Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster
Friday, September 20, 2019
with special guest Spencer Thomas
Friday, September 20, 2019
Doors 7:00 PM / Showtime 8:00 PM
All Ages
Artist website: Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster
Pre-sales for all shows end at noon on the day of the show. Tickets are will call only, nonrefundable, but transferable to another person (for the same show). All tickets are general admission.
What does a songwriter who has mined darkness do when he finds a measure of contentment?
This was the challenge that faced Fayetteville, AR songwriter Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster when writing his new album ‘Take Heart, Take Care.’ A songwriter who had success with Water Liars and Marie/Lepanto (his collaboration with Will Johnson of Centro-Matic) and has earned acclaim from NPR, Billboard, The New York Times, and Paste Magazine now took time to reassess his writing process. Kinkel-Schuster, who everyone calls Pete, says, “I had, more than anything else, good things to say, and ironically I was unsure of how to say them. I’d spent so long yawping at perceived darkness both real and imagined, internal and external, that I was in a sense starting from scratch, learning to express something good in a way that didn’t feel cheap or silly or disingenuous to me.”
“It took a long time, relatively speaking,” he says, continuing, “It involved a lot more patience and consistency.” He is talking about songwriting but could be talking about the work of showing up for life. He lists the means that helped with the latter, all as if still unfolding: “Learning to stop making the same mistakes over and over. Moving to Arkansas. Meeting my partner. Finding peace and stability at home but being able to keep working. Finding a balance between all of these things. Being sober for a number of years and working on upkeep.”
This balance of which he speaks comes through in ‘Take Heart, Take Care.’ Characters are drawn to and away from other people. They seek both risk and comfort. In the album opener “Plenty Wonder,” he sings of the concept, allowing himself “Plenty wonder in this world still to be found.” The notion of balance comes up yet again when singer and songwriter Julien Baker reacts to the album. She says, "’Take Heart, Take Care’ is a beautiful intersection of grit and tenderness. Pete’s lyrics are immediately intimate; brutal enough to swear at you, but familiar enough to dispense gentle wisdom in its plainest form. This record is an appeal to the essentially human, a perfect balance of poetry and candor, full of soul-feeding truth and heart-breaking honesty."
Several songs look back at a younger self with curiosity. “Friend of Mine” belies the camaraderie of youth; “Cut Your Teeth” is about seeing abrasiveness around us but then finding and cherishing “a deep and gentle welcome place inside” and remembering the journey that brought you there and the maintenance needed to keep perspective. It also powerfully alternates from fingerpicked acoustic guitar to hails of overdrive.
“Name What You Are” may be the most autobiographical song here (a medium in which Pete does not usually traffic). “It’s being quietly amazed at the places and conditions you put yourself in and why and what that meant at the time and what that means now having more or less dedicated your life to it.
The atmosphere of ‘what the hell’s going’ on but it not mattering as much as that you’re simply doing it. For lifers in terms of making music, I would hope it might pretty true.” Yet the fingerpicked guitar and melody is more about the reflection back than the manic activity remembered. When asked about the song, Pete quotes Harry Crews, “Survival is triumph enough.”
Several songs, such as “Take Heart, Take Care,” are in the second person as if speaking directly to those out there who can identify with his earlier, darker experiences. He sings, “Time, time is the mender, whose strange mechanics, yet untold, bid us rise entwined together.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and novelist Forrest Gander notes how this technique makes the listener lean in, saying, "You'll notice a little delay in the timing as the tunes of JPKS' "Take Heart, Take Care" back-eddy while he leans into and opens up the song's long vowels. It's almost as though the singer were pausing for a friend—that's us—to catch up, to keep him company just before he turns to dive into the reprise. In fact, friendship is a recurring theme in this album. The second song is ‘Friend of Mine’ but other lyrics remind us ‘to keep it close’ so that what counts doesn't go ‘asunder.’ Pete's voice has an easy, unfeigned sweetness tinged with melancholy, and its warmth blows convincingly behind the alternately precise and fuzzy guitar notation that gives the album its definitive sound."
