Photo Credit: Ricky Hartle
Sometimes a little time on the road can do wonders for musical creativity. That’s what Milwaukee’s The Delta Routine found out from their tour-heavy schedule over the last year or so. The outburst of creativity and inspirations from their time touring can be heard in their fourth and latest album You and Your Lion. The album marks their first with veteran producer and Semi-Twang guitarist Mike Hoffmann as a band member.
“I wrote a lot of lyrics while we were out on the road in the last year and I’ve gotten to see a lot of the country I’ve never seen before,” says singer Nick Amadeus. “It was the first time I had written lyrics on the road. This is the first time I got that done while we were in the van when we were in New York or wherever we happened to be. It shows up a lot on the record and made it very easy for me. It felt very natural and very good. They’re some of my most mature lyrics. I definitely got the points across that I wanted to.”
Hoffmann says he noticed how easy it was for Amadeus to write the songs.
“He was running them off and I was playing along with it. It was like everything flowed right away,” says Hoffmann. “The compositions were really well realized already. And of course we’re on the road so it was very fitting. This is some of Nick’s best work and best collection of songs.
“Hopefully when we look at it in retrospect maybe every state in the Union will be mentioned eventually,” adds Hoffmann jokingly. “It’s a fun little band thing that you mention every state at some point in your career.”
Where the band’s previous effort Cigarettes & Caffeine Nightmares was a bit disjointed with members coming and going during its creation, Lion feels like the truest and most complete representation of the group. Band members Victor Buell IV and Al Kraemer went back to focus on Calliope, so the band asked Hoffmann to join.
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“Cigarettes was really stitched together. We had been on the road as the unit we are now almost a year and we went into the studio,” says Amadeus. “It made it a lot easier and a lot more fun.”
One similarity, though, was that the band recorded at the same factory near Chicago, with additional work at Hoffmann and Amadeus’s studios. They recorded the tracks mostly live over a roughly four day span. The band was able to take advantage of the unlimited possibilities of the big and spacious room in the factory, which they described as “similar in size to the big room at Abby Road.” This time they didn’t feel rushed and recorded all 11 songs, compared to only a few the previous time.
For Hoffmann, the band is a bit of a return to the way he played before Semi-Twang.
“Coming in and playing Nick’s music and Delta Routine’s sound, it feels just where I’m supposed to be,” he says. “It’s a lot more loud and raucous. There’s a lot of more rock ‘n’ roll drama in it, power chords and volume and things like that that I love and that’s where I originally came from.”
Following the album’s release, the band hopes to get back on the road. They hope to play places they haven’t been yet like the Southeast and Northwest. One confirmed stop is this year’s South by Southwest.
“We’re pretty anxious to get back out on the road,” says Hoffmann. “When you take two months off you get antsy. We’re really conducive to travel in terms of the type of vehicle we have. It’s like we’re ready to go anywhere together. We’re really armed with a product now that can take us anywhere we want to go.”
The Delta Routine play an album release show on Sunday, Feb. 22 at Hotel Foster with openers Camp Sugar and Thistledown Thunders.
