Interview: Jesse James DeConto (The Pinkerton Raid)

Currently based in Durham, Jesse James DeConto hails from New England and intelligently blends the Americana traditions of both regions in his band The Pinkerton Raid. But on the group’s new album The Highway Moves the World — slated for a Dec. 2 release — a fleshed-out rock sound nicely complements his salt-of-the-earth lyrics, resulting in the group’s most impressive collection thus far.

Prior to a Friday, Nov. 4, full-band show at Highland Brewing Co., DeConto spoke with Asheville Stages about the latest batch of songs, maintaining musical rapport with a rotating cast of players, and finally breaking into the WNC scene.

Edwin Arnaudin: What do you consider some of the key turning points in your musical career thus far?

Jesse James DeConto: In 2016, I made Tolerance Ends, Love Begins with a 10-piece band at The Fidelitorium with Mark Simonsen and Thom Canova producing and engineering, and that was the first time I felt like I had done what I had set out to do, and it opened up some of the opportunities I’d been hoping for in terms of festival slots and feedback from critics and fans. Up to that point, I think I needed to make a couple of albums as an “elementary education” and to experiment with booking and touring just to try and get a handle on what I was doing as an artist. My brother Steven and sister Katie and a cast of friends hung with me through those first few years and gave me a chance to try and figure it out.

Since then, I feel really lucky to have been able to play for a solid four years with Scott McFarlane on drums and Jon DePue on bass and to have made two albums with them and with David Wimbish producing. David has really challenged me as a songwriter, and I think these last couple of albums have been more rooted in songcraft than soundscapes or performance-art. And I’ve come to realize how important that is to me.

And just as important has been creating new music, hanging out and traveling with a steady group of pals and building those friendships. Crafting songs as a guitarist with a rhythm section is a big reason why The Highway Moves the World is as much of a rock album as it is, even though overall it’s still firmly in the indie-folk and Americana camps.

Jon and Scott couldn’t continue with all the touring and commitment after the COVID-19 lockdowns; I’ve been able to rebuild that sense of trust and camaraderie with Derek Skeen, who now plays either rhythm guitar or bass and sings the background vocals that have been such a big part of my sound over the years. We’re still trying to find our footing with a lot of turnover in the rest of the lineup over the past year.

I’m glad to have a circle of friends and my brother Steven, who can step in, even if they can’t commit. Scott is actually filling in on drums for our shows in November. Knock on wood, I think we’ve found a path forward with some new guys joining up over the next couple of months, but recognizing the song as central to all this has made me more intentional and comfortable with seeking out more opportunities to play solo and potentially to arrange future recordings with that in mind.

Just before the pandemic, I had come to terms with how important house concerts are going to be as I move forward, and how I need to move fluidly between full band, solo and smaller ensembles. Big thanks to friends involved with The Last Real Circus, the booking app SHOWX, and my new team at Keystone Artist Connect who’ve had me play solo sets connected to SXSW, Newport Folk Festival, and AmericanaFest this year. All of this has helped me to own that this is a solo project with full-band expressions, and I don’t take for granted that my siblings and pals have walked alongside me with it during different seasons over the past decade.

EA: Please tell me about your transition from journalist to musician and what prompted the shift. In what ways have you seen both sides influence each other over time — particularly with your songs on The Highway Moves the World?

JJD: I didn’t see myself as a musician when I was growing up. I first started singing in a school choir when I was 15, and my world started to open up. I will work really hard when I can see the end goal, but I didn’t have that vision when I first picked up a guitar at 17. It was another five or six years before I wrote my first song, and it was terrible.

But I guess I got better at it. The only thing I knew myself to be was a writer. I figured that out when I was 14 and accepted that I was never going to play second base for the Red Sox. And so I fell into journalism because I have an idealist streak in me — I couldn’t imagine using my creativity in a Don Draper kind of way, to sell stuff — and a newspaper job was the only option I knew about where you could kind of make a living as a writer. I turned out to be OK at it, and I stuck with it for more than a decade full-time and then freelancing after that.

