photo: Alysse Gafkjen

***

David Shaw’s personal studio is tucked directly behind his New Orleans home, in a cozy, wooden building in the city’s St. Roch neighborhood. It’s a few steps from The Revivalists frontman’s main house, past a plunge pool that’s decorated with the lyrics to “Southern Nights.” The studio is filled with recording gear and instruments; an acoustic guitar and a platinum record for The Revivalists’ crossover hit “Wish I Knew You” hang on the wall.

The space has become Shaw’s artistic oasis, especially in recent years. Like pretty much everyone else, he spent the early part of the pandemic hunkered down, sorting through all the complications that came with the COVID-19 era. And, eventually, he also started making the most of his first forced vacation from the road since The Revivalists formed in 2007—using his studio to sketch out the initial ideas for what would become Pour It Out Into the Night, The Revivalists’ fifth full-length LP and first studio album in almost five years.

The record—a 12-track mix of rock and-roll swagger and anthemic pop that still maintains The Revivalists’ jamband soul—is both an evolution of the group’s hallmark sound and a recommitment to their original goal to deliver an upbeat, positive message that’s equally authentic and danceable. Arriving in June 2023 on Concord, as the live-music world returns for its first truly traditional summer in some time, Pour It Out Into the Night also captures the release and gratitude that Shaw, his bandmates and countless music fans feel as the world starts to tilt back on its axis (musically, at least).

“It was a bit of a creative boon for me,” Shaw says. “The pandemic got me off the road, which, honestly, was very much needed. I was totally fried and depleted. And so, with that extra time at home and that extra rest, I felt my brain come back online. I had this chance to be a normal human for a little bit. And all these thoughts and all these songs started coming—three or four a week. With songwriting, I’m either really slow or really fast.”

As he discusses the genesis of Pour It Out Into the Night, Shaw is relaxing in his studio on an early Thursday morning during Jazz Fest. It’s been an action-packed few days for the singer/ guitarist and the rest of the New Orleans bred Revivalists, full of more twists and turns than even a band weaned on the adrenaline-fueled annual gathering could have anticipated. After playing a hometown show at The Fillmore, the always-dynamic singer lost his voice, forcing The Revivalists to cancel their marquee spot at the Fair Grounds Race Course. He recovered in time to perform with his solo outfit at Daze Between—a jam-centric summit full of improvisational groups that, like The Revivalists, favor psychotherapy over psychedelics. And, a few days later during Jazz Fest’s second weekend, Shaw will turn in another set under his own name. However, as a make good for the previous weekend’s snafu, the singer will also invite out the rest of The Revivalists—many of whom were already onsite to back local favorite Boyfriend—for a surprise performance of Pour It Out Into the Night’s uber-catchy first single, “Kid.”

“Canceling the show, I finally understood how the airlines feel,” Revivalists guitarist Zack Feinberg adds with a laugh a few hours later, while sitting outside a coffee shop a short bike ride away from his house. “You have a legitimate reason that you can’t do it, and people are still so mad.”

It’s the very un-rock-and-roll hour of 10 a.m., but Feinberg has already been up since before dawn with his twins, who were born in July 2021. Like Shaw, Feinberg was freaked out about the lockdown at first, but quickly saw a silver lining. “There was a lot of anxiety and uncertainty—we didn’t see our best friends, like David and his wife, at the beginning,” he says. “It was a nice break in that it was the longest time that I’d ever spent stationary at home in my adult life. I did a lot of yoga and, that first summer, my fiancé and I went to Nantucket and bounced around with friends there. It was inspiring and I ended up getting a lot of work done.”

Pour It Out Into the Night started as an insular record but ended up taking The Revivalists outside the Crescent City. Shaw and Feinberg spent much of the pandemic working on tracks alone and together, finding solace in the ability to be in a room with other musicians. They also did their best to tune out the noise, even when they found themselves working on “Kid” on an auspicious day like Jan. 6, 2021.

“We were in a great writing flow,” Feinberg says of the tune, which is full of classic Revivalists lines like, “But I’m just living for the spirit now.” “It’s rare to feel like you’re channeling something really special. And then we started getting texts and saw what was happening. It was like, ‘Oh my, God. But, let’s ignore this for now.’”

