In the past few years, Bozeman, Montana based band Kitchen Dwellers has been picking up steam as they’ve gelled and gained confidence thanks to a healthy dose of practicing, recording, and performing live music. It has helped them become a more cohesive, collaborative group.
“Over the years, we’ve just got better at presenting ideas to each other and working together,” says guitarist Max Davies.
Today, Scummy Water Tower is happy to announce the band’s new album Seven Devils, which the band calls their most collaborative release yet and the fullest realization of their early vision for the group. The album, which will be released March 1, 2024, was produced by Glenn Brown, whose credits include Greensky Bluegrass and the band Spinal Tap and winning a Best Bluegrass Album GRAMMY Award for producing Billy String’s 2019 album Home.
On the album, the quartet— which also features Shawn Swain (Mandolin), Torrin Daniels (banjo), and Joe Funk (upright bass) – continues to find creative new ways to weave bluegrass, folk, and rock, along with rich stories and mythology.
As part of the announcement, the band is sharing a video preview of the album, which was filmed by videographer, close friend, and collaborator Sawyer Gieseke.
“[Sawyer’s] been on the road with us a little bit,” says Davies. “He also came to the studio with us, and he was able to capture a little bit of us working in the studio. He interviewed all of us. He interviewed Glenn.”
The band is also sharing the album’s lead single “Seven Devils (Limbo),” which you can listen here and watch the video below.
In addition to releasing the album, the band is excited to get back out on the road next year. The tour will take them across the U.S. All band tour information can be found at kitchendwellers.com.
Scummy Water Tower recently caught up with the band to talk about their journey recording Seven Devils and why they feel it’s their strongest effort to date.
Your new album is the follow-up to your album Wise River, which came out last year. What made the band want to get back into the studio again? What’s it been like being prolific these past few years?
Torrin Daniels: We released our last album, Wise River kind of in the middle of Covid, so that recording process and the process of making those songs was kind of a result of being all sort of stuck in the same place for an extended period of time. We weren’t able to go on tour, so we were able to go just into the studio that we rented in Bozeman almost every day and work on songs for most of that year. We were able to sort of hone our craft a little bit during that time.
And since everything has sort of gotten back to a more normal state as far as touring and people being able to see live shows and whatnot, we’ve sort of kept up a lot of those practices and that sort of rate of songwriting and creating new material. Some of the ideas for songs that didn’t make it onto Wise River we just sort of held onto and those were able to sort of blossom and grow into their own pieces of work. So, it’s just an ongoing process, really.
Is the new album a mix of older and newer songs that you wrote?
Torrin Daniels: Well, this new album is definitely all new songs, but maybe the ideas for them or pieces and parts of them have been sort of floating around for a little while in the ethos.
Shawn Swain: I’d say there’s a few songs that have parts of them that have been written in the past, but maybe made more relevant in current life that we actually got around to finishing or rebranding those songs to fit today’s band. That was a fun process too.
The band worked with Glenn Brown who has worked with some of the who’s who of this style of music, Americana, bluegrass, folk, etc. How did you get connected with him to do this album?
Max Davies: We knew there was a list of about five or six different music producers that we were interested in working with, and when it came to deciding who it was that we wanted to work with… some of it came down to schedule, who was available to work within our time period, and we ended up talking with all of them. And when we spoke with Glenn, he is so passionate, and he was really excited about the project. He listened to all of our previous studio albums. He also came to a live show.
And from seeing us play live and listening to our studio albums, he was really excited about working on a studio album together to see what we could come up with because he thought he could bring something… he has a certain way of doing things and a certain professionalism with all of his gear, that he thought he would be a huge help to what we could come up with. So, we talked with him, and our first conversation with him was about three hours long, and that’s when we were like, “This is our guy.”
Torrin Daniels: We realized pretty quickly he was kind of a genius just as far as knowing how the songwriting process goes and knowing tons about music theory but also the recording process and the right avenues to take to capture that.
Were you pretty familiar with his previous work?
Max Davies: Yeah, from listening to a lot of recent acoustic albums, I’m kind of convinced that there’s no one that can capture acoustic instruments as well as him.
What were some of the biggest ways he influenced the album?
Shawn Swain: Oh, so many, really. I mean, he just hears parts of a song that haven’t really been fully constructed yet. I think he hears them completely in his mind, so when you start showing him the initial draft of something, he already can see the song’s full potential. I feel like in his ability to unlock that, it’s pretty amazing.
Torrin Daniels: This album is probably our most collaborative work today as far as songwriting goes. So, there were several songs that we just sort of sat on in the studio with Glenn and sort of constructed a song out of little to no music that we’d had written before that. Some of the songs just came from either just a vocal melody from a chorus or just an intro, and we sort of built songs out of nothing with him. So, he definitely influenced a lot of the writing and the sort of creative process for this album.
