The Soil and The Sun’s most excellent new adventure: Taking “Meridian” on the road

The widely admired Grand Rapids ensemble this week unleashed its much-buzzed-about new album and took time for an exclusive in-studio performance on Local Spins Live. (Video, podcast)

 

Members of The Soil and The Sun are on a musical adventure that they hope will never end.

And with a powerful new album, an upcoming U.S. tour and a fair amount of national buzz about their singular, atmospheric sound, it’s easy to see why this “family” of West Michigan musicians may be as pumped up as ever about their lot in life and their rosy future.

“This is the most exciting and probably most interesting thing we’ve recorded,” said singer, guitarist and principal songwriter Alex McGrath, referring to the seven-piece band’s new “Meridian” album, released earlier this week. “But there’s still more growth to happen, there’s more focus. We’ll be focusing the vision, I think in the future. We’re going to be trying some new things, too. We’ll see what is to come.”

For now, the Grand Rapids band – McGrath, his wife, Ashley, Benjamin Baker-Johnson, Joanna Perry, Jacqueline Warren, Michael Newsted and Kellen Kerwin (replacing William Campbell, who recently departed the group) – is perfectly content with its dynamic sonic approach and its indie-rock status, free of record label tethers.

The sold-out, standing-room only crowds of eager fans who’ve flocked to The Soil and The Sun’s recent shows (including its triumphant pre-release concert earlier this month at Founders Brewing Co. in Grand Rapids) dramatically confirm the band is headed in the right direction with music that’s part spacey folk, part prog-rock, part post-rock and all spiritually “experiential” with an orchestral sheen.

New songs such as “How Long?” and “Samyaza” build to almost feverish crescendos enhanced by multi-part choral harmonies which are especially invigorating and seem to completely envelop listeners in a live setting.

“It feels like we’ve gotten to know each other’s voices over the last couple years and it leads us to be able to create harmonies together, especially this new album,” Ashley says. “It was really fun sitting down and arranging all the harmonies to fit, especially Alex, Jackie and my vocals. It’s exciting to have them lock in like that.”

DIZZYING ARRAY OF INSTRUMENTS AND LOTS OF PEDALS

Of course, the band’s music is often enhanced by layers of sound and textures and special effects, aided by a dizzying array of instruments and effects pedals. (Alex jokes, “I get excited when you say ‘pedals.’ ”) Indeed, the band is populated by serial multi-instrumentalists.

“There’s definitely a lot of talented people in the band which is definitely really cool, especially for me as a songwriter to be able to bring my songs to these talented musicians,” Alex said.

On Wednesday, the band, however, brought a stripped down, pedal-less version of its sound into the studios of News Talk 1340 AM (WJRW) for Local Spins Live to perform a new song, “Leviathan,” with two acoustic guitars (Alex and Joanna), a tiny keyboard (Ashley) and an odd Unisynth electronic guitar (Kerwin). Check out a video of this exclusive performance below with a podcast of the entire show here.

As the band’s third album, “Meridian” clearly marks the project that best represents The Soil & The Sun’s sound, vision and instrumental acuity, captured brilliantly by engineer/co-producer Rick Fritz at Chicago’s Audiotree Studios.

The songs, Alex says, cover the gamut of the human experience. “Emotionally, it spans a whole range, the whole spectrum,” he suggests.

It also reflects a band whose members have grown to know each other and their talents intimately.

“That’s a big part of it, just the collaboration aspect of it. It makes the writing process more of a melting pot of ideas,” Alex says. “We spend a long time playing it again and again and whittling it down into something manageable.”

EMBARKING ON A MAJOR U.S. TOUR

Manageable and wondrous, a quality which mesmerizes fans during live shows. And The Soil and The Sun is planning plenty of those over the next three months as it tours the country behind the new album.”

Starting tonight with a show at The Loving Touch in Ferndale, the band continues with tour stops in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Kentucky before returning to Holland on Aug. 30 for a Hope College Concert Series concert at the Knickerbocker Theatre. (Get ticket details for that show online here.)

After that, the band plays a series of 27 shows through mid-November, from St. Louis to Boston to Atlanta and many points in between. Over the past couple of years, while earning attention from the likes of Paste magazine and NPR, they’ve managed to build a fan base in places as far-flung as Chicago, Nashville, Kansas City, Portland and Los Angeles.

“It’s a blast. It’s awesome,” Alex says of being on the road for 100 to 150 shows a year. “We wouldn’t have it any other way.”

And the five-year-old band hasn’t forgotten about its West Michigan roots during its travels. “It feels like an honor. When we travel, we talk about Grand Rapids a lot and West Michigan,” Ashley says. “It’s really a beautiful place. It feels like your parents being proud of you or something.”

All of that time on the road also has turned the band into a family.

“It’s kind of like we know each other better than a lot of … families know each other, in good times or bad, and we’ve had to work through a lot. It’s come really far and we love each other a lot,” Ashley says.

“It’s spending time with each other, having community,” she says of the nine-member traveling troupe that includes Baker-Johnson’s wife and child. “Every day, traveling together, hanging out together, friends in every city that we stay with, the shows and meeting new people, making new connections and being able to play the songs we get to play every night. It’s really kind of what we’re all about.”

For more about The Soil and The Sun and to purchase its music, visit thesoilandthesun.com.

THE SOIL AND THE SUN ON LOCAL SPINS LIVE; VIDEO BY PAUL SINKEVICS

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