photo: Luke Rogers

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By the time The Brook & The Bluff began work on what would eventually become their fifth full-length studio album, the last thing on their minds was getting back on the road to play another round of dates. But, as is often the case, the live-music spirit turned out to be harder to shake than they initially thought.

“We’d gotten done with an awful lot of touring off the back of Bluebeard—honestly, since 2021, we had been on this cycle of take two months off, go on tour, take two months off to record a record, go on tour. And we had just gotten to the point where I was like, ‘OK, let’s stop this cycle that I feel so many artists and bands can get stuck in, take a step back and try to write the best possible record that we can,” Joseph Settine—the soulful, roots-leaning indie outfit’s lead singer—says of the summer 2024 creative sessions that followed Bluebeard, their 2023 set. “And, funny enough, when we were asking ourselves what that should sound like, the answer was, ‘It should feel like a live record.’ We had just done all of this touring, and we felt that one of our strengths was that we are a live band. We built this thing very grassroots—we’d show up to a city and there were 10 people there and then the next time that we’d come back, there were 50 or 100 there and then it kept going from there. The idea is that you play as many shows as you possibly can and the people will hopefully start to come.” 

When the ensemble—whose lineup also includes guitarist Alec Bolton, and brothers John and Kevin Canada on drums and keyboards, respectively—started writing, they immediately tapped into the infectious, high-energy sound that has helped The Brook & The Bluff expand its reach outside of Alabama and become favorites on the jam-adjacent festival scene during the past decade. As Settine explains, their guiding light was to craft a swampy Southern rock-and-roll record.

“With Bluebeard, we said, ‘Let’s make the coolest album we possibly can,’ and I feel like it was the perfect product of that,” he admits. “We went to a mountain house, spent 10 days holed up there, and did all the studio tricks that we could possibly come up with. And then, for this one, we went to our producer’s house, sat in the same room, played these songs 10 times to get the best take and went from there.”

That producer was Micah Tawlks, the Nashville transplant who has helped shepherd albums by Hayley Williams, The Lone Bellow, Mat Kearney and COIN. Before entering the studio, The Brook & The Bluff had run through their new music “dozens of times” to make sure the live energy felt right. At Tawlks’ place, they sat in a circle as the tape rolled and played together in real time, approximating the feel of one of their shows. Classic-rock acts like Clearwater Revival, Tom Petty and Eagles served as their stylistic compass while, Settine says, The Beatles’ melodies “remained ever-present in our lives and music” and elements of AC/DC and Fleetwood Mac seeped into their collective DNA. However, they took the most inspiration from a veteran act that often doesn’t get its due.

“With this record, Little Feat was the biggest one for me personally, and all of us have fallen under the spell of that band since then,” Settine says. “Growing up, they were one of my parents’ favorite bands, so I was always listening to them. I had forgotten about Little Feat a little bit in my adulthood, but I started coming back around to them, and they’re one of the best and most underrated bands of all time. I was obsessed with “Roll Um Easy” in 7^th grade and went back to it and kept going down the rabbit hole—I was floored by them throughout this entire process. We would be listening to these classic-rock records and be like, ‘Let’s make a record that, if you’re hanging out with your friends, you can just put on it and let it spin throughout the night.’”

The Brook & The Bluff frontman describes the writing process for Wereworlf as their most collaborative yet. In the past, Settine would often come up with the bones of a song and then bring them to Bolton or the whole band to hammer out. This time, Settine and Bolton still got the ball rolling— “Gone for the Weekend,” “Can’t Figure It Out,” “Werewolf” and  “Moving Along,” which was originally earmarked as the last song on Bluebeard, were the first cuts that felt relatively finished—but the entire band played a bigger role in bringing those arrangements to life. 

“Alec and I have always had this writing partnership that has been really close and special,” Settine says. “That’s how we came together—from the first EP, we’d get together to work things out. It’s always been this thing where we’ll text each other and see what we’ve got. And, in June of 2024, we were sitting on his couch trading songs, and it seemed like we had come up with the core of what would become Werewolves. Then, we just started working out arrangements with the band. Our work on this record is the truest expression and distillation of what we are as a group. We were having these rehearsals and then, as we were adding things on, it all just became more collaborative, and it was really fun and special.”

In many ways, it’s simply an evolution of Settine and Bolton’s approach from the start. The Birmingham, Ala. natives met during their freshman year at Auburn in 2012 and started playing together in a local cover band. “It wasn’t really as serious,” Settine says. “Alec and I always felt really dedicated, but it was college. Sometimes someone is like, ‘I’m gonna be in a band,’ and then the next year comes around and they’re like, ‘Actually, I’m just gonna be a college kid.’ So some people were not really engaged and, eventually, in our last year, Alec went out and got a gig and called me and was like, ‘I need somebody to help me play this three-hour gig and I was like, ‘Well, of course.’ We wanted to keep playing together, and that’s how The Brook & The Bluff started.”

Playing as a duo, their early gigs mostly consisted of covers, though the budding songwriters would slide in their early originals every once in a while, hoping their audience didn’t notice— though some fans did, and their enthusiasm encouraged the nascent musicians to keep writing. 

