Off the Record

Kevelle Wilson 0:11
Hello everyone, you're listening to WKNC at 88.1 FM HD one rally where a student run nonprofit radio station based out of North Carolina State University. I'm Kevelle Wilson. And this is off the record.

What's good everyone you're listening to WKNC Ada point one he won rally. We are a student run nonprofit radio station based in North Carolina State University. I am Kibo. And this is off the record. Today actually, I am in Garner, and at the performing arts center with the Shoaldiggers, who performed here today.

Thank you for your time and having me.

So really quickly, the online summarizing what type of music you'll make.

The Shoaldiggers 0:59
All I can say is that it's a mix of all the influences that we grew up with listened to and are still listened to. I mean, it spans punk music spans country, cash, a little bit of bluegrass sprinkled in there. And it just comes out. The other end sounded great, I hope and we ask people what it is, and they they kind of have a similar answer to me is kind of incomprehensible and nondescript. You know, it's hard to put a finger on it, but we, we, we love to try it. Anybody else want to take a stab at that? Yeah, it's a good mix is a good mix of a lot of stuff.

Kevelle Wilson 1:39
Okay, so I know y'all just released a new album called wind, wired and ways to wonder. Um, can you call me walk me through the creative process for your third album?

The Shoaldiggers 1:52
Well, the pandemic happened, and as we all know, it was crazy times for all of us. So we recorded the record in three different recording sessions, one at a Masonic Lodge in Hillsborough, Eagle Lodge number 19. Thank you, boys. And then the second session at an abandoned Moose Lodge. Thank you other boys. And the third one at a former Methodist Church. So we had all the big hymns there. And each one was a little different, but we were kept on plugging during the pandemic and did what we could and kept the creative process rolling. Hence the wind, the wires and the ways to wander.

Yeah, Kevelle, I'll talk a little bit about the songwriting. Just heard the voice of our boy Darrell white, for Chief songwriter. Some of the other bandmates write a little bit, sometimes will lead the songs that we write. So there's a few in there like that. But

inspiration comes from, you know, whatever is on the mind. Darrell is a surfer and takes a lot of surf trips, and summer, winter, year round, really. And he comes home a lot of times from the ocean and the beach with tunes. And a lot of the tunes refer to scenes that he's seen on the sand or in the water as well. And yeah, the you know, there's no, there's no formula, creative process or anything like that. But, you know, think the songs kind of kind of come and you better make sure you got your notebook handy, because you won't remember the next day. That's been my experience anyway.

Kevelle Wilson 3:39
Okay, so So having so many band members, when you kind of make an album, and you'll have like so many ideas and songs that don't make the cut? How do you guys kind of determine things like what actually makes it onto an album or like things like Song order when you have such so many people?

The Shoaldiggers 4:00
That's a good question. We're in the fortunate position after making this last album that we wound up with five extra songs that didn't make it onto the album. And the decision making process is

you know, not It's not easy to decide which ones should go on. We love everything that we write, if it gets to the point where we're, we're, we're going to record it, then we definitely want to keep it and make sure it gets out into the world. So that kind of prompted us to get back into the studio again and bring some new materials. We've got seven new songs that we're working now just final mixing down and adding together with the other five that were leftover from the other album. But you know, often we've been really proud of putting our music out onto vinyl and we're kind of here in the age when vinyl has enjoyed its resurgence and people want to buy

albums again. So one of the things that kind of limits us is the number of albums and the amount of minutes and seconds

You can put on each side of an actual LP and so we have to spend a little bit of time kind of wrestling with that but we feel real proud of the way we got this last one out and we still have that process ahead of us again sometime later this fall with this new material that we're getting ready to put out

Kevelle Wilson 5:20
going to take a quick break from the interview so you guys can listen to rebars sunset special diggers enjoy

I am back with the interview with the Shoaldiggers hope you all enjoyed rebars sunset enjoy the rest of the interview.

Okay, so my personal favorite song off the new album is rebar sunsets. I just really enjoy all the wind instruments in the middle there

when I go around and maybe give a favorite song off the album

The Shoaldiggers 11:33
well as easy because I agree with you. I also like rebar sunsets is kind of the most dynamic to me it has a as a real mood. I'm not exactly sure what that mood is. It's kind of it's kind of mixed. Maybe mysterious is a good word. Yeah, that's my choice.

I'd love to talk more about the other great songs on the record. But I agree as well. I mean, rebar has been my one of my favorites since we first played it since Daryl first brought it to us.

You know, listen, the funny thing is when a new song comes, comes into the band. I personally am a person who listens to music first. I think I focus on that and lyrics I sort of dig into lyrics a little later. So over the months after rebar came in I started to realize what was actually being sung and those lyrics really get me I mean it's it's just great songwriting.

