Big Something bringing its mix of rock, jazz and funk to Pembroke – The Patriot Ledger
Jay N. Miller
“We had a lot of fun with our past catalogue with songs about outer space,” singer/guitarist Nick MacDaniels of the band Big Something was saying. “This time, on our new album, the songs are more about exploring the depths of inner space. Most of the album, “Headspace,” kind of goes on a journey through different topics, times, and places, but all of it kind of relates back to mental health.”
Big Something just released their seventh studio album, “Headspace,” on their own Truth Serum label, on Nov. 17, and they’ve just embarked on a 40-city, seven-month national tour that touches down for its only Boston-area stop on Saturday, Dec. 23, at Soundcheck Studios in Pembroke. (Soundcheck Studios is located at 150 Corporate Park Drive in Pembroke, the show begins at 8 p.m., with Tampa, Florida, duo The Ries Brothers, and Connecticut quartet One Take Weekend opening. Tickets are $20 in advance, $25 day of show, available through soundcheck-studios.com. Call the venue at 781-730-5233 for more information.)
Big Something had its origins in 2009 around Burlington, North Carolina, where most of the musicians lived. By the next year the sextet had released its debut album, “Stories from the Middle of Nowhere,” and their blend of alternative rock, with jazz and funk underpinnings found an audience right away. By 2013, the band’s eponymous second studio album was cited as Album of the Year by the Homegrown Music Network, and they were touring nationally.
Band draws fans of many genres of music
Big Something’s heady mix of rock, jazz, and funk drew fans from all those genres, as well as others from the jamband quadrant, who came to love the group’s extended improvisations at live shows, where a tune like the popular “Megalodon” could easily stretch out to 15 minutes or more without losing any momentum or energy. Sirius Radio’s Jam On station took a particular liking to the band with 2016’s “Truth Serum” album. The fourth Big Something studio effort, “Tumbleweed” in 2017, placed their songs in a post-apocalyptic setting, reminiscent of the “Mad Max” movies, exploring man’s place in the cosmos even as the music reached new heights of funky creativity.
Big Something’s lineup has remained pretty much the same, and only Doug Marshall stepping back from the bass position in favor of Matt Laird this year has changed it. Nick MacDaniels writes most of the songs, plays guitar and mandolin and sings, with Josh Kagel on keyboards and trumpet, Casey Cranford on saxophone and EWI (electronic wind instrument), Ben Vinograd on drums, and Jesse Hensley on guitar. The members’ versatility on multiple instruments allows Big Something to sound like a much bigger band, and their ability to turn familiar covers from other groups into thrilling, orchestral sounding epics made them audience favorites everywhere they played. (Check out the video of their cover of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” from Telluride, Colorado, for one especially exciting performance.)
Co-writer’s death changed band’s tone
MacDaniels had collaborated with lyricist Paul Interdonato for most of the band’s songwriting, but after Interdonato died in 2017, the singer’s songs gradually took a more introspective direction, shifting from that outer space fun to themes of enjoying life as it is, appreciating the people and experiences around you. It’s been noted that some of the new tunes can be seen as conveying a theme of both requiem and rebirth. On “The Mountain” from the new album, for example, which has a video with spectacular scenery, a soothing, reflective tone embraces that natural beauty. The song “Bob and Weave,” with guest Josh Phillips, frames frenetic vocals in hip-hop style cadence over a laidback musical foundation, for a sense of achieving calm amidst everyday turmoil.
Get your calendar:Christmas is coming fast. Start setting your concert schedule for the holiday week now
The song “Clouds” appears in two versions on the record and has two gripping videos out also. In the full band version with guest Andy Frasco, a vibrant jazz-funk arrangement ends in a blazing guitar jam, as MacDaniels sings a chorus “I’ve been running … running away from you.” But in the unplugged rendition, with just MacDaniels and Justin Osborne from the band SUSTO on guitars, it comes across as a more poignant anthem of resilience. The album’s title cut, “Headspace,” is a sizzling bit of prog-rock with a hypnotic, ascending hook, where the theme seems to be finding your footing “while the world’s on fire.”
Music ‘takes listeners on a journey’
“I think ‘The Mountain’ takes listeners on a journey, and that’s what the rest of the album does too,” MacDaniels offered from the Baltimore stop that opened the tour recently. “’Clouds’ is also introspective, and not about a breakup as some might guess. That song is more about when you are about to lose someone to addiction, or another way, and you can’t quite face it. When you lose someone like that, how do you get past it? You can’t keep running from it, and I think that song tries to help people deal with that and try to get on with life.”
We suggest that an earlier song, “The Breakers” with its surfing video, takes on a somewhat similar theme, managing to be both warm-hearted and haunting as it deals with time passing.
“Oh, yes, ‘The Breakers’ is 100% about the passage of time,” said MacDaniels. “That song is definitely about coming to peace with the finite timeline we are all on.”
Yet before we give the impression the recent Big Something music is all serious and reflective, it should be pointed out that those thoughtful lyrics come with the same vividly intoxicating arrangements of rock, jazz, and especially funk that made the sextet so appealing from the start. The words may be a bit deeper, but the musical fun quotient is still off the charts, and any particular tune could veer far afield into all sorts of unexpected territory.
“I think one of the great things about music is its ability to bring people joy,” said MacDaniels. “In a live concert setting, that has always been what we try to achieve, and put out positive energy and a positive message. Songwriting can also be great for expressing other emotions, and I like to think of it like a painting, where you can have all kinds of different hues, and people can take what they want from it.”
Big Something sought rural setting to record
For this latest album, Big Something and producer John Custer spent time secluded away in Minnesota’s Pachyderm Recording Studios, famed for being the setting for Nirvana’s seminal “In Utero” album. The rural Minnesota landscape helped inspire the new music’s joy and appreciation for life and community. And from their beginning, creating Big Something music has been a collective effort.
“I appreciate and am very proud of the fact that we have stuck together through all the years,” said MacDaniels. “Even if there’s been a new bassist, and a new keyboardist before that, we’re all still very much family, and in both cases, it was just an amiable passing of the torch, just life moving on.”
“We all came from very different influences, and we are also of kind of varied ages,” MacDaniels noted. “We come from a lot of ‘90s rock, but a couple of the older guys are very much into ‘70s-‘80s rock, from metal to Frank Zappa. Casey is very much a jazz fan, and Jesse’s dad is in a bluegrass band. When we write, we don’t consciously try to be one thing or another, and the songs just happen organically. I might think I’ve written a cool one, but then the other band members all get to interpret it in their own way, so the final product comes from a very collaborative effort.”
Band pays tribute to its influences
The inter-band collaboration also sees some collaborations outside the band this time, with guests like Frasco, Phillips and Osborne. And, of course, Big Something still loves to mix in classic covers, which they transform with their own treatments.
“We love paying homage to musicians of the past,” said MacDaniels. “I think that’s a cool way to show our band’s influences, and we will definitely be throwing a wide variety of covers into shows on this tour. And the musicians we collaborated with on this album? We’re very particular who we work with, very careful about that. But these people are great writers themselves, and also great people, so it was just really cool having them along on this record.”
We mentioned hearing the band at Brighton Music Hall in 2018 and 2019, and MacDaniels noted their love of the Boston area and its music fans. Due to the pandemic they haven’t been back to the Boston area since 2020, so the Soundcheck Studios show is a big deal to them too.
“We’ve been trying to get back up to that area for a while now, where we’ve always had really good response,” said MacDaniels. “We’ve heard so many good things about this club, and it was 2020 since we’ve been up there, so we are really looking forward to that Saturday night at Soundcheck Studios.”
