The indie-folk/Americana trio brings its tour to Michigan this week for shows at St. Cecilia Music Center and The Ark. The Local Spins interview with Zach Williams.
Finding Peace and Joy in Their Music: The Lone Bellow (Courtesy Photo)
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When members of The Lone Bellow return to The Ark in Ann Arbor on Friday and to St. Cecilia Music Center in Grand Rapids on Saturday to reacquaint Michigan fans with their harmony-driven indie-folk and Americana gems, they intend to make friends out of strangers in what band founder Zach Williams calls an “engaged and communal” experience.
The band formed more than a decade ago has made friends of many fans on tour, thanks to compelling and memorable songs from five studio albums, including the trio’s latest, 2022’s “Love Songs for Losers,” with another on the way.
Williams, Kanene Donehey Pipkin and Brian Elmquist will make their first Michigan stop of their 2025 tour at The Ark at 8 p.m. Friday ($40 tickets available here), before traveling to Grand Rapids for a 7:30 p.m. Saturday show in St. Cecilia’s Royce Auditorium that’s essentially sold out (a few $39-$54 tickets available here).
Local Spins writer Enrique Olmos recently chatted with Williams, who makes his home in East Nashville.
Enrique: Zach, what have you been up to lately?
Zach Williams: We’ve been living in the same house for like almost a decade and we are in the process of moving. Last night, I hosted a songwriter-in-the-round (at the) Bluebird Cafe. My team and I found these four up-and-coming songwriters. And it was an honor to be able to just post them literally in a circle and have everybody hear their songs.
Enrique: Why was it an honor?
Zach: I had people that were maybe a little further along in their life or their career that took me under their wing when I was trying to get started. And now I have this ambition to want to do that with other people. And the songs were just really wonderful.
Enrique: What are your feelings around the move? I’m sure there’s a lot of logistics.
Zach: There’s a lot. I have four kids. So there’s a lot of good emotions attached to this house. We currently live in this old cottage kind of thing in East Nashville. It’s like 100 years old. It has a lot of history and just kind of mystery to it. So the kids have grown to love that. But yeah, we’re only moving down the street. The street that we currently live on is quite busy. So the street that we’re moving to will allow my kids, especially my eight-year-old, to just venture out. It’s like an old fishing cottage that we’re moving into. We’re going to do a lot of work on it. It’ll be fun.
Enrique: That’s beautiful. I’m wondering how your kids inspire your work or even your day to day life?
Zach: I think that for me, my formative years of being a little boy up until probably graduating high school were a really important part of my life. And I have a lot to be thankful for. There’s a lot of darks and lights. And now having kids that are living through that same time, it stirs up all those old memories. And it is incredibly inspiring, especially watching them navigate how to be an honest person, and a good friend, and a part of our community. There’s so much beauty, but it’s all beauty in the mundane.
VIDEO: The Lone Bellow, “Victory Garden”
Enrique: How do you handle those dark moments you mentioned?
Zach: I’m a pretty simple person. When it comes to that, I’ll go on an aimless walk where I’m not walking towards anything. My buddy told me that’s something monks do. That they go on these walks where they’re not walking anywhere. So I do that a lot. I’ll get the dog, and I’ll just go outside. I’m a very communal person. So I definitely like to keep my close friends aware of how I’m feeling and vice versa. That’s a big part of it. And then music is an incredibly huge part of it. Songwriting and singing has been a very cathartic thing in my life for 23 years.
Enrique: What are some of the challenges about the touring/traveling lifestyle?
Zach: Bands like my size, we’re kind of like blue-collar-level musicians, playing one or two thousand cap rooms. I mean, I love my bandmate Brian. But we’re two fully grown men who share a hotel room every night to try to keep costs down. It’s not totally ideal. But we’ve been doing it for like a long time. Obviously, one of my least favorite parts of touring is you miss life at home. Things happen and you’re just not there for it and you hope that your children are seeing you do something that you love and that it will inspire them when they grow up. But since you’re not living the regular parenting life of always being there, there’s always that question in your mind of “is this going to be OK?”
Enrique: How is the community of Nashville supportive to your familial life?
Zach: We’re 13 years deep into this now. I’ve been touring basically since my youngest was three years old. And that’s definitely one of the inspiring things about living in a place like Nashville. It kind of has an army base vibe to it, where the public school teachers know that there’s probably one parent on tour. So that’s a real beautiful blessing, knowing that that’s in our community.
