Spotlight: Everette
Your latest single ‘Keys to Kentucky’ has been a hit among fans. Can you share the story behind this song and what inspired its creation?
We wrote this with our very good friend, Jon Decious. Jon is a great dude…eccentric redneck. It was actually our first time writing together, and we had spent half a day not getting anywhere…it’s like that sometimes. Then, Jon mentioned that he had some “half songs” that he’d been sitting on. He started singing a few lines, and Brent and I were both electrified. We dove right in, and the song just kinda fell out after that.
Keys to Kentucky was one of the songs that made us wanna record a record like this…more stripped back and organic.
‘Dang the Whiskey’ seems to resonate with a lot of your listeners. How do you approach blending personal experiences with universal themes in your songwriting?
Most of the time, we probably lean towards the old idea of “not letting the truth get in the way of a good story”. But sometimes the truth….what actually happened…is exactly what needs to be said.
Every song is different. Some days, we might be feeling like we need to write something more zoomed out and universal, and some days we’re feeling more autobiographical.
We mostly tend to gravitate to whatever feels exciting or inspiring in the writing process. We also like to think about what’s going to feel awesome on stage, and sometimes the little extra spice of fiction might be what’s closer to how we feel than what actually happened in real life.
The visual aesthetics of your ‘Man Of Constant Sorrow’ video are quite striking. What was the creative process behind this visualizer?
Brent: When I was a kid I used to cue some music, stand at the closed garage door with a basketball cradled in my right arm and pretend that my team was getting introduced to an imaginary crowd of adoring fans. The garage door would dramatically move up slowly revealing me and my “team.” When the door was all the way up, I would take off towards the basketball goal doing lay ups. Weird kid. I know
That’s how the Man of Constant Sorrow video starts. Other than that, I think we were trying to just look like a garage band jamming for whoever will listen. Deep down, that’s still who we are.
What can fans expect in terms of musical direction and themes from the EP? Are there any new influences that have shaped this project?
In this record, you’ll hear the rawest version of Everette. We didn’t talk too much about wanting it to sound a certain way. Some of the songs we’d been playing live for a while, so they’d already been lived in a while and figured out.
Either way, we’re probably leaning more in the direction of artists like Don Williams, Brent Cobb, Shovels & Rope.
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