“When The Bomb Shelter Sessions came out, it was kind of our calling card – it was really just a demo,” says bass player Rick Barrio Dill. “We recorded it in two and a half days after only being a band for three months, and then have been on the road the last four years supporting what ostensibly was a demo. A lot of songs were born on the road, because we were definitely a live band. So we really wanted to do the traditional record thing, but we had to choose from 37 songs, many of which had been road tested. So it wasn’t so much that there was pressure as it was just exciting for us.”
The Bomb Shelter Sessions contains quite a few gutsy, old-fashioned rock’n’roll tunes. By contrast, the band’s sophomore release is a tamer beast, with greater focus on building up emotion via soul numbers and blues ballads.
“What we finally decided to do was, ‘Let’s just make the best record right now, as far as songs’,” says Dill. “Some of that was wanting to showcase more of the ballads and more of the soulful side, as well as having an equal part of that crazy live thing that we’re known for. At this point we had gotten such confidence and such swagger from the last four years, from the fans that we had built up, that we almost felt there a big safety net there.”
Vintage Trouble formed roughly five years ago, but the four members had all previously worked together in different outfits on the LA band scene. While they weren’t banking on Vintage Trouble becoming a career band, there was a distinctly different attitude from the outset.
“We just wanted to stop chasing anything and just make music that we liked,” says Dill. “It wasn’t fashionable five years ago to even be thinking of the type of music that we were doing, especially in Los Angeles, but we just wanted to make music that we liked from the time period that we liked. Lo and behold, we had a gig three weeks after being a band and immediately it just took fire and before we knew it we had four residencies a week all over Los Angeles.”
During the construction of 1 Hopeful Rd., the band was intent on producing a captivating start-to-finish album journey. Despite the advances in their creative bond, certain elements of The Bomb Shelter Sessions recording process were carried over to album two.
“We tripped onto our mantra on Bomb Shelter Sessions in that we were trying to only make something so we could sell it at our gigs,” Dill says. “Three months in we had so many people coming out to the gigs, and we had to put something onto CD so we could sell it at gigs. So we just went into the studio and all set up in a circle and just got ‘em down live. Most of what you hear is us all playing together all at the same time. Even though Ty [Taylor, vocalist] was in the side booth, he was singing at the same time as we were laying it down.
“That was something that we held onto for this record, and in that comes a little bit of that recklessness and danger or excitement. Some things aren’t perfect, we’re not fixing things in Pro Tools. Hopefully the honesty still shines through, because I definitely think that was something people associated with it. It was sort of opposite the trend, especially with more popular forms of music where everything is really really perfect.”
Taylor’s rich, soulful vocals and charismatic personality are the locus of much of the band’s appeal. From a creative point of view, however, there’s no clear leader of Vintage Trouble.
“Obviously Ty is your quarter back – he’s arguably one of the greatest singers and frontmen on the planet. But we’re definitely four alpha personalities, which is interesting. On paper it probably wouldn’t work, but that was another thing we realised early on – this odd collection of these alpha males, there’s a lot that each one brings to the table.
“Our biggest challenge is getting out of our own way. Sometimes somebody’s headstrong and luckily there is a respect that goes around the table. If somebody else is particularly headstrong about a certain issue or part or whatever, we’ll try it. We try all kinds of things to give everybody that respect. That’s probably one of the oddities that I think is so amazing about Vintage Trouble. Our age, we’re a little older, and if you throw too much testosterone and youth into that mix obviously it self-destructs and explodes, but I think we realised early on how lucky we were to be in a room with each other. All of us realised how lucky we were to find chemistry. That was the magic interlocking thing.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
