Futurebirds w/ Color Green

Futurebirds
w/ Color Green
Friday, November 22
Doors 7pm / Show 8pm
All ages / Standing
$18 Member / $20 General Admission Advance/ $25 GA Day of Show

Futurebirds, Easy Company

"I'm movin' on," Daniel Womack sings during the first minute of Easy Company, an album that finds Futurebirds — once the best-kept secret of Athens, GA's music scene, now a beloved act on a national scale — back in the driver's seat, speeding together toward some new horizon.

Momentum. Evolution. Expansion. Those are important traits for a critically-acclaimed group that recently celebrated its 15-year anniversary. "When you've been a band for as long as we have, there's a lot of moving on," says Thomas Johnson. "We just keep going, because that's how you keep things fresh. That's how you keep the spark." By matching the sharply-written songs of three distinct frontmen with a progressive mix of rock & roll, electrified folk, and cosmic American roots music, Futurebirds have built an audience that's as wide as the band's own sound. With Easy Company, Futurebirds' fifth studio album, that sound reaches a new peak.

Featuring four songs apiece from singer/songwriters Womack, Johnson, and Carter King, Easy Company feels like a celebration of the tight-knit bonds that have held Futurebirds aloft since 2008. Back then, the guys were college students at the University of Georgia, building a buzz around town with shows at fraternity houses and local bars. Years later, they've become headliners at bucket-list venues like The Ryman and The Fillmore, collaborating with fellow genre benders like My Morning Jacket's Carl Broemel along the way. They team up with new partners on Easy Company, which was recorded with producer Brad Cook in the border town of Tornillo, TX. The guest list includes Waxahatchee's Katie Crutchfield, who trades verses with King on the album's title track, and Drive-By Truckers co-founder Patterson, who delivers a spoken-word monologue during "Soft Drugs." A brass section even makes a brief appearance. The result is a bold blend of old and new, delivered by a band of brothers who've never sounded so invigorated. Easy company, indeed.

"We've made a concerted effort to challenge ourselves, always finding new angles to look at this thing we've been doing for more than 15 years," says King. "What hasn't changed is the core of this band. We still have three songwriters. We still have our original bass player, Brannen Miles. When you come this far together, your walls come down and you realize that these friends know exactly who you are, and you know exactly who they are, and it's such a relief when everyone can just be themselves. It's great company to be in, and it's so much better for the art."

Futurebirds kickstarted Easy Company's creation with a week's worth of live-in-the-studio performances. For a group of road warriors who'd already logged thousands of hours onstage, this was an opportunity to capture the sheer energy of a Futurebirds show — the same show that prompted Rolling Stone to dub the band "the most captivating rock act touring today" — on tape. "People sometimes see us live and say, 'It sounds so energetic, big, and full onstage, but some of your earlier records don't really capture that,'" King explains. "That was something we talked to Brad Cook about. We wanted to find that live magic in the recording studio. We wanted to move fast and stay in the moment."

The results speak for themselves. Praised by USA Today for "mixing Neil & Crazy Horse with My Morning Jacket" on their previous records, Futurebirds defy comparisons altogether with Easy Company. "Colorados" pays tribute to the Centennial State with sunny vocal harmonies and Kiffy Myers's searing pedal steel. "Bloom" begins with a solitary acoustic guitar, then gives way to thick, reverb-soaked soundscapes. Drummer Tom Myers take a bow during "Solitaires," a song driven forward by deep, Deadhead-worthy grooves, while keyboardist Spencer Thomas adds gauzy atmosphere to tracks like "Feel Less Bad." It's easy to imagine those songs becoming highlights of the band's concerts, joining audience favorites like "Trippin'" as setlist staples, but Easy Company wears its studio-album status proudly. It also marks the first time Futurebirds have handed over the reins to an outside producer. Free to focus exclusively on the music itself, they've never sounded so dynamic. The loudest moments reach a new peak of big-budget crescendo. The softer moments evoke cozy campfires and front-porch guitar pulls. Brad Cook captures the full range of those performances, but it's the bandmates themselves who make Easy Company sound, well, easy.

"We've never thought of ourselves as one particular kind of band," says Womack. "That's important for longevity, because we're always recreating ourselves and finding ourselves all over again. I don't think we're done with that process. We're always ready for more."

For Futurebirds, the road goes on forever. Easy Company is the latest stop on a journey that's still unfolding, winding its own path through American rock & roll, giving Futurebirds and the grassroots community they've created — the Birdfam — a new place to land.

