Musical Metamorphosis
How Pickwick lost its sound and found a soul.
There once was a band from Seattle called Pickwick. They peddled decent but indistinctive indie folk (as it seems most Seattle bands these days are apt to do). The band occasionally ventured across the landmass known as Washington state and was almost immediately embraced by the villagers of Spokane, specifically the sect that holed away in former coffeehouse and music haven the Empyrean.
Well, that band is nearly dead. Today, Pickwick is still intact. In fact, the band is thriving — these days as a soul act. See, while the band found love in this neck of the woods, there was a more important group that wasn’t in love with those old indie folk tunes: the members of Pickwick.
Roughly a year and a half ago, the band had an existential crisis and was on the verge of giving up. Rather than simply throwing in the towel, the guys climbed into a cocoon of self-reflection in hopes of emerging as a new creature.
“We had to really evaluate what we did well as a band and what we didn’t do well,” says guitarist Michael Parker. “We tried to listen to the music we were making as critically as we could, and we all kind of looked at each other and got frustrated with the music we were making.”
“We felt it was pretty derivative of the bands we were listening to at the time: Wilco was a big influence at the time, the first Fleet Foxes record came out, Grizzly Bear put out a record — bands like that,” he says. “We didn’t really hear ourselves in it all that much, or anything that was really all that unique to ourselves.”
The band began implementing drastic changes, which transformed their reserved indie-folk sound into something with a little more soul. Parker says one of their most important decisions was to let singer Galen Disston be himself. Read More…
