Photo by Tim Dwenger
Hot on the heels of a run through Colorado’s ski towns, we caught up with guitarist Max Davies of Kitchen Dwellers over Zoom to talk about the band’s upcoming album (drops Friday March, 1st – Order Here), how it ties into an ancient epic poem, and the band’s love for the late Jeff Austin. Check it out!
Max Davies: We have a little break right now. So I’m at home for about one more week and been home for almost a week. So it’s right in between our January run and then kind of a big run in February and then March and April.
Listen Here Denver!: Yeah. And I know you guys had a run through Colorado I mean, seems like you’re in Colorado every couple of months.
Max: We can’t stay away.
LHD!: It’s awesome. So I know you did several shows up in the mountains in some pretty small rooms. Must have been a fun run.
Max: It was very good. You can’t deny the ski run. It’s really hard not to do that year after year. It’s fun to go get to the smaller ski towns and we’re able to get some more people out to those shows. People make a whole ski run out of it and they come skiing and we saw a lot of the same people every single night. And yeah, the small rooms are very fun and we had a blast. It was also fun because it was like when I left Bozeman, it was negative 40. So getting to like 15-20 degrees, I was like, oh, I feel like I’m at the beach.
LHD!: I went to the shows in November at The Ogden when you guys unveiled your new album Seven Devils (out Friday, March 1st). I mean, obviously, you can’t stay away from Colorado and love skiing, but why did you choose to make such a big announcement on that weekend?
Max: Well, the timing kind of worked out with when we knew we were going to release the news. Everything’s thought out as far as when to announce and when we can get the vinyl made so it really worked out timing wise. But also headlined we the Ogden once before, but this was like, for us to do two nights at the Ogden, one night at Cervantes’. Those were like some of our most anticipated shows as a band, really, ever. Two nights at the Ogden is no joke for us. So we were like, well, the first night we should announce the album because…why not? Those are some of our bigger multi-night shows that we’ve done.
LHD!: There was so much energy in that room. It was so much fun.
Max: I know we had some of our friends that were. There was so much energy in the room. I think at one point during one song, I seriously just burst out laughing because it was almost too much to handle.
LHD!: Yeah, that’s what’s great. One of the great things about that room, just the way it’s set up, it feels real crowded on the floor and then the whole balcony is just kind of right on top of you guys as artists. I mean, there’s just so much going on in there.
Max: Yeah, I remember I was living in Winter park for a little bit and went down to see The Wailers at The Ogden and that was my first time ever there. And now to go back and play it…I’m always like, I remember the first time I saw a show here!
LHD!: You mentioned unveiling a couple of the songs from the album, but there were at least two or three that you guys have been playing for a while, right?
Max: Yeah. So the title track, “Seven Devils”, is one that we’ve been playing for a while that almost went on the last album, but for whatever reason, it didn’t. Then that kind of became the focal point of this album as far as theme, and it’s the launching pad of the whole thing. So we’ve been playing that one for a little while and then there’s one other song that’s a really old song called “Here We Go” that we’ve been playing out for a little bit, but it sounds different. It has Lindsay Lou on it. Has drums. It’s got new life to it.
LHD!: I know you mentioned “Seven Devils” being the theme of the album and I’m reading in your bio that you really tried to correlate this to Dante’s Inferno and I’m curious to know how that came to be. It’s a pretty significant task to correlate an album to something like that.
Max: We realized that a lot of these songs we were writing had a human existence theme. All the songs were personal, but could still be kind of relatable with just what people might be going through right now and throughout all of time, really.
The Seven Deadly Sins go back a very long way and have been kind of retold throughout history. So we had all these songs, and I think Torrin made the correlation with Dante’s Inferno, where he meets all the Seven Deadly Sins on his descent into Hell. We thought it’d be really fun to correlate a specific song with one of the sins and kind of take the listener through a little bit of a journey throughout the whole album. There’s an arc from the beginning all the way to the end. And it’s like there’s certain realizations that maybe a protagonist goes through during the album, and then by the end, they’ve kind of gone through this journey.
LHD!: So are the roman numerals in the song titles, do they signify which sin the song is correlated to? Is that how that works?
