Photo by Charles Peterson
Seattle indie Vaudeville Etiquette have announced an April 15th release for debut album Debutantes & Dealers. The album will arrive via Sunyata Records, the label owned by Mad Season/Screaming Trees/Walking Papers drummer Barrett Martin, who also served as the disc’s producer. Debutantes & Dealers was mixed by Jack Endino (Mark Lanegan, Nirvana).
USA Today recently premiered the album’s first single, “Blood & Bone,” which can be heard on the band’s site – http://www.vaudevilleetiquette.com/#!music/c161y.
Vaudeville Etiquette, who’ve been described as The Civil Wars meets Fleetwood Mac (and recently did a Seattle hometown show where they played Rumours in its entirety) have spent the past year playing shows up and down the Northwest and recording the album between gigs. The band was formed by co-lead vocalists Tayler Lynn and Bradley Laina, who moved to California from Seattle in search of greener pastures. But as Laina puts it, “It’s tough to build an audience in a city like Los Angeles, where most of the audience is looking for an audience of their own.”
After months of grinding it out on the LA music scene, they headed home. Says Lynn, “It was time to take the grit and struggle we’d endured and bring it back to Seattle. We knew we’d find a hungry audience there and a sense of community that would allow us to be ourselves. We knew that’s where we would grow, that’s where we could generate attention organically with loyal fans that want to hear new music and see live shows.”
Matt Teske was the first addition, a guitarist looking to push the conventional genre boundaries of his favorite new instrument, the pedal steel. After replying to an ad on Craigslist for “anyone who wants to play anything,” the three hit it off instantly and continued to apply the same genre-bending criteria in searching for the rest of the band.
“You have to be fearless in attempting to blend any style of music with us.” says Laina, “If we’ve got a country tune that needs a calypso backbeat and an African bassline, we have to all say yes and try that together. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t but we all have to be on board to go a little crazy to ultimately end up at what sounds right.”
Bryce Gourley was up for the task when he joined as drummer. He grew up listening to his parents’ classic rock albums and noticing the idiosyncrasies in the drum lines of each. Sander Vinberg, a bassist whose Swedish background and love of folk and jazz music contributed to his sophisticated tone and firm grasp on theory, rounded out the band in a grounded yet vastly experimental way. It was then that Vaudeville Etiquette really started to take serious form.
“It took a few tries, but there was a point where the five of us felt like a real family with an equal hierarchy and a balanced sense of valuable input” says Lynn, “That’s when we knew we had something, something worthy of recording.”
Hear it for yourself on Debutantes & Dealers.