“There’s not necessarily a word to define the feeling you get from being with your friends,” drummer Andrew Campanelli adds a few weeks later. “But that is what we aim to capture with this band.”

As the LP came into focus, The Revivalists found themselves sorting through 100 song sketches that they whittled down to the winning tracks which made the record. Some had been in the works for quite a while. Feinberg and Shaw started Springsteen-esque single “Good Old Days” after a colorful night during Mardi Gras 2018. Likewise, the thematically appropriate “Wait for the Sun” had already been in contention for multiple albums.

Eventually, the entire group decamped to Vermont to work with Rich Costey, a noted producer and mixer whose credits range from Muse to Ice Cube, Audioslave, Jimmy Eat World, Frank Turner, My Chemical Romance and The Mars Volta. “We walked a mile through the woods every day to the studio, which felt like an enchanted forest,” Shaw says. “It put us in a great headspace to be immersed with the music and to fully embody what we’re doing. There were no distractions. It just had this calming effect, being among the wilderness and being immersed in nature in that way. Humans, in general, really respond to that. And it felt like we were connected and calm. I’m not sure if we would’ve gotten that just being here in the city with all the distractions and all the hustle and bustle.”

“We went back to square one,” bassist George Gekas says. “We had that collective ethos again, after all these life changes and the pandemic. We went from being this large touring party/organization to where we were 10 years ago, which was just us and maybe one other person helping out. That let us focus on our writing and our interactions. It made it all feel a lot more organic to us.”

“It’s the distillation and the purity of doing a thing in its simplest and most honest form,” saxophonist Rob Ingraham says. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean we were in there hitting trash cans. We produced the hell out of this record.”

However, the group did end up bringing it all back home, finishing the project at Esplanade Studios and Marigny Studios in New Orleans, where they added some overdubs, recruited friends like vocalists Josh Kagler and Anjelika “Jelly” Joseph, and laid down the groovy “How We Move.”

There were a few setbacks along the way. The octet was forced to move out of their longtime practice space due to asbestos, and COVID continued to be a concern. “The whole band, except David, caught COVID when we went back on tour,” Feinberg says. “So, when we were coming back to do overdubs, we all had to do it remotely. I have a little mother-in law house and George quarantined there. We were getting Airbnbs for people to stay in so their families wouldn’t get it, and then I tested positive so George had to move out. It was a whole thing.”

Pour It Out Into the Night is also The Revivalists’ first record since Shaw dropped his debut solo album in 2021; a more personal and stripped-down set of songs, the self-titled LP had been in the works since long before the pandemic, but ended up teaching the singer a lot about his role in his primary outfit as well.

“Doing that project opened my eyes to a lot of things, and I hope to make another [solo record],” he admits. “With the band, I have a lot of firepower to lean on, everybody plays their role and we all know what we do best—we’ve all grown in that way. And with the solo group, every decision is on me, which is empowering, but I’m at my best when I’m very collaborative. I’m not the type of general that’s like, ‘It’s my way or the highway.’ I know that other people can see things that I can’t see, and if I close myself off to that, I’m not gonna be as good as I can be. I feed off their energy, and I feed off my own energy.”

Campanelli adds, “There are things on Pour It Out Into the Night that are very Dave and then things that are very not Dave, and that is what this band is about. The only thing that keeps that quantum cloud from being just chaos is the fact that, when we write the songs, we try to make sure that they truly represent us. We say things that we believe. We’re not just saying things because they might sound good in a song. That doesn’t mean that everything is true. But, there’s always some aspect of our character that plays into these metaphors.”

***

The Revivalists’ formation had all the makings of a classic-rock story long before the band achieved fame outside their local community. Shaw—who grew up listening to punk and, yes, Nickelback in Ohio—originally moved to New Orleans in 2007 to work for a gas company after Hurricane Katrina.

“I have a construction management degree so I moved down here for the rebuild,” he says. “We were laying the pipe for all of New Orleans after the gas lines flooded, and I was running the concrete crew. It was hard work—I had a lot of motivation to get this music thing going.”

Just a few weeks after relocating to his new hometown, Shaw happened to be singing an original song, “Purple Hearts,” on his front porch as Feinberg, who was starting his junior year at Tulane, rode by on his bike.

