The pandemic, for many touring musicians, was a rare chance to take an extended break and recharge their creative batteries. Not the Kitchen Dwellers.
The Montana-based string band wanted to make a new album (which became the 2022 release “Wise River”) that made a statement about the group.
“We kind of took that route in just saying, let’s use this time to our advantage. Let’s use this time to really come out of the end of this thing better than (when) we went into it,” said banjo player Torrin Daniels in a late-December phone interview. “We wanted the finished product to show that we had been putting the work in and that we didn’t take this (pandemic) time to rest.”
The result was a year-plus period in which the four musicians – Daniels, mandolin player Shawn Swain, bassist Joe Funk and guitarist Max Davies – improved and grew more collaborative in their songwriting and emerged with what Daniels feels is the best representation yet of the band’s music and playing.
“The first couple of albums that we put together were really evidence of us still trying to figure out what exactly we are and how we fit together and how to play our instruments and write songs and things like that,” Daniels said. “This most recent one (“Wise River”), I guess, is just a more mature version of whatever we’ve found ourselves to be.”
Today’s Kitchen Dwellers are actually a markedly different outfit than the one that formed in 2010 while in college at Montana State University in Bozeman. Early on, the group had a fiddle player as a fifth member, and most notably, a different guitarist in Kyle Shelstad, who wrote nearly all of the songs for the original Kitchen Dwellers. The initial unit released a self-titled album in 2013 and earned second-place honors in new band competitions at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and the Northwest String Summit before Shelstad split with the Kitchen Dwellers in 2014.
Daniels said Shelstad wanted to move back to the Midwest, where he’s now in a band that better fits his folkier style of songwriting.
“I think ultimately it (Shelstad’s departure) was really good for us because we were able to sort of really pursue the type of music that we wanted to play,” Daniels said. “None of us were really contributing to the writing of songs when he was in that band because he’s a very prolific songwriter.”
In making “Wise River,” the Kitchen Dwellers, whose music is informed by bluegrass, but incorporates other influences that include rock and pop, sought to grow and evolve by stepping outside of their comfort zones in several ways. Where the current lineup’s first two albums, 2017’s “Ghost in the Bottle” and 2019’s “Muir Maid,” were produced by musicians from the string band/bluegrass world (Leftover Salmon’s Andy Thorn on “Ghost in the Bottle” and Chris Pandolfi of the Infamous Stringdusters on the latter album), the Kitchen Dwellers reached outside of their genre for “Wise River” by bringing in Cory Wong of the funk band Vulfpeck to produce.
“He connected with us because he had sort of had this interest in working with a string band and working with bluegrass music, which is something he doesn’t typically do,” Daniels said. “So it was kind of like, we were coming together sort of as these two different parties from two different musical worlds to try to put both of our best feet forward to record this album.”
The four band members also agreed with Wong’s suggestion to work with Nashville-based songwriter Elliot Blaufuss to hone the material for “Wise River.”
“I think it helped bring a lot of new songwriting ideas to the table,” Daniels said. “I think it made us all better songwriters just getting the opportunity to work with Elliot.”
The Kitchen Dwellers have done a good deal of touring in support of “Wise River” since the album was released in April and the band has a busy year of shows on deck for 2023. But don’t expect the same show from night to night. The band plays the Domino Room on Valentine’s Day, along with sultry singer Lindsay Lou.
This article appears in Source Weekly February 2, 2023.
MAKE LOCAL JOURNALISM HAPPEN
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