Max: So there’s really no direct order or numbering sequence for the Seven Deadly Sins. There’s an order that Dante encountered them in story and so each roman numeral in the song titles relates to the order in which they appear in Inferno. It’s not like you’re supposed to listen to it in that order, which some people ask, but no, that’s just letting you know, okay, you can look up whatever the third sin was that he encountered.
LHD!: This is gluttony or this is whatever. Okay, that makes sense. So did you guys write some of the lyrics to fit that concept, or did the songs just sort of fit in with the structure of the Seven Deadly Sins?
Max: I would say, like, 80% the songs fit and, like, 20% we were like, okay, we can kind of lean a little bit more in this direction, but it was more so the case that the songs fit. There were a couple that we were like, ‘okay, so here are the Seven Deadly Sins and we have this batch of songs; which song could relate to which sin?’ There were a couple that overlap because you know, the nature of Gluttony and Lust for example, there’s some overlapping things between them all.
LHD!: Sure. Absolutely.
Max: We could play with it a little bit, which was cool.
LHD!: Okay, so “Here We Go” is an older song that just happened to fit? That’s your song, right?
Max: Yeah, “Here We Go” is actually Wrath because it’s about a school shooting.
LHD!: And was that pulled in because it fit this idea or were you going to put it on this album anyway?
Max: We were going to put it on the album anyway, which is kind of wild that it worked out that way.
LHD!: It’s really interesting that it all just fit like that. In your bio it said that Torrin was driving around and just kind of realized that this all fit together.
Max: He wrote “Seven Devils” and he realized that there are so many different seven devils in the country and throughout history. There’s seven devils within native american culture, and there’s multiple places in the United States that are called seven devils. I think he just must have been driving around and thought, oh, this kind of feels like Dante’s Inferno.
LHD!: Crazy. Wow. So I think this was your first time working with Glenn Brown. What was that experience like? What did he bring to the table know. Influenced the.
Max: This was our first time working with a producer who is a lifelong career producer. I think is every producer is different, but I think one of the things that Glenn did very well was that he really just tries to pull stuff out of you. He’s like, that’s cool, but I think it could be cooler. Yeah, let’s find a way to make this cooler, and let’s see, that sounded good, but I think you can play it better, or I think you can sing it better.
Something that he brought to the table was that he has so many toys in his studio and just really high quality, professional grade gear that just makes you play better. When you’re playing into a 1950 RCA microphone that lives inside of a glass case and he says ‘this has only been used twice.’ You’re like, ‘all right I better live up to the expectations here.’ It helps you channel what you’re trying to get across.
He just brought a lot of professionalism, but in such a fun way. He’s just having fun with it. He at one point he said ‘none of this matters we’re just making music.’ This is just for fun and for the beauty of it. He’s really a magical guy, and he just brought a lot of that to the table.
LHD!: Were there any songs in particular that were kind of going in one direction and then he put into another direction that ended up on the album?
Max: Not so much going in one direction, and it moved. But there’s one song that we wrote about an Irishman, and he was able to procure and record a bunch of Irish instruments on it. He blows everything up. He expands, and he makes things bigger than what they were initially.
LHD!: Okay, that makes sense. So in addition to Glenn, you had a couple other guests on the record, including what, Lindsay Lou and John Mailander.
Max: Yep. We had Lindsay Lou, John. We had Mike Shimmin on drums, Kaitlyn Raitz on cello. We actually had a guy in Ireland by the name of Dermot Sheedy play this Irish drum on ‘Meagher’s Reel’ and ‘Waterford Son.’ He lives in Ireland so we sent him the tracks and he threw down this awesome drum track.
LHD!: Oh, that’s awesome. So you weren’t feeding him anything other than the track and said, hey, run with it on your own? Is that what you did with everybody that contributed?
Max: Yep. Pretty much. Lindsay Lou knocked it out of the park. She sounds so good and I know Glenn went down to her house in Nashville and he said that they recorded it in her living room. She was having a bunch of fun with it and was doing a bunch of different takes. We were all laughing in the studio because we were just listening to take after take after take and they were all so good.
LHD!: That’s awesome. So you didn’t actually get to work with her in the studio. That was one of those remote collaborations.
Max: Yeah, that was kind of between sessions. We were down in East Lansing, and then Glenn had to go to Nashville to do something because it is really hard to work with everyone’s schedule. Lindsay Lou is very busy, John Mailander is very busy. So in order to get everyone kind of dialed in, it’s hard to navigate everyone’s schedule.