“Directly across the street was a cemetery so that was my audience,” Shaw says with a laugh. “I think about that sometimes—there’s something tied up in this lyric from our new album, ‘Sing the songs that wake the dead,’ that goes back to that moment.”

A guitarist and lifelong music fan, Feinberg was impressed with what he heard and stopped to listen to Shaw finish. The future bandmates struck up a conversation and Feinberg ended up riffing on some Mississippi John Hurt inspired licks on Shaw’s porch.

They quickly bonded and began hanging out more frequently. Feinberg made Shaw a compilation of 500 songs that were part of his cultural zeitgeist, including music from local heroes like The Meters. The guitarist—who grew up in Pleasantville, N.Y., in the shadow of Manhattan—was captivated by the then emerging modern jamband scene from an early age, having watched his older brother Seth Winters play clubs like New York’s Wetlands. During his formative years, he gravitated toward Béla Fleck & The Flecktones, Medeski Martin & Wood and Soulive, as well as mainstays like the Grateful Dead, Phish, Dave Matthews Band and classic songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Paul Simon. He cites a time he saw Citizen Cope open for Robert Randolph at New York’s Irving Plaza in 2001 as a particularly inspirational show.

Feinberg brings a natural jamband energy to his own group as well, rattling off key show dates with an archivist’s precision. He reminisces about a night he and Shaw bonded at the bar Cooter Brown’s. “I used my fake ID to get in, and we connected on a personal level,” the guitarist says. “We shared our personal histories and family histories—the little dark demons that we’d been facing. That was the beginning of that friendship.” (Feinberg keeps track of his group’s poster art as well, which inadvertently led him to Chris Jacob, who runs a local frame shop and gets writing credit on the new album. The Revivalists co-founder was impressed enough after seeing Jacob play live—wearing an Orville Peck-style mask— that he used a bit of his music in “Down in the Dirt.”)

Shaw and Feinberg started playing open mics and duo gigs around New Orleans, before gradually expanding their band. The project went through a few early lineup shifts, but the future core members all had natural chemistry. Feinberg had met Campanelli, a Loyola student, through the Sunday morning clinics they both attended at Tipitina’s and asked him to join as soon as they started doing full-band shows. Campanelli knew Gekas at Loyola and brought him aboard in 2008 when an early bassist went home for the summer. Similarly, Ingraham started sitting in with the nascent group Feinberg’s senior year and, later, joined in a more permanent capacity—though he had already been collaborating with the guitarist on other projects at Tulane.

“I was a psych major, and Rob was a double major so we were lab partners at a pharmacology lab,” Feinberg says with a smile. “We would give these little rats drugs and have them do mazes and stuff.”

Ed Williams, who plays pedal steel and occasionally Dobro in the group, went to Tulane, but didn’t meet Feinberg until after college.

“Ed started sitting in and joined after we added all these other instruments,” Feinberg says. “When you’re a young band, you need something to separate you.”

Likewise, trumpeter/keyboardist Michael Girardot had jammed with Feinberg in their college practice space and would occasionally guest with The Revivalists before he officially signed on.

“George, Andrew and I were trying to get something started, and Dave and I were doing another thing,” Williams says. “I came in to record ‘Catching Fireflies,’ a song Dave and I had written, and that solidified things, though I still had a job at that point. On the road, I was working in finance. And then at night, I would play the shows.”

The Revivalists also quickly distinguished themselves from their New Orleans brethren by writing rock-and roll songs that, despite the inclusion of brass instruments, stayed clear of jazz and pure funk. “We’re not from New Orleans. It is an influence, and it is a big part of our identity, but it’s not the core of who we are,” Feinberg says, noting that he and his bandmates were able to build strong early followings in their individual hometowns and had a mix of places to crash across the country from the start. “We’re always trying to stay true to ourselves.”

“We played the New Orleans thing to our advantage early in our careers, and we still had that college vigor,” Gekas says. “The New Orleans name could get us a gig on a Tuesday somewhere or we could open for Rebirth Brass Band.”

The band leaned into their improvisational roots by necessity. They nabbed a regular gig at a beach bar in Pensacola, Fla., called Bamboo Willie’s, charging through three sets a day for three days. In order to not be pigeonholed, The Revivalists had an early rule that they would shy away from covers so they channelled their teenage heroes and stretched out every night.

