motel void

MOTEL VOID: Crave On started as your solo recording project in 2014 with the album Jewel Encrusted Laughter. What inspired you to transition from a solo endeavor to a full band, and how has that evolution shaped your sound?

CRAVE ON: On the first album I played everything myself out of necessity. Me and Kate had moved to a new town, Olympia, WA, where we didn’t know anybody except for a few acquaintances. I wrote and recorded JEL just before we moved to Nashville. I put together a full five-piece band because I wanted to play the songs live. Our first show was in March 2015. Then because the live band existed, we needed to make another album to capture what that was like, so I wrote more songs and we made our second album, Cheers. Then the next set of circumstances led to our third album Evergreens, and so on and so forth, so a chain of events runs through all of our albums up to this one. For better or worse, what shapes our sound is the compulsion to continue making songs and playing music and how that gets refracted through what’s going on in our lives.

I’ve known Bryan for more than 20 years and Kate for 15. We’ve been playing music together for a decade. So hopefully there’s some kind of synergy or hive mind that happens when we play. Me and Kate have cowritten songs more in recent years and in the beginning I did it all on my own. I think she just wanted to write songs so we started collaborating. It was a natural thing to do.

MOTEL VOID: Evergreens, your album from 2017, reimagined folk songs from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. What drew you to reinterpret these particular tracks?

CRAVE ON: Kate and I took a trip to Berlin in autumn 2016. I was struck by how few guitars I saw there. Musically, everything was geared towards electronics, synthesizers, computers, etc. That made me curious about getting out of what had been my standard musical setup. So I bought a little drum machine, Korg Volca Drum, and at the same time the band went from five-piece to a trio. Since we didn’t have a drummer, we started using the drum machine. It felt strange to try to recreate what we had been doing as a five-piece with the drum machine, so we needed new songs. The idea for playing “Coo Coo” came from seeing Cass McCombs playing it in concert. And then I think that led to the idea of doing an album of folk songs, which felt like a good idea because I wanted to internalize those older song forms and lyrics. There was a speech by Bob Dylan from around that time where he said he had learned to write songs by playing those kind of songs so much, so that album was meant (1) to help us get oriented to playing with the drum machine and (2) as a kind of song studying project. The juxtaposition of old songs with new sounds felt novel and fun.

MOTEL VOID: You’re from Nashville. How has the city’s music community influenced your approach to songwriting and performing? Do you have any favorite local venues and artists?

CRAVE ON: Nashville life has a musical aspect at almost every turn. So many people here play instruments and write songs. The standard for performers is high. It means you have to work hard at your music if you don’t want to be mediocre compared to all the talented people around. My favorite local venues are Springwater which is a dive bar that’s been there forever and Soft Junk which is an amazingly decorated arty space in an industrial zone. I can’t name artists because I don’t want to leave anybody out and the list would go on for a long time.

MOTEL VOID: You’ve released your new album Fantasy Hall this October. What was the writing and recording process like? And do you have plans for a tour to support your new album?

CRAVE ON: These songs were part of a huge batch written in 2020-2021 lockdown. During that time I went through old notebooks and dusted off old songs, revising some of them either a little or a lot. For example, Orange Light in a Dark room is from February 2018, Merle Haggard was written the day Merle Haggard died (April 6, 2016) and revised later, Ocean of Wires is from around that same time period. Little Bit Stronger was the newest one.

Our previous album, Slow Pulsing Rainbow, was also from the same lockdown batch. Those were recorded and mixed at home during the lockdown and in the year after. I sent them to mastering just before Kate and I became parents to our son James in June 2022. We had already made plans to record Fantasy Hall at the Bomb Shelter before our baby was born. We anticipated that with a baby at home it would be hard to make the album there. Actually, there was a studio day booked in June of 2022 that we had to cancel because we were going to the hospital for the birth. So the sessions didn’t start until December 2022. We had three days that went from 10AM-8PM. Myself and Kate were still in the kind of bleary tired new parent stage. With us were bass player Bryan, who has been with us since our very first show, and drummer Anson, who played with us just after lockdown up to the recording sessions. After that was about a year of sporadic overdub and mixing sessions, usually just me and Andrija Tokic (who owns the studio) and recorded the album. It all seems like a really long time ago!

We would really like to tour. There’s a chance we may do some shows outside of Nashville in early 2025 but in early April, Kate and I are welcoming our second baby. Eventually Crave On will tour again (our last big tour was 2019) but we’re very much in baby world for the time being which is nice in a completely different way.

However, we are determined to keep the music rolling until doomsday so I’ll be attempting in the coming months to write more songs, which I haven’t really done in a serious concentrated way since 2020-21. Time will tell how that goes.