I was in my happy place — it was a bittersweet evening, but I was nevertheless in my happy place, in the back of the room, right in front of the soundboard. Onstage were three of my favorite people ever, three of my dearest friends.
The show was sold out, the room was filling up, and the crowd was beginning to get rowdy. But in my little corner of the ornate Royale in Boston, a pall of sadness was creeping in. The end of the set was nigh and I knew it. And then the text. "Are you with the Darlins? Are you safe? Have you heard about Paris? There's been an attack at a concert."
It felt like a punch in the gut. Panic kicked in. My happy place was now a place of violence and disappointment and panic — and I stopped paying attention to the show. This was the last show I would ever see my friends play together, and here I was furiously Googling, oblivious to what was happening around me while searching for answers that I didn't really want to find.
Half a world a way, someone just like me was standing in the sweet spot — watching artists they'd seen grow and develop, watching friends they'd known and cared for since they were just scrappy rock 'n' roll upstarts — and they were massacred. And onstage in Boston, Those Darlins were sounding better than they ever had.
After roughly a decade together, Nashvillian rock 'n' rollers Those Darlins are calling it quits. They'll say goodbye with a farewell show Friday at The Basement East. Now I'd like to take a look back at their evolution as a band.
H.A.R.L.O.T.S.
I wasn't there at Those Darlins' moment of inception, but I was close. I was around when Kelley Anderson, Nikki Kvarnes and Jessi Wariner started kicking around the idea of playing country covers. Not pop stuff, not tourist stuff, but deep traditional country. Jessi was from the woods of Kentucky, Nikki was from the mountains of Virginia, and Kelley was from the Carolina coast. We were all at the Southern Girls Rock and Roll Camp in Murfreesboro, Tenn., and the vibe was in the air. The trio adopted the surname Darlin and started practicing and practicing and practicing.
They were buck dancing back in those days and would practice in my then-girlfriend's kitchen while cooking and drinking wine. It was like some scene from a Les Blank documentary. Jessi and Nikki lived down the street from Mandi — now my wife — on the other side of the cemetery in a house my wife still calls the "Witch's Hat." They called themselves the Highland Avenue Royal Ladies of Traditional Secrets. Jessi made a H.A.R.L.O.T.S. poster, and Mandi hung it in the kitchen.
It was a magical era of house shows and outsider venues. Everybody was making art, and nobody was worrying about the consequences. It was a time of CD-Rs and primordial social networking, when the music industry was bottoming out, nobody knew what they were doing, and anything was possible. Nashville wasn't cool in the eyes of the world in those days — Murfreesboro even less so — and no one knew what was brewing in the house shaped like a witch's hat on the south side of the cemetery.
THE WHOLE DAMN THING
By the time Those Darlins' debut self-titled album hit stores in 2009, the buck dancing was gone. But the band had mastered the trad-country moves that came with practicing and practicing and practicing. Their influences were broadening as they brought in classic R&B and garage, reflecting more of the stylistic restlessness that would define the band's triptych of LPs.
Those Darlins was recorded in New York City with Jeff Curtin of Small Black. It was a move that would prove fortuitous, even if it felt counterintuitive at the time. Like Nashville punks Be Your Own Pet before them, the Darlins cast a spell over New York media. They were young, beautiful and hip, and they could play circles around most cats. They could bring the party while playing said circles around said cats. They wrote songs that were rebellious and hilarious and brash. They were from a weird place and were tailor-made for the apex of music blogging's cultural impact.
The world economy was collapsing, American conservatives were kicking off an eight-year tantrum, and the Facebook "like" button had yet to be created, and things were fucking tense, man. Tracks like "Whole Damn Thing" — an irreverent and absolutely true story about getting drunk and eating an entire chicken — and "DUI or Die" were insolent and cheeky and tough to pin down.
