In 2007 and 2008, during their boom days, it was hard to swing a dead cat in Knoxville without hitting a Llama Train show.
The band was recently graduated from the University of Tennessee, where they’d been a popular college party group, and had sanded down their rough edges, maturing and blossoming into a really interesting indie/alternative rock group while still retaining an energetic, jammy feel live.
Saturday nights there was a good chance the Train would be blowing the roof off of Preservation Pub or World Grotto. They were a local band with two full-length records (Siren Sounds, 2006 and Out of Season, 2008) who were on the rise, opening for national touring acts. They were all over 90.3. They made it onto one of the most coveted stages in town, The Bijou Theatre, with the Dirty Guv’nahs, and even occasionally toured around the region.
Eventually jobs, families, and other projects–and perhaps malaise brought on by fatigue from living the lifestyle of an in-demand late night party band –broke up the band. They went their separate ways, scattering around the region. Singer/bassist Scott Faw eventually picked up with Grandpa’s Stash and drummer/singer Matt Honkonen went through a Renaissance Man period, playing with Tenderhooks, R.B. Morris, Tim Lee 3, David Clifton and, recently, two solo albums (all the members are “slashies” since they could and did play multiple instruments on stage…Honkonen calls JP Plumlee a “Swiss Army knife”). Guitarist Dave Epley is in D.C. now, working on projects of his own.
But the exciting news for those Llama Train fans who’ve been holding their breath all these years: a reunion is in the works.
Using Honkonen’s Tiny Treehouse studio in Sequoyah Hills as a home base, the band is reigniting the flame, jamming, writing, and yes–recording new material.
Honkonen says the plan is nebulous and malleable, that the group is just having fun shaking off the dust for now. But he may be demuring, because he continued to explain that Llama Train 2.0 has five songs tracked and is entering the mixing and mastering phase. According to Honkonen, those songs could be a string of singles, an EP or the first chunk of a full new album.
The plan is for the band to do at least one live reunion show in 2016 at Preservation Pub, the band’s unofficial “home” according to Honkonen. “Scott West has been egging us on to play at the Pub,” he said.
“All of the stuff that seemed so important in college doesn’t matter now,” Honkonen says when he compares these new sessions to their work in the day. The members are thirty-somethings now with jobs, wives, children. Whereas they used to get drunk and maybe play sloppily on a song live or have occasional ego-driven arguments in the studio, Honkonen says they just “get drunk and have fun playing music with friends” now.
“I think I like them more now than I did in college,” he says.
Good personal and collaborative artistic dynamics don’t really die with time or space, and Llama Train seems to be proving that to themselves as they reconvene and rediscover the magic they can make together when they make music.
How and when the general public will get to see it first-hand remains to be seen, but as The Dude famously said in Big Lebowski, “New information has come to light, man.” So ears to the ground, Knoxville listens and waits for a chance to see these behemoths of 2000’s Knox rock on stage and in their headphones once again.
