The Figgs will play at the Circle A Café on Wednesday, August 7, at 8 p.m. Winter Bear will open the show.
The world is not exactly telling them they want more music from The Figgs, admits bassist and founding member Pete Donnelly. But that’s not stopping the band, who once named an album Sucking in Stereo.
“We keep putting out music basically out of being stubborn,” he says during a phone interview as he recovered from a root canal.
How stubborn, exactly? Try triple-LP stubborn. The rock ’n’ roll trio, formed in 1987 in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., will soon release Shady Grove, the third and final album in what The Figgs call their Ted Trilogy (also including 2015’s Other Planes of Here and 2016’s On the Slide).
Ted was Ted Collins, keyboardist for The Figgs in the studio and at some East Coast live dates, who died unexpectedly in 2017 just short of his 50th birthday. Donnelly and fellow Figgs Mike Gent and Pete Hayes had been friends with Collins since college, before the band even started. His death came out of nowhere, Donnelly says, and saying goodbye has not been easy. Fortunately, Collins’ keyboard and influence are still felt on Shady Grove, which the band began work on in 2017.
“I’m so happy Ted is all over this record,” Donnelly says.
Shady Grove was a “massive project” that saw The Figgs record in several Northeast studios between gigs over nearly three years. Donnelly says a lot of songs started with a member bringing in a half-finished song and then submitting it to the “primordial ooze” of the band in the studio. One song came from an 11-minute improvisational jam that Donnelly then converted into a seven-minute song after also writing lyrics. “The songs would tell us who they wanted to be,” he says, “and we would just finish them.” The Figgs already have enough material for their next album, which Donnelly says will be more focused.
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The Figgs have long had a strong connection to Wisconsin, not only playing many shows across the state over the years, but also releasing music by both The Figgs and Donnelly and Gent’s solo albums on Milwaukee native Jon Phillips’ Good Land Records.
“We have a simpatico relationship with the music scene in Wisconsin,” Donnelly says. He attributes the beginning of the relationship to friendships with Boris the Sprinkler’s Norb Rozek (also a columnist for Maximum RockNRoll), and Tom Smith of Exclusive Company in Green Bay, both early champions of the band.
Donnelly says he feels utterly disconnected to music as a business. The thrill and communal nature of art remains the hook. “The music is just this thing that keeps us going,” he says.
The Figgs will play at the Circle A Café on Wednesday, Aug. 7, at 8 p.m. Winter Bear will open the show.