The intimacy that Gander and Baker observe comes of both form and function for Pete: a desire to keep things simple aesthetically but also the limitations of time and money. His bandmate in Marie/Lepanto, Will Johnson, taught him by example how to build a record by yourself; Pete followed this method, playing all of the instruments except keyboards. “Will is a hero of mine and I’d grown to admire his way of working. We made the Marie/Lepanto record in 3 ½ - 4 days and looking back, I was taken aback that we were able to do that. I take a lot of cues from Will,” he reflects. It freed him. The effect is cinematic yet direct, wind across the plains at times, humidity you can feel at others, and the occasional glimpse of a promised coastline, all of it from a view always in motion.
The sounds also provide a backdrop of a complicated world for Pete to approach his type of makeshift, hard-won providence. The underlying message is of hope, to others as well as himself. He states, “Here I’ve fumbled my way, as always, and of necessity, into a collection of songs that hold a light to the joys and comforts of life not given up on, those that appear over time as we are looking elsewhere, to surprise and delight us when we need them most. Sure, it’s me, so there are glimpses of and nods to the dark, but the dark is not winning anymore. I simply mean to acknowledge its presence. To me, that’s the most fundamental job of songs, of stories, of all art—to be allies, friends, companions, when we need them most and it’s my hope that these songs can do that work in a world that seems to need it.”
So what does a songwriter do when he finds contentment? He tries to pass on what he knows in hopes of helping the next person.
Spencer Thomas
“More often than I’d like to admit, I found myself paralyzed to my bed,” said Jackson, Mississippi native Spencer Thomas about the lows of his early twenties. In his last years pursuing a voice degree at Delta State University in the Mississippi delta, Thomas found just how debilitating mental illness could be. “I would have anxiety so bad that I would seize. My brain would shut down, and depression followed after. These spells subsided the more I worked on songs.”
Spencer had begun to collaborate with his best friend Zach Lovett and started to understand it’s more than a creative outlet. “The lowly moments turned into opportunities to write songs.” As their college band dissolved, the two went onto form Young Valley along with Zach’s twin brother Dylan Lovett.
“Zach taught me so much about writing, and I absorbed everything I could. He had been doing it for much longer and knew what made a song work. He helped me find my own identity.” The songwriting team took Young Valley on the road.
Spencer dropped out of school, moved back to Jackson, and toured with Young Valley heavily for the next five years playing the drums and singing, sharing the stage with acts like Lucero, Lilly Hiatt, American Aquarium, and Futurebirds. “I’d get the Don Henley or the Levon Helm comment all the time. It was hard as hell to learn to play drums and sing at the same time, but I managed. I always wanted to play in a real band.”
All the while, Thomas had written a few songs in his own time that didn’t fit the mold Young Valley had created. “We tried some tunes of mine that were a little more personal, and they didn’t quite fit, so I put them in my back pocket.” As Thomas’s influences matured, he realized the kind of songwriter he wanted to be. “I love guys like Tom Petty, Elvis Costello, and Bruce Springsteen. They sing for all people and took so many risks as songwriters with their sounds changing from record to record. Their creative freedom was astounding.”
After Petty’s death late 2017, Spencer decided to book studio dates for the songs he saved up on the side. “We’re only on this earth for so long. Tom Petty left behind a legacy and songs over a 40 year career and I said ‘I want to do that.’” Young Valley had just finished the final touches on their self-titled record in Water Valley, Mississippi with Matt Patton (Drive-By Truckers) and Bronson Tew (Fat Possum, Dial Back Sound), who welcomed Thomas in to bring his own record to life.
Teaming up with Tew as his producer/engineer/bass player, Young Valley band mates Ethan Frink (drums) and Kell Kellum (guitar), and Jay Gonzalez (Drive-By Truckers) on organ, Hangin’ Tough was tracked in February 2018. “A lot of these songs come full circle to talk about depression. ‘State & Downing’ is about feeling stagnant. ‘Lift Me Up’ is about asking a loved one if they can help you when you are low. Many of these were born from dark places.’” Influenced by Jeff Lynne’s production style, Tew adopted the mantra “broad strokes” in order to preserve the magic within the song. “I let a close friend hear the record when it was finally mastered, and he sent me the text message ‘You wrote an album about depression—and it’s beautiful.'”
Hangin’ Tough is out June 14 on all platforms. Spencer will tour Southeast upon release. He'll tour Midwest/East Coast in September, and West Coast in the Fall, opening for Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster of Water Liars.
