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Maturity and innovation
The Nadas make the leap from college tunes to concept songs
by Shea Conner
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Playboy magazine once called The Nadas “the best college band you’ve never heard of.” But in recent years, the Des Moines folk rock quintet has undergone a change. What’s the change, you might ask?
“A collective 40 pounds,” laughs vocalist/guitarist Mike Butterworth. “No, I think we’re just a little more mature now.”
The Nadas
The Nadas
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As the former Iowa State students entered their 30s, the band’s lyrical content changed. With their 2008 album “The Ghosts Inside These Halls,” songs about hook-ups and hangovers were replaced by songs about family and finance. The album helped to expand the group’s Midwest fanbase, gaining both older and younger listeners.
“I think we’ve always been known as a college band,” says Jason Walsmith, the band’s other guitarist and vocalist. “Maybe we’re getting a little bit farther from our college days, but the kids still really like us.”
The Nadas have also been garnering attention with a new project, “Almanac.” The intention of “Almanac” is to capture the year of 2009, one month at a time in album form. Therefore, the group is writing, recording, mixing and releasing one new track each month. Each song is being released on the band’s Web site (www.thenadas.com/almanac) and a physical copy will be released at the beginning of 2010.
The January track is called “Bitter Love,” the February track is called “Long Goodbye” and the soon-to-be-released March track is titled “Wrecking Ball.” Walsmith says it will be a momentous record of surrounding happenings, not a history textbook set to music.
“We’re not constantly watching CNN or chasing ambulances,” he says.
All the while, The Nadas will be touring the Midwest. They have several upcoming shows in Iowa and the Phoenix area this spring, but the band will stop by the Record Bar in Kansas City for a gig on Friday, March 27. The show starts at 9:30 p.m. with opening acts Radio City and Bonne Finken.
Walsmith says they will play the first few songs from “Almanac” Friday night.
“Then we’ll pretty much revert back to our college days,” he laughs.
- Kansas City Star
Discography
Not A Sound- 1995
New Start- 1996
Coming Home- 1998
Transceiver- 2001
Listen Through the Static- 2005
Ghosts Inside These Halls- 2008
Almanac- Out March 2, 2010
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Bio
For a band with nearly 15 years behind them, the Nadas sure marked a lot of firsts with their new album, The Ghosts Inside These Halls. The roots rockers’ sixth studio release is their first produced by the band, their first recorded in their hometown of Des Moines, and their first as a fivesome. But perhaps most notably, it’s their first time truly baring their souls. “We have always been very honest in our music, but with this record we have allowed ourselves to be totally exposed,” explains singer/guitarist Jason Walsmith, who co-founded the Nadas with fellow singer/guitarist Mike Butterworth as Iowa State University students in the early 1990s. “It’s raw and open. We’re also very comfortable with who we are as a band and as musicians and I think that comes through in the record. We aren’t pretending to be anyone or act like a band we aren’t.”
This rawness is reflected in the album’s title, which comes from the first line of the first song.
“I thought it symbolized where we are in our careers,” Walsmith says. “We have reached a certain amount of success, but there are always those thoughts in the back of your head, ‘What if I had just done this instead.’ Those are the ghosts to me.”
Like so many American bands, the Nadas started as a way for its members to pass the time between classes. Unlike so many American bands, the Nadas outlasted their educations and rode a growing fan base to a genuine, honest-to-goodness career.
While Butterworth is known for his rock ‘n’ roll intuitions (on perfect display in his live cover of the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage”) and Walsmith for his alt-country roots, they work flawlessly as a songwriting unit, skillfully evoking the romance, introspection and uncertainty of living life on one’s own terms in the 21st Century.
Altogether, the Nadas have sold more than 75,000 albums through their own Authentic Records, including 2003’s Transceiver and 2005’s Listen Through the Static, both produced by Todd and Toby Pipes of Deep Blue Something.
The Nadas have also been called the “Best College Band You’ve Never Heard Of” by Playboy, had one of their songs (Walk Away) become the official elimination song on Speed Channel’s “Pinks” show, and were one of the final four bands for Bon Jovi’s Have a Nice Day band competition — all the while steadily touring the country in Meatloaf’s old tour bus, named Meatloaf (of course).
The Ghosts Inside These Halls builds on that memorable career not just by taking the band in new directions, but by giving fans another dose of ear candy to remember their hook-ups, break-ups, milestones and hangovers by.
“Jason and I have always helped with each others’ songs, but with this record we truly collaborated more than ever before,” Butterworth says. “And that definitely made for our best material yet.”
Blue Lights, with its clean, soulful rhythm guitar track and dense vocal harmonies on the chorus, is equal parts spiritual uplift and arena rock ballast. Good Night Girl, meanwhile, begins with celestial, bell-like guitar tones before drummer Ian Shepherd’s snare cracks wide open into as powerful an anthem as anything the Nadas have ever recorded.
Lyrically, the album chronicles all the things that go along with embarking on your 30s, wives, kids, house payments and the like.
“The beautiful thing is our fans have grown up with us, so it makes it even easier for them to relate to at least something in every song,” Butterworth says.
Which takes us to yet another first on The Ghosts Inside These Halls: the first Nadas song inspired by a children’s book, “TK.”
“The lyric ‘I’ve been near and I’ve been far/ Boats and planes and trains and cars’ came to me because my four-year-old son has a book called ‘Boats, Planes, Trains and Cars,’” Walsmith laughs. “His bedtime reading has been engrained into my head.”
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