Straight Outta Brown County Indiana! The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band is back for a hometown party!
The latest album from Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band was written by candlelight and then recorded using the best technology available . . . in the 1950s. But listeners won’t find another album as relevant, electrifying and timely as Dance Songs for Hard Times.
Dance Songs for Hard Times conveys the hopes and fears of pandemic living. Rev. Peyton, the Big Damn Band’s vocalist and world-class fingerstyle guitarist, details bleak financial challenges on the songs “Ways and Means” and “Dirty Hustlin’.” He pines for in-person reunions with loved ones on “No Tellin’ When,” and he pleads for celestial relief on the album-closing “Come Down Angels.”
Far from a depressing listen, Dance Songs lives up to its name by delivering action-packed riffs and rhythms across 11 songs. The country blues trio that won over crowds on more than one Warped Tour knows how to make an audience move.
“Too Cool to Dance” might be interpreted as the album’s centerpiece for its message of not taking things for granted. The seize-the-moment anthem offers the chorus, “We may not get another chance. Oh, please don’t tell me you’re too cool to dance.”
“Too Cool to Dance” heats up thanks to Peyton’s 1954 Supro Dual Tone electric guitar. Once known exclusively for playing acoustic guitar in the country-blues tradition of Mississippi icons Charley Patton and Bukka White, Peyton has seemingly migrated north and plugged in with Chicago giants Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters.
“It’s crazy,” Peyton says of “Too Cool to Dance.” “It almost feels like a song from the 1950s that’s been lost. At the end of the day, it still somehow feels like us.” To document the livewire immediacy of Dance Songs for Hard Times, the Big Damn Band — including a healthy Breezy — made a pandemic road trip to Nashville to record with producer Vance Powell (four-time Grammy Award winner whose resume includes work with Chris Stapleton and Jack White).
Peyton embraced Powell’s suggestion to turn back the clock and record no more than eight tracks of audio to analog tape. Minimal overdubs are heard on Dance Songs for Hard Times, and Peyton sang while playing guitar live in the studio.
“Vance likes the gear that I like,” Peyton says. “And he has a bunch of cool gear I would only have in my wildest dreams.”
Visually, Dance Songs for Hard Times is led by a video to accompany the song “Ways and Means.” Defined by pastel colors and confident dance moves, the video was made at an old-school laundromat to match the song’s Bo Diddley-boasting on a limited budget: “My knife is sharp, my guitar never flat … king of the laundromat.”
As Peyton says, it’s difficult to create blues music that isn’t personal. “The song ‘Ways and Means’ was written for all those folks who have the moves, the style, the substance, the talent, but maybe not the seed money or the famous last name,” Peyton says. “All those people who had to work extra hard because they didn’t get to start way ahead. Folks who have been playing catch-up since they were born and had to get really good just to make it to zero.”
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