Propelled on waves of swift pop and southern rock, Nashville’s The Vegabonds were set to make the largest impact of the band’s career before 2020 screeched to a halt due to the COVID-19. The lack of touring prospects forced the band, which started out in Auburn, AL back in 2009, to find alternatives to the road, and with the help of modern technology and old-fashioned ingenuity, The Vegabonds remained sharp through livestreams while concocting a new album. Recorded with longtime producer Tom Tapley (Blackberry Smoke, Mastadon), Sinners and Saints blends pre-pandemic expectation with new world emotions, driving forward with mood and tone. Bassist Paul Bruens shares what it was like transitioning from club to camera and what the band hopes to accomplish in 2022 as The Vegabonds return to Macon for their Grant’s debut on Saturday, January 29th.
AI- Is this gonna be the first time that the Vegabonds have been back to Macon since the pandemic?
PB- Oh, yes, it definitely is! I think our last show in Macon was right before the pandemic started. It’s been that long! It’s actually kinda strange, ’cause it’s been that long for a lot of places we’re goin’ back to this year. You don’t realize how much time has passed. It’s been almost two years! I haven’t even stepped foot in Macon in two years, personally, so it’s crazy. We’re used to goin’ there a few times a year and hangin’ out with friends and just playin’ shows or seein’ live music.
Well, let’s duck back those couple of years and talk about 2019 for just a second. That was a pretty big year for you guys. You were havin’ a good one, and I can only imagine that you were all set to make 2020 even bigger and better. Like so many different acts that things hit a wall with the pandemic, what was on your mind when it looked like there was gonna be no touring?
It was like you said, we had a big year planned for 2020. We didn’t have new music, but we had a lot of festivals. We’ve been around for a decade and what we were coming into was the year we finally always wanted for touring! We were getting so many offers and things we’ve always hoped for and then everything comes crashing down! The first thing that goes through your mind, is, “Are we gonna be okay?” When you’ve had a band who’s like your family for a decade and then all of a sudden, you’re hitting a wall– and not even just us, but everything else in the world that’s going on– it’s a little stressful. I think the first few months of 2020, it was the wondering of what’s gonna happen, when it’s gonna be over with, and the not knowing that really gets to you all that time.
You had two, what I would call pretty big rallying points for that time period. First thing being that many, many artists took to streaming when the pandemic shut everything down– some to greater success than others, or I guess rather it was easier for some artists to embrace the feeling of performing without the energy of a live audience. You guys were able to take advantage of that. Did I understand that you guys had your own studio and you outfitted it to be able to do streaming shows?
We actually had a couple different partners with livestreaming. When everything happened, our booking agency decided to go ahead and start doing something different, so they bought up a couple little studio streaming services where we could actually– it’s called SlingStudio– use it to toggle back and forth between iPhone cameras and other HD cameras. We used it for the first time on Memorial Day weekend in the studio in Atlanta, Georgia where we record. Since no one was recording, Tom Tapley, our producer, was like, “Hey, we should try to do this in the studio, and then we could make a song the next day afterwards, you know, start recording again.”
It was really stressful, more than anything, ’cause we’re so used to dealing with the live audio side of things, and that wasn’t really the biggest worry. Now, the worry is we’re havin’ to be on camera and we’re not the kind of band that is in front of a camera– hardly ever! We’re always off the camera doing things or just playing music, and being on camera, it was like we’re all of a sudden running an SNL production! Everything came down to the final minute before it aired live– ’cause we did all of our livestreams live– and so we were like, “Oh crap, this image isn’t set up to put on there!” We were just runnin’ around… I was in a total panic that whole time because I was goin’ back and forth between the audio and the video side of things, and then I was like, “Oh wait, now I gotta play!”
We had a very small crew because of what was goin’ on during COVID, so we had two video guys and Tom, our producer, who was mixing in the studio where we recorded our new record and our last record. He was mixing live to do all that stuff. We ended up doing a lot of livestreams partnered with Acme Radio out of Nashville, where [they] would run sound, audio, and all that stuff for us. And even lights, they’d help out with that doin’ the Nashville livestreams. But it was really fun to do all that stuff. It was a different side of things.
