Editor’s Note: In November, Wisconsin Americana-rock band the Driveway Thriftdwellers released their great new album High Top Van, their third studio album and first full-length project since 2018. We dig it and think you will too.
You can listen to the album below:
Formed in 2012, the group’s Madison and Milwaukee-based lineup currently includes Jon Knudson (vocals, guitar), Ryan Knudson (pedal steel guitar, vocals), Aaron Collins (bass, vocals), Kyle Rightley (guitar, vocals), and Jon Storey (drums, vocals). According to their press release, the band is best known for their “pedal-steel-rich arrangements, heartfelt lyricism, and energetic live shows.”
The new album High Top Van was produced and mixed by Ian Olvera at Milwaukee-based TreeHouse Studios and mastered by Justin Perkins at Mystery Room Mastering. It follows their 2016 debut, Cutover Country, and their 2018 self-titled sophomore album, Driveway Thriftdwellers, and finds the band embracing a wider musical palette.
The press release notes that the band “let the songs go where they naturally wanted to go” and that “across the album’s tracks, listeners will hear touches of rock, folk, country, soul, and pop – all grounded in the band’s signature melodic storytelling.”
“This album is a collection of lived experiences and musical experiences. We didn’t limit ourselves to one genre or one idea of what a Driveway Thriftdwellers record should sound like. If it felt honest, if it felt good, we ran with it,” says Knudson in the press release. “We wanted these songs to feel like the last few years have felt – unexpected, meaningful, and full of joy. This record moves around because we moved around. It’s the sound of real life.”
Prior to the band’s album release show at Madison, WI, venue The Bur Oak with the equally amazing Joseph Huber, guitarist and vocalist Kyle Rightley penned an exclusive Artist Essay for SWT about their emotional return to the studio to record the album.
Seven years. That’s the time it took us between our self-titled album and High Top Van. While not a full decade, it’s a span of time that makes people ask, “I wonder if they’ll do another album.” We wondered ourselves. A lot of life happened between 2018 and 2025. We’ve had children born, families grow and change, loss and grief, and relationships begin and end. Not to mention a global pandemic that completely changed the landscape of the music industry. Driveway Thriftdwellers had to take a back burner for a while. We still gigged pretty regularly through those years, but new recorded material was just not in the cards for some time.
Despite the time it took us to get into the recording studio, we had no shortage of new material. Songs have a way of just wandering into existence with this band. Someone will toy around with a riff during a soundcheck or one of our rare rehearsals, and someone else will throw a vocal melody or lyrical fragment at it, and boom! A song is born. We’ve spent time during the interim after the self-titled album making demo recordings and passing around files remotely. We probably had 15 or 20 songs that were more or less complete, but even then, how do we know which ones to invest our time and energy into for a new album?
We had a few false starts in there as well. Sometime around 2023, it felt like we might be mustering the energy to record again. We decided to try doing it on the cheap. We’d record the basic tracks in our drummer Jon Storey’s basement, then outsource them to someone else to mix them and make everything sound magical and professional. We struggled with amplifiers and microphones to capture a decent sound. After spending the better part of a day recording the song “Our Town,” someone suddenly got an uncanny sense of déjà vu and remembered that we had already tried this approach. We dug through some old files and learned that we had, in fact, already recorded the basic tracks for this very song years ago! And they sounded better than what we were currently doing! Maybe that’s embarrassing to admit. But the only way this band works for us is if we keep it casual and not take ourselves too seriously. And being a bit disorganized and forgetful comes along with that approach.
Around the beginning of 2025, we felt we were in a position where a new album actually seemed realistic. I don’t know exactly what happened that made the stars align. For one thing, we were very aware of the years quickly going by. There was a sense of “now or never,” a sense that we had better get into the studio and get to work before life throws another curveball to one or more of us. We realized that we were much better off recording in an actual professional recording studio. Not just for the gear and expertise of a dedicated audio engineer, but also for the external accountability that we needed. If we tried to chip away at this album with home recordings from a few scattered weekends, we would never get it done.
So we got in touch with our friend Ian Olvera, who had worked with us on our last album. Ian works out of a recording studio in Milwaukee called TreeHouse Studios. It was such a fun and easy experience! Maybe because we knew we had limited time and budget, we got right down to business in the studio. We didn’t have time to overthink or try to get anything perfect. We recorded a few road-tested songs that we’d been playing at recent gigs, but we also recorded a fair amount of never-before-performed material that magically came together before our eyes and ears. There was a sense of total openness to new ideas, no matter how crazy they might seem. You’ll hear some random twists and turns in some of the songs that were captured on the first or second take. A good example is the “wipeout” drum breakdown in “Ballin’ the Jack.” I don’t remember who had the thought to put that section into the song, but we all agreed to give it a go. Within a few minutes of the initial idea, it was in the can, and we were ready to move on to the next thing.
I would say that some of this music was born out of troubled times, but it turned into a joyous, tender, humorous, and fun-sounding record. I truly hope people pick up on that while listening.
Kyle Rightley
Contributor
Kyle Rightley is a guitarist and vocalist with Driveway Thriftdwellers. Originally from Cortez, Colorado, he has lived in Madison since 2007. Kyle teaches private music lessons and plays guitar and low brass in a wide variety of groups and genres. Some of his other bands include The Big Payback, Lonelyproof, and Five Points Jazz Collective.
