Milwaukee singer-songwriter and musician Travis Whitty has enjoyed a wide range of experiences since he started performing a few decades ago. He spent a handful of years as the bass player for local folk-rock band Field Report, which released a pair of albums – 2012’s Field Report and 2014’s Marigolden – on Partisan Records that received acclaim from national press (including from yours truly via American Songwriter and JamBands.com/Relix). He’s also performed with his wife Ashlee in experimental folk-pop band Golden Coins, as well as Old Earth for a little while with former fellow local musician Todd Umhoefer.
However, in recent years, Whitty has found the courage to start sharing his own songs and singing voice. That journey culminated earlier this month with his band Whitty Remarks’ release of their debut album Nary A Care. The band, which features his wife and other frequent collaborators, will perform tonight, April 25, at Cactus Club in Milwaukee with openers So Zuppy and Melodia.
The album is a deeply personal collection of songs dedicated to Whitty’s father, Patrick. On June 23, 2020, his father suddenly died after years of battling alcoholism. It was a devastating loss for the songwriter as his father had been a driving force in his performing since he was in high school. Even more so with it happening during the onset of COVID, when a true formal tribute wasn’t possible. He started writing his thoughts down and recording demos as a way to process his grief and examine his own journey becoming a father. Later on, he realized he had a sizable collection of these snippets of potential songs.
As the songs came to life in writing and recording, he found the process therapeutic and reenergizing. Nary A Care is a celebratory yet cuttingly real look at his father and their 40 years together. It’s a tribute to someone who had been to many of his band’s shows and was an avid supporter of Whitty’s artistic life. Small details in life were enlarged.
“Music was the binding agent that kept us in touch all the way up until Dad’s abrupt and early end,” Whitty writes in the album’s press release. “In fact, my first band’s practice was in his dining room. Five doe-y eyed high schoolers fumbled through ‘American Jesus’ by Bad Religion about fifteen times and called it a night.”
“From that tiny, repurposed communal room, a desire to write original music commenced. Making sound became an extension of my kinetic career path. Twenty-something years later, here we are.”
Joining Whitty and his wife are a slew of impactful collaborators: Andrew Jambura and Stephen Strupp (Sat Nite Duets), Todd Umhoefer (Old Earth), Christopher Porterfield and Barry Paul Clark (Field Report/Argopelter), Eric Arsnow (Seances/Fight Dice/Devil’s Teeth), Peter Vartanian (Fauxny), Luke Bassuener (CONTROL/Asumaya) and Nathaniel Hauer (Hello Death).
The band’s personal, dynamic, and engaging form of folk-rock will appeal to fans of Kurt Vile, Built to Spill, Midwife, Pinback, Yo La Tengo, Mount Eerie, and Cat Power.
SWT caught up with Whitty to learn how Whitty Remarks came to be, how the loss of his father impacted the writing and recording process, how he hopes to give back to the community, and his hopes for future shows and music.
I listened to the new album recently and I thought it sounded great.
Oh, thanks. Yeah, it’s interesting to hear how people feel about it now that it’s out after putting it together for about five years. You kind of sit in a little window thinking your own thoughts about it, and then when people get to react to it, that’s kind of the fun part.
The band grew out of your previous band that also included your wife Ashlee. Can you talk a little bit about that and why the two of you decided it was time for a change?
Yeah, so our old band was Golden Coins, and it was just a little more experimental and didn’t have a specific direction. And this album did. It focused on the loss of my father about five years ago. At first, it was just going to be me making it, and I’ve kind of always gone under the Whitty Remarks moniker for my own creative work. It just felt like a nice natural transition because Ashlee’s on the record and we’re playing together live, and so I don’t know, just a way of growing up the college version of the band.
How would you describe the band’s sound and influences? What makes it stand out?
I think first and foremost, it’s just kind of a singer-songwriter, folky kind of thing with influences that kind of…I’ve been telling people Kurt Vile is kind of a big influence, Spoon, Cat Power, Pinback, a lot of real hook-based stuff. Most of these songs start as loops and then they kind of build from there. Just the way that I can write at home, that’s how I’ve always written. And now with us having two kiddos, it’s kind of my evenings when I can muster up the energy to play for a little while.
It usually starts as a loop and then goes from there and flushes out. So, we bring other people in to help kind of actualize the thing. So, we’ve had my old bandmates, Chris Porterfield, who’s in Field Report. He’s played a lot of pedal steel on the record, some guitar. He’ll be part of the live band too. And then our brother-in-law, Luke [Bassuener], he’s our drummer, he’s from Madison. He plays in a band called Control, that is really cool, and does his own thing under the name Asumaya. So, he’s always kind of been the rhythm section for this record.
