ECLECTIC ROAD
Upstate traverses variety of genres
Harry D’Agostino is on pace to hit 200 days on the road this year. During that time, D’Agostino, the bassist in Hudson Valley-based band Upstate, has crossed paths with loads of other touring artists.
“I’ll see five buddies who just play bluegrass and it just looks so simple for them,” D’Agostino said ahead of Upstate’s concert in the courtyard of the Museum of Fine Arts on Wednesday.
Upstate plays bluegrass too (OK, the band plays around with bluegrass, and jazz, and soul, and pop). But nothing is simple. The band
members get along but they didn’t start out as pals in a garage making noise. Instead, D’Agostino says the group members follow an overlapping desire to pull together their unique talents into a single sound.
Upstate has three lead singers, four songwriters, five members, but often six or seven at live shows, and a willful disregard for genre. Pick a random tune off new album “Healing” and you’ll hear wildly different styles. Exhibit A: The song “Young” features long a capella, gospel-inspired passages from singers Melanie Glenn, Mary Kenney and Allison Olender, as well as vocal lines that nod to hip-hop and modern R&B; between all this, the song effortlessly fits in jazz flute and Peruvian percussion.
“Our band is a ouija board, everyone has their hand on it and we are pulled in some direction together,” D’Agostino said. “We do a tremendous amount of compromising to take a song from the beginning to the other side. But we have learned that if someone has an idea, before anyone can say they hate the idea, we try it. It makes more sense to not argue for five minutes and instead try it out. We usually know pretty quickly if something is going to work after that.”
This means nobody in the band can be too precious about their ideas. A great example is “Marietta,” the breakout tune from “Healing.” D’Agostino started the song but couldn’t ever figure out how to finish it. Kenney thought it had too much magic to toss and picked it up to finish it.
“I had written the chorus and part of the first verse and Mary did the rest,” D’Agostino said. “But the song also had a lot of iterations. It started as this kind of Andrew Sisters jazz song, but it finished in a very different place. And that’s how it often works. One of us has a sketch of a song then someone else makes something new out of it.”
Be warned, if you haven’t seen the band and hit the MFA gig, the arrangement you fell in love with on the album could be completely different on stage. D’Agostino says producer (and Wood Brothers percussionist) Jano Rix helped shape “Healing” by “making sure we didn’t over-spice the stew.” But live, they tend to add new tones or sonic detours to the tunes.
“On the album you only get to do them one way,” D’Agostino said. “What’s nice about the live thing is we can do them any way. So we develop this shorthand and someone will say, ‘Let’s do the Dolly Parton version tonight,’ or ‘Let’s do the Lucinda version this time.’ ”