Lucero have long been one of my favorite bands. Ben Nichols’ voice and song-writing tug at my heart strings like no other, and the band’s willingness to deviate from “the path” (both musically and career-wise) have earned them my deepest respect and loyalty. I’ve had the pleasure of attending many a Lucero show over the years, and I can’t say I’ve ever been disappointed. If you can get to one on their current tour, go. You won’t regret it. Till then, welcome to TVD’s Lucero Takeover Week.
Between performing and recording with both Lucero and Glossary, Todd Beene is a pretty busy man. Fortunately, we were able to catch up to discuss Lucero’s new record, Glossary’s new record, life on Warped Tour, and Southern duality. He’s as smart as he is nice and talented to boot.
Well, let’s start with the obvious. You play pedal steel and are touring right now with Lucero. Based on the photos you and Roy Berry have been posting, it looks like it’s been a pretty good time so far. How are you finding festival life?
This is our first experience with this kind of thing. Summer is usually festival season for us, but this is the first time we’ve done a touring festival circus. We were all a bit apprehensive going in, but we are all honestly having the time of our lives. We have met and gotten to see a lot of great bands that we probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to see in our normal touring situation. There are lots of great bands out here like Street Dogs, Lionize, Against Me!, The Aggrolites, Foxy Shazam…it’s been great so far.
You’re also in another one of my favorite Tennessee bands, Glossary, which have been around for over a decade. Tell us non-local folk how Glossary came to be.
Glossary started in Murfreesboro, TN, around the same time Lucero did (around 1997). Glossary started as an indie-ish get-together for Bingham and Joey and they remain the only original members. Through the last twelve years or so, the band evolved into a rootsier, R&B-ish thing as Joey really focused on songwriting. He’s spent a lot of time refining and becoming a really good songwriter and you can hear how he has led the evolution of the band especially over the last four records. I joined the band somewhere around 2001 or 2002.
Lucero – Old Sad Songs
There have been other personnel changes since then, but the core group we have now (Joey Kneiser, Kelly Kneiser, Eric Giles, Bingham Barnes, Me) has been running solid for about four years and we are in a great place as a band. Everyone’s really excited about the new record we just recorded, called “Long Live All Of Us,” that’s on time for a fall release.
How is it juggling membership in two bands?
Well, these two bands have been “sister” bands for years and years so that goes a long way in providing understanding when there’s the odd conflict here or there. Ultimately what it means for me is that I don’t really get to spend much time at home. When one band takes a break, I go directly to the other one because that’s how we tend to schedule it out anyway.
For instance, I spent April and May in Murfreesboro working on the Glossary record. I had five days at home before leaving on the Warped tour with Lucero which is about sixty days for us. When Lucero gets done, I’ll be home for a few days, go to Murfreesboro for a week for wrapping-up details on the new record, then back to Memphis for three weeks to work on the Lucero record.
Then there’s a short Lucero tour in October and a Glossary tour in November…and so it goes. Sometimes if I accidentally dwell on it, it’s maddening. Now it might seem like I’m complaining, but I’m not. I have too many friends that aren’t working right now and I feel very grateful that I get to do this and I truly love what I do, including the travel. But I miss home, too.
Lucero – Ain’t So Lonely
Glossary’s sixth full-length album, Feral Fire, was inspired by a line in Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road. What about this novel struck a chord?
The record wasn’t necessarily inspired by the book. The songs had all been written and we were talking about titles and trying to come up with something that encompassed what we had set forth as the theme of the record. We were talking about it and Joey said something like, “I keep coming back to ‘Feral Fire’ (as a title) and I think it’s in The Road, but I just really like the imagery and alliteration of the phrase.”
He had read The Road a year or so before that, but I had just finished The Border Trilogy and was in the middle of The Road. A couple of days later I got to the passage where “feral fire” is used. Sho ’nuff it was in there. I think Joey really liked it because for him it perfectly encompassed a feeling of extreme longing and that longing is a big part of the record. Through many of the songs there’s longing for something better, longing for trying to reconcile who you are and who you want to be, longing for all the things you think you were meant to do, longing for the girl you know you can’t have…which brings us to your next question:
One of the songs on that album, “Save Your Money for the Weekend” hits me particularly close to home. Having been born and raised in the South in a very religious home, I can obviously relate. I’ve been wondering what kind of feedback you’ve gotten on it, if any?
I have been really pleased that there hasn’t really been any negative feedback from that song, because it seems disrespectful but it’s totally not, and you know how people can get down here when you start throwing “Jesus” around in songs. When they don’t pay attention they either think you’re A) a right wing fanatic, or B) a heretical miscreant. But the absence of criticism can only be explained by the savvy of our fans who know exactly what the song is about and understand that it’s a narrative; a story. Religion, spirituality, mercy, forgiveness…these will always be a part of our songs because the duality of how most Southerners live between Saturday night and Sunday morning is one of the things that makes the culture important to us and worth writing about.