Yeah, definitely stand out for me is rebar.

Well, thank you guys, but I disagree. Pile of sins is my favorite song mainly because of the guitar solo that Dr. Gary Larson plays in, makes my skin tingle in such a good way.

My sec, and I'm not even gonna put this in order in that second new Eagle blue that Steven back road is also just a moving song and so beautiful. So those are my two.

I'm going to join with Daryl on this one and say Paulson's is at the top of my list. But I will also say this you know when we got this album back in its final form from Citizen vinyl out in Nashville. And we're proud to say that we printed this thing in May I had it produced right here in North Carolina because we are definitely a North Carolina band.

We took it and sat and listened to it several times over and

I feel like from start to finish there isn't a song on this album that I don't enjoy listening to and feel super proud of having been a part of creating so

yeah, there's some top tops on the list but everything on this album is a lot of fun.

Yeah, well, there'll still no answer but I'll give it anyway my my favorite my favorite tune off the album is new Eagle blue.

It just such a beautiful song. But sonically is well it just there's something about it just holds together so well. And it just sounds like a

perfectly finished piece of art that has come out of back and it's just beautiful. And it just sounds so like perfect to my ear. There's just something about it that I love. And then your pile of sins is a kind of a tie. Or it's a very close second and then also I can't not mention the song off the album called 12 Kings is another one that is definitely one of my favorites. It's just a rockin song and fun to play and great lyrics and yeah, so that's my two cents

so, someone mentioned vinyls earlier.

Kevelle Wilson 14:55
What is it like the to press your own album as a smaller band

The Shoaldiggers 15:04
it takes commitment from everyone, because we are put out our own stuff, we don't have a record label. And we have helicopters circling overhead looking for us right now. But until they find it, we are, you know, we put a lot of our own money back into the band and back into the funds. And that is how we're able to do it is for the love of art.

I'd like to just piggyback on that last word that Darrell mentioned, because, you know, we've gotten to where it's not, it's not terribly hard for us to, to get into a studio situation and lay the songs down, we've become more and more efficient over the years with this, and even look forward to doing more of it because of how good it's been going. But where we really got stalled in this last effort was in making final decisions about the artwork that that was going to be on the cover of the album. And, you know, serendipitously we kind of had,

you know, we had people all the way in Indonesia, even working on artwork for us, and then it wound up being that in our buddy Gary Larson's garage, or our banjo and guitar player, Gary pulled out his phone and took some photographs. And that's what while it winds up being the album cover, so it did take us probably the better part of a year or more to get to that where we will finalize the album cover but we're hoping this next album doesn't drag us down that much.

Okay, so looking y'all up online, it says, y'all are swamp grass, which is for our listeners and make sure a bluegrass folk and country. But then you kind of also throw like sea shanty slash pirate music, I guess it would be a good thing to call it. How in the world did you all as a group arrive upon this unique sound?

Naturally, I would say

it comes from all of us and from all our locations and all our experiences

Yeah, I'm from Down East I def, I grew up in the great dismal swamp. So I'll take some of the swamp Enos there Blackwater and cypress news and Spanish moss. And, you know, everybody here has come from unique places and have has folk and and psychedelia and soul and funk and just all over the spectrum. And so we love it all. And we try to just play it all and make it our own.

This is Matt, the drummer, then one of the newer members of the band. But I would say in my time with a group they arrived at, we arrived at the sound because a lot of old souls in the group that really have an appreciation for traditional music, but also want to have a little bit of a modern spin on things too. So that's where my observation of how we are they arrived at this sound.

thing. We love to ask people after our live events, what they hear and for them to give us some suggestion of what how they would describe our music. And we have on occasion had some pretty good ones thrown back at us once when we were down in Carolina Beach where we will be back in just about a month.

One of the guys at the end of the show said what do you call this? And I said, You tell me he said acid jug band.

Okay, wow. I don't I didn't realize we went that far out. But another another friend of mine at the end of the show. We were playing it in the cat's cradle. said you guys are folk bangers and we're just kind of casting the nets out there to see what people how people could describe us.

Folk stop we heard tonight so yeah, we're you know, we're open to suggestion and still looking around for how to describe ourselves.

Kevelle Wilson 19:13
Since you all have so many kind of influences and genres y'all mix into your music, how do you make a cohesive song with everything going on?