“George and I bonded over Umphrey’s McGee early on,” Williams says. “That’s what happens when you have multiple guys in the band who grew up in the Northeast.” “It’s cool to call these guys friends and colleagues,” Gekas adds.

“It’s like, ‘15 years ago, I was that dude at your show and now we are in a fantasy football league together.’”

Slowly, The Revivalists started having some small wins, which gradually built into a full-time career. They scored a spot at the 2012 Hangout Festival in Gulf Shores, Ala., through a competition and ended up meeting their future booking agent, Phil Egenthal. Around the same time, Galactic saxophonist Ben Ellman agreed to produce their sophomore album, City of Sound. And they signed with Hard Head management, leading to numerous collaborations with Warren Haynes and deeper inroads into the established jamband scene. Throughout, The Revivalists continued to play up to 150 shows a year, blossoming into festival favorites and consummate collaborators both in and out of their hometown. (They, ultimately, moved to C3 Management in 2016.)

Yet, perhaps the band’s defining moment took place when “Wish I Knew You,” a track off 2015’s Men Amongst Mountains, broke through into the pop stratosphere, scoring the musicians constant radio play and setting them on a path to becoming the rare jam-rooted band to appear on daytime programs like Today and Ellen. The upbeat banger peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard Adult Alternative Songs chart and, for a time, held the record for most plays in a week for any track on Alternative/Modern Rock radio.

“It changed our trajectory—having a lot of success like that upsets the balance a little,” Feinberg says. “We never tried to consciously say, ‘Let’s go in and make another ‘Wish I Knew You.’’ But it impacted on the next record in terms of our creative direction.”

The ensemble followed up that success with 2018’s Take Good Care—recorded and co-written with Dave Cobb, Andrew Dawson and Dave Bassett—which spawned another chart-topping single, “All My Friends.” They continued to grow as a live act too, headlining multiple nights at Morrison, Colo.’s Red Rocks and New York’s Radio City Music Hall, and even opened for The Rolling Stones on a few occasions. Chicago-based drummer Paulet “PJ” Howard, who played with Neal Francis in The Heard, also joined their ranks after collaborating with Shaw on a solo endeavor.

“Dave would call my phone. At that point, it was the gig line, but Dave would just ask about my family, and we became really good friends,” Howard says. “Unfortunately, my man Andrew had to have surgery during Jam Cruise one year, and they asked me to sub. Then, a year later, Dave called and said, ‘I have another idea I want to try out.’”

Of working with so many A-list producers on Take Good Care, Campanelli says, “There’s certainly pressure to follow it up, and that might have led to us writing songs with some more outside people on the last one, but it didn’t change us in this way where you’re just chasing money. We really like making catchy songs. It’s like, ‘How can we exist in that space without working for that space?’”

“The formula hit, and it wasn’t something that we had planned,” Williams says. “I don’t think we went into the studio and were like, ‘We need to do that again.’ We were seasoned enough to know how it works. We’re not gonna be able to go in there and make ‘Wish I Knew You 2.’ People would reject it. We’re eight individuals and we all have individual songwriting tendencies, and we play into that.”

“If we had success in the first three or four years, then things would be different,” Gekas says. “We talk about that all the time.”

“I knew these guys way before that song, and it is very inspiring and so cool to watch them rise to the occasion,” Howard says. “It has elevated their game, and it’s given them newfound motivation.”

Campanelli agrees, adding, “There’s some chatter about how certain people in the band might feel like the last record took us away from who we are. I don’t agree with that. We went to Nashville, and we lived on Music Row, and we were at RCA Studios. I love the last record. I like this record too. I have a little Dave Cobb in my head who yells at me all the time.”

***

On the Friday before Memorial Day, the members of The Revivalists have congregated at Relix’s New York studio for a livestream performance shortly before Pour It Out Into the Night’s release. A fitting summation of the various worlds The Revivalists’ currently traffic in, their New York media blitz not only includes the Relix session but also a return to Today and an acoustic taping for WFUV public radio.

Despite their high-profile morning show hang and a few early wake-up calls, the eight musicians are calm and collected, able to shift between settings with ease.

