Courtesy of Desire Lines
Photography by by Cory Weaver
At the start of their run together as Desire Lines, songwriter Jenny Roques and new musical partner Matt Pace only needed their guitars, voices, favorite covers, a few of her originals, and a couple of chairs. An acoustic duo was born and the sounds were pleasant enough, for sure, though there was something else there, something that’d require a few more people and little more noise.
With Roques already involved in a small handful of projects at the time, the pair didn’t need to rush a new group into being, but that’s what happened naturally when drummer Ryan Adams and multi-instrumentalist Sam Golden were able to commit to the project. Pace switched off to bass, Roques began writing even more songs, the covers were cut down to a minimum and, sure enough, a really engaging sound began to happen. Known for her voice in Americana/rootsier acts, Roques was now writing in a rock context and the instrumentation of the group quickly changed to accommodate that, with Golden ably switching to lead guitar and Roques moving to the fuller-role as singer and bandleader.
The result of this organic growth is the band’s first disc, After Sundown, which will officially be released with a showcase at Vintage Vinyl this Saturday at 12:30 p.m. In fact, that date provided a critical piece of the puzzle, as the band poured time and energy—as well as the time and energy of recording engineer David Beeman and masterer Brad Sarno—into making sure that the release was doable by the ambitious goal of an RSD release date.
“I guess a couple songs were finished in January,” Roques says over at a late lunch with Pace and Golden, at the Mud House. “One I wrote over a couple days in January, ‘After Sundown.’ ‘The Gift’ took a month, or so, to figure out. The rest were written in pieces, over chunks of time all through the last year. It was a very cathartic writing session for me.”
The newer tunes, Golden suggests, found the band toying with “a radical shift in sound. I was playing fiddle at the first shows. Matt was singing some songs. There was more of a folky-country aesthetic.”
Pace suggests that “it was always supposed to turn into a rock band. It didn’t come together for a while, at least not in the way that I thought it was supposed to go. It was driven by Jenny wanting to do a rock project, not be a louder, country band.” A turning point? “Jenny after about the first three practices said, ‘We’re playing rock ’n’ roll, guys.’”
Roques says, “I definitely think that over the last year, since the four of us work so well together, we’ve gotten to really hone in on what we wanted to hear. These guys are really good at telling me what they hear in a song and we were able to figure out a direction.”
And that direction’s an appealing one, with an emphasis on '80s and '90s indie/college rock sounds that’d appeal to fans of bands like Throwing Muses, the Breeders, Juliana Hatfield/The Blake Babies and the reborn-and-active Belly. (Personal aside: the band reminds this writer of an early '90s group from Nebraska, The Millions. Desire Lines fans can click on this YouTube link to agree/disagree.)
Desire Lines performs at 12:30 Saturday at Vintage Vinyl, as well as 11:30 a.m. May 4 at Cherokee’s Cinco De Mayo Festival (stage yet to be determined).
