courtesy photo
words by Chance Solem-Pfeifer
It might mean a warm bed, a home-cooked meal and a slew of old friends, but based on The Talbott Brothers’ brand new EP Coming Home — the end of a long and somewhat lonely tour can mean a lot of conflicted feelings.
The EP serves as a sort of epilogue to their 2013 full-length The Road, all songs from that record, all fleshed out from slightly drier folk pop to full-fledged rock songs and all curated to get at a certain part of the road. Specifically, the end of it.
Through the four songs — “Morphine,” “On The Run,” “Wretched Man” and the title track, Coming Home rings as a passionate but troubled ode to what happens after a return and some of the raw nerves that come about when the traveler has changed and the people he’s left behind have as well. Or maybe they haven’t. And that can be it’s own sort of problem.
Brothers Tyler and Nick Talbott released the EP earlier this month at The Waiting Room and it sees them drawing on classic rock influences — nearly always open to harmony — with both the pop structure of a John Mellencamp song, as well as with that pop star’s America-by-birds-eye-view perspective. And it’s pop music in that way very deliberately.
In a Hear Nebraska song premiere of “The Road” last year, Tyler (who writes songs in the band as well as Nick), told us: “We don’t want to take three minutes and 30 seconds and talk about ourselves. We want to give a voice to everybody, so to speak.”
These are songs then that, yes, are very simple to trace back to a touring band, but are general enough to try and get at broader experience. You could say most people are in state of constant departure or return.
You can see The Talbott brothers at The Bourbon on April 4 with Evan Bartels and Clay. But right now they join us as a full band in the studio on Hear Nebraska FM. Ladies and gentlemen, here is The Talbott Brothers.
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is the host of Hear Nebraska FM. Join him and Jacob Zlomke next Monday for a live performance from Bogusman. And reach him at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.