Although Dawg Yawp’s Cincinnati Entertainment Award nomination for New Artist of Year accurately reflects its freshly minted band status, nearly everything else about Rob Keenan and Tyler Randall dates back several years. Their friendship began as Turpin High School classmates more than a decade ago, corresponding to Randall’s interest in the sitar, setting the stage for Dawg Yawp’s indelibly unique sitar/guitar/synth composition.
“I heard it for the first time on ‘Within You, Without You,’ and I thought it was an electronic instrument,” Randall says. “Rob was like, ‘No, that’s a sitar.’ Then I got into Ravi Shankar and I had to get one. I told my parents, and they said, ‘One, what is a sitar? And two, you play guitar, bass and mandolin. Why a sitar? No.’ So I mowed a lot of lawns, watched my neighbors' dogs and did a lot of research online.”
Randall found his sitar and waited six months for shipping; when it arrived, the strings were loose, the bridge had fallen off and it required work to get it performance-ready.
“I felt ashamed, thinking that some Western guy could just get a sitar and just do this,” Randall says. “It took me about six months to get it in tune.”
Keenan's and Randall’s path to Dawg Yawp was long and circuitous, although fairly similar. Keenan began piano lessons at age 7, Randall picked up guitar at 9. They met in high school when Randall played guitar for a vocal chorus concert where Keenan was singing.
“Backstage, Rob was playing me a song he wrote called ‘Lou,’ which is on our EP (Two Hearted) — it’s 10 years old, it’s the first song we wrote — and I loved it so much,” Randall says. “We started playing and realized we could harmonize really well and had good chemistry.”
They both attended Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Keenan arrived after a semester at Indiana University and found Randall deeply immersed in Electronica. They dropped out and relocated to Chicago, then Colorado, with drummer friend Austin Barker, but Randall and Barker quarreled regularly. Randall left to tour with the band Sonnymoon, leading to New York, California and New Jersey moves.
“I love (Sonnymoon’s) music,” Randall says. “But I was in a supporting role for so long that I started having my own ideas. That’s when the trouble started; I broke up with my girlfriend, left the band and was stranded in Schenectady (N.Y.). I was miserable and alone and started singing and writing my own songs. I called Rob and said, ‘Let’s move back to somewhere near Cincinnati, get a house and live where we can be comfortable and have the freedom to do what we always did.’ ”
In early 2014, Keenan and Randall reconnected with Barker and bassist James Noyes to form Echoes, but their insular, cerebral music alienated audiences.
“We played at Northside Tavern, and it was weird stuff,” Randall says. “They were so disappointed.”
“Our parents and everybody came,” Keenan adds. “Nobody talked to us afterward. It was terrible.”
Barker left again, as did Keenan’s girlfriend (“Not together,” he clarifies, “although that would’ve been a better story”) and Keenan and Randall were back to a duo. They’d dabbled with sitar and synths in Echoes, but adapted it to a Bluegrass/Folk direction, learning 50 songs in the Simon & Garfunkel/Milk Carton Kids/Nilsson vein (the riff from “Coconut” surfaces in their original tune “Air”) to play gigs at Taste of Belgium, where Randall was bussing tables.
“It’s cool how we got into Bluegrass,” Keenan says. “The music we discovered when we were younger was Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Miles Davis, Eels and Led Zeppelin, and we didn’t know where we were from. It’s weird how much crossover there is between England, India and the Ohio River.”
In early 2015, they debuted Dawg Yawp at clubs MOTR Pub and Southgate House Revival, and original songs began dominating the sets. The duo’s trajectory climbed steeply when Raisins/psychodots/Bears vocalist/guitarist Rob Fetters caught a Dawg Yawp show — Keenan’s father ran sound for The Raisins back in the day — and chatted up the guys after the gig. Upon discovering they didn’t have any product, Fetters offered his estimable studio services, but they needed convincing.
“We like to make our demos ourselves,” Keenan says.
After assurances the band would retain control, Dawg Yawp headed to Fetters’ Sayler Park studio and ran through most of their original songs for their producer, holding back a few that were still cooking.
“We wrote ‘Need You to Know’ just for the session where we were going to show Rob all of our songs,” Keenan says.
“We had it as a seed and this opportunity made us kick it into gear and finish it,” Randall says. “The studio helped us get our live set together. We wanted it to sound really good, and Rob Fetters was a big help in consulting with people on how we could do this live.”
Two Hearted and Dawg Yawp’s subsequent live presence — particularly the duo’s two amazing MidPoint Music Festival sets last September — have captivated area audiences with cryptically engaging songcraft and the confounding brilliance of putting a sitar in the lead role. With three new tracks in the can — once again with Fetters at the board — and the promise of more on the
horizon, Dawg Yawp is poised to shine a broader spotlight
on sitars, synths and guitars.
“Sometimes I look down at myself when I’m playing a show and it’s like, ‘What happened?’ ” Randall says.
For more on DAWG YAWP, visit dawgyawp.com.
For more on the 2016 CINCINNATI ENTERTAINMENT AWARDS, visit citybeat.com's CEA page.