We recorded this in two different places. We started with drums at Silver City. Andrew Jambura, from Sat Nite Duets, engineered the initial part of the record, and then did a lot of work at home tracking at home, and then sort of final touches at Wire & Vice in Wauwatosa with Ian Olvera, who also mixed the record too.
So, just kind of all over the place and really just over the course of five years, because I became a parent right around the time my dad passed. This record’s my way of processing that whole experience of losing a father and becoming one, and just finding moments when I could throw at this record, and it felt like a good time to see it through to the end. It’ll be the five-year anniversary of his death and just kind of a nice little capstone to acknowledge that experience.
It was recently the ninth anniversary of my dad’s passing.
Yeah, it’s hard.
Very tragic, so I can really relate to the feelings that you went through.
Yeah. I think that’s after kind of finishing this thing, the hope is that it resonates with people. I mean, I’ve had some folks reach out already, too, that have heard some of the songs and heard what the backstory was to this record and said that thematically it hits on their lives personally, too, and that’s all I can really hope for this thing. And really, just making the physical record, it kind of just started more for me and my family as a thing, and then I figured, why not?
There’s sort of a base level to pressing a record and making it for everybody else and hoping that it resonates. So yeah, it’s a weird duality that people can identify with this record. It may come with grief and that’s a hard thing to talk about, but I think making this record and saying things out loud really helped me process, and otherwise you just kind of keep it in and making art in whatever way has always been my way of processing things with what’s going on in my life.
What’s the story behind the album’s title?
When we were cleaning out my dad’s house, he was an avid hunter and sportsman, and he had this print, I can’t remember the artist’s name. But it’s a painting that I think a lot of people had in their houses, especially in the Midwest, that’s just wildlife paintings from the sixties, seventies, eighties. He had this print of pheasants walking through a field and the title was Nary a Care. And I thought that was a really cool phrase, and it kind of speaks to my dad’s cadence just as a person. He lived a very simple life, was always at his best when he was outside. So just the simplicity, I guess, is what that statement means to me.
Your dad was a strong presence early in your musical growth. What were the most significant ways that he influenced and inspired you?
I think music, for whatever reason, was always just a thread in my upbringing. My parents split up when I was younger, but that kind of remained the constant between both houses, was being brought up on music. So, Dad loved things like AC/DC and Black Sabbath, which he kind of grew up on in high school. And then he kind of switched over to country [like Garth Brooks and Shania Twain]. a little bit more later in his life. And the first practice that my high school band had was in his dining room, junior, senior year of high school. He just always made room for me to be creative. The relationship was turbulent in some ways, but I think he always kind of let me be me and always supported my artistic endeavors. So, from being able to practice in his dining room to him coming to shows, he showed up in those ways. I thought what better way to honor him than to make a record about him.
How would you describe the writing and recording process and how your dad helped shape that process?
I’ve always bits of songs laying around and just over the course of having late nights with a newborn, being up and just looking through notes and work and trying to find moments to make stuff for myself when we weren’t taking care of Arlo, he was sleeping, I just started finding all these little threads that kind of related to dad and could sort of tie into the music that I was writing. So, lyrics are kind of in little spots, pulling those together.
I guess I could preface the whole thing by saying that Dad passed during the height of COVID, the beginning of COVID. So, he didn’t really have a service. We had a small family get together outside when it was pre vaccination kind of stuff. So, everyone was still very timid and just unsure of the state of the world.
So, it felt like he didn’t get the sendoff I wanted him to get. It was a very sweet celebration of life that we had with close family and friends, but just felt kind of rushed in the whirlwind of what was going on in the world. So, as I started pulling little pieces together from these songs, I realized I had kind of a whole record in front of me. And then I built that out as a playlist, sent it to my brother-in-law, and he started to add drums, and he’s just really intuitive. We hadn’t even played together before we went to the studio to track his drums. It was almost like learning the songs right there in the studio, but he’s so efficient that we do a handful of takes and just pick one essentially to react to.
Then from there, just whenever I could use guitar vocals and stuff at home. It’s weird. I love certain parts of the studio, but I think being at home and just having your own time if you can dedicate it to it, because it’s a lot easier to have a home setup that sounds pretty passable at this point. It was nice to just find those moments when I just had time to do it and then polishing through the end there with a little more studio time.
But yeah, definitely a lot of revelations, a lot of the steel, and there’s some electronic clarinet on this record that Todd Umhoefer, who’s in Old Earth, a Milwaukee band, he’s since moved to Portland, but basically just sent him the songs and he sent me a bunch of stuff back and so did Chris Porterfield and the steel and the clarinet on some of these songs. The first pass kind of laid [their parts] into the sequence. It just sounded so cool and really locked into what I was hoping to convey emotionally. So really, yeah, a really cool silver lining where I didn’t really have to direct much. These guys just kind of knew it.
