The FADER Magazine Issue 49 October/November 2007
BAND OF HORSES
Band of Horses live in the soil and in your heart.
The herons are out back and Ben Bridwell is peering through his porch windows, watching the birds through the binoculars he keeps nearby. Isolated thunderstorms have been dumping boatfuls of warm rain on Mount Pleasant, South Carolina all morning, big ol’ raindrops leaving dimples and ripples across the surface of Bridwell’s backyard lagoon. As the sunlight continues to cut through the rain, the Band of Horses frontman stands up and heads to the screen door. With his right hand he places a nice, fat dip of long cut chewing tobacco between his teeth and lower lip. “The devil really is beating his wife!” he says. “He just slapped the shit out of her, put her in the fuckin’ net.”
A sliding glass door separates the kitchen and back porch of the Band of Horses house. It is not difficult to open or close: many, many bowls of boiled peanuts and the brews to wash them down travel through this doorway. The back porch is a home within any home and the vibes on this particular porch have produced banjo troikas and deep fried lyrical fodder for Band of Horses’ second album, Cease to Begin. It’s a record that furthers the brand of Main Street paeans and rocking chair anthems that the group’s 2006 debut Everything All the Time hinted at.
Ben Bridwell and his bandmates, drummer Creighton Barrett and guitarist Rob Hampton, have just returned from a lengthy tour across the States warming up large amphitheaters for Modest Mouse, though this particular route home wasn’t their longest. In late 2005, when Band of Horses was made up of Bridwell and former cohort Mat Brooke, Bridwell made a promise to his father to be back home in South Carolina before the following Thanksgiving. Bridwell had been away for over a decade, cutting his teeth as a drummer in chamber pop outfit Carissa’s Wierd and tending bar in downtown Seattle. As Carissa’s Wierd called it quits, Bridwell took up penning his own tunes. He locked himself indoors and began recording demos on guitar, the promise of which (with a little help from old friend Sam Beam of Iron & Wine) landed him in a studio with Brooke, recording their Phil Ek-produced Sub Pop special. Future horseman Barrett knew from the beginning that something extraordinary was there, having once heard Bridwell momentarily get behind a mic for Carissa’s Wierd. “It was like, Where the fuck is this angelic voice coming from?” he says. Bridwell’s singing voice does indeed possess supernatural properties. Sucker floats like down feather in a hurricane but hits with the emotional heft of the Saturday afternoon gladiators Bridwell holds so dear. It moves and it hurts and it inspires the kind of guts-on-the-floor, wistful at-the-bar confessionals only the finest tunesmiths can trigger. Critics applauded Everything All the Time and tossed hyperbole the Horses’ way, fueling heavy touring across multiple continents even after the early departure of Brooke. Still, Bridwell made good on his promise to his dad. He was back in South Carolina a few weeks before his deadline.
Bridwell grew up in Irmo, South Carolina, a few miles outside of the capital seat in Columbia. His parents come from the wilds of Atlanta, his mother’s mother was neighbor and childhood friend to Harper Lee, as well as the crush of Lee’s autistic brother. Bridwell and Barrett now live just “down the road” from Bridwell’s father, while Louisville-born Hampton lives in downtown Charleston with his girlfriend. Barrett, who grew up along the Mid-Atlantic coastline, has an aunt that works in a peanut plant vacuuming peanuts, a job she often jokes about by declaring that she “sucks nuts for a living.” “Yeah,” says Barrett, “I got a real radical country family.”
Bridwell grew up ensconced in American sports culture, playing infield for ten years and worshiping University of Georgia football for three times as many. His house is a shrine to the Bulldogs and for the day’s entirety Bridwell keeps his mess of hair underneath a black UGA ball cap. Despite these clean cut interests, Bridwell grew up a bad kid. “I was totally like, the Dennis Rodman, fuckin’ wannabe punker dude that still played pretty good ball,” he says. His penchant for ink started early despite the fact that tattoo parlors are outlawed in South Carolina. “I got some redneck dude in his trailer to give me a tattoo when I was in ninth grade,” says Bridwell as he spits Skoal juice in a plastic cup. “The guy was threatening to kill his wife and kill their dog while he was doing it. It was seriously a nightmare.”
