Moondoggies

Moondoggies Tidelands has kind of snuck into my list of favorite albums over the last few months. It's grounded in alt.country, but alt.country with some weight to it, and with a liberal use of amplification, like the Band maybe. It's got a lot of heart, too, and some really uplifting multi-voiced vocal arrangements. So anyway I interviewed the singer for PopMatters and it went up today.

Don't Feel Doomed: An Interview With the Moondoggies
By Jennifer Kelly 31 May 2011

Near the close of the Moondoggies’ excellent second album, Tidelands, at the tail end of “We Can’t All be Blessed,” singer Kevin Murphy and his band – Caleb Quick, Bob Terreberry and Carl Dahlen – erupt into harmonies, their voices criss-crossing in triumph over what has been, up to that point, kind of a downbeat song. It’s a fitting summation for an album that begins in dogged discouragement and ends in renewal.

Tidelands is, by any definition, a huge improvement over the Moondoggies’ 2008 debut Don’t Be a Stranger, a tighter, more cohesive statement from a band that is still carving out its particular niche in rock and roll. The album was written during the darkest months of the post-meltdown recession, as friends and family were struggling to keep jobs and houses and put food on the table. Yet it is by no means a depressing album. Listen to it from beginning to end and you’ll begin to get a sense of endurance, of persistence in the face of deep discouragement and even of joy.

“That’s right on. That’s exactly it,” says Murphy when asked about the complex mix of emotions that Tidelands captures. “We were trying to be constructive in the middle of negativity. We were trying not to be too much of a bummer.”

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