They were raucous and wild but without the machismo collector-dude-isms of the underground or the slick production and bland tones of Music Row. Those Darlins was a collection of tunes that clicked with the cool-kids hive mind and opened up a lot of doors for Jessi, Nikki and Kelley. It was an incredible thing to watch unfold from across town.
SCREWS GET LOOSE
We didn't see Those Darlins very often for a while there. Mandi and I got married, settled into our careers and stayed close to home. Kelley, Jessi and Nikki were careening from coast to coast, busting their collective ass and building an audience. Drifting apart is part of the game, one of those weird things about being a grown-up that you just have to get used to. The downside of watching the growth of a band you knew before anyone is that eventually, if everything goes right, you have to share them with everyone.
By the time Those Darlins' second LP, Screws Get Loose, was in the can, they'd hired my former roommate Linwood Regensburg to play drums and moved in a decidedly more rockin' direction. Back in the H.A.R.L.O.T.S days, when buck dancing and Carter Family tunes were de rigueur, the girls would joke about starting a heavy psychedelic band called Stone Fox. With the addition of Linwood, they'd more or less become Stone Fox.
Screws Get Loose succeeded by balancing out the weirdness of songs like "Mystic Mind" with the power pop of "Hives," and roughing up the edges with stinging barbs like the friend-zone anthem "Be Your Bro" and the girl-group kiss of "Boy." The Darlins' classic Southern flourishes were coming more from Big Star territory than Carter Family, more Sam the Sham than Patsy Cline. They were becoming ambassadors for the hip side of Music City, garnering plaudits from esteemed critics like Robert Christgau and landing placements on TV shows.
They were making it happen.
IN THE WILDERNESS
I didn't ask a lot of questions when Kelley left the band. The official explanation — that she left to "to pursue other musical projects and professional ventures" — seemed completely reasonable. In the decade I had known her, she'd been going full speed ahead in all directions. The fact that she had grown in a direction away from the two women she had spent five years working with didn't come as a surprise either. Hell, I would have been worried if things had stayed the same.
If I had learned anything about this group, it was that they were voracious learners with insatiable intellects and a fierce need to be moving forward. Their progress as people and as artists was impossible to slow down, even if the audience was getting left in the dust. By the time Blur the Line, the band's third and final album, was announced via a conservative-riling display featuring the four Darlins posed au naturel, any vestige of what Christgau had once called "cowgrrlcore" was gone.
Those Darlins had gone glam, enveloping themselves in slick Warhol-Arbus imagery, playing down the humor, wrestling with bigger thoughts on mortality and morality. This was a serious record from a band with a silly reputation, an ambitious piece of art from folks who were, frankly, known for being goofballs. Songs like "Ain't Afraid" and "Oh God" were dark — the music was gritty, heavy, world-weary, urbane. The band of Blur the Line was a long way from the fiddlin' and hollerin' of "Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy." All involved had come a long way from the halls of the Southern Girls Rock and Roll camp.
TOO HARD TO FORGET
"Well, it's about time for solo records, right?" I asked Linwood, attempting to mask my disappointment.
We were in a coffee shop in a quaint New England village outside of the city when he told me the band was breaking up. Nikki would confirm it later that night over oysters and prosecco downtown. Again, it seemed reasonable, and my professional intuition told me that great things were possible with this latest development. Still, it felt like my parents were getting a divorce.
Shittier, maybe, because my parents never made any good records. While this wasn't my band, per se, their victories felt like my victories, and their failures felt like my failures. They embodied the dream we all had, they achieved the goals we all shared.
That night in November, as the news of the Paris attacks flooded my newsfeed and I had to assuage my mother's fears that I was somehow in danger too, it dawned on me that I needed to put my phone away and focus on what was right in front of me. Not everyone gets to see their friends have such a great go of it.
Not everyone gets to see their friends grow to become artists of great talent and great renown. Hell, most people never get the chance to experience the magic of making music firsthand. And most bands don't get to bow out, dignity intact, artistic vision complete. I was, and always will be, grateful that I got to watch it all happen firsthand.
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