Drew Holcomb’s new album, Medicine, is set to be released on 1/27/15 and is easily his best work to date.
His comfortable, easy elegance and superb wordsmanship join together in near perfection on songs like “You’ll Always Be My Girl” and “Here We Go.” On “I’ve Got You” and “Ain’t Nobody Got It Easy,” the harmonies blend seamlessly and lend themselves to a sense of timelessness. In support of the album, Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors are traversing several countries and most of the eastern seaboard before ending the tour in New Orleans on April 19th. We caught up with Holcomb to discuss Medicine, Bonnaroo and the return of his very own The Moon River Music Festival in 2015.
I was listening to “Here We Go” while at work and I could not pay attention to what I was doing. That song drags you in, like a pretty girl leading you to the dance floor. It also originates from a place very near and dear to my heart, Bonnaroo. “We played Bonnaroo a year and a half ago. It was a blast. Bonnaroo is such a bucket list item for any band. We were sitting out in front of our tour bus in some lawn chairs, drinking some red wine and listening to music. It was a couple of guys from the band, my manager, my brother and a cousin and we’re all playing songs that we’ve loved that year, trying to introduce each other to new music. The music was flowing. The wine was flowing. The conversation was flowing. The laughter was flowing. It was just one of those nights where you just feel really alive and you realize how much the music you love has to do with the people you love. When you feel like you’re walking alone in life, which I think everybody feels that way at various points of a day, a week, a year, you have those moments with the people you love, listening to music, and it brings everything into perspective. You’re not alone if you’ve got people, and music helps you get through life. That’s what that song is about and really what the whole record is about.”
I caught Holcomb’s set in New Orleans at Voodoo Fest in 2014 and was once again blown away by the energy that he seems to be able to conjure in the live setting. “I can trace two things back to two different conversations, one with my mom and one with my dad, when I told them I wanted to do music. My mom made me make one promise. (Laughing) It was really kind of funny. She said, ‘promise me that I can always understand the words. I love music but I don’t like it when I can’t understand what people are saying.’ So I thought, okay, I’m going to be the kind of singer that you can understand what they’re saying. Because of that, I’ve always put a lot of energy and craft into the lyrical side of what I do. I think that is the trademark of our music, the simple, thoughtful, hopeful, but not naïve, point of view. The second thing was that my dad told me, ‘if you’re going to do this, you better work really, really hard at it. Promise me that you are going to work hard.’”
Obviously this struck a chord in Holcomb. “The music business is brutal. It’s a really hard place to have success. I’ve always had a pretty determined and stubborn attitude that I am going to keep at it until it works. I think that comes across in my music. In a lot of ways it is me preaching to myself. “Shine Like Lightning,” on the new record, is the perfect example of that. It’s a story about how long we’ve been doing this and critics and being misunderstood by cynical people. It’s about feeling like you’re fighting this uphill battle to do your music and travel and define your audience. There is a healthy chip on my shoulder that I’ve always had. With any kind of chip on your shoulder, you can either be cynical or work hard. I’ve always had the attitude that we are going to work harder and it paid off.”
Holcomb is one of the few artist that I’ve witnessed, who balances the life of a father and husband with his life on the road with such perceived grace and humility. “There’s no overarching, completely thought out philosophy. My mom, when I was a kid, told me that I was an old soul. Part of what that means is that I always take a long view. I think that so many bands and so many artists have success when they are young and get burned out and make a lot of dumb choices on the road. From the very beginning, I’ve been on the road with people that have a similar point of view, in the sense that we’ve all been looking to find somebody particular to spend our lives with. Ten years later, we’re all married and some of us have kids. We wanted to make music for the long run. We didn’t want to be a flash in the pan and have all the accessories of fame and success. We wanted to make great music for great music’s sake and hopefully pay our bills along the way. We’ve all been able to maintain the perspective, that home, where our wives and our kids and our friends and our families are, is where we belong. What we do on the road allows us to go back home and be the kind of fathers and husbands that we want to be; that we aspire to be.”
Medicine came together rather quickly. Ignoring the norm, their one song at a time approach sparked something in the band that resulted 2015’s first truly remarkable record. “Part of the thing that I don’t like about the modern traditional approach is that when you start with just the rhythm section, and then you add guitar, piano and vocals, is that whoever’s turn it is, has to work with what is already there. A lot of the great records that I love were made with 4, 5, 6 musicians in a room working it all out together and recording until they got it right. And making sure those parts worked together in real-time, not just on a computer, moving them around around until it works. It was really driven by the idea that, if that happens, the cooperative elements of musicians talking back-and-forth would create better parts and better music. I started watching these documentaries, like the Muscle Shoals documentary, and thinking about all these records that I love. They were recorded by people playing at the same time, editing themselves and knowing their strengths and weaknesses. I knew that my band was good enough to do it that way and I was right.”
Holcomb put together his first music festival in 2014. The Moon River Music Festival at The Levitt Shell in Memphis, TN was wonderfully successful and will return in 2015. “I love my hometown. I’m from Memphis. I grew up in Memphis. I’ve always wanted to do a festival in Memphis, not I’ve always wanted to do a festival and randomly picked Memphis. It was Memphis first, and then I want to do a festival. I wanted to bring a bunch of artist that I love and that I’ve gotten to know on the road to Memphis and introduce them to my hometown. Also, I wanted to bring our fans from all over the country to Memphis to meet my town. It was completely successful in that. A lot of the artist that we brought in were like, ‘man this is such a great town, a great venue and great people, I should play Memphis more often.’ A lot of people that came in from out of town were like, ‘gosh, this is a great city.’ We are definitely looking forward to keeping it as an annual event. We will announce (the 2015 lineup) in February.”
Drew Holcomb and the neighbors kick off their spring to in Glasgow, UK, on January 29th, before returning to the US for a lengthy run of shows including two days in Knoxville on 2/13 and 2/14. Plan to spend your Valentines day with a group of guys that can’t help but get you some bonus points with you date. For a full list of shows and to preorder Medicine, check out his website.
Check out “American Beauty,” the first song from Medicine.
