Nashville’s All Them Witches will be performing at War Memorial Auditorium on New Year’s Eve with fellow glorious Nashville band Moon Taxi.
The four-piece ensemble was born and raised in the Music City in 2012; “We all just ended up hanging out in the same spot, I guess, then we ended up living together, started jamming, and turned it into a band,” says drummer Robby Staebler. “We all have similar expectations about everything in life, I think. That lets us be at peace around each other; we’re forced to be around each other all the time, and that’s not necessarily always easy, but the fact is, our similar views and expectations definitely help with that.”
Not only do they hold similar views and expectations, the bandmates bring a similar work ethic to the proverbial table. “Everyone brings a lot of past life regression, anger…no, that’s not true,” says Staebler with a laugh. “Everyone brings focus and attention.” That may very well be the understatement of the century. In fact, All Them Witches plays a show nearly every day, and a cursory glance at this band’s rigorous tour schedule would make the faint of heart go glassy-eyed…but this band? Unfazed.
They’ve been tearing up the highways in support of their latest album, “Dying Surfer Meets His Maker“, released via label New West Records at the end of October. Is it psychedelic rock? Is it alt-country? Is it Americana? The band’s sound is indeed difficult to categorize, and under the “genre” header on their Facebook page, there’s only one word–“listen.” “There are all kinds of different people that like our music. The metal scene, the Americana scene, whatever it is, I think people like to label it by whatever they’re into. I think it spans a lot of gaps. At our shows, there will be a person wearing a leather jacket, a lady completely dressed up, a 17 year old girl wearing a baggy hoodie and neon green hair, a few older people scattered about with neatly-trimmed beards. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone in their 70s at one of our shows, but seeing folks in their 60s in fairly common. We’re a real jamming band, and those old guys love it. You’ll see a lot of different people. All the humans in the world are kind of a mixture of each other and our music is the same way. We don’t live in an imaginary atmosphere.”
While the band didn’t do anything particularly out of the ordinary in the process of recording the new record, the boys decided they could use a change of scenery, and headed to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, home of Dollywood, to make the album. “This time we took it somewhere else where we thought we could be away from everybody so that we couldn’t run away at night and go hang out with everyone we knew. We’d have to just stay in the mindset and crank some stuff out since we didn’t have a lot of time. I’m pretty sure I had some weird dreams while I was there that were inspired by the idea of running into Dolly,” Staebler admits.
All Them Witches’s tour schedule picks back up in January with trips to Chicago and California; in February, the band will embark on their first European tour, and plan to hit the festival circuit when they return. The multi-talented Staebler, who does all of the band’s artwork, shuns the idea of New Year’s Resolutions and sets short-term goals instead to deal with the insanity of their schedules. “I keep myself busy, I do all of our art, I work on that stuff constantly, I’m always making work for myself, that’s how I survive the rigors of the road. That, and smoking a decent amount of weed, which you could probably tell by the amount of times I’ve said ‘um’ and ‘and’ with you on the phone,” he says with a laugh. “I set myself daily goals. I have to stay focused on a moment-to-moment basis. If I can do that, then I can look back on the year and feel like I accomplished great things. Every moment is my resolution. And that is probably the cheesiest thing you’ve heard all week. Seriously though, we are very busy, hardworking people who have an insane focus and drive for our craft.”
[Get your tickets to ring in the New Year in Nashville with All Them Witches and Moon Taxi here: https://www.wmarocks.com/events]
Leave a Reply