Was there a song that really got taken to a new level through working with him?
Joe Funk: “Unwind” is probably the best example of it, because Torrin had a few of those ideas, and then we kind of sat down in the studio with Glenn for six hours. He was just in the room with us, and we were just working on that song, and it sort of came to life out of that one session, really.
Torrin Daniels: All of them have a little bit of that element where they take something from some idea that was just thrown out there in the studio and that we just went with it because we were in this creative flow state with Glenn. So, I think that’s what makes it probably the most genuine or authentic record. I think that we sound more like ourselves on this album than we have on any previous studio efforts, and I think it’s because of the way that we recorded it and how sort of authentic and genuine we were being with our creative selves and together in the studio at the time, which makes it pretty exciting.
Why do you think it ended up being so collaborative?
Max Davies: Well, for one thing, the studio that we worked in was a really small and tight space, so you didn’t have anywhere to go or run off to. And just over the years, we’ve gotten a lot better at presenting ideas. When someone has one part of a song written, if it’s your song, there’s three, or in this case with Glenn, four other guys that might have an opinion on how that could change. Over the years, we’ve just got better at presenting ideas to each other and working together.
Torrin Daniels: And accepting other people’s ideas too. Not trying to take too much ownership over the art if we’re all trying to create it as a team.
Shawn Swain: And I think a good amount of this batch of songs definitely came to the rest of the band as ideas… I don’t know if there were any fully complete songs, actually.
Torrin Daniels: It was probably like two, like full. That’s like it.
Shawn Swain: So, with the rest of them, it opened up that opportunity for the other band members to share input and… I mean, I think it gives the songs quite a bit more depth than any we’ve previously recorded.
Max Davies: It’s also just a lot more fun to do it that way, I think.
Were a lot of those songs written on the road? Or any specific settings?
Max Davies: Some of them were on the road. I remember we were working on “”Waterford’s Son” at the Airbnb in Tennessee. Most of them, for me, were written at home though.
Shawn Swain: We’re so busy on tours. It’s still a small crew and we all are pretty hands-on, so the day-to-day tour life is often difficult with our schedule to get a lot of writing, so I think most of it comes from home, which for me is why a lot of my songs I write with are… definitely things from home and things I do there.
In a way, that kind of ties in with the band’s name, with being at home, sometimes in the kitchen.
Torrin Daniels: Yeah, the band name actually came from when we were in college, we were just playing music at Shawn’s house basically every day. We weren’t really a band yet. We were just kind of picking in the afternoons after our classes in college and we needed a name go to enter this open mic thing at a local bar, and so we threw around a lot of names, and the only place that we were really able to stand together and play together in Shawn’s house was in the kitchen. So that was a name that got thrown out there, I’m pretty sure, by a girlfriend of the band at the time, and we just went with that for that open mic, and it stuck.
Shawn Swain: Never changed it.
Torrin Daniels: Yep, we never got any better ideas than that, so shout out to that girl. I don’t know which one it was. It was a long time ago.
The new album is called Seven Devils. What was your inspiration for the title and the song?
Torrin Daniels: I wrote that song… that’s one of them that was more sort of complete when we went into the studio. It wasn’t fully complete, but we’d been playing it live in certain versions for a while. There’s a lot of things, places and towns and then natural sort of places in the country that are named Seven Devils, kind of all over. And I first noticed it when I went on a road trip right after college to Oregon and Washington, and there was a ton of stuff in the Pacific Northwest named Seven Devils, just like cliffs and campsites and creeks and stuff like that, that we ran into as we traveled down the coast of the Pacific Northwest.
So, I just kind of jotted that down as an idea for a song name or something. And then after some research I noticed that there’s a bunch of stuff on the eastern side of the country also named Seven Devils. There are a few things here, where we are in North Carolina today, that are called Seven Devils, and then there’s also the Seven Devils Mountains in Idaho. And they come from different sources too. Some of them are biblical or Christian in origin, and the one in Idaho is a Nez Perce [Tribe] sort of creation story. I found it pretty odd and unique that that phrase is ubiquitous through those cultures of completely different groups of people. The song itself is more about being in a relationship and not knowing what to do or where to go, finding yourself at a bit of a crossroads.
Judging from the song titles, it seems like you wanted to create a journey through the album. Was that the case?
Torrin Daniels: Yeah, so the idea with this album is sort of that it takes the listener on a journey. We’re trying to treat it as sort of one congruent art piece instead of a group of songs for this round.
What were some of the major themes you wanted to convey on the album?
Torrin Daniels: Thematically, we’re drawing parallels between the subject matter in these songs and the seven deadly sins, and kind of treating it as a modern nod to Dante’s Inferno, and sort of the trip that the listener takes could be similar to Dante’s dissent through the nine circles of Hell, but really we’re taking a much more modern approach and just trying to put it out there that I think people search for happiness in a lot of the wrong places today and find themselves not knowing where to go to find it.
