This story is featured in CityBeat’s Aug. 23 print edition.
With COVID in our back seats instead of our rearview mirrors, it’s conceivable that artists’ music continues to be refracted through the prism of the past three years. Darlingside guitarist, banjoist and vocalist Don Mitchell understands how that assumption applies to the Boston quartet’s latest album, the just-released Everything is Alive, but he’s quick to illustrate the reasons that differentiate it from that expectation.
“We would have created an album during lockdown, so it’s not like lockdown gave us the time and therefore this album happened, but it being this exact album, it’s for sure influenced by the pandemic. I just wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a ‘pandemic record,'” says Mitchell by phone from his Waltham, Massachusetts apartment. “It found its way into some of the themes; coming back to life, back to yourself, being distanced from or being a part of a community. There are mortality themes that are closer to home, having older parents and the fear of what might happen. But it’s not something that we were like, ‘Let’s all process this together.’ In some ways, Fish Pond Fish was more of a pandemic record because we finished it at the very beginning of the pandemic. We started writing Everything is Alive mostly in 2021 and into early ’22. This is more of a coming out of lockdown record than a lockdown record.”
Darlingside has never shied away from changing courses. After their 2009 formation in Boston, Mitchell and his bandmates — Sam Kapala, Auyon Mukharji (mandolin, violin, vocals), Harris Paseltiner (guitar, cello, vocals), and David Senft (bass, kick drum, vocals) — forged a sound rooted in ’90s indie rock, but once Kapala’s departure pared them down to a quartet, they adopted the single mic/drummerless percussion of traditional bluegrass. Sonically, the band retained their indie rock roots but incorporated more ’70s harmonic folk, particularly British folk, and rock into the mix; everyone from the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to the Zombies and Nick Drake have been referenced to describe Darlingside.
“When we transitioned from indie rock to the bluegrass format, around 2013, 2014, that’s when I started playing the banjo and Auyon started learning fiddle chops and rhythmic patterns, and we pulled in a lot more from the world of old time bluegrass and folk music,” says Mitchell. “Prior to that, we’d been influenced by ’90s/early 2000s college rock. Guster used to come to our college; the earliest version of Darlingside got to open for Guster and that was a big deal back then.”
Since then, Darlingside’s four core members have been open to exploring different creative pathways to achieve their end results. Given the band’s democratically collaborative architecture — all four members are credited equally as songwriters — it didn’t matter who brought songs into the process, because everyone ultimately contributed to their completion. That changed slightly with the isolation of lockdown in 2020, which had an unintended effect on Everything is Alive.
“We’ve always done a lot of collaborative writing where we’re all in on everything from the beginning, and we were doing that at the start of the pandemic,” says Mitchell. “We were remote but we could play the telephone game, essentially; somebody passes a prompt, somebody else does a free write and somebody else turns it into a verse. Then somebody sets a melody to that verse and somebody else adds a whole new section. But since we had so much less in-person time, we decided to do assignments and work in pairs, and by the end of the week, each person would have to take something that was not developed and present a full draft, maybe not a final draft but a complete song.”
As a result, Everything is Alive retains the gorgeous atmospherics that Darlingside has championed since 2015’s Birds Say, while incorporating a rawer, more roughly hewn sound and a more personal lyrical perspective. Repeated listening reveals an album that is a solid contender for best-of-2023 honors.
“There are a lot more songs where you can see the edges of the different writing sensibilities and singing voices of the members,” says Mitchell. “It started organically, then we said, ‘Here’s what we like about this. Let’s hold onto that and not sand it away,’ like we might have been tempted to do in the past.”
Another new wrinkle for Darlingside on Everything is Alive is the fact that each member has a fully functioning home studio, and given that the group has often been given a collective co-production credit, they’ve come to understand their finished product through their own demos as well as through the production of other people’s work.
“We are all producers in a certain way, and we realized that some of the core takes in the demos we were sending around were worth holding onto and building around,” says Mitchell. “In a lot of cases, that bare bones thing is in the final track. We recorded drums and keyboards around it later in a proper studio, but that initial seed is from the moment of creation.”
The pandemic had another unintentional effect on the outcome of Everything is Alive through the livestreams that Darlingside was performing during lockdown. For the band’s fifth livestream, they assembled in Mitchell’s living room for the first time in months, and that proximity led to a momentous decision.
“Some band members hadn’t yet listened to all of the new songs that were being generated in pairs, so we decided to debut songs for each other on the livestream, while playing them for the audience. It was sort of a reality TV moment for us,” says Mitchell with a laugh. “It was one of the things that made us choose to lean into the individual voices and experiential lyrics and keep things relatively unadorned. For a lot of bands, it wouldn’t be that weird, but for us it was a deeply uncomfortable and vulnerable thing and we decided to honor the trust and vulnerability and carry it forward into the album.”
For Darlingside’s first tour in a very long time, there will be a few changes. Original member Senft will not be touring with the band on this circuit — Mitchell assures that Senft is on “family leave” and doing fine — so his slot will be filled by bassist Molly Parden, who also sang on Everything is Alive. And Darlingside will be expanded to a live sextet with the addition of drummer Ben Burns and keyboardist Deni Hlavinka.
From the very beginning nearly a decade and a half ago, Darlingside’s mission statement as a band has been contained in their name, derived from a quote offered by British writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and imparted to the band by their college songwriting instructor Bernice Lewis, who advised her classes to “kill their darlings.” By all rights, they should be committing darlingcide, but in true independent fashion, they preferred their adapted spelling. In any event, they have tried to stay true to that counsel.
“We’re not always as good at it as we’d like to be after this many years, but it’s something we try to do,” says Mitchell. “I don’t have favorite songs, maybe just on a given day, but I have favorite bits and moments, which I try to be suspicious of, as our name would suggest. Be suspicious of your cleverest bits that you’re most tickled by. I find the favorites thing to be difficult with my own work, and I’m glad I don’t have favorites because it would start to feel like it was keeping me in one place.”
Darlingside plays Memorial Hall OTR at 8 p.m. Aug. 31. Info: memorialhallotr.com.
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This article appears in Aug 9-22, 2023.