That was my second point of that period. You bring up Tom Tapley, you bring up recording the most recent album, Sinners and Saints. You say at the time when everything shut down, you didn’t have new music, but you did take that opportunity to put something new together. I know that you had some of those songs written before, and then you wrote some during. How did having that kind of dynamic– songs written before and during COVID-19– affect the sound of the album? I mean, love is still love, heartache is still heartache, but when it’s happening in a pandemic, it had to have felt different.
It did feel different because there was a point when we were making the record that we were like, “Is this our last album? What’s goin’ on here? When could we ever even put this out?” But also there was a feeling where there was no rush. We had nowhere to go, nowhere to be, and it was stress-free. It was fun! It felt like we were back in the days when we all first met in college and were like, “Let’s just play music and see what happens,” you know?
The album was done in different parts. There’s a few songs that were recorded a few months before the pandemic started, and then there was the session we did when we did our Memorial Day livestream. There’s another session a few months later, and then we finished it up in early 2021. It was four different sessions spread out. Every few months, we’d come back in and revisit, sometimes retouch up old songs that we figured out how to do something better. We hardly get to do stuff like that ’cause we’re so busy touring and life is busy. It was a different way to look at a record. We were just trying to make the best songs we could make to put out together and we weren’t on anybody’s timeline, but our own. It was really nice!
I get different things from different people– road warriors that have spent so many years never really being home for longer than just to be able to do laundry, kiss the wife, say hi to the kids, and then right back out because it is a grind to make a living as a musician. The downtime really showed people that there could be an alternative, and I think that there has been a drive among different sects of music to retool the way that they do touring and performing live. What about you guys? Did you see any changes that you want to make in the future going forward now that you’ve been back out playing?
Definitely. With the pandemic, we would do shows on and off throughout 2020 and early 2021, but we could only do a couple here and there. It was very hard to find an ability to do something, and so we slowly eased ourselves back into what we do. Over the past couple years, we’ve been more of a weekend warrior type band or we’d go out for five or six days, but living in Nashville, we have that flexibility and that tour radius to just bounce out Wednesday through Saturday and then be home for three days and wake up in our beds on Sunday mornin’. We’ve really figured out that there’s a leaner way to touring rather than just being gone every day and losing money during the week all the time and figuring out when to tour, where to tour– but it’s different for us because we’ve been doing it for so long.
We were at that point anyway, where it was time to define, “Where do you need to be as the Vegabonds?” Instead of having to be everywhere, we just figured out where we’re wanted and then we’re branching out from that. The pandemic’s kind of made us start over, but with a sense of like we’ve already been there before, you know what I mean? It’s like we had to start from the bottom and start reaching out and branching out again, but it’s actually been some of the most fun touring we’ve had in a long time, just coming back to these cities after not having been there in so long, watching the demand build up, and seeing so many old friends. But at the same time, we’re running into so many new fans who haven’t seen us play in the past two years, but have become fans over the past two years. It’s been a really interesting lifestyle change, but it’s comin’ back in a really nice way.
Tell me what’s in the works. You’re back out, you’re playing. What is the next evolutionary step gonna be for the Vegabonds?
Well, the next step is we’re tryin’ to create some of our own events and festivals rooted around some bands that we know personally and our friends. We’re working on some new music right now. We’re about to start that process again but other than that, the main step is we wanna start doing tour dates that are annual events and things like that. Kinda like what the Allman Brothers used to do back in the day and where like, every New Year’s, you know where we’re gonna be or every March, you know where we’re gonna have this big event. Or same thing with June or July. So this year we’re formulating where we wanna be during certain months and making our own traditions.
Have you got anything in mind or in motion to start this year?
We do, but I can’t disclose it just yet. Atlanta, Georgia has become our biggest market and it’s definitely gonna be a place where you see some really cool things happen out of us between that and the other cities in Georgia.