And I think there’s a lot that could be learned from more people going inward and taking a journey inward toward the self, and sort of addressing those themes with the self, not from a shame or judgment standpoint, which is where the Christian aspect of it lands is definitely with shame and judgment, but more from a less egocentric idea, and more something to be aware of within yourself rather than feeling a need to confess your “sins” to somebody.
What song or songs had the biggest impact on the direction of the album thematically?
Torrin Daniels: “Seven Devils” kind sets it up to sort of feel like the beginning of a journey. The other ones just kind of fell into place and all the songs are super unique to themselves. I don’t think there’s really two songs on the album that sound anything like one another, so they’re all sort of there playing their own part.
I really like “Pendulum” and “Cabin Pressure.” What was your inspiration for those two?
Torrin Daniels: I wrote “Pendulum” and that’s sort of lyrically straightforward as far as somebody battling with different addictions and how each individual can just trade one addiction for another, whether it’s good or bad, and kind of just how everybody has a baseline addictiveness, and it varies from person to person. That song just kind of popped in my head when I was driving one day.
Max Davies: “Cabin Pressure” kind of came from just this little guitar chord riff-thing. I thought it would be kind of cool to do a little bit more of a rocking tune, but still, of course, have our classic acoustic elements to it. And that song is just kind of about really escaping your current situation that you might not be enjoying so much. Some of that was written when we were on the road. We also live in a place that’s, like everywhere, changing very rapidly, and so people are always talking about leaving or changing their current situation. It’s kind of not so much the grass is greener on the other side, but I’ve just had it with whatever’s going on with my current life or situation and I’m going to make a radical change. That’s kind of what that song is about.
How do you think the band’s lyrics and sound have evolved most compared to the previous albums?
Shawn Swain: I think a lot of that just has to do with how we were talking about the depth of the songs, earlier. It’s hard to describe saying that your songs sound more mature in an actual logical sense, but I do feel like that’s basically what’s happened here. There’s just a lot more care taken to the individual moments within each song to make it as special as it can be.
Torrin Daniels: I think we’ve sort of come into our own… It feels like, not only with the album, but also just with our live show and things like that, we had this idea of what kind of band we wanted to be, but maybe didn’t have the technical prowess yet to correctly execute that when we first started as a band. When we started, we were all still definitely learning our instrument and figuring out how to play acoustic music, and sort of went about it in a different way than any of our friends ever did when they learned how to play acoustic music. So, I think we had this idea of what kind of band we wanted to be for a long time, and now it’s sort of coming to fruition.
The band seems to be venturing more and more into storytelling, including “Waterford’s Son.” Why do you like that type of songwriting?
Max Davies: Storytelling is something that each of us really appreciates. Some of us really grew up with storytelling music, so there’s a big affinity for that.
Shawn Swain: “”Waterford’s Son” is probably the biggest example of a huge storyteller song. Max wrote this song about this person’s life, and it’s a pretty good story, and it’s kind of a long one too.
The album opens with an instrumental called “Prelude.” What was the inspiration for that one?
Torrin Daniels: Well, we sort of had this idea, we wanted to take elements of the first song, “Seven Devils,” and sort of reconstruct them in a way that sort of lays out this… just a little instrumental piece to sort of prepare the listener for the rest of the album. I think most of the time when albums have just an intro track or a small instrumental piece at the beginning, it’s like a palate cleanser to sort of prepare the listener for the rest of the album, and I guess that’s kind of what we hope to achieve with that.
What were some of the biggest surprises creating the album?
Max Davies: A surprise for me was that we were in a recording studio with some really amazing gear, some historical gear. And one of the things that I think enhanced the album. For me, listening through the album, I think it’s not super tangible, but I do think that there are some consistent things sonically through the album that makes it sound like one thing, and a lot of that has to do with the gear that we were using, and some of that we’ve recreated and even brought into our live sound. And that has just kind of helped create this cohesive sound of us as a unit, as a band. And that was a big surprise for me, that I didn’t know that going into the studio I was going to be like, “Oh, this piece of gear is perfect for our band and now, kind of in my opinion, essential to some of our sound.”
Besides the album release, what else are you most looking forward to in the year ahead?
Shawn Swain: Just coming up soon, the New Year’s shows in Montana, three nights in Missoula at The Wilma, which should be really awesome.
Torrin Daniels: The Wilma’s one that we sort of grew up going to in college when we were first starting out as a band. The first thing that we all really did together as a band, me, Joe, and Shawn, was go to Yonder Mountain String Band at The Wilma in Missoula. So that venue holds a great amount of significance to our history as a band. We’ve been wanting to do that for a long time, so that’d be great.
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.