But the transition happened simply because it took me a long time to figure out what I really loved and wanted to do with my life. And even if I had known, I was raising kids and so I couldn’t take the financial risks that are necessary early-on if you want to build a career in the arts.

At some level, journalism and songwriting are the same job — you’re telling stories that can help people relate to one another. When you’re doing a good job at either one, you’re setting a scene, developing characters, trying to help people reflect on their own lives and how they might fit into other people’s lives. Many years ago, I wrote a lot of the lyrics for Tolerance Ends, Love Begins while sitting in courtrooms waiting for hearings to start when I was a crime reporter.

I think facts can have power, both in the deliberative or political sense and in the literary sense. Some of my favorite lyrics from the new album — and also beyond my own writing — are just bare facts: “The rain’s a runnin’ down the walls” about the leaky basement where I learned to play bass with my dad 20 years ago; the unadorned naming of East Coast landmarks that evoke memories for me and I imagine for other people — “Mass Pike, the G-Dub bridge, the Jersey tolls, the Chesapeake”; “He’ll cash the chips, scatter gold, suck the marrow from the bone,” quite literal images about how my brother savors life, from blackjack and fine dining to incredible generosity.

EA: When and where were these songs written and recorded? And what personal and social matters were especially on your mind while crafting these lyrics and soundscapes?

JJD: I wrote all these songs between about 2016 and 2019, and recorded them with David in early 2020 at Arbor Ridge Studio in Chapel Hill, with some overdubs happening into 2021.

There are a few songs at the core of the album that came out of watching my wife and teenaged kids trying to navigate their experiences of gender in the era of Trump and #metoo and the women’s marches. “The Magical Flying Rowan Tree,” “(Not All) The Boys Will be Boys,” and “Cinnamon Sweet” are all songs of empowerment. Deep down, I don’t know what they really mean to these people I love, but writing them helped me as a songwriter, husband, and dad to find something hopeful to hang on to. When you love someone, watching them suffer is probably the hardest thing there is in this life.

I think once I figured out this was going to be an album inspired by my family, then I started thinking along those lines. Appropriately, I guess, these songs were written at my home here in Durham. “Basement Tapes,” “The Highway Moves the World,” and “In Your Eyes” are all grounded in different identities I inherited from my family, so that’s why I sequenced them up front, setting the stage for the rest of the album. On “Au Cheval,” “Sometimes, Brothers,” “Lisbet Cries” and “Dream the Sun,” I’m trying to narrate universal human experiences in the stories of each of my siblings.

I had “Blood in My Eyes” left over from the album cycle for Where the Wildest Spirits Fly, when it just felt too personal to fit on a cinematic concept album about landscapes. Even though it’s not factually related to my family, it could have been. The people we love and trust the most are the ones who can hurt us the worst. “Merseybeat” is a really different song, but it’s similar in that it’s rooted in a friendship — this one with Scott. Playing in a band together for years, you spend a lot of time in the car just talking. Scott loved talking about the Wirral Peninsula outside Liverpool where his mom grew up. I tried to capture the spirit of that place in the images he gave me. It’s a good capstone for the album because it celebrates belonging to a family and to a place — or to multiple places over a lifetime.

Photo by Kendall Bailey

EA: What does your family think of the title track? Do they like having their story immortalized in song or are some a little bashful about it?

JJD: Fittingly, my family is more concerned about my kids and my nieces and nephews than anything I’m doing! Best I can tell, they appreciate the song. We DeContos are pretty much an open book. Anyway, I think most listeners will plug their own experiences into the lyrics rather than learning much about my family.

EA: How do you feel that your bandmates’ skills have grown on this album? Were there particular moments in the writing and/or recording process where they surprised you, and perhaps helped push your own skillset to new levels?

