Value in Permanence
Originally Printed in The Boulder Weekly February 5 2009
Elephant Revival discovers themselves on their debut album
by Dave Kirby

For all the elegance and hushed grace that attends Elephant Revival’s eponymous debut CD, it’s worth noting that the band was born in the mud.

Well, partly anyway.

Bassist Dango Rose recalls the encounter.

"Bridget Law and I met at a festival in Keystone, dancing barefoot in the rain. It was sort of, 'Hey, who are you? This is fun. Oh, you’re playing in a fiddle competition; I’m playing in an old-time string band. Wanna go to Kansas?'"

Fiddler Law and Rose eventually met up with songwriter/vocalist/djembist Bonnie Paine and Dan Rodriguez (who met on a rooftop in Connecticut) the same year, 2003, and via a labyrinthine route through Oklahoma and Colorado and California and Connecticut (capturing multi-instrumentalist Sage Cook along the way) Elephant Revival eventually found its center of gravity in Nederland.

And that's not really an uncommon story for string and acoustic bands these days: musicians spending months surfing the summer sun at festivals across the Lower 48, establishing and nurturing musical connections that overlap, renew, dissolve or mature, bearing fruit that lasts as long as years, or as briefly as the firewood at a festival site campground.

What is less common, though, is a band that emerges whole from that nomadic life and manages to balance the songwriting craft of five players, elude simple genre categorization and understate its strengths with the studied gentleness that Elephant Revival serves up. Produced by Taarka's David Tiller, and opening with the achingly wrought Paine ballad "Ring Around the Moon," the CD brims with poised folk ballads, modern Celtic fiddle dirges, hints of blues and Appalachia... coaxing the spirit but slyly avoiding climbing fully into each form’s body.

There are times when the vibe seems almost mournful.

"And that's not a bad thing," says Rose. "It surprised us too, hearing the album and saying, 'Wow… we are kind of mellow.' The recording process captures a moment in time, and it also captures the truth about the individuals making the album. We just wanted to be as truthful as we could."

Truthful. An interesting notion, not altogether clear.

"Say, we could be playing a bluegrass show… let's say we're at the Southern Sun, everybody's dancing, they want to hear a fiddle tune. Well, we're going to play that, because it's the vibe of what's going on. But in the studio, you kind of get down to the core individuality of us, and the end result became… Elephant Revival, self titled.

"We're just real happy with it. It's a real portrait of the web we weave."

Like their frequent live shows spanning the acoustic music axis from Boulder to Nederland to Lyons, when they're not plying festival waters, the CD features original songwriting as well as reinterpretations of some traditional and contemporary fiddle tunes.

"At the core, I think we're a band of five songwriters. Bridget takes a lot of her tunes from good friends, contemporary writers from Scotland, and also writes in that style. So… we all have individual songwriting styles."

But for all the live gigs, they intentionally avoided the "as if we were playing live" approach to the recording process that so many bands reach for in the studio. That temptation, albeit frequently rendered successfully, tends to promote the live experience as central to the band's persona, rather than the substance of the songs themselves.

Rose credits Tiller's hand in helping to focus the band and draw on its strengths, no small feat with a handful of multi-instrumentalist musicians who all draw from varied influences and who all share fellowship in contributing songs.

"ThaMusement was one of our biggest influences. [Tiller] understood that the recording process is different from the live show. You have a different opportunity. So we got to look at our songs in new ways, sort of to focus on the intricacies. Bonnie was just talking the other day about our friend Zach Cramer doing the French horn on 'Currach,' and the process that actually took was a long tracking process, because they were kind of creating a sort of wind-like melody in the background, which, to me, was one of the crowning moments on the album."

For us, the CD suggested a commitment to permanence, a jointly crafted vision. But we wondered… for a band that coalesced across a blizzard of zip codes, that calls Boulder County home equally with Tahlequah, Okla., that commonly regard Winfield, Kan., as the site of their first real gig… can any one place ever really be home?

Is there value in permanence?

"There is value in permanence, absolutely. Right now, in particular, it really feels like a sense of arrival. We're very excited and very happy with where we are right now, just being part of this amazing musical heritage surrounding Boulder and Nederland."