About Color Green:

For the California-based quartet Color Green, playing music together is all about stepping into the unknown. "When we play live, I don't really know what's going to happen," says Noah Kohll, one of the band's two guitarists and four vocalists. "You really have no idea what you're going to get with this band, which keeps things fresh for us and maybe makes the live experience special." In a very short time, they have developed a word-of-mouth reputation as a dynamic and unpredictable live act, grounding their cosmic jams in earthy melodies and drawing from '60s SoCal folk-r0ck, '70s classic rock, '80s underground rock, '90s psychedelic dance-rock, and any other sound that catches their ears.

Adaptable onstage and off, Color Green has shared stages with a range of groups that reflect both the sophistication and the wild malleability of their sound, including Fuzz, Kikagaku Moyo, Circles Around the Sun, Hiss Golden Messenger, and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Yet, because they see boundless possibilities from one note to the next, they anchor their music in the urgent present rather than the distant past. Color Green can be a million different bands without losing their essential hue.

They capture that wild, mercurial quality on Fool's Parade, a meditation on loss, grief, confusion, frustration, and the clarity to which they all lead. The album has the dynamic of a tight live set, full of ebbs and flows, highs and lows, quiet moments like the devastating "5:08" and reckless jams like the epic "Kick the Bucket." "Four Leaf Clover" bustles and shimmies like the kaleidoscopic dance rock of the Stone Roses, while closer "Hazel Eyes" recalls the elaborate orchestrations of Brian Wilson and the whimsical melodies of Buddy Holly. "We shaped it to showcase our range," says guitarist Corey Madden. "All the songs were written together as a band. It's the four of us in a room, and it features all of our voices. It's one step toward what this band truly is. We spent a lot of time getting our shit together as a band, and now it's set in stone for me."

Color Green started out as a very different, much more limited kind of group. "Me and Corey worked together in New York scooping coffee beans for a living and putting them into bags," says Kohll. "I was living in a basement sublet, and he would come over to write and jam and record." From those casual sessions came a self-titled EP in 2021, full of spectral jams and offerings up to Jerry Garcia, their spiritual guide. The next year they followed it up with a self-titled full-length via Aquarium Drunkard, with various friends helping to round out the songs. "These things happen in an interesting way," says Kohll. "There's been a lot of weird synchronization with this band. It's all very organic. After we put out our first album, we thought, Oh, this needs to be a live band,

too."

After running through a few different rhythm sections, they met drummer Corey Rose and bassist Kyla Perlmutter, who not only are kickass players but opened up all new possibilities within Color Green. "Our first practice together, everyone was like, This is so loud," says Rose. "That became a really important part of the band, and we try to capture that dynamic when we record." Perlmutter adds, "We all really value each other's input. It doesn't feel like there's an unfair hierarchy in this band. We respect each other's tastes and recognize that we're all very, very much in love with music in our own ways."

After sharpening their attack on the road — playing DIY shows in small towns while opening for some of their heroes — the expanded Color Green began writing songs for what they considered a debut album. "One of us will come in with a riff or an idea, and the others will take it up and let it morph into something completely different," says Perlmutter. "What we come up with together, I don't think any of us could do by ourselves. The music we make is always surprising me." The album's title track, with its snaking guitar lines and parallax instrumental interplay, started out as an eastern jam when Rose came in with a very loose idea: "I wanted to write something in 6/8 time," she says. "It was super awkward at first, but 40 minutes later, it sounded like Fairport Convention. It took everybody to get there."

Says Madden, "I like when stuff happens and it opens up the door to something else in my brain. We might spend a lot of time working on something and get nothing out of it, but then in the back of my head I'm thinking, if you take this and add it to that… Sometimes it takes hours to figure out two seconds of a song, but it's always worth it."

The aching heart of Fool's Parade is "5:08," a moving expression of grief — not moving through it, necessarily, but simply living with it, moment to moment. "What's it like, on the other side?" they all sing together, as though consoling one another. "Oh, the longing for the space to peer thru." Inspired by the death of Madden's father, it is rooted in a Spiritualized show. "I was going through some gnarly personal stuff," says Madden, "and it was all hitting me at once, all these emotions. I talked my way through some crazy shit, and by the end of the show I had '508' hashed out in my brain. It's about losing people very close to you and wanting to communicate with them and not really knowing how."

"It's the quietest song on the record," says Rose, "but it's also the heaviest. We all cried while recording it. Everybody's singing on it, and everybody's crying on it. Sometimes we're like, Let's not play that song tonight. It all depends on how we're feeling."

Thank you to our year-round Lead Sponsors: AC Hotel Portsmouth, The Brook Casino, Katzman Contemporary Projects, MacEdge, and Raka.

Funded in part by a grant from the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation - Rutman Family Fund.
3S Artspace is supported in part by a grant from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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