two photos down). It was terrifying, but we loved it…until we got kicked out for being too loud.

I blame Chris.

Our first fan was a darling dog named Bella. While we played, she’d lie on the floor in a circle of blasting amps, perfectly content.

Bella is a badass. I mean, just look at that mohawk. She never would’ve even considered telling us to turn it down.

(Although we really should. We’re all losing our hearing.)

Our first gig was for seven people in the guitarist’s backyard. After we played, no one said a word about the music. It was very awkward. A year later, we played another backyard show, this one for about twenty people. It was way better in that folks actually acknowledged we’d just performed songs. Many of them even said nice things.

After writing and practicing together for a couple of years, we grew tired of the crappy recordings captured on our phones, which were essentially in-your-face drums with melodic mumbling in the background. We found an amazing producer – Matt Williams at The Eagle Room – and recorded nine of our songs in one day. I think Matt is used to more polished musicians, not a bunch of grungy rockers who decide after three takes that it’s time to move on. But we were stoked with the results, and a few days ago, after a healthy dose of Matt’s magical mixing and mastering, we released our little album, Dark Circles.

I’m glad the me who started writing songs 30 years ago didn’t know it would take this long to get them out in the world, because she would have drowned in a puddle of tears. But the me of today is feeling pretty snazzy about the whole thing, especially since I just learned you can ask Alexa to play our songs, and she does it. How cool is that?

I mean, you know you’ve really made it when even Alexa knows who you are. 😏 😆