“We were doing a ton of Beatles music, a bunch of Sam Cooke songs and all this over stuff that was all over the map,” Settine says. “It was, first and foremost, songs that we loved and songs that we wanted to play and then we would be like, ‘Now, what do these hammered college bros wanna hear?’ We’d throw in some Sugar Ray and ‘Tribute’ by Tenacious D was always one that killed. We would do something weird, like a Justin Timberlake cover with two acoustic guitars. It was always interesting.”

The duo chose the moniker The Brook & The Bluff by combining the names of areas where they hailed from—Settine is from Bluff Park and Bolton grew up in Mountain Brook—and began honing their infectious blend of indie-folk, soul and rock. 

After graduation, The Brook & The Bluff’s founding members returned to Birmingham and met John Canada, who saw them during the fall of 2015 and offered to round out their sound. John’s brother, Kevin Canada, signed on as their keyboardist a few years later.

The Brook & The Bluff released their self-titled full-length debut in 2018 and followed that set with 2019’s First Place, 2021’s Yard Sale and Bluebeard. Along the way, they also relocated to Nashville and continued to barnstorm the country, appearing at Bonnaroo, Hangout Music Fest, Firefly Music Festival and Shaky Knees and supporting like-minded acts such as Mt. Joy and Rainbow Kitten Surprise. Yet, by the time they entered the studio to work on Werewolf, several members of the group were at a crossroads—10 years into their project—as one musician was preparing for his wedding and another was going through a divorce. They naturally filtered that range of emotions into the music.

“It was super cathartic,” Settine says of the creative sessions. “It’s also been a processing tool first and foremost, trying to figure out what’s going on with you. This was the first time that I was writing songs in real time as my relationship was falling apart. I was moving out and had to move into Alec’s house while I figured out where all the pieces were falling. So writing, being together in a house and being able to walk out into the living room and say, ‘What do we have today?’ was definitely a change and something that was really needed—for me especially. But it was interesting because we had both ends of the spectrum represented—some guys are getting married and starting this whole part of their lives and I’m leaving that and going back into another phase. A lot of the lyrics are about how I felt like a piece of shit most of the time, and how I was looking at things that were going on or reflecting on how I was as a partner.”

Their homegrown approach also reminds Settine of their early days jamming together in Birmingham. “We’d have band practice at 11 a.m. most days,” he says. “We would walk in some days, and Alec would be playing a completely new demo that he was working on that we hadn’t heard—that was how ‘105’ came together. We trickled into rehearsal one day and Alec sneakily pulled up his computer and started playing it and everybody was like, ‘What the hell is that?’ That’s the song.”

While Settine’s words dealt with that emotional roller-coaster head-on, the group cased those lyrics in up-tempo, energetic music.

“One of my friends texted me and said, ‘My friend’s listening to your songs and having a real empathetic moment for you,’ because all of them seemed to be really sad,” he says. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, but they are hidden by some happy guitars and harmonies.’”

This past fall, The Brook & The Bluff returned to the road, both to remind concertgoers that “we’re still here” and also to road test the Werewolf songs. They found that the new material already felt familiar to their fans.

“A lot of times, when we would go into playing one of the new songs, the energy in the room would lift,” Settine says. “As a touring artist, you’re always a little bit scared because people want to hear the songs they know. But this time, we never ran into that problem, and it was honestly validating. We would start the riff to ‘Werewolf,’ and this palpable energy was moving throughout the room. So it’s like, ‘OK, maybe we’re onto something—maybe we did make the right kind of record.’”

In January, The Brook & The Bluff also appeared at Out of the Blue, the Mexican destination event hosted by Noah Kahan. Settine says he relished the opportunity to hang out with so many artists in their musical community, who he rarely gets a chance to spend quality time with. In addition to their own set, the members of The Brook & The Bluff sat in with the festival’s headliner during a cover-heavy show that weaved in many of Out of the Blue’s performers. Kahan circulated a list of potential covers in advance of the gig, and Settine and his bandmates zeroed in on Sufjan Stevens’ “Chicago” and MJ Lenderman’s “She’s Leaving You.”

“I was obsessed with that record,” Settine says of Lenderman’s 2024 breakthrough, Manning Fireworks. “I feel like that was part of what we were like experiencing, too. And when that record came out, we were like, ‘Holy guitar.’ It feels like Tom Petty back in the day in a lot of ways when you listen to his music.”

Looking ahead, The Brook & The Bluff will hit the road this winter and spring for an extended run through several cities they haven’t visited in quite some time. While in the past the group has cherry-picked a few new tunes to focus on live, this time they are pumped to “play the record in the same way they recorded it” and plan to showcase all of their new tunes at different points.

“Bluebeard was hard to recreate because we had done so many things in the studio that we couldn’t bring on the road, like making the solo on ‘Hiding’ have this giant pitch shifting moment,” he says. “This time we are excited to just present ourselves as five musicians who are just going to be playing off of each other every night.”

A student of rock history, Settine abides by the Prince motto of giving his fans what they want and promises the hits, but The Brook & The Bluff also plan to draw from different corners of their catalog. He suspects they will put together three or four different versions of the setlist they can turn to on any given night to keep it interesting for themselves as well. “We’ll probably be playing most of the same songs from the new album every night,” he says. “But we also wanna draw from the whole catalog and see how we are feeling on a given night. We can say, ‘Do we wanna play all of our Spotify Top 10 or hammer out some deep cuts tonight?’ It will definitely change night to night.”