Chatting Up Pete Lanctot: What Influences the Country/Blues Artist & His Stray Dogs
Pia Finnigan
Posted On September 1, 2015
(ND) Pete Lanctot & The Stray Dogs will be doing a residency at Brooklyn’s 68 Jay Street Bar. A historic Brooklyn venue. What do you like best about connecting to the audience in a live setting?
(Pete Lanctot) Yeah, we’ve been playing the first Saturday of the month residency at 68 Jay Street Bar for almost two years now. Jan Bell, who curates the music there, and is an amazing songwriter herself, has really created a gem. It’s a really special and intimate thing going on there. I think it’s a combination of the fact that it’s a very old New York feeling thing going on in a neighborhood that’s increasingly populated with luxury high rises and the fact that Jan has really built an amazing community and knows the scene so well. It’s our favorite place to play in Brooklyn and we’re really honored to have been doing the residency for these past two years.
(ND) Do you have any pre-performance rituals?
(Pete Lanctot) In general I try not to be to premeditated about performing. One of the most exciting things about playing with the Stray Dogs is that there’s a rotating cast of really talented musicians in the band, so each show is unique and different. Everyone really listens and reacts to each other on stage which gives the music a very raw energy but it’s something that really can’t be plotted out beforehand. It fits the vibe of the music well and ultimately it works to our advantage logistically because New York is a tough place to have pre-performance rituals. Clubs tend to be pretty tight quarters and there are usually bands on before and after you, so it’s often a set up, plug in and start playing situation.
(ND) How have Brooklyn & Nashville, 2 music capitals of the world, molded your music and you as an artist?
(Pete Lanctot) Our producer, Chris Donohue is based in Nashville and there’s a whole iteration of the Stray Dogs comprised of Nashville guys. We recorded No Sign of Love or Farewell, our forthcoming record as well as our EP, Caledonia with Chris in Nashville and go down there often to play. Tennessee is an amazing place for music. It’s like a microcosm of American music contained in one state. There’s the Appalachian mountains and that whole tradition of music in the east, Memphis in the west with it’s blues tradition, where things first went electric even before Chicago had a scene and then it all meets in Nashville in the center of the state, which of course has a deep history of country music and the record industry. It’s all the music that’s really influenced me and you can really feel that energy when you’re there. New York is a much rougher energy. It’s a jazz city and a punk music city and has that fly by the seat of your pants at one hundred miles an hour feel which I love, there’s a recklessness to it. I think that the convergence of those two vibes have had a huge impact on my music and on me as an artist.
(ND) You can hear the influences of so many types of music – country, jazz, blues, Americana – in your work. How would you describe your unique sound to someone who has never heard it before?
(Pete Lanctot) This is always a tough question to answer. We’re often described as an Americana band, which is a really wide umbrella and contains a lot of different styles and genres. I’m deeply influenced by old blues and country music artists and the music I write comes out of that tradition and I’m really lucky to be able to work with a number of really amazing, creative musicians who really get those references and have a lot of respect for that tradition. However, ultimately we’re interested in creating something new and modern using those references as jumping off points. To keep the vibe of those old recordings without trying to replicate or imitate them.
(ND) Tell us a little about the inspiration behind your recent track, “The Only Love I Know?”
(Pete Lanctot) It’s a Country Waltz. It’s an old feeling song that kind of borrows from Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb and Bob Wills. Those old country songs are pretty amazing because the song rarely tells you the whole story. With songs like I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry or Wildwood Flower you only get a few little details and you need to piece the rest of the story together for yourself and then you’ll have these amazing, beautiful melodies that underscore these really devastating stories. With The Only Love I Know, the band is a pretty traditional country music orchestration of fiddle, guitar, upright bass and drums, but lyrically the narrative becomes less and less clear whether the narrator is speaking to a long time love or a past love or a love that was never there at all. It’s uses that older tradition of songwriting and form and reworks it into something new and modern.
(ND) Who has inspired you most in your musical career? Why?
(Pete Lanctot) I don’t think that there’s any way I could pinpoint just one person. I’m really inspired by listening to other songwriters. Tom Waits, Nick Cave, guys like that are an education in what a song can do, they are on a different plane in terms of thinking about songs. I’m really inspired by Alynda Lee Segarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff. She is doing smart, modern, important things with very traditional American song forms and sounds. She’s a really inspiring writer. I also love a lot of older stuff, Charlie Patton, The Carter Family, Skip James, The Mississippi Sheiks. There’s so much mystery in those recordings. Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of Cajun music from the 1920s and 30s, guys like Iry Lejeune, Canray Fontenot and Delma Lachney. That music is so strangely menacing and beautiful. It’s not too difficult to find inspiration when you have such a deep and vibrant musical tradition to tap into.
(ND) What can we expect from your upcoming album, No Sign of Love or Farewell, set to release October 2015?
(Pete Lanctot) To me, No Sign of Love or Farewell feels like a collection of short stories or snapshots of a bunch of different characters that don’t necessarily have direct contact with each other but inhabit the same world. It deals with loss, love, anger, all the good country music material. The songs generally deal with being caught in the middle of something, of being uncertain of where to go. Narratively they go some strange places. There’s a song about running away with a medicine show circus, a chain gang gospel song sung from the perspective of a morally questionable preacher, kind of surreal settings, but for me as a songwriter it’s really exciting to find the humanity in these situations and to be able find where tenderness, love, regret anger, very normal and powerful human emotions lie in the midst of all that weirdness. We recorded it very quickly- the whole thing was tracked in five days down in Nashville (besides for one session up in Brooklyn to track Adam Brisbin, our guitar player up here). Working at that pace was great because it gave the record a very present energy- it really has a “band playing in a room” vibe. There wasn’t time to overthink things, which I think really worked to our advantage.
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