Notes
Some artists want to run in the other direction from their early influences, but Twin Fork’s Chris Carrabba knew it was the right time to revisit the big influences that shaped his musicianship. Those influences involve Americana, roots-folk rock that started its incubation back in 2011, when Carrabba had his musician friends around to help with his solo album Covered in the Flood.
“Growing up and I thought I would just be treading on what I knew and if I worked in that genre I wouldn’t have anything new to add to it,” Carrabba said. “Then I realized at some point that the whole thing is about tradition and passing it down and I felt I had just as much licence as anyone else to explore it.”
Twin Forks is usually comprised of Chris Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional (vocals/guitar), Kelsie Baron (mandolin/banjo), Sara Ellen Bost (tambouring/vocals), Jonathan Clark (bass) and Shawn Zorn (drums), but due to everyone’s hectic schedules and multiple band commitments, line changeups are the norm for the present-based Nashville outfit.
“The guys helped me do the covers and that ultimately turned into Twin Forks. This is like family, this is what I wanted to do, every band I’m in is comprised of my great friends and luckily for me my great, great friends happen to be really great musicians,” Carrabba said. “Though Twin Forks is an every changing kind of lineup, nobody leaves all the way, but because almost all of us are in other bands and the newer members of the band fit that mold too – these are my friends from home, everyone lives close by.”
Suzie Zeldin also plays with Twin Forks when she’s not doing The Narrative, and the same goes for Ben Homola of Bad Books. “He’s like in seven bands and when he’s not playing with us my cousin Shawn is our drummer. It’s really a fantastic thing when we’re all together and really fun when it’s everybody,” Carrabba said.
Once he wrote the first Twin Forks song, Carrabba knew he was on the right track.
“I was like, ‘Clearly this is the template,’ and I hoped to comprise a new record, it was like a song a day or two songs a day and that’s where I am now again, we just did two brand new songs this week we wrote and recorded,” Carrabba said on the easiness of working with friends. “I love that we still write a song and are recording it 10 minutes later. Not that there’s ever resistance, I don’t mean like personal resistance like that thing like where’s the song? Why won’t it land? That happens plenty often, but for the most part its happened with such brevity and little resistance – it’s fantastic, it’s luck.”
Where Dashboard Confessional was based in percussive right hand action and open tunings, Carrabba explained Twin Forks is more about Travis picking and flat picking. “I think that style to me is inherently joyous, that influence is where my vocal melody life began, or my song topic might come from,” Carrabba said on getting back towards Americana music.
“I sit down with Jonathon more than anybody because he’s been in the band the longest. The way the songs get written are either I write them all, I write the whole thing and then we interpret it as a band, which is writing because a song can then change radically,” Carrabba said. “Or I write a song and Jonathan and, or Ben, or Kelsey, or maybe everybody pipes in every now and again, ‘