You're Going To Hate My Other Band

On Consuelo's Revenge

This entry is about my other band: Consuelo’s Revenge. You’re probably not going to like them. Dreadnoughts fans rarely do. People have literally walked up to me after shows and said: “Love your band man! But uh, I’m not really into that Consuelo’s Revenge stuff.” And that’s fine. It’s not really for you, it’s for me, and our 34 monthly listeners on Spotify, and it’s for my amazing friends in Providence, Rhode Island, the greatest city in the greatest state in America.

In 2012 I was phenomenally burned out from touring with the Dreadnoughts. The thing with touring for 2-3 months at a time is that it completely sucks the joy out of the two things that make being in a band worth it: (1) playing music you love, and (2) enjoying the time with friends. It’s amazing to me that so many people seem to like our songs, which is why I sometimes wish I could explain to them how it feels to play them every night for 28 out of 30 nights, with varying degrees of success, thousands of miles away from your home. And I will never have better friends than I’ve made in the Dreadnoughts, which is why it sucks so badly to have those friendships strained (and in certain cases outright destroyed) by the pressures of touring. Or to pull into a town to see old friends for a few fleeting minutes before you have to run off and do some goddamned useless sound check where the sound person will forget to write all the settings down and you’ll be doing it all over again on stage in the middle of what was supposed to be your first song.

So 2012: I had moved with my new spouse to Providence, RI, to do a graduate degree, so that I could actually pursue a real career and not become one of those drugged-out zombies that populate the ranks of aging and endlessly touring punk bands. But music always has a hold of me, and it wasn’t long before I went on Craigslist—just as I had in 2006 to meet Seamus O’Flanahan!—looking for musicians.

And there was Ian, a bass player, looking to start a kind of folk-Americana-soul thing, influenced by Springsteen, Sam Cooke, and Tom Waits. I cannot explain to you how much I love that cluster of music. People endlessly bash the USA, but the reality is that Americans are responsible for virtually all of the amazing musical styles that emerged in the 20th century, and that safe, nice, polite welfare states in Scandinavia or Western Europe (or indeed Canada) are cultural wastelands by comparison. Though other countries punch well above their weight class here—Jamaica, for example— American music is indisputably the most brilliant, dynamic, diverse and influential of the past 150 years.

So we started the band, but a lot was missing. And then we found our singer: on Youtube, a young lady named Amanda was taking time during her little boy’s naps to strum a few tunes on the uke and sing. We were captivated by her voice, and I wasn’t surprised a few years later when her singing with our band won her two straight “Best Female Vocalist” awards from Providence’s Motif Magazine. She is far and away the most natural and unique singer I have ever worked with, she did recordings in one take, she didn’t hide her Rhode Island accent, and at a time when female vocalists were all tripping over themselves to sound even more light, wilting, whispery and breathy than the last radio-saturated manic pixie dream-girl (a trend that has officially reached its peak with the music of William Eyelash), Amanda fucking dug into her gut and pulled this soulful, smoky, unique sound out for the world to hear. It was magic. It took me 12 years to learn to sing even half-decently, Amanda is a natural and writing songs for her was a joy.

We added violin and keys and Al Diaz on the drums and the amazing Kirk Anderson on the button accordion, giving us a traditional element that few folk/Americana bands have. And then we just.. wrote some songs, recorded some albums, played some shows, and became great lifelong friends. That’s it. Imagine that, huh?

Hey, I love playing in the Dreadnoughts, and the band has done things I am immensely proud of. But there was something much more real about Consuelo’s Revenge; we played in dive bars to 25 people, we gained underground credibility in the Providence scene but knew no-one outside the city would ever care, we just put out cool albums and played fun local shows and gained a few superfans. I could never explain to fellow Consuelians why this was in many ways better than touring around Europe playing to 200 people a night, but it really honestly is.

And not to get too personal, but the people in that band knew what suffering was (they still do, sadly) and they sang about it from the heart, in this intensely real fashion. In the Dreadnoughts, we sort of cosplay drunken pirate guys, pretending to be lots of things, putting on lots of masks, but only rarely singing about something deeply personal (“Dear Old Stan” is an exception). I mean, I know I care a lot about real cider and polka and what that all represents, but those are my interests, they aren’t really my life, you know? The Dreadnoughts music, for all of its strengths, is kind of fake.

So anyway, here are some Consuelo songs you might like:

1. “Henry Lee” (A murder ballad, punked up)

2. “Well, Well, Well” (I get to sing this one, channel my inner southern rocker)

3. “Pasadena” (the fan favorite)

4. The Palatine Light

And though I’ve moved on from the band and they still play without me, when times are tough, I still put on our version of “What are they Doing in Heaven Today”. It’s rough, it’s raw, it’s a little messy, but god damn it, it has soul.