“With ‘Wish I Knew You,’ that pressure was new,” Girardot says. “We were a live band, figuring out how to make the songs as long and interesting as possible. And now we’ve lived with that for a while, and it doesn’t affect us as much anymore.”

The band is also prepping for their upcoming summer runs with The Head & The Heart and Band of Horses, working their latest batch of songs into their live set and figuring out new ways to naturally extend their classic tunes. “Wish I Knew You” currently runs about 10 minutes live.

The members of The Revivalists are adjusting to changes off the road as well. During the pandemic, Feinberg, Ingraham, Girardot and Gekas all became first-time fathers. (Williams already had a “Revival Tot.”)

“The songs that were written during the pandemic have an element of that time in them,” Campanelli says. “But it’s all coming from our perspective as growing people, trying to look for answers.”

“These East Coast cats, I’ve watched their demeanor change—not because of the music but because of what’s at home,” Howard says. “They have beautiful children, they have amazing wives, they have amazing families.”

“A lot of things changed because of COVID—the way we thought about the band and the way we appreciated the band,” Girardot says. “There was a time when I started learning coding and thinking about doing IT stuff again. It made us appreciate being able to do this again. Working on this album helped us find each other again.”

“The pandemic made me face myself,” Shaw says. “I can’t remember a lot of things from that time. It was almost like a trauma that my brain is protecting me from. Everything slowed down so there’s all the time in the world to just sit and ponder all of the decisions you’ve made. I didn’t know if my job was gonna even be a job anymore and, if so, how I was going to pay my mortgage. And that was scary. I had that swirling around in my head. So it was this weird collision of existential dread and pure bliss since I didn’t have to do anything.”

“Zack wrote ‘Good Old Days,’ and it meant one thing to him,” Girardot says. “But, recording that song in the middle of the pandemic made me so appreciative for what we have. All this stuff had been taken away from us. I didn’t know whether we would be able to tour again. But, I had this whole year to be at home with my daughter. I had my bandmates. When we started to record that song, I was like, ‘If our musical career had to end today, I would still be happy and satisfied with where we’ve been.’”

“Music has a unique ability to cradle someone and hold them in a way that lets them put their guard down,” Shaw says. “All their protectors go back to where they came from. When a song hits you, emotionally, it’s like, ‘I’m connecting with this person and what they went through via my own lens and what I went through.’ And when that connection is made, there’s no substitute for it. I’ve seen myself grow a ton through some of the songs that I’ve written and just by processing those emotions via that avenue. The energy has turned straight up—it’s more focused on positivity. It’s more energy-based, as opposed to leaning on this question of, ‘Are you high?’ We’re getting our high from this thing that’s going on up here.”

Shaw has long been vocal about his sobriety and ability to command a dynamic live show after years of clean living. After he moved to New Orleans, a night of hard partying landed him in the emergency room, and he decided to swear off drugs and alcohol.

“The sex, drugs and rock-and-roll thing is a total myth—it’s a total lie,” Shaw says. “Some people can do that and maybe they burn bright, but they burn out. For me, it was gonna go one way or the other, and I don’t think I would be here if it went a different way. I had to choose—I chose love, I chose music. I couldn’t choose this thing that was just this unfillable black hole.”

He is also a proponent of therapy and talking about mental health in music. “Therapy has been a huge part of my growth process, and I’m so happy that it’s being normalized these days,” Shaw says. “I’ve been in therapy for nine years, and there’s probably never two or three weeks that go by where I don’t talk to my therapist. We’ve developed a really special relationship, and I wish that for everyone.”

“A big throughline on the new record is cutting out the noise and the distractions,” Ingraham says. “At the core, this record is really truthful. This is us.”

Feinberg describes the idea of unburdening yourself—“getting it out there, off your chest”—as a major thread on the new LP. He is proud of his band’s ability to remain positive in this often dark era and enjoys that their music is equally at home in a muddy festival field or on the radio at a suburban pharmacy.

“Our music is life-affirming,” he says. “When we’re writing, we think about somebody going through a really hard time—the worst time in their life. And music has the ability to give people hope and lift spirits in a small way. It saves lives. We occasionally get messages from people saying how impactful and important our music has been to them, and we write with that in mind a lot. It’s right there in the name of the band— The Revivalists.”