From its sepia-stained cover photo of Benjamin Tod and his wife, Ashley Mae, to its terse title, Survived, The Lost Dog Street Band’s new record offers more of Tod’s hard luck tales of woe and redemption with his group’s rootsy bluegrass blend to deliver a raw portrait of life lived in the margins. Now living on a Muhlenberg County, Ky. homestead, the couple have been playing together since busking days in various string band arrangements for almost 15 years under the Lost Dog brand. The prolific Tod has also been releasing solo records for the last eight years, which are somehow even more hardscrabble, spare and autobiographical than his Lost Dog music. Typical song subjects deal with Tod’s addiction and recovery, blue-collar anger and his rambles through America.
But Survived finds the Lost Dogs embracing a fuller band sound, which includes accompaniment by Ben Duvall on drums, Jeff Loops on upright bass and John James Tourville on pedal steel. The new material is also much more rooted in the country/bluegrass genre than before. This allows Tod to open up a bit more emotionally here; “Brighter Shade,” the opening song, exemplifies that range in a deeply expressive long song to his wife, whose fiddle etches out the haunting melody line. In a recent interview with American Songwriter, Tod explains a few of the new changes: “We ran live tracking for the first three days. Then we did overdubs for two days, and at the end of the week, we mixed. Every other album I worked on, I spent between four and eight months building. So, this was a whole new process, and I liked it much better. It suits my soul much better. And, the product is better, in my opinion.”
The Lost Dog Street Band plays Bogart’s on Dec. 6 at 7 p.m. More info: bogarts.com.
This story is featured in CityBeat’s Nov. 27 print edition.
This article appears in Nov 27 – Dec 10, 2024.