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Known for their captivating blend of rock & roll and country, \u2018The Black Lillies\u2019 have become one of Americana music\u2019s biggest success stories; an internationally-renowned band of roots-rockers, armed with songs that blur the boundaries between genres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Four men. Four friends. Four artists, each of whom could rightly put out a solo record tomorrow, tied together by a bond to something that\u2019s greater than the sum of its parts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cGoing from a six-piece to a four-piece, it\u2019s given these guys space to shine and grow and evolve, and the chemistry has gotten better,\u201d says Contreras, who in another life was the mandolin-shredding bandleader of Robinella and the CCstringband, once signed to both the Columbia and Dualtone labels. \u201cThese guys have become not just sidemen or guns for hire; they\u2019re invested. Their opinions count, and their creativity is as much a part of this record as mine. There are songs that I wrote; that Sam (a veteran of the Americana group The Everybodyfields) wrote; that we wrote in any combination and all of us together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s pretty simple, when you get down to that romantic notion of having a band. We rehearse together, we travel together, we hang out together because we\u2019re dedicated, and I think the music is really showing that now. For me, it\u2019s been years of learning to set your ego aside, but experience teaches you that you have to.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Making room for other voices in the band was vital in rekindling Quinn\u2019s creative fires. The winner of the 2006 Merlefest Chris Austin Songwriting Contest and a respected solo artist after The Everybodyfields folded, the well had dried up for him back home in Knoxville until a spot opened in The Black Lillies. Working with Contreras, Townsend and then Schaefer, Quinn says, was akin to tossing gasoline on the smoldering embers of his songwriting chops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like, when the itch hits, that\u2019s the time to scratch it,\u201d he said. \u201cOffice Depot is now my favorite place. I\u2019m always buying paper and pens and destroying them, because I write all the time. Right now, I\u2019m looking at four legal pads, a notebook, a journal and a bunch of stolen hotel paper. It\u2019s a bit of a neurosis, I\u2019m afraid, but I want to be a better writer, and this band is an outlet to become that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Black Lillies were conceived during a particularly emotional period in Contreras\u2019 life. A divorce, a disassembling of his old band and a 9-to-5 job driving a truck left him with days of turbulent thoughts and nights alternating between pen-and-paper and a guitar to put them into some semblance of order. \u201cWhiskey Angel,\u201d released in 2009, was a springboard to a whirlwind career revival, and within two years, the band had notched several national tours, landed on the hot list of countless publications and appeared everywhere from the Grand Ole Opry stage to the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. Other records \u2014 \u201c100 Miles of Wreckage,\u201d \u201cRunaway Freeway Blues,\u201d \u201cHard to Please\u201d \u2014 helped define a sound that was rooted in distinct male-female harmonies, intricate instrumentalism and emotionally charged lyrics that look toward the hope of a new day dawning, regardless of the darkness of broken hearts and bereft spirits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Around the making of \u201cHard to Please,\u201d however, the band faced its biggest challenge to date \u2014 losing key members, integrating new ones and facing a future that meant changing musical directions. Contreras, however, rose to the challenge, drawing inspiration from some of the titans of the genre in which the Lillies often find themselves categorized: The Eagles and Wilco, just to name a few.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe think about those favorite records of ours, those masterpiece records, and they\u2019re no filler, all killer,\u201d he says. \u201cWe grew up listening to records like that, so we thought, \u2018Let\u2019s go for it. Let\u2019s stack it.\u2019 It should be nothing but keepers, and there really shouldn\u2019t be five seconds of, \u2018Oh, they didn\u2019t know what to do here.\u2019 Everything should be purposeful.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the dust settled, he found himself with the right set of players: Quinn, who won songwriting awards and was once a labelmate of the Avett Brothers during his time in The Everybodyfields; Schaefer, a guitar wizard and a veteran of the Texas alt-country band Mickey and The Motorcars; and Townsend, the youngest member of the band who was brought in on drums in 2015 and has quickly become the group\u2019s veteran anchor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe just don\u2019t want to be a throwback band. We want what we do to sound new and fresh and modern. We\u2019re venturing out from a pure East Tennessee sound, and hopefully that comes through,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Known for their captivating blend of rock & roll and country, \u2018The Black Lillies\u2019 have become one of Americana music\u2019s biggest success stories; an internationally-renowned… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":617,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,11,42,5,10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","category-events","category-festivals","category-life","category-outdoor","category-summer"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodstuffconnections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodstuffconnections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodstuffconnections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodstuffconnections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodstuffconnections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/goodstuffconnections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":618,"href":"https:\/\/goodstuffconnections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions\/618"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodstuffconnections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodstuffconnections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodstuffconnections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodstuffconnections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}