So, you traded parts of the songs digitally to each other?
Yeah. Yep. And Todd recorded his parts at a studio, so he had someone help engineer it. But yeah, a lot of passing files around for sure.
Any favorite interactions with the guest musicians?
Yeah, I mean, so Barry Paul Clark, he plays bass on most of the songs on the record. He had an upright that he played at Wire & Vice, and just again, one of those things where he just got the song and kind of knew how to react to it. The song that opens this record, “Apparition Premonition,” he just drove it home and maybe did three takes, but just made it sound so cool and cinematic. And just being in a studio space with him, seeing how his brain works, was really inspiring. He’s a musician’s musician, just knows his stuff and is really inventive and really thoughtful.
You have a long history of playing music. How have those experiences prepared you for leading your own band?
That’s a good question. I think it’s still taking me time to be a band leader. We had a practice for the show we have for Cactus, and I was learning as we were practicing how to articulate what I wanted or had hoped for out of everybody in the room to play. And honestly, a lot of that I think comes from Chris playing in Field Report with him for a number of years. He was really good at just conveying the message and the overall kind of energy of a song or a record or a performance. I learned a lot from him.
I learned a lot from my other bandmates in Field Report, just traveling and reacting to each other in different rooms. That was one of the biggest lessons for me. It’s like you could play the same set, but every night be totally different because you’re in very different spaces. So, learning how to adapt and be malleable in that way, it took a lot of years, and I feel like I’m starting to get there.
What was the biggest surprise in making the album?
I think the biggest surprise was that we actually did it. We actually made it happen. I think in my line of work as a video editor and an animator, projects kind of fall through the cracks. Sometimes they aren’t fully realized in the way you’d hoped. So even just in the past couple of weeks, having the physical thing in my hands and just sending out a bunch of the pre-orders in the past couple of days, that’s a surprise that I got to this point and that the physical thing is here and that I feel like it both in packaging and the way it sounds and everything, all of those elements came together and the way I had hoped for the original vision.
It sounds like the full sales for the test pressing are going towards AODA counseling services in Oshkosh, WI in honor of your dad. Why was that important?
With the pressing plant, we worked with Smashed Plastic in Chicago. They give you four test pressings to make sure everything’s working right. And historically, a lot of bands have sold those as a special edition kind of thing. So, we put all four of those up at a little bit of a higher price point. And basically, all of that money or any of that money is going to counseling services in Oshkosh. So, there’s a place called Solutions Recovery that we’re going to be supporting with any of those proceeds. They deal with substance abuse. Alcoholism was the thing that my dad struggled with, and ultimately, he lost his life early because of it, lost his battle with it, however you want to say it. So basically, just trying to give back to those communities and in honor of him.
And again, one of those interesting and impactful moments where the songs had sort of spoken to their experiences in their own life in that way and chose to pick one up for those reasons. So again, if it helps anyone process grief or just know that they’re not alone, that’s kind of the hope for this record is that people can connect to it in different ways like that.
What makes you keep playing music?
I think we were all kind of talking about that, though, during COVID. At least for me, I basically asked the big question: why do this anymore? And it took me a little while to realize why to make art again. And actually, Todd from Old Earth, he’s basically just said, “because this is how you’ve always navigated life, just us as artists. And so, you can continue to do that. Maybe it’s for just you or maybe it’s for other people, but that’s how you process it.”
So, I think that consideration on top of how it could be used to help other people just became the forefront of how to do this kind of stuff for a lot of other people here in the community. And even in high school, the high school band that I was in, most of our shows were benefit shows for places like Amnesty International or the West Memphis three fund organizations like that. So, it’s always kind of been a foundation in that way, connecting with people and not necessarily making it about money, really, it’s just the money is to help others when it can or the awareness or whatever you’re speaking to. I think we could all help each other more.
What are your future plans for the band?
I think we’re just trying to get through the next couple of weeks in terms of playing shows. We haven’t done it in a long time. And we’ll kind of take stock and see if we want to do more of it. Definitely have a bunch of music on the back burner that I’d like to finish tracking and put out at some point. There are a handful of songs that didn’t make the record. So, putting those out digitally, I think, is maybe the next step after.
And then, yeah, I don’t know, a couple more records or EPs at least in the near future. Just always kind of a fine dance with the kids at home and working out schedules and taking moments when we can to be creative.
You can follow Whitty Remarks on Instagram and Bluesky and listen to their music on Bandcamp.
Joshua is co-founder of Scummy Water Tower. He’s freelanced for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including: Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Guitar World, MTV News, Grammy.com, Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, A.V. Club, SPIN, Alternative Press, Under the Radar, Paste, PopMatters, American Songwriter, and Relix. You can email him at josh@scummywatertower.com.
