Photo by Nicole Mangiola
Blessed Feathers recorded their last album, Order of the Arrow, in a fully adorned New York studio. For their latest album, though, the folk-pop duo didn’t have the benefit of a professional studio, or even a home studio—or, for that matter, even a home. In early 2013 Donivan Berube and Jacquelyn Beaupré Berube quit their jobs and said goodbye to West Bend to travel the continent, play shows and tour the National Parks. The couple spent the next two years voluntarily homeless, mostly living out of a tent.
“We put our apartment into a storage unit so our overhead was only $50 a month,” Donivan says. “We weren’t really making money, but we didn’t have rent or a mortgage to pay when we were gone, or a job to get back to. Once you get your expenses down as close to zero as you can, all of the sudden you’re looking at a map, like, ‘Well, do you want to go to Miami? Do you want to go to North Carolina? New York? California?’ Wherever—you can go anywhere.”
Those travels are captured on the duo’s latest album, There Will Be No Sad Tomorrow. Every Blessed Feathers album has been about the road, but this is the first that was actually recorded there. Part of it was tracked in Huaycán, Peru, which inspired a pair of songs, and the rest was captured in friends’ basements across the country using borrowed equipment. “I would borrow a friend’s laptop, because we didn’t have one, or a friend’s drum kit for a week and do all the drumming I could do before I had to return it,” Donivan says.
Unideal as those recording circumstances were, they kept the band on track, Jacquelyn says. “We would just wait until our friend left and then set up all the recording equipment real quick, hammer the songs out, then clean up everything before they got home,” she says. “We had to work fast in order to get the songs down, and maybe that pushed us to work more productively.”
Though Sad Tomorrow’s backstory suggests a light fantasy—a life on the road, free from responsibilities—the songs hit heavier than that. A few of the album’s more mournful numbers were shaped by an ambitious bike trip Donivan took last year, a month and a half trek from Wisconsin to California. “Wyoming / Dakota” details that trip’s loneliest, most punishing stretch. For days he’d bike a hundred miles without seeing much of anything. “Wyoming, how could you do this to me?” he sings, “How much more road could there be?”
A Clean Break
It’s impossible to separate the achiness in Blessed Feathers’ songs from the band’s incredible backstory, which was highlighted in an NPR segment in 2013. Raised in Florida as a Jehovah’s Witness, Donivan moved to West Bend at age 17 to live with friends who shared his faith, and found work in a pizzeria with Jacquelyn, who did not. The two hit it off, bonding over music among other shared interests, but being with her meant leaving the church, and thus cutting off ties with nearly everyone in his life, including his closest friends and entire family. So he did.
NPR’s piece proved unusually controversial for a four-minute Morning Edition segment about some pretty music. Dozens of commenters online weighed in on Donivan’s choice, some supportive; others, to put it mildly, not. “The coolest part was all those people writing in to me and telling me how much it meant to them to hear that. Somebody literally told me that I was the shining beacon of someone who had lost their family, but still set out to pursue their dreams and make a new life for themselves,” Donivan says. “To hear that was amazing. That’s why you make music: to connect with people. That’s what everyone wants.”
For all the exposure a segment like that provides, though, it doesn’t do much for a band’s career. “We made $1,000 on iTunes the day that story aired,” Donivan says, “but it’s not like Sub Pop came calling, or Rolling Stone came calling the next day. It didn’t matter.”
After years of courting their favorite labels, hoping to secure a commitment from one, they’re taking advantage of their independence with Sad Tomorrow. They’re releasing it digitally themselves, and partnering for the physical release with Vinyl Me, Please, a subscription LP-of-the-month club that’s recently featured albums from Wilco, Father John Misty and Hot Chip. Blessed Feathers will become the first artist distributed through the club that hasn’t been on a label, and they’ll reap the benefits of the club’s large subscriber base. “We realized the best publicity we could ask for is getting the album delivered directly to 20,000 people,” Donivan says.
Blessed Feathers are in a good position to promote the record. After their extended stint on the road they settled, on a typical whim, in Flagstaff, Ariz. Though they didn’t have any ties there, they were drawn to the city by its art scene, geography and novel climate. “We’re at a 7,000-foot elevation now, so we get more snow than Wisconsin does, but the difference is that you get two feet of snow, then the next day the sun comes out and everything melts and you get blue skies again, which is amazing,” Donivan says. “It’s so incredible, the freaking sun.”
They can’t say how long they’ll be there. Both have nice jobs. Donivan works at a used-instrument shop, while Jacquelyn works at a bakery (“I bring home the bread, literally,” she says.) And though they’re happy, Jacquelyn says their thoughts inevitably keep returning to the road, and all the places they’d like to go. “We get itchy feet,” she says.
“Part of me is so comfortable here that I think we could give up and do this forever and just keep working 40 hours a week like normal people,” Donivan says. “And part of me is trying to remember that we’re only doing this so we can save money and hit the road again. We can’t get too comfortable, I guess, because this is really just a means to get back to that dream life again.”
There Will Be No Sad Tomorrow will be released Oct. 9. Select songs are streaming now at blessedfeathers.bandcamp.com.
