By Melissa Komar
“I’d be lying if I said we weren’t nervous,” admits Zack Chance, one half of the up and coming old-country rock and blues duo known as Jamestown Revival.
Chance fields all my questions about their on the brink musical act via telephone in Los Angeles; Jonathan Clay, the other half of the duo is in Texas at the time of the interview, painstakingly finishing up an old shuttle bus that they will use for their tour.
The nerves to which Chance alludes are tied to their recent January 13th performance on the Conan O’Brien show. Pretty big accomplishment for two outdoorsy, late twenty-somes guys who met at age fourteen in Magnolia, Texas, which at the time Chance estimates had a population somewhere around eleven hundred.
Aside from playing on Conan O’Brien, 2014 has been big for Jamestown Revival so far. They played their first ever sold-out show in Los Angeles, they appeared on KCRW, a well-respected, major radio station out in California, and they will be releasing their first full-length album on February 11th.
“2014 has been so amazing to us,” admits Chance, but he is cautious of being too overwhelmed by their recent success. “It’s like we don’t want to breathe or touch anything. We don’t want to break it.”
So, before Conan, sold-out shows [there’s been a couple more on their tour since our interview], and a full-length album, Chance and Clay were two fourteen year-old boys living in Texas who realized a shared passion for music and figured out they enjoyed creating it together.
“We wrote our first song together when we were fifteen,” recalls Chance and jokingly adds, “that’s buried in a vault somewhere and hopefully never sees the light of day.”
The guys continued making music from this point forward, holding what they called “studio nights,” spending the night at each other’s houses and recording songs on old, cheap recording software from Guitar Center.
The two soon went off to college, both going to Texas State. Clay left early to pursue a solo career and Chance stayed to earn a degree in marketing. Soon after graduating, Chance found the two of them playing together again.
“We realized pretty quickly it was more fun to tour together than it was separate.”
It was around this time in late 2010, early 2011 that they went back to hanging out on property in Huntsville, Texas that had been in Clay’s family since the late 1960s. During one of these visits, the two decided to skip the usual ATV riding and fishing and bring instruments instead.
“We were just hanging out on this old back porch and wrote a song and it felt different, more so than anything we had ever done before.” And so Jamestown Revival was born. “It was sort of a rebirth, a new outlook on how we wanted to create,” Chance explains.
Along with new beginnings, their name pays tribute to an early United States settlement. “It’s a throwback to one of the early settlements, Jamestown, Virginia. It was the leaving behind the old and starting a new, going in search of adventure, the contrast of living in the city, but missing the wilderness.”
Their upcoming album, Utah, reflects their ensuing adventures, serving as an autobiographical account of their move from Texas to California, the following two years of traveling, playing shows, and being on the road and missing home. Although there are definitely moments of sorrow, the duo also highlights discovering things in California that they enjoyed and their observations along the way.
Staying true to their do-it-yourself style, they began shopping the songs around in 2013, but weren’t getting anyone who wanted to record them as far as producers go. Drawing on personal resources, the two talked their friends, who just happened to be music engineers, into taking as little money as possible to help them record the album. “We rented a bunch of gear and found this cabin in Utah up in the Wasatch Mountains,” explains Chance.
The recording process, like the writing of the songs, quickly became another adventure. “We wanted to do it the way that the people we sort of idolized did it. Jon, Nick [bassist], Ed [drummer], and I spent four or five days doing live tracks straight to tape.”
Aside from the four, the album saw a special guest: the cabin itself. “It’s sort of moments from this cabin in Utah and you can hear the cabin on the record. So, that’s why we named it Utah. That cabin is the fifth member of the band for this record.”
So aside from the cabin, what should listeners expect from Utah? “It’s very honest and hopefully that’s what people find in it. Our harmonies are really based in a lot of old country and blues. It has very vocally-driven melodies.”
Utah is set for release on February 11th, but if you can’t wait until then to hear more of Jamestown Revival’s honest and beautifully crafted in nature songs, check them out this Friday, February 7th at World Live Café at 8:00 p.m.
Chance promises a great show, with a mixture of mellowness and good old-fashioned partying. “It’s going to be a little bit unruly and gentle at the same time. We love to get rowdy. We know our way around some barstools. We want it to be an emotional high and an emotional low.”
