A festival that has been going strong for eight years provides the perfect excuse to pull old friends out of the woodwork for a night of musical bliss. As you read Tuesday, Trey Cutrell will be making his way through the area with his outfit My Old Ways. Members of Sau will return to Richmond to share the stage with Kid is Qual’s Jon Sullivan [you'll be reading about that tomorrow -ed]. And hailing from Nashville will be the one and only Andrew Leahey, accompanied by the Richmond incarnation of what he aptly refers to as the Homestead. I had a chance to ask Leahey a few questions and get to the bottom of what appears to be an ongoing connection between Nashville and Richmond, as well as get a deeper look into his musical back story.
How did this project begin?
Andrew Leahey & the Homestead began as a recording project. I was living in Michigan at the time, working at a music website and generally freezing my ass off. I hadn't written a song in years. During the final months of 2010, I started getting back into songwriting. It went slowly for a day or two, and then the floodgates opened, and I wound up with entire album of material in just a few weeks. It was rootsy rock & roll, like Tom Petty or Ryan Adams. I'm a Richmond native, and I knew that some of my hometown friends had been playing in Virginia-based bands whose music closely matched the new stuff I was coming up with. It made sense to come back home and spend a long weekend recording those new tunes with my friends. I wound up meeting a few new musicians, too, and what started as a three-day recording session turned into a full-fledged band. Those three days were so influential that I wound up quitting my job, leaving Michigan, and moving to Nashville to play music full-time. But Richmond is never far from my mind.
Nashville seems to be a catalyst for many musicians and their ambitions. Do you see the city contributing towards how you approach this project?
I moved to Nashville last year. I still have my main band in Richmond, but I also play with a second version of the Homestead in Nashville. It's complicated. This past year has been a constant process of driving back and forth between those two cities, playing shows with whichever version of the Homestead happens to be free that weekend. Nashville is a very inspiring place to be, though. The city thrives on music. Everyone either plays it, promotes it, books it, sells it, or knows someone who's intimately involved with it. When I tell people that I'm a full-time musician, they don't automatically equate "musician" with words like "slacker" or "homeless" or "pothead"... although Nashville certainly has plenty of all three.
How does Richmond play into the scheme of all things Homestead?
Richmond is the heart of this band. We're from here. We record our albums here. We held our first rehearsal here. I could move to Anchorage and I'd still drive to Richmond every month.
You seem to have quite a bit planned for the New Year with a release on the way. What else do you have planned?
We just signed with a management company in Nashville and a PR firm in New York. I'm doing a solo tour in January, visiting places like Charleston, Knoxville, Chattanooga, Greenville, Winston-Salem, and Greensboro along the way. All of this will lead up to the release of our new EP, Summer Sleeves, which comes out in February or March. After that, I'll be playing as often as I can, touring with the band whenever possible and doing solo shows whenever the other guys can't make it. I'm not getting any younger... so the time to go balls-to-the-wall is now.
Do you have anything in store for your appearance at this year's Ghost of Pop?
We'll be playing three songs from the new EP and one song from our full-length debut, which came out in late 2012. Apart from that, I'm excited to play to a new audience. I'm excited to hang out with everyone. I'm just excited in general, because I've never been in town for any of the previous Ghost of Pop events, and it feels like a great way to cap off the year.
Considering everyone in your band spends their time in other projects, how does this play to the dynamics of the band, and do you find that it helps maintain diversity in your songwriting?
It's pretty crazy. Some of these guys play in three different bands, so it's hard to schedule things like rehearsals, tours, recording sessions, etc. At the same time, I love the fact that everyone here is so damn good. We're a band of songwriters and vocalists and bandleaders. Pretty much everyone can sing. Everyone can write. I'm so glad that I don't have to blow smoke up these dudes' asses by pretending to enjoy the other bands that they play with, because I genuinely DO enjoy those bands. I mean, Phil plays guitar in Long Arms. Those guys (and girl) are incredible. Ben plays with Mason Brothers. Phil, Ben, and Kerry play with Exebelle & the Rusted Cavalcade. All of those bands deserve all the awesome things that are coming their way, and I feel like we're all in this thing together, cheering each other on and helping out whenever we can. Getting back to the Homestead, though... Basically, I love these guys, and I can't fault other people for loving them, too, so it makes sense that they'd be playing in a million different bands. And yes, these individual people certainly influence my songwriting. Whenever I write songs now, I don't think about playing them alone, with an acoustic guitar strapped around my torso and no one else onstage. I think about playing them with the Homestead. I imagine the harmonies that Phil is gonna sing and the drumbeats that Matt Morton is gonna play. I think about whether Kerry should play pedal steel or baritone guitar. I consider turning the whole thing into a piano-based song, so Ben can show off the full breadth of his chops. I'm writing songs for the band now, not myself.
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Catch Andrew Leahey and The Homestead as they take the stage for the eighth annual Ghost of Pop festival, which is being held this Saturday December 8th at Gallery 5.