As 2015 came to an end, Lyle Divinsky had his immediate future pretty well mapped out. He was releasing his solo album Uneven Floors and getting ready to hit the road to promote the new music.
Then everything changed: Divinsky was contacted by The Motet, a Funk band that suddenly found itself in need of a new lead singer. Even though Uneven Floors was making some noise behind a Top 5 Soul music single in the U.K., it didn’t take any convincing for Divinsky to change his plans and find out if he was the right fit for The Motet.
“It was pretty funny timing,” he says. “I had started to get some love from over in the U.K. and Japan. I was just about to click ‘send’ trying to book a bunch of stuff. I was running my own thing, like managing myself, so it was a lot of work, and then The Motet opportunity came around.”
The only initial issue for Divinsky was whether or not he could continue to do solo and side projects if he were to become The Motet’s new singer. And that concern was alleviated immediately.
“It was kind of a no-brainer to me,” he says. “I know a lot of the guys in the band also have little side projects that they do and solo projects that they pursue. I talked to them, making sure I would still be able to do something like that as well.”
But even with some signs of promise for his solo career, the opportunity to join such an established group — the band will mark its 20th anniversary next year — was a significant step up for Divinsky, career-wise.
“They allowed me to just kind of jump up a whole lot of rungs on the ladder to be able to join in with an incredible working machine,” he says.
With career considerations out of the way, the next questions to address were musical. The Motet had started recording its seventh studio album, Totem, and had essentially completed basic tracks for the songs. The group needed lyrics and vocal melodies for some songs and wanted to improve on the lyrics and melodies that had been completed for other songs.
So to test their musical chemistry with Divinsky, the band members sent him the instrumental tracks for “The Truth,” a song that looked destined for the scrap heap in its vocal-less form.
“My first test was writing to that song,” Divinsky says. “It was kind of immediate. The idea of ‘The Truth’ came pretty quickly for the hook. And it was kind of a good sign for me, where I was incredibly inspired by the music. So I turned that around, sent it back to them and they loved it.”
After getting together with the band for a rehearsal and then doing an initial run of shows in early 2016, the singer was invited to become an official Motet member.
Divinsky is a good fit for the Funk-centric group, growing up in Portland, Maine on Funk and Soul music thanks to his father, who’s also a singer.
“If I can sing half as good as he does by the time I get older, then I know I’m going to be all right,” he says of his dad.
By his high school years, Divinsky also developed a passion for Hip Hop, but never thought about music as a career until he gave up on his original dream job.
“I was kind of the delusional little boy that thought he was going to go pro in basketball,” Divinsky says. “And I kept that delusion going pretty long until, funny enough, I was talking smack with my coach and being like, ‘Hey, are you going to let me sing the national anthem,’ just expecting him to be like, ‘Oh, shut up and go run.’ And he was like ,‘Yeah, sure, I’ll set it up right now.’ So I had to step up and do it.
“Right around the same time, I reconnected with some old friends that had been playing a bunch of music. They asked me to come jam. So it all kind of worked out at the same time. I just fell in love with it (music) and never looked back.”
Divinsky went on to attend Skidmore College near Saratoga Springs, N.Y. In 2009, he moved to New York City to pursue music. Within about a year, he recorded and self-released his first album, Traveling Man, and started scraping around for gigs at night, while often playing solo in the subway during the day. He made more money in tips for his busking work than he did for his club shows, often using the subway proceeds to pay his band members.
Slowly but surely Divinsky made progress on the New York City scene. His fortunes got a boost when he was chosen for the Songwriters Hall of Fame’s Abe Olman Scholarship award.
“I had been playing in New York for about four years at that point,” Divinsky says. “My buddy who was working over at BMI, unbeknownst to me, (had) put my name into the pool and I ended up getting chosen for it, which was a pretty amazing thing. And so they gave me some money to spend toward music. I got to take some trips and learned about a bunch of music and got myself a little bit of gear so I could keep on doing (my) thing.”
Divinsky’s work on The Motet’s Totem and its spirited, soulful and richly funky tunes like “The Truth,” “Fool No More” and “I Know It Too Well” are proof that the current lineup — with fellow new member/sax player Drew Sayers and holdover members Dave Watts (drums), Joey Porter (keyboards), Ryan Jalbert (guitar), Gabriel Mervine (trumpet) and Garrett Sayers (bass) — are on course to continue making its best music yet.
Divinsky says fans that see The Motet this fall will experience a group that has developed considerably as a live unit in its time touring together.
“Every night’s a conversation and every night you get to learn a little bit more about each other’s playing and where the songs want to go and how we want to kind of morph things to best suit us and best inspire us,” Divinsky says. “I think we’re getting to the point where we don’t have to think about it nearly as much. When you’re able to just be in the moment with each other, then that’s when the special moments happen. I think where we’re at and what we’re getting into, those special moments are just coming more and more frequently.”
The Motet plays Bogart’s Saturday with Dopapod. Tickets/info: bogarts.com.