Enrique: How would you describe the enjoyable parts of touring?
Zach: There’s so many good parts of touring. I’m of the opinion that the real work in a band, a band that’s dedicating their lives to it, is about the honesty and the friendship that happens in the band. The art will end up reflecting that. And we’re very blessed to genuinely enjoy each other’s company. We love each other kind of like brothers and sisters. I love being able to tour with Kanene and Brian. They are just wonderful, wonderful souls. I lucked out tremendously linking up with these two.
Back at St. Cecilia: The Lone Bellow play GR Saturday. (Photo/Anna Sink)
Enrique: In what ways would you say that friendship and bond of honesty reflects in your art?
Zach: Well, I think that we all have a shared desire for adventure. I think back in the day when we first started touring, the adventure was like, holy crap, we’re all quitting our jobs, hitting the road and doing this. But now this deep in, the adventure is like, OK, what are we going to make that’s going to not feel safe in a good way? I think that shared sense of adventure is a real asset to the creation of our music.
Enrique: Can you expand on the idea of creating something that doesn’t feel safe? What do you mean by that?
Zach: I guess probably the best thing would be to like give you an example. For a while we would lean really heavily on producers. So we would always try to work with a producer that we found really inspiring. Whether that was Dave Cobb or whether that was Aaron Dessner, we leaned really heavily on that. And we were like, OK, we’re going to go make a record and the producer is going to be the bad cop and we’re going to bounce off of that.
Enrique: But you decided to switch up that process for your latest record.
Zach: Yeah, when we made our latest record, “Love Songs for Losers,” we decided to put on our big boy pants and try to produce a record by ourselves. And that was really scary. But I’m so thankful that we did it because we had the gumption to believe in ourselves and to literally invest money into it and to do this thing. Then we did it and we ended up learning a lot from the process. And I think that helped us get to a much-needed next stage of our music making. We kind of tasted the blood. And we wanted it again. So we produced another record that we haven’t released yet.
Enrique: What do you hope to capture when you go write a song or track a record?
Zach: Our North Star has always been to ask if this song or this show or this moment is honest, or are we just putting on something. We’ve always been able to be really frank with each other and be really honest about the music that we’re trying to make. And now I think we’ve found some peace and joy in it. I hate that you can’t hear the recordings yet but you can feel those foundations in those songs.
Enrique: Where does the foundation of a song begin for you?
Zach: What I love about music is that you go in the studio and you’re by yourself, you’re in your head, you’re making the thing. A song starts at such a vulnerable point. Like every single song starts as one of those ideas where you tell yourself “this isn’t going to be anything, this is just some silly thing that I wrote in the bathroom.” And then it snowballs and gets its own lifeform. Then you get to go and play it live. And see how other humans interact with this thing that kind of came out of nowhere. It’s a really interesting part of humanity.
Enrique: Why do you find the exchange between artist and audience to be an interesting aspect of humanity?
Zach: Well, people show up, get babysitters, pay for tickets. God forbid they pay for tickets on some third-party site that overcharges them. They show up and they’re like, we are here to experience a moment. Then we as the band have the honor of painting their next hour-and-a-half. And there’s just something in those rooms. Especially now, since it’s so easy to just check out and not be a real human being anymore. It’s so easy to just be an avatar that lives online or whatever.
Enrique: This is true. We’re so often hypnotized by our phones or the algorithm. It seems as if live shows are one of the final frontiers of connectivity.
Zach: It’s nice to be able to walk back in these rooms, to see and feel real humans, who are engaged and communal. Nobody ever thought there would be this other version of life that could keep folks away from living in the here and now. There’s a lot of musicians that see their role as simply trying our best to help each other live in the moment, and a live show is such a beautiful collection of that.
Enrique: Why do you find it beautiful?
Zach: You have all these people who are strangers at the beginning of the night. And then at the end of the night, we’ve all experienced something together, including the band. I think that’s a really important part of just feeling alive. That’s why I do it.
Enrique: I heard you mention in an interview that you love to mow the lawn. Can you tell me why?
Zach: I love watching things grow. We have a little garden. You know we’ve got our little plants in the front yard and this and that. And I love mowing the lawn. Well, first of all, there’s not that many things in life where you can just like, do the work and just immediately see the results. I think especially being a musician, like it’s so ambiguous. It’s like, how, how do I even know if things are going well. But yeah, mowing the lawn is a very meditative thing for me.
VIDEO: The Lone Bellow, “Homesick” (Live)
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