Delta Rae playing the Old Rock House tonight
Listen to their single "If I Loved You," featuring Lindsey Buckingham
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9df7mHBjOYM
Delta Rae – Carry the FireSeymour
Stein’s office sits way up in the high rises of the Rockefeller Plaza; a
corner office, with a beautiful view out over New York City, its
surfaces cluttered with all of the memorabilia, awards and accumulated
paraphernalia of a lifetime spent in the music industry.
It was
into this office that the six members of Delta Rae shuffled one day in
the summer of 2011. A rather convoluted connection had led them here to
this meeting, their first with a major record label, and no one was
quite sure how to proceed. “We were very nervous,” recalls Ian Holljes,
with perhaps some understatement.
“But we talked briefly, and
then Seymour said ‘Well, why don’t you sing something for me?’” The band
duly launched into Hey Hey Hey, a joyous, rollicking tune that begins
with an exquisite four-part harmony. Ten seconds in, Stein asked them to
stop. The band balked. But Stein stood up, walked to the door and
hollered for his colleagues to join them. “You gotta hear these people!”
he cried into the hallway. “They sound so beautiful!”
The story
that led Delta Rae to Stein’s office, a major label deal, and the
release of their stunning debut album, had in fact begun many years
before, in the Holljes household, where siblings Ian, Eric and Brittany,
enjoyed a childhood that was close yet itinerant, carrying them from
Durham, North Carolina, to the Bay area of San Francisco, via Nashville,
Tennessee, and Marietta, Georgia. Throughout it all, they relished the
continuity of great music — their parents’ record collection, rich with
James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Fleetwood Mac, Paul Simon.
Along the
way, Ian and Eric forged what they describe as “a close musical bond”
writing songs together from a young age. Their younger sister,
meanwhile, was in possession of “this huge, brassy voice,” Ian recalls.
“When she was young, it was like a lion that you couldn’t quite tame.
But as she got older and we got to know her voice we saw the power in
it.”
The brothers both headed back to Durham for college, and
after graduation decided they should pursue music in earnest. They
convinced their lion-voiced sister to join them, as well as an old
friend, Elizabeth Hopkins, whose singing they had always loved — “it’s
got that raspiness,” Eric says, “that old soul to it.”
The four
set up home in an old house in the woods, and set about finding their
collective voice, crafting their songs, and playing them live. “Very
early on I felt we had found something special,” says Ian, who with his
brother writes the lyrics. “It was really the uniting of the four
voices, a type of music that resonated with me. Just to be in the thick
of it is amazing, because the four people in this band sing with such
heart — you just lose yourself in it.”
By late 2010, the four had
become six, with the addition of drummer Mike McKee and bassist Grant
Emerson, and were honing their material on the road. A lot of the songs
evolved through live performance: Mike, for instance, innovating the
percussion with chains and trash can lids, while Grant picked up an
upright bass to round out the band’s sound.
For Ian, Eric,
Brittany and Elizabeth it was a matter of working out how best to get
their voices, their words, and their sentiment heard. “Playing those
early shows, you’re often confronted by half-working sound-systems and
weird venues and so you have to find an energy that can at times
transcend the music,” Ian explains. “So a lot of times we’d come down
off stage and sing something in the middle of the audience, or be
screaming out as opposed to singing in order to convey the emotion, to
find something primal that will affect people.” Soon earning a
reputation as incredible live performers, the band's hope was that if
their music was pushed and pulled and tried and tested in front of an
audience, then by the time they came to record, the songs would be
strong and robust.
The 12 songs on Carry the Fire display that
muscularity, as well as great tenderness and, at times, vulnerability.
They are songs that reflect the great stew of the band’s own shared
histories and influences, as well as those of the land that bore them.
There is the richness of Americana, of gospel, bluegrass, blues and pop,
but there is also the well-oaked, deep-rooted tradition of
storytelling, folklore, mythology. There is a thread that binds together
west coast harmonies and the gospel choir, Southern gothic and civil
rights, all of the tensions and the joys and the fierce, bright hope of
America’s great cultural, geographical, musical journey.
Some of
the songs here explore their relationship with Durham — the city where
they now live of course, but also where the Holljes’ mother was raised,
and where their parents studied. “The song Surrounded is about how the
town has a lot of ghosts for us,” Ian explains. “It’s about the
relationships that we make and the people that we fall in love with and
the ghosts of the people that they’ve been with before and who have left
an impression on them.”
Country House, too, stems from Durham:
charting the year Ian spent caring for his former professor, a
paraplegic; a time that gave him cause to contemplate the isolation of
growing older, and the mortality of those we love. And the stirring,
bittersweet Holding On to Good belongs here too, nodding to Brittany’s
decision to leave behind her first love and move to North Carolina to
make music.
As well as tales of loves lost and kindled and
preserved, there are plenty of songs on the album shaped by the shared
history of the siblings (and Elizabeth, a friend since childhood) and
that celebrate the intensity of that bond.
Morning Comes, for
instance, Ian describes as “coming very much from our family” of the
strength they showed weathering hard times and unemployment, pressed on
by “the feeling that the best moments come on the other side of that; if
you can just hold out, then things get better.” Eric agrees: “I think a
lot of our songs are laced with hope,” he says. “Even the darker ones
have hopeful qualities to them. And I think that’s something we grew up
with and we believe in — we believe in the resilience of people, and
we’ve seen it time and time again.”
And certainly new single Is
There Anyone Out There, carries this same spirit. A song that Ian wrote
while working at a desk job, grafting 40 hour weeks, wondering if there
might be more to life out there. “It’s a song about disillusionment,” he
says, “about growing up and not necessarily being the person you
envisaged yourself to be.”
It is this song, too, that has borne
the album’s title. “It’s saying that we’re just moving forward, and we
don’t have control over what the next generation does or what they do
with what we give them,” Ian says. “We only get so long on earth, so all
we can do is carry the fire.”
It is an appropriate image,
perhaps, for this band — the inheritors of a great musical mantle,
carrying forth such tradition, but bringing to it their own flame and
ignition, the wisdom of their own generation, and the promise of so much
to come.
