Andrew Volpe walks into Sawhorse Studios on a Monday afternoon, sipping a neon-green soft drink from Taco Bell. Clad in a zip-up hoodie, bootcut jeans, and a faded baseball cap, he looks like your typical Midwestern, aging millennial dad. The other members of Ludo look the same—you wouldn’t clock them for a band that’s sold out The Pageant nine times and counting.
“I give few enough f—s in general about how I’m perceived,” Volpe says. “I do the opposite of image construction. I just don’t care if I aesthetically exist.”
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Ludo has no time for rockstar pretensions, especially in its current phase. Since regrouping in 2018 after a nearly seven-year hiatus, the band has become more of a casual creative outlet than a full-time job. Now that most of them have children, partners, and other sources of income, there’s no longer a need to relentlessly tour and record like they did 20 years ago.
That’s not to suggest they’ve gotten lazy. At Sawhorse Studios, they spend three whole days working on new songs, and a lot of this time is spent perfecting small details. Volpe spends over an hour on one guitar riff with studio owner Jason McEntire, tweaking the frequency, adjusting the mix, and varying the strumming pattern over and over until it sounds just right.
“My wife, when I got home, she asked me, ‘what did you do today?,’” McEntire says. “I was like, ‘We worked on a song.’ She’s like ‘one song? You were gone all day!’”
Ludo is as tight, self-assured, and focused as before. The only difference is that now, they can enjoy the creative process more and pause to breathe whenever they get the chance. For card-carrying grown-ups with full-time jobs and families, having fun is more valuable than ever.
“Part of it now is ‘are we enjoying ourselves?,’” keyboardist Tim Convy says. “We probably would have been driving ourselves crazy enough to get [the songs] done before, whereas this was a little bit more casual. It’s a positive thing.”
Recording new songs isn’t even the most exciting part for the band—it’s debuting them live at HalLUDOween, the band’s annual Halloween show held at The Pageant. With three nights of multiple supporting acts and activities (last year included trivia, food trucks, and tarot card readings), HalLUDOween is something like a cross between a fan convention, a festival, and a concert. It’s meant to celebrate Ludo’s listenership as much as the band itself.
Ludo fans have a rare sort of loyalty to the group, bordering on obsession. They come from all over the country to fill The Pageant each HalLUDOween weekend, sometimes purchasing “super VIP” tickets to spend time with the band one-on-one and perform with them during soundcheck. Numerous couples have gotten engaged at the shows, and the band performed more than just music when they took on one couple’s wedding ceremony on stage at HalLUDOween 2021.
This devotion isn’t just limited to the spooky season. Year-round, fans dissect songs and share inside jokes in a Facebook group called “Skeletons On Parade: A Ludo Family.” In 2022, members of the Facebook group raised money for international fans to fly to St. Louis and see two of the HalLUDOween shows for free. The group will continue its “scholarship program” for this year’s event, having raised $7,000 as of this writing.
Tony Parente started “Skeletons On Parade” after Ludo reunited in 2018. During its first year, the group had around 80 members, but grew by about 200 when the next HalLUDOween was announced. Parente says its membership continues to grow with every show announcement. The group currently sits at a little over 2,000 members—including Volpe and Convy.
“There are a lot of these online communities, but the bands don’t actually interact,” Parente says. “Most of the time, bands are really out-of-reach, and the fact that they take time out of their day to interact with this community is huge.”
Parente discovered Ludo in college through the song “Good Will Hunting by Myself,” but he wasn’t truly evangelized until he purchased the album You’re Awful, I Love You in 2008. He felt a kinship with the band because its members seemed like they “weren’t the popular kids in high school,” and were proud of it.
Perhaps this is why Ludo inspires so much ardor—not despite the fact that it’s made up of ordinary guys, but because of it. The years of constant touring, performing at dive bars, and interacting with fans certainly helped, but above all, Ludo connects with people because its members have always stayed true to themselves.
“The extra effort of digging in to find a genuine truth pays off in the long run,” Volpe says of his songwriting. “It’s a much quieter connection you end up having with your audience, but one that ends up being much deeper and longer-lasting.”
But excavating a “genuine truth” from oneself through music is thorny at best — at worst, it’s downright unattainable. All music is a performance, after all, so there’s inevitably going to be some degree of artifice. Or as Robert Christgau puts it, the “persona who sings the song” is separate from the “person who created both the song and the persona.” While the two can overlap on occasion, they nevertheless remain distinct. Even the very notion of a true, authentic self is tenuous—more of a verb than a thing, always transforming and always slipping from our grasp. Volpe is the first to admit that he might never be able to convey his complete, true self to listeners, if such a thing even exists. But that doesn’t stop him from trying anyway.
“It does feel like a Sisyphean effort…but it’s the only struggle worth undertaking,” he says.
For people to enjoy your music is one thing — for them to form an entire community around it is something else entirely. Volpe might never fully reach his goal of communicating a “genuine truth” through music. But if their emotional resonance with fans is any indicator, it seems he and the other members of Ludo have gotten pretty darn close.
Tickets for this year’s HalLUDOween, on Oct. 27, 28, and 29, can be purchased here.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Each year, Ludo returns to The Pageant to spend the spookiest time of the season with their devoted fans. HalLUDOween spans three nights and includes a variety of openers. “The Inevitable Burnout Super VIP” tickets are also available and include access to sing-along and meet-and-greet events, a signed set list, $100 to the merch store, and other perks. For more information and tickets, visit ludorock.com.
Nightly openers
October 27
October 28
October 29