The Shoaldiggers 19:30
That's a really good question and not

Seems to me each song starts with a kernel

from an individual maybe a kind of a duo effort sometimes. And each player brings their strength to it. If someone had were very open minded, I'd say someone has an idea that's specific. We'll communicate it and try to accomplish that. Otherwise, we're all just kind of throwing our creative juices at it. And what you hear I

wouldn't hesitate to say it was really orchestrated to sound like anything in particular, it's just all of our particular creative juices going, and that's what you get. And if someone has a specific idea, then we'll try to communicate that. Yeah, I'll share a thought on this one Cavell so you know, with a pretty big band, right, like, generally a nine piece or so sometimes 10, you know, sometimes less, but our full format, we usually have about nine 910 members on stage, it's a lot going on. So a lot of instrumentation, a lot of sound, you know, to people on percussion is horn section, also a bunch of acoustic instruments that sometimes have got, like a more sophisticated resonant spectrum, kinda than just electric instruments. So that kind of adds a lot of complexity. So anyway, there's a lot going on, I gotta say, we'll work it out in practice, kind of as we hear it, right. But one thing that's been kind of cool about our growth as a group, as we figure out, you know, how to bring the synth sound together and make it holistic, but from my personal growth as well, you know, when I started with this band, I was pretty much a novice, like I never really performed on many stages or anything like that, and I just wanted rock out, you know, the whole time. But if everybody does that, and a nine piece band, it's just like a train with one speed, you know, and so it's been cool to learn like when not to play, because in nine piece format, sometimes people need to not play. And that actually like adds to the richness of the sound, it also adds to your arsenal of sounds you can make, because you've got different combinations and things that you can bring to bear. And then it helps to, you know, we've been working a lot here lately on how to build the energy and then bring it back down, you know, and how to build to the high point of the song and swell and fade a little bit like that you can only do that if you're not necessarily rocking as hard as you can every single second. But it's been really fun to me, because for one thing, it's really nice to be able to listen to what's what else is going on. And so if you're if I'm not playing as much, it gives me an ear that I can hear what my bandmates are doing, I really enjoy that. And then also, then when it is your time to contribute something to the sound, it's like that much more of a contribution, you know, you can hear it that much more because it wasn't there before. Whereas if it's all there together, it can just kind of turn into mud. So hey, you know, we're getting we're getting better that we tack a little something on there. I think Chris points out a really important thing, one of the things we've learned to do is learn how to listen to each other. And that comes from a lot of practicing together. You can go back and practice your part and work on that. But it really is about coming together. And we have religiously practice every week for years and years now in order to be able to do what we're doing. But one of the other things I think is really neat about that kind of listening is I always feel like we're working to help train audiences and how to listen as well. Because like Chris said, if we just all got up there and turned our amps up loud, and played as loud and fast and phonetically as we could, people would not enjoy this music. We're teaching them how to really hear what we're doing. And it's a lot of subtleties that come together. Sometimes it's a subtlety as big as a freight train. But other times it's a whisper that's flying over top of the waves of the ocean. So that to me is one of the great things about playing in this band and witnessing people enjoying this music.

So speaking about kind of the so many instruments y'all play up there. One of the unique ones I saw was a musical saw. Does anybody want to speak about that real quick or soft players are here? Oh, really? Okay, I mentioned something.

Yeah, pass down from the Appalachian traditions. The musical sauce has been around for centuries. I think just from the lumberjacks getting into that Jack cider and just like we don't have anything else we're gonna Oh, this thing can sing. So we're really lucky. We have two of them. Now our alto saxophone is Allison Zirkel plays the tenor musical saw which is the deeper saw and then our tenor saxophone is Steve Coles plays the really high pitch alto musical saw so people have heard it here or there, but I guarantee you haven't heard two of them and they harmonize great together and they make us feel a little funny in a good way inside and we love it.

Kevelle Wilson 24:31
Okay, so I heard you y'all talk about Cat's Cradle a little while earlier. What are some other of your favorite venues that you performed that?

The Shoaldiggers 24:41
Take one we've we played at Nassau Street Tavern in Hillsborough a lot and it's always an interesting experience. It's a small place and as our band has grown over the years and some shows we ended up bringing only four or five and some shows would bring everybody but we played a few at Nasseri where we bring nine and

It's always makes me nervous and I'm, I'm wound up and what once we get in and it's time to go, it's one of my favorite experiences to be crammed up there shoulder to shoulder and just blast and, you know, with everybody, so I'm gonna throw one out for Nash retiring, because I do enjoy playing there with everybody.

I got one. I mean, there's, you know, when you ask the question, it makes me think of sort of some of the premier gigs we've had, which, you know, I think, one, you know, we

had the enjoyment to open for Southern Culture on the Skids at full steam a few years back. Motoko Yeah, so, and that was a, that was a pretty cool one, I really enjoyed playing it, she Cory hills. But because of our format, you actually saw it earlier here tonight. You know, we can hold our own pretty good without any amplification or anything at all, you know, fundamentally, there's nobody that can't Don an acoustic hat and just play out in the woods or something. And, you know, I love those big sound stages. And it's really fun to rock out like that. But some of my most favorite performances have actually just been sometimes at, like, on a street corner, or, or at somebody's party, or, you know, something like that, you know, and we're just kind of playing acoustically. And it's keeps a lot of the same stuff. And it's same songs, but it's different to and, you know, I like that a lot.

