The Brook & The Bluff share their time-altering music at the Bluebird April 6
The Brook & the Bluff's first song, "Masks (Live)," made Spotify’s U.S. and Canada Viral 50 Playlists with more than 7.5 million plays.
That was 2016. Fast-forward to 2024 and their latest album, "Bluebeard," gives listeners 12 tracks with "a lot of crazy background vocals, particularly in the number 'Twist My Arm,'" said frontman and lead vocalist Joseph Settine.
The Beatles-inspired band, coming to the Bloomington's Bluebird Nightclub April 6, offers hints of John Mayer, lots of blues, and flickers of Jackson Browne, Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell.
It's no surprise The Brook & the Bluff's newest album pays homage to the 1960s and '70s, a time when American popular music blended political messaging with the haze of mind-altering substances.
The beginnings of The Brook & the Bluff
The Brook & the Bluff became a quartet that whisks up delicious vocal cocktails after Settine and guitarist Alec Bolton first founded the band in 2015 during their senior year in college. The band name refers to Birmingham, Alabama, neighborhoods where they both grew up.
Drummer John Canada and bassist Fred Lankford later joined Bolton and Settine, and the group moved to Nashville, Tennessee.
"Our success was slow and incremental," Settine said.
Recording four voices can be done a few ways. For their album "Yard Sale," 10 tracks full of melody and harmonic blues, they recorded most of the songs together on one mic. Other times, they'll record each voice separately and combine afterward.
Finding their harmony wasn't so difficult. Settine and Bolton met when Settine was 19, and they began performing as a duo. It was 2.5 years later they began dreaming of a drummer, and Bolton's childhood friends Canada and Lankford eventually filled out the quartet.
They started out doing mostly covers.
"We started getting more serious," Settine said over the phone recently. "And we started writing original music."
Since the band is doing fewer covers and more originals, Settine said, "We tried to imagine what it would be like if we were a band in the ‘70s in Laurel Canyon, and make what that record would have sounded like."
Finding inspiration for the music
Laurel Canyon, a neighborhood in Los Angeles' Hollywood Hills, may have inspired some of the most iconic musicians of the era.
Frank Zappa moved to the intersection of Lookout Mountain and Laurel Canyon Boulevard in the late '60s and previous Byrds bassist Chris Hillman wrote "So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star" in the area in 1966, according to Lisa Robinson writing for "Vanity Fair."
The Doors frontman Jim Morrison may have written "Love Street" while living near the Laurel Canyon Country Store and, in 1965, Michelle Phillips and John Phillips lived on Lookout Mountain enjoying the Mamas and the Papas’ golden era.
The forested gulch behind Sunset Boulevard may be romanticized and misinterpreted, and less geography than metaphor, Robinson wrote, but during the mid-'60s and early '70s, residents came up with some of the best music ever written.
"For us it was the ‘70s," Settine said. "For a listener it can be any time from the past that could bring them little moments of joy."
As for selling albums, what they really want, Settine said, is for people to come hear them play live and then say, "Holy sh**, that's a good band."
If you go
WHAT: The Brook & the Bluff
WHEN: 8 p.m. April 6. Doors open at 7 p.m. For ages 21 and older.
WHERE: The Bluebird Nightclub, 216 N. Walnut St.
TICKETS: $22.50. Buy them online at https://thebluebird.ws/tickets/
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Beatles-inspired The Brook & The Bluff come to the Bluebird April 6
