Lettuce + Rdgldgrn • New Mountain Amphitheater
Get funky this Halloween with the soulful and energetic Lettuce, with support from RDGLDGRN on Tuesday, October 31st in our outdoor amphitheater!
This event is rain or shine. Children under 12 are free with paying adult, and require ear protection. No chairs will be allowed in the venue.
• More about Lettuce •
For more than two decades, Lettuce have brought a new vitality to classic funk, matching their smooth and soulful grooves with a hip-hop-inspired urgency and mastery of beat. Now, on their fourth studio album Crush, drummer Adam Deitch, guitarists Adam Smirnoff and Eric Krasno, bassist Erick “Jesus” Coomes, keyboardist Neal Evans, saxophonist Ryan Zoidis, and trumpet player Eric Bloom deepen that sound by channeling the sonic freedom and infectious energy of their incendiary live show.
Produced by Lettuce and Co-Produced, recorded/mixed by Joel Hamilton at Brooklyn’s Studio G, Crush first came to life on the road, with the band developing new material and testing it out live as they toured. “We’ve all noticed that our music goes into a lot of different directions onstage, and we wanted to capture that in a way that we never really have before,” says Coomes, who names classic psychedelia and ‘90s hip-hop among Lettuce’s key inspirations on Crush. “It’s definitely more wide-open in terms style, but it still stays true to the funk.”
The follow-up to 2012’s Fly, Crush finds Lettuce brilliantly infusing their psychedelic and hip-hop sensibilities into bass-heavy funk. With its spidery guitar work and hypnotic beats, “Phyllis” is a delicately sprawling epic that embodies what Deitch refers to as “a chill-hop vibe that’s kind of the flip-side of all that powerful uptempo funk that people might expect from us.” On “Get Greasy,” Lettuce give a nod to the groove-fueled EDM subgenre known as future funk, building off its highly danceable rhythm with a blissfully loose and horn-laced arrangement. And on “He Made a Woman Out of Me,” guest vocalist Alecia Chakour lends her bluesy growl to a scorching take on Bobbie Gentry’s 1970 country-soul classic.
Whether paying homage to Led Zeppelin on the fiery and guitar-driven “Silverdome” or delivering a deeply riveting and richly textured hip-hop medley with “Oresteia,” Lettuce maneuver through Crush’s kaleidoscopic sound with sophisticated ease and powerful synergy. “More so than any of the records we’ve done before, this album is very much about the improvised grooves and improvised solos,” says Krasno. “Instead of going at it like, ‘Here’s a melody, now here’s a guitar solo, here’s another melody, here’s a sax solo,’ everyone’s leaning on each other in a way that’s completely unspoken. It’s all of us moving as one unit and creating this new sound together.”
According to Lettuce, that sense of unity and togetherness has much to do with a camaraderie that’s only intensified over the lifespan of the band. Formed in 1992, when several band members attended a summer program at Boston’s Berklee College of Music as teenagers, Lettuce was founded on a shared love of legendary funk artists like Earth, Wind & Fire and Tower of Power. After returning to Berklee as undergrads in 1994, Lettuce started playing in local clubs and steadily built up a following that soon extended to cities across the country and then throughout the world. Releasing their studio debut Outta Here in 2002 and its follow-up album Rage! in 2009, the band dedicated the coming years to balancing their frequent touring with involvement in a host of other musical endeavors (including Evans and Krasno’s role as founding members of acclaimed soul/jazz trio Soulive).
In recent years, Lettuce have watched their fanbase expand as they’ve hit bigger and bigger stages and earned their name as a can’t-miss festival act. And in making Crush, the band had no trouble harnessing the spirit of their explosive live show. “Some of these shows we’ve played over the past couple years have been so amazing, it’s like you go home a different person,” says Coomes. “I’m sure remembering those moments in our minds and our hearts helped bring out something special when we were recording these new songs.”
So while Crush offers everything from all-out party jams to headphone-ready journeys into space funk, each track was born from an unabashed joy and love of live performance. “That energy we get when it’s prime time and we’re about to go onstage and we’re just excited beyond belief — that all came out on this new album,” says Deitch. “There’s a feeling that the band is rising, and it’s a really beautiful thing.”
• More about RDGLDGRN •
RDGLDGRN (pronounced red gold green) have already distinguished themselves in the DC music scene. Their highly stylized sound (that Go Go drum beat- a distinct DC rhythm) takes hip-hop infused punk and indie rock to create something refreshingly unique, is getting attention from fans stretching far beyond the DC niche scene.
Comprised of three members who identify as Red, Gold, and Green, RDGLDGRN began making music in their basement studio, drawing from a vast and almost ironically diverse pool of influences like Chuck Brown, Vampire Weekend, Outkast, The Neptunes, and Bad Brains. What many might consider a wildly ambitious, even impossible task to pull off, RDGLDGRN managed to effortlessly combine genres of music to create something new, something all their own, and something that has the music industry buzzing with excitement.
The band gained widespread recognition when they self-released a song called “I Love Lamp” on YouTube- a way for friends and local fans to listen to their music. They had no idea that within just a few weeks, the video would have over 100,000 views and the attention of many notable figures both in the industry as well as on the blogosphere.
Producer Kevin Augunas (Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Cold War Kids) quickly took notice of the band, and in addition to producing RDGLDGRN’s debut, also signed them to his label, Fairfax Recordings (Gotye, Tribes) in a joint venture with Universal Republic Records.
Upon entering the legendary Sound City Studio in Van Nuys, CA, a studio where Fleetwood Mac recorded ‘Rumours’ and Nirvana recorded ‘Nevermind’, RDGLDGRN were fortunate enough to have captured the attention of Nirvana alum, Foo Fighters front man, and hometown hero, Dave Grohl who recorded drums on the entire album.
It wasn’t just rock royalty that took notice of RDGLDGRN, the hip-hop community was also taken by the band’s unique sound. Genre-bending artist, producer, and designer, Pharrell Williams (N.E.R.D., The Neptunes), co-wrote and co-produced the standout track “Doing the Most”, lending his distinct style to one of the most unique tracks on the album that showcases Green’s undeniable talent for rapping and singing infused with Pharrell’s style of unusual beats and musical wit.
The result is a debut that truly demonstrates the group’s ability to straddle genre lines, to combine musical polarities and unite both artists and fans over music that’s multifaceted. However, it’s not the musical intricacies, or the obscure combination of influences, that make RDGLDGRN who they are. It’s their ability to create something entirely fresh and new, something that’s often overlooked in this state of the industry where musicians try to stay afloat by following trends. If you ask RDGLDGRN who their biggest influences are, they’d tell you the Beatles and Bob Marley. And while RDGLDGRN don’t exactly sound like those legendary artists, they do share in common something less tangible- they all have made it a point to carve their own path by creating something entirely unique.
Venue and address
New Mountain AVL, 38 N French Broad Ave, 28801 Asheville
- Tue10/31/20176:30 PMTickets
Tickets for October 31, 2017
Lettuce + Rdgldgrn • New Mountain Amphitheater
This event in Asheville was published by New Mountain AVL.