JJD: This is going back to the recording process, of course, because nobody in the new live band was involved at that point. But I think Scott, Jon, and David in their own ways pushed me toward some more aggressive sounds than I would have chosen on my own. I felt very indecisive about how “Blood in My Eyes” was going to sound. Most of what you hear in the recording was the result of a pivot on tones and rhythm that we worked out over the course of 24 hours at Arbor Ridge. I had to literally “sleep on it.”

I’ve always gone for sweet, clean electric tones. I didn’t feel like a heavy rock rhythm and fuzzed out guitar were really in my wheelhouse, but everybody agreed that’s where the song should go, and it forced me to make some decisions about that on a shorter time horizon than I like, but we ended up with something that seems to resonate with people. We had Garrett Langebartels on a second guitar for about six months leading up to those recording sessions, and I think his guitar solo on that song became one of my favorite moments on the album.

EA: I love the horns on the title track and the organ — maybe a Hammond B3?— later on. Did you envision these sounds early on, or were they something you added later in the recording process to help round out the songs?

JJD: We were using Jeff Crawford’s studio, and he’s got a Hammond L100. That organ sound was David’s idea, and he tracked it right away after we had laid down the rhythm parts. I’m pretty much a sucker for brass, and I decided early on that the ending should feel like a big celebration and that trumpets were the way to do it. I told Charlie Humphrey that I wanted it to sound like a “fanfare.” I always loved Charlie’s horns in Holy Ghost Tent Revival [now known as Moves], and Scott had gone to App State with him, and I like to have those personal connections when making a record. Kevin Williams from Holy Ghost also engineered those overdubs there in Asheville early in 2021. It’s one of my favorite moments on the album.

EA: You make it back to Asheville on a fairly regular basis. What is it about the musical community here that keeps you wanting to play here?

JJD: Honestly, I found it really hard to break into that market. It took years to book our first show at Isis [Music Hall] last September. I’m probably just savoring every moment and hanging on for dear life! Maybe it’s because I grew up in New Hampshire, but I feel at home in the mountains. It was sweet to get to share a show with Kevin, [drummer] Ross [Montsinger] and [vocalist/guitarist] Dulci [Ellenberger] as Fwuit back in the spring, and Ryan Schilling and his team are cutting the new album at American Vinyl Co.

I think the biggest thing is probably that my best friend — also named Kevin — moved to Asheville last year after 17 years in Seattle. His wife Eliza’s brother Jordan Carlson is a stylist at Wink Salon and has lived there for a long time. On top of playing at Isis, The Grey Eagle, AVC with Lonesome Station, and Highland Brewing Co. coming up on Nov. 4, we’ve played a couple of house shows at Jordan’s place down in Fletcher. Just over the past year or two, I have a new community of friends in Asheville that I didn’t have before. That’s what makes Asheville so great for us is just coming to play for my friends and their friends.

EA: Do you have big plans to share these tunes later this year and into 2023 once the album is out in December?

JJD: We’re playing a series of album release shows in the places that mean a lot to me. After Highland, we’re going to Charlotte on Saturday the 5th, and then to Richmond and DC on Nov. 11-12. We’ll do more of these regional releases in Wilmington on Dec. 2, and here in Durham on Dec. 9. I’m working on tour dates from Atlanta to New York in February with Palmyra out of Virginia and Ferdinand the Bull out of Pittsburgh.

It looks like I’ll have at least a couple of unofficial showcases at SXSW, and I’m tentatively working on a big solo tour out through the Midwest, down to Austin and back over two-three weeks. I should be back in Asheville at one end of that tour or the other. Besides that, we’re working hard at booking the festival season for 2023 and will build dates around that. Hopefully we’ll be able to announce some of those dates soon.

IF YOU GO

Who: The Pinkerton Raid
When: Friday, Nov. 4, 7 p.m.
Where: Highland Brewing Co., 12 Old Charlotte Highway, Suite 200., highlandbrewing.com
Tickets: Free

(Photo by Heidi Gardner)