Band’s appeal has novel twist
Name from Dostoyevsky book gets group unexpected following
“People do like to put you in a box, but none of this is anything new. … At the end of the day, it’s all just rock ’n’ roll to me.”
TIM WILSON OF IVAN AND ALYOSHA
It’s probably a given that you’ll attract some unusual listeners when you decide to name your band after characters in a Dostoyevsky novel.
Like the professor of Russian literature who showed up at a Tulsa, Okla., gig by Ivan & Alyosha, ready to dispense tidbits of information to the four-piece on the author’s final philosophical masterwork.
“We just kind of looked at him the whole time as he talked about the Brothers Karamazov, where the names come from,” laughs singer-guitarist Tim Wilson. “We’ve had college kids come in who were turned onto the band because of the research they did on the novel. I figure it’s a win-win situation when people like that show up. It’s caused a stir in ways that none of us would have ever considered.”
Formed in 2007 by Wilson and guitarist Ryan Carbary, Ivan & Alyosha have found themselves, much to Wilson’s bemusement, lumped in with groups like The Lumineers and Mumford & Sons in the neofolk movement.
Truth is, Wilson is more than happy to be spoken of in the same breath as The Lumineers, who share their record label (Dine Alone) in Canada.
“People do like to put you in a box, but none of this is anything new,” he points out. “The singer-songwriter thing has been around for ages, and then some journalist decides he doesn’t like it anymore, or it becomes too popular.
Mumford & Sons and The Lumineers, they’re just writing great songs in a certain genre. It’s funny, in my old band I would just sing, but in this one I’ve got an acoustic guitar shoved in my hands, so that makes what we do folk. At the end of the day, it’s all just rock ’ n’ roll to me.”
In the five years they’ve been together, Ivan & Alyosha have released three EPs and one single, and have only just put out their first full-length, All the Times We Had.
Wilson admits it might be a little unusual to wait so long, but rightly points out that the band hasn’t exactly been sitting around. They’ve been in constant tour mode, adding new members (brother Pete Wilson on bass and guitarist Tim Kim), and most importantly, developing their craft.
“It takes time, and then you also have to factor in things like wives and kids,” he says. “We’re living life; it’s not like we’ve been sitting in the studio trying to come up with songs.”
Funnily enough, opener Jay Nash has been doing exactly the opposite.
The Vermont singer-songwriter recorded his latest and 10th album, Letters From the Lost, in his home studio, setting very specific boundaries on what he wanted to do.
“I was playing around with melodic and rhythmic motifs, and then searching out resonance in them,” he says. “It started as a project where the only directive was to record a song over a day, and at end of day, I would let it go no matter what state it was in. Then I would start on a totally new one.”
Nash ended up with somewhere close to 30 songs. He chose four for last year’s Out of the Woods EP and then picked out another nine for Letters From the Lost.