Well, we'd be lying, if we didn't say that we really do love the tiki bar, maybe best of all, and it has a lot to do with the fact that whenever we get to play there, which is we've been very fortunate over the years through the wonderful connection with Dave and Abby, the owners of the bar and restaurant there, ocean grill, and Tiki Bar, they're old friends of our man, Carolina Beach, Darrell White's old surfing friends have gotten us down there. And we're gonna be back down there on August 17. So we're like chomping at the bit to see July and a teat, roll away and get down to the beach and get our feet in the sand and back in the water. Hopefully, everybody is going to be able to get down there and join us up on the pier.

Kevelle Wilson 27:16
Okay, so after a long performance or jam session was kind of like a go to food or restaurant or the band.

The Shoaldiggers 27:26
Neck, you want to take this one.

We are blessed in that our tradition as a band has evolved for years and years, even before our current situation, that at band practice, we have home cooked meals made for us. And previously it was a lot by Chris and his wife, Megan, who also used to play with us. And we practice there and every practice just delicious home cooked meals, and sometimes we help supplement now. We're at Dr. Gary Larson's house and his wonderful wife, la Lesley Ann is making amazing, amazing food for us. And so we really do we sit down together and we eat and we discuss, and we laugh, and it is the heart of this ban. I want to add a little something into that because I think the question had some i What Darrell said, I really appreciate you because it is one of the things that I think is a reason why we're successful. Because not only do we get beautifully fed well by these loving, generous people in our band family. But we also get that time together to sit and talk about upcoming events and things that we need to keep on track with for our business. And that really helps a lot. We're really fortunate that we've been able to keep that as a tradition. But the other thing I will say I think your question had to do with like after you've just come off of a live concert experience. You know, one of the things I know my friend here, Darrell White doesn't like to eat too much before he gets up on stage because we work pretty hard when we get up there and you don't really want to feel that bogged down. Now I will say the last Cat's Cradle show we all might have eaten a little too much over the gourmet Kingdom across the street. But one of the traditions that we've kind of worked out over the years is if there is food that's happening before the show, we pack some plates and we call them our dashboard plates for the way home so we're often eating food in the trucks on the way home driving out of the gig and eaten at 1130 or 12 at night which might not be good for our bodies, but it sure feels good for our souls

Kevelle Wilson 29:35
Okay, is there anything y'all wanted to talk about that I didn't cover?

The Shoaldiggers 29:45
Next, our newest member? Yeah, I'm Nick. I'm the newest member of the auxilary percussion and all the bells and whistles. So my job is just to keep adding new colors and I'm like Jackson Pollock of the band and that just keep throwing paint

I'll make Canvas and, and then I hand some magic eraser to the rest of the guys here and then tell them take away which don't like so.

What was it? Oh, no. Oh yeah, so my wife Sue's is I guess we kind of become the the band mascot

concert dance leader. Yeah. So she, she's got the workout moves, the 80 1980s workout moves. Yeah, she gets everyone going. That's a lot of fun.

Yes, is

Kevelle Wilson 30:34
do you mind telling the audience where they can find you on social media is all that here?

The Shoaldiggers 30:39
Yeah. So we've got we've got we're on Spotify, you can find us on any any of this audio streaming services. We're on all those. We got a YouTube channel with a few things up there and more coming all the time. You can find us at Shoal diggers.com on Facebook and Instagram too. And we'll see that missiny else. Well, we showed up on Bandcamp recently with some hot albums for sale and we don't have any merch there. You have to come see us for that. But yeah, we'd be happy to ship your record if you ordered on Bandcamp

on our website, give us their email. Yeah, the best way to stay in touch with what we're doing is to sign up for our email list on our website. Just go enter your email. We don't we don't bug people too much. Pretty much just useful stuff about good shows coming up in the area.

Just want to shout out to the group who put a lot of time and attention a while back into coming up with a really unique name. The show diggers there's not any other show diggers there in the world. But that means it's pretty easy to find us because we own the domain and it's just straight up shoulders on Instagram and all that so if you can remember the name of the band you'll be able to find our channels

and one more thing show does not just mean a Salah shanba sandbar, it means a large group of individuals and when you're digging it is digging it so that's what we like to think of. We're a bunch of people digging each other and hope you dig it to show power show larmy join up.

Kevelle Wilson 32:07
Thank you all for tuning in to this interview. You can check out at our interviews at wknc.org/podcasts and click on off the record. I am keyfile on WKNC 88.1 FM HD one rally. Thank you for listening and take care