One of the highlights of the Cincinnati’s Bunbury Music Festival in 2015 was the scorching set from Indie Folk sextet Motherfolk. But one of the highlights of the set itself was when vocalist/guitarist Nathan Dickerson called out the assembled multitude and playfully chastised them for not assembling at the band’s recent gigs.
“Where have you all been?” chided Dickerson as he acknowledged the 40 or 50 Motherfolk regulars who were dancing wildly in front of the stage.
“We played the year before at Bunbury and I think there were like 40 people there,” Motherfolk guitarist/vocalist Bobby Paver says. “Everything was running smoothly and there were a lot of people there (in 2015), especially for us. That show in particular really kind of kicked off our fan base in Cincinnati. It ended up being really good for us.”
Overall, things have been good for Motherfolk since its 2013 inception. The band has maintained a consistent release schedule over the past four years, including its self-titled 2014 debut, the Trying to Kill the Moon EP, and 2016’s Fold album, which was reissued in October in a new deluxe format that includes the new songs “You” and “All That’s Left.” Fold Deluxe also teed up the release of evocative accompanying videos for the songs “Fold I,” “Fold II” and “Fold III,” which were recorded live in the beautiful St. Xavier Church sanctuary (“I” and “II” have been released, “III” is coming shortly). Motherfolk has also established itself as a viable touring entity in its brief existence, with an amazing amount of regional and far-flung roadwork.
The seeds for the group were planted when Dickerson and Paver attended the same high school. Their personal friendship blossomed when they were both enrolled at Kentucky Christian University — about 150 miles southeast of Cincinnati — which led to an inevitable musical collaboration.
“We were proximity friends,” Paver says.
“That turned into jamming together sometimes in the dorm rooms and eventually showing each other songs we had written, and then writing songs together,” says Dickerson.
The duo’s expanding musical bond resulted in adding a member, playing occasional performances as a trio and ultimately testing the waters in Cincinnati. Dickerson tried to get bookings at various local venues but was routinely denied because their “out-of-town” status meant they didn’t have area fans to draw into clubs. For Motherfolk’s first Cincinnati show at the 86 Club in Corryville, Dickerson offered a slight deception.
“I was like, ‘I could say we’re from there,’ you know, like a liar,” Dickerson says. “Honestly, that moment in time might be why we’re all in Cincinnati now. We could have wound up somewhere cooler. I could have said we were from New York.”
It was that first 86 Club performance that led the musicians to the conclusion that they should keep the name they had hastily invented for themselves. The actual derivation of Motherfolk is lost to the mists of time, but the reception at that first show convinced them to retain their provisional moniker.
“The name was kind of a joke for a long time. At first, we did these little three-piece Folk things, so we were like, ‘We’re called Motherfolk, because that’s funny,’ ” Paver says. “I don’t even remember the conversation where (it was brought up)… but it just kind of stuck. At that first show, there was definitely a change in the room when we started playing. It was the energy we brought to it, and you could tell that we really loved what we’d been working on.
“We played that first show and we had a decent amount of people that liked us and it felt too late in the game to change our name. It was like, ‘Alright, well, this is us now.’ ”
Although the pair didn’t intend to form an actual band, Motherfolk coalesced regardless of their plans. That might never have happened without the input of producer Stephen Keech, former vocalist of Hardcore band Haste the Day and the producer of Motherfolk’s self-titled 2014 debut. After HTD’s dissolution, Keech moved to Nashville, set up a home studio and canvassed for clients on Facebook. Dickerson, an HTD fan, saw a post and in a musician’s WTF moment, emailed Keech and asked if he’d be interested in producing him and Paver. After hearing their songs, he readily agreed.
“He was building his portfolio so it was nice for us because we didn’t have a ton of money,” says Dickerson. “Since then, he’s been the right fit for us when it comes to recording.”
“The first couple of times we went to Nashville, I don’t think we had the intention of forming a band,” Paver says. “It seemed like a lot of work, and I didn’t know that we had the potential, but listening back to the songs, I started to believe in it. And Stephen said, ‘You know, if you found some solid band members, you guys could do this.’ ”
Over the past couple of years, Motherfolk has had some personnel shifts, but the current lineup of Dickerson, Paver, keyboardist Karlie Dickerson (Nathan’s wife), bassist Clayton Allender, guitarist Joel Call and drummer Ethan Wescott has been stable since the recording of Fold. The new deluxe edition of Motherfolk’s sophomore album satisfies a variety of needs for the band.
“We’re facing a new writing project where we’re trying to think of what the next step is — what do we say that hasn’t been said, how do we keep relevant to our fans,” Paver says. “One of the things with the deluxe version is that we wanted people to know we still care. And it’s one last push for Fold — we’re kind of saying goodbye to what we wrote for Fold and trying to embrace the next step, but also give people a reason to continue to listen to us. That’s kind of what we did with the EP. We just wanted to let our fans know it was still important to us and we were still writing. From the live perspective, it’s just more fun to play newer songs. If you’re writing well, people tend to gravitate toward what you care about in your songs.”
Fold introduced the solid band version of Motherfolk to the wider world, and gave them a foot in the door to a number of important touring opportunities. The deluxe version now finds the band standing at the crossroads, deciding which direction they will travel going forward.
“Fold was important for us in a couple of ways,” says Dickerson. “Lyrically, it felt important to say what we were trying to get off our chests, and in solidifying our fan base all over. A lot of people really latched onto a lot of songs on Fold. So the deluxe version is, like Bobby said, a send-off for Fold, because we really appreciate what it’s done for us, but at the same time we’re moving on to whatever is next. We’re in the beginning stages of what that is, but we wanted to give it one last push as a celebration of it.”
Fold was also successful in separating Motherfolk from its actual Folk roots, and establishing the band as an Indie Rock entity. That delineation was important in 2016 and it remains important as Motherfolk prepares for fresh opportunities in the New Year.
“We did use a lot of acoustic stuff on the first album but then we moved to an Alternative, Indie Rock, almost Surf sound, and we really kind of found our identity with Fold,” Paver says. “Whatever we do in the future, we’ll just build on that. For the first album we were throwing the best songs we had at the album. Fold gave us a chance to step back and think about what we want to actually say with an album and make it a cohesive statement all the way through.”
Motherfolk plays the Southgate House Revival on Dec. 22. Tickets/more info: southgatehouse.com. For more on Motherfolk, click here.
This article appears in Nov 29 – Dec 6, 2017.
