TGIF! Dogwood Tales at Fa5.
It’s so damn awesome to watch our great local bands succeed at such a high level. This past year, we’ve celebrated Rebecca Porter’s rise to prominence, Overman’s gritty climb and Palmyra’s huge run. Well, look out, because here comes Dogwood Tales.
Thanks to Cville’s Fridays after 5 series Old Hank and The Mysterious Jon got a great look at this very, very good Harrisonburg 4 piece last night while Bazz was with Patrick and the wives over at the JPJ to see the Chris Stapleton.
Before we get jabbering here about Dogwood Tales, we gotta slather some love upon the Valley. If we took time to do justice to the incredibly vibrant music scene over the mountains, we wouldn’t have time for a Dogwood Tales write-up. So let’s just pay homage to the greatness that is the Shenandoah Valley Band-O-Sphere by dropping a few names that tickle us pink.
Steel Wheels, Old Crow Medicine Show, Illiterate Light, The Statler Brothers, Patsy Cline, Rebecca Porter, Shagwuff, The Judy Chops, Cold Cocked (we had a blast at these Ace metal mayhem shows), The Golden Pony, Court Square Theater, Pale Fire Brewing, Queen City Music Studios. The Basement DIY Scene. And Multiple Summer Festivals. It’s not even beginning to be an inclusive list but let’s push on.
The Valley band that seems to be primed for a big move in 2025-6 is Dogwood Tales.
The band was formed in 2016 by Winchester, VA friends Ben Ryan and Kyle Grim who initially stepped on stage as a 2 piece, both singing and playing guitar. JMU served as the petrie dish for their creativity and as it became apparent they had something that might work, they added best buds and collaborators Jake Golibar on drums and Danny Gibney on bass (who engineers their recordings and is building a big-ass reputation as a producer in the Valley).
Ben and Kyle have known each other so long they finish each other’s sandwiches and share lead and backing vocals seamlessly. They’ve known Golibar and Gibney almost as long. The result is an outfit that knows itself so well it never leaves the pocket.
They describe themselves as an “emotional alt-country band influenced by the sights and sounds of the Shenandoah Valley and the eclectic local DIY scene of lo-fi, shoe-gaze and country acts.”
They claim Neil Young and Magnolia Electric Company’s Jason Molina as songwriting influences. Apt comparisons to Uncle Tupelo and Wilco have been made. In an 2022 interview with WNRN’s Bob Mosolgo, Kyle said their dream show would be to play with Slow Dive and Gillian Welch. That’s telling and we’ll revisit it in a moment (shout out to Mosolgo for being a deft, low key interviewer who doesn’t act cringe or make it about himself).
Dogwood Tales’ very real spikes in growth and popularity correspond to 2020’s release of Closest Thing to Heaven with the single Riding Horses, the release of the 13 Summers 13 Falls EP in 2022, (title cut and Hold You Again made it as singles), and 2023’s Rodeo EP featuring the single Stranger. 2024’s EP Sending produced the single Driver’s Side Fantasy. That’s 5 hits on 4 Albums released in 4 years.
Not fucking bad, boys.
Over the past year they’ve been working on the next album while strapping on their tool belts to turn a garage into their very own new studio where they are finishing up said album this summer. In May, they joined Anniversary Group’s roster and are gearing up for playing some big shit in the next few months, including this summer’s Newport Folk Festival.
All this is to say, it’s a damn big moment for Dogwood Tales. A moment that most bands can only dream of.
We’ll know how it all plays out when they release this next record and take it on tour. But last night’s show gave us a preview of some of the new songs and how these boys are evolving their sound.
We heard for the first time Angel Dreams, McMemories, No Use, Princess Peach, On the Other Side, and Every Star in Rockingham County, There were tight, emotional versions of the hits including Driver’s Side View, Mt. Jackson, Stranger, 25, Riding Horses, and Hold You Again. Deeper cuts included Lower than the Bottom and Living in the Shadow from their first album. They did a killer cover of Townes Van Zandt’s To Live is To Fly.
The band is at their signature best in these new songs at that moment when honest themes of loss and longing give way sonically to a fuzzier, shoe gazier thing. It’s like an ear place they create for you to go contemplate the heady images they just laid out in vocal harmony.
The jams become transporting, ethereal, lush yet rockier. Things get War on Drugs-y, Interpol-y, or Slow Dive-y at times.
It gets back to Kyle’s Gillian Walsh / Slow Dive vision. Dogwood Tales use their considerable writing and vocal skills to tell stories that make you smile and get all melancholy at the same time, in that authentic Blue Ridge way. Then they use their considerable skills on their instruments to jam the story out in a shoe gaze, grab somebody willing and dance real close kinda way.
That readers, is a creative, unique Alt Country sound that’s all their own.
And that type of sound takes power. To accomplish this opening up in the sound, Kyle seems to be moving from a more country/americana acoustic sound toward a more electric setup, joining Ben with his Tele or Strat paired with a silverface Deluxe Reverb. Ding! (Old Hank’s rig bell rung).
Because playing with Powerpoint on the computer is like crayons and a coloring book for the old people, Old Hank has made you a childish diagram of the progression of Kyle’s rig. (Feel free to cut it out with your digital sissors and magnet it to the digital fridge by making it the screen saver on your Macbook Air or Chromebook although the aspect ratio is probably janky.)
The difference in your sound if you have 1 acoustic and 1 electric guitar vs 2 electric guitars and a bunch of tasty pedals can’t be overstated. You simply have more power to shape and sustain your sound and lo, children of the Commonwealth, to rock. This isn’t to say that Kyle won’t play acoustic guitar in songs and shows to come, or that they will never have pedal steel join them again. Or that rock has never happened on an acoustic guitar because it has.
It just seems to say that Kyle is expanding his palette and bulking up on power. Or, as he’s said, his guiding star is Neil Young. Kyle may simply be feelin’ a little Crazy Horse like Neil often does, playing louder with them boys.
Armed with the new songs and the increase in horsepower, Dogwood Tales absolutely ripped the ball cap off this show and we can’t wait for the new record and the next level they take their band.
Self creation is the greatest form of art. Being in a band is to play in that greatest of sand boxes. It’s gonna to be a blast to watch these gentlemen use their band as a canvas to express who they are and what they wanna say. At just the right time in their careers.
If it sounds like we’re really pulling for these guys, it’s because we fuckin’ are, Junior.
Oh, and one more thing.
We weren’t going to write up the opener Friday because we’re lazy, we didn’t know anything about them and we thought we wouldn’t get to Ting in time to hear them anyway. But we did, we’re glad to get to take them in a little, and we are in fact gonna scribble a bit about them.
The band’s name is Silverstone, a cover band with a typical configuration plus a bucketed horn. They were super proficient on their instruments including vocals, but their choice of covers was just so very smart and fun. From the time we got there, it went something like What’s Going On by 4 Non Blondes, Cake’s Speed Racer theme — The Distance, a ripping Jagged Little Pill cover, Zach Bryan, Led Zep, and they finished with G&R’s Sweet Child O Mine. It was some seriously crowd pleasing stage work by the band, the members of which hold down sizable day jobs around Cville, according to T. M. Jon’s sources. As per their elevator pitch, “Silverstone is a collection of local musicians navigating their midlife crises by playing other people's music … and was voted Charlottesville's 6th best Charity Cover Band in 2022.” So they’re funny, too.
Smart people are often funny, Old Hank has gathered.
OK, time to wind this nonsense down. Night, Grandkids, I’ll do my best to remember your names in the morning.
Old Hank