Bridwell first collided with Barrett at a local party, haggling over the origins of a Dinosaur Jr song. But it was the sounds of the Pacific Northwest that would beckon them out west. That love affair with the region’s sound plays an audible role in the fusion between cowboy bar blues and indie rock riffage that Bridwell has created. “Living here we first heard Modest Mouse and Built to Spill and bands like that,” says Bridwell. “It was the most intriguing thing in the world. It was like Chapel Hill, but radder and more progressive. I think both of those elements are going to be with us for a long time.”
Sitting along the Band of Horses mantle is a series of old black & white family photographs. Just to the left of the old stone fireplace is an old newspaper clipping in a frame, aged a warm shade of cantaloupe. Like his grandson, Bridwell’s grandfather Tom Ham had a propensity for words, having written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as well as penning the novel Give Us This Valley, a tale of life in North Georgia that he describes in the now framed write-up as a story “pyorely to plaisure yourself” with. It is a sentiment that similarly captures the experience of listening to Cease to Begin. Although a large portion of the record’s sonic skeleton was assembled in Seattle, Bridwell’s lyrics are undoubtedly of the Southeast. It’s as though Everything All the Time’s love letter to home has been opened and returned in kind, with Bridwell realizing the potent significance of his roots. Cease to Begin is littered with Spanish moss serenades and country store imagery, a beautiful Southern gothic testament.
Like swimming pools in every yard, love of space and long cut Skoal, Band of Horses seem purely American—not just the transcontinental exchange in sound they’ve developed, but the way they carry themselves as well. During an appearance at the Route du Rock festival in France, they were drinking heavily as they prepared to follow Glaswegian hitmen Franz Ferdinand. “We’re watching Franz Ferdinand and they’re absolutely murdering game, total fucking machines, speaking French to the crowd,” says Barrett. “Afterwards we walk out, kind of salty already, and Ben says, ‘Parlez-vous Francais?!’ All these people scream ‘Yeeeaaaah!’’ and then Ben says, ‘We don’t! 1-2-3-4!’ We were definitely channeling the spirits of Dalton in Roadhouse, maybe Waaaaade Garrett.”
The Village Tavern is, as Bridwell describes it, a “redneck shithole.” It has its charms, however. The temperature has dropped marginally since the sun went down and bands are beginning to load in for the night. Rob Hampton arrives sporting a freshly cut mane. He buys a round for the table. Bridwell says he “can’t imagine a better place to play or hang out, at all.” Closer to the house than downtown Charleston, the VT is a regular meeting spot for the band and Bridwell mentions that his dad often comes out but can’t tonight because he’s got to get up early for a long drive to see Bridwell’s sister and baby niece. Beers are cradled in Band Of Horses koozies they travel with and three decades worth of hits pipe from the speakers. Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” comes on and Barrett’s ears perk. “Look at all those asses shakin’ in there,” he says.
Some, including producer Phil Ek, have suggested that the move home signifies a transition in the band’s sound. “Phil was saying that this was our ‘Southeast’ record and lots of people seem to be calling it that now,” says Bridwell. “Fuck that. I don’t have any perspective on what the songs sound like. The songs write themselves.” Bridwell insists that he refuses to “over think” the writing process, that it remains as natural as it can be. Some critics and naysayers have suggested the opposite, that the quilts of reverb Ek and Bridwell lay over the vocals have done nothing but create a My Morning Jacket clone for fans of Doug Martsch. Barrett references breakfast food, if only circuitously, in order to defuse such claims, “Waffles ain’t nothin’ but pancakes with a syrup trap.” Exactly. But that reverb, which was once a security blanket for a singer/songwriter seemingly unaware of his gift, has done wonders to open up Bridwell’s throat. He knows now just how lethal his voice can be, and after a few weeks on the road singing to thousands, Bridwell and the band seem to be hitting a serious stride. Everyone assumed this was a group that would stay underground forever, but after touring with Modest Mouse and seeing the commercial altitudes they’ve unexpectedly reached, Bridwell has started dreaming of similar ovations for his own work. “It’s my job to reach out with my voice and make people want to fucking die,” says Bridwell many beers into the night. “That’s why I think we should be the biggest band in the fucking world.”
After happy hour, the group migrates back to the house for high fives and even more cold beers. Minutes after midnight, all is still inside the house. The devil and his wife made up hours ago, tucking each other in for the night. From the back porch you can hear the frogs and crickets trade choruses over the jet black airspace. Frogs sing to frogs, crickets sing to crickets. Ben Bridwell surveys the size of his lawn, thinking about moving further out to the country. There’s even more space out there.
