Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band is ready to hit the ground running this Fall when the tour winds it's way across America's Heartland, kicking off on November 9th in Ferndale, Michigan.
The band will perform songs from their vast catalog and ones from their latest effort, Dance Songs for Hard Times. This eclectic body of work was produced by Vance Powell (four-time Grammy Award winner whose resume includes work with Chris Stapleton and Jack White). Peyton embraced Powell’s suggestion to turn back the clock and record no more than eight audio tracks to analog tape. Minimal overdubs are heard on Dance Songs for Hard Times, and Peyton sang while playing guitar live in the studio.
Dance Songs for Hard Times conveys the hopes and fears of pandemic living; it is relevant, electrifying, and ironically timely, having been written by candlelight and then recorded using the best technology available…in the 1950s.
Far from a depressing listen, Dance Songs lives up to its name by delivering action-packed riffs and rhythms across 11 songs. The country blues trio that won over crowds on more than one Warped Tour knows how to make an audience move. “I like songs that sound happy but are actually very sad,” Peyton says. “I don’t know why it is, but I just do.”
Peyton, the cover subject of a recent issue of Vintage Guitar magazine, showcases his remarkable picking techniques in “Too Cool to Dance.” It’s rare to hear a fingerstyle player attack Chuck Berry-inspired licks with index, middle, and ring fingers while devoting his or her thumb to a bass line. Yet the multi-tasking Peyton has made an art of giving the illusion a bass player is accompanying him, despite the Big Damn Band’s roster featuring no one beyond himself, Breezy Peyton on washboard, and Max Senteney on drums.
“Too Cool to Dance” heats up the set thanks to Peyton’s 1954 Supro Dual Tone electric guitar. “It’s crazy,” Peyton says of “Too Cool to Dance.” “It almost feels like a song from the 1950s that’s been lost. At the end of the day, it still somehow feels like us.”
Visually, Dance Songs for Hard Times is led by a video accompanying the song “Ways and Means.” Defined by pastel colors and confident dance moves, the video was made at an old-school laundromat to match the song’s Bo Diddley-boasting on a limited budget: “My knife is sharp, my guitar never flat … king of the laundromat.”
As Peyton says, it’s difficult to create blues music that isn’t personal.
TOUR DATES
11/9------Ferndale, MI --------Magic Bag
11/10------Cleveland, OH------Music Box
11/11-------Buffalo, NY----------Iron Works
11/12------Pittsburgh, PA------Jergels
11/14------Syracuse, NY-------Funk N Waffles
11/15------Pawling, NY---------Daryl's House
11/16------Sellersville, PA -----Sellersville Theatre
11/17------Wash DC-------------Pearl St Warehouse
11/18------Winchester, VA-----Bright Box
11/22------Newport, KY---------Southgate House
11/24------St. Louis, MO--------Blueberry Hill
11/25------Bloomington, IN-----Buskirk Chumley
11/30------Grand Rapids, MI---The Stache
12/1-------Milwaukee, WI-------Colectivo Back Room
12/2-------Berwyn, IL-------------Fitzgerald's
12/7-------St Paul, MN-----------Turf Club
12/9-------Green Lake, WI------ Thrasher Opera House