LHD!: Oh, absolutely! But it is nice, that in this day and age, you can make it sound like everybody’s there in the studio together. It’s great. So, you guys are coming back to Colorado for the WinterWonderGrass festival again this year. For people that haven’t been there, it can be five degrees and snowing when you take the stage. I remember being there for Greensky one year and Anders was just brushing snow off his Dobro, it’s crazy. What keeps you coming back to a festival like this?
Max: Oh my God. Wondergrass might be the best festival, the way that it’s so put together and I feel like it’s a very inclusive festival. They do such a good job of putting up pictures from previous years. They take such great care of the artists. We have so much fun doing it and I think the fact that anything can happen. The weather is always a variable. It could be freezing and snowing, but everyone’s kind of like, well, we’re all out here, we need to dance to stay warm, so we’re going to have a good time. All the bands that he invites there are really great. I think he does a good job of getting the mainstay bands that do it year after year that everyone loves seeing and then every year he gets a few total outliers that people may not have heard before or wouldn’t expect to see there. I love that.
LHD!: A couple years ago he had The War and Treaty and they were awesome. Last year he had Neal Francis up there. It was great.
Max: This year He’s got Shadowgrass and Mountain Grass Unit. He’s really got some super awesome young bands and hopefully we can get on the hill and ski a little bit if possible.
LHD!: Yes, I would bring your skis for sure. Check out music on the mountain. They do those little sets on mid mountain during the day. So it’s so much fun. It’s just such a great idea.
LHD!: So you guys know one of the acts that’s really keeping the spirit of Jeff Austin and the original Yonder Mountain String Band alive. I’m kind of curious what he meant to you guys as musicians and if you ever got to spend any real time with him?
Max: Yeah, he meant kind of everything to us in the beginning, in our early stages. The band used to make this yearly pilgrimage to The Wilma and that was the first place that I ever actually saw Yonder. It might have been the first show we saw together as a band actually. It was out of control. It was just amazing. It was so much fun, such a good time. I think that is one of the things that we are trying to keep alive, is this feeling of being able to come to a show and let out whatever you had going on that week. You’re not supposed to act a certain way. You’re not supposed to do a certain thing. Everyone can just come and be themselves. I think that’s at least what we’re trying to have people experience. I know that was important to him too. We saw Jeff Austin Band a number of times at festivals that we were at right before he passed away and he was talking from the stage about a lot of really powerful things.
Max: Scotty does the two Wondergrass events in Colorado, and he for a couple of years did one out in Vermont and we played the one in Vermont right before he passed. Jeff was there at the festival and none of us had actually ever met him, but we were at the hotel and we need to go back to the venue so we all jump in the transport van and there’s only one other guy sitting in there and it’s him. So everyone’s like, oh, my God we get to meet you right now. Dude, this is fucking awesome. So we met him in the van and then we all got out of the van and chatted with him for a sec. So it was really cool to share that with him shortly before he passed away.
LHD!: Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah. He was just such a powerful spirit and obviously incredible songwriter. Songs that he put together that I see popping up in your set list from time to time are great.
Max: It’s wild. Yeah, we learned a bunch of his songs and they’re amazing. They’re so non-traditional. I think he’s a very underrated vocalist and showman. But, yeah, his songwriting was very powerful, for sure.
LHD!: Absolutely top notch. Like so many bands in this genre, you guys have some really fun covers that you work into the mix. And I’m curious how do you choose what to cover?
Max: We throw stuff at the wall and whatever sticks. We’re a band that likes to try things and no one takes what we do that seriously. If someone throws out an idea, we all try to figure out a way to make it work. For the Iron Maiden one, we were like, is this going to be too hard for us? Can we even play this? But, yeah, we worked on it and found a way. It’s also cool because we get exposed to different music from each other because everyone has very different backgrounds on what they like. It’s fun to learn other styles of music and I think that’s where all the variety comes from.
Don’t Miss The Kitchen Dwellers at WinterWonderGrass in Steamboat
Saturday March 2nd at 6:20pm on the Main Stage
Sunday March 3rd (Late Night) at The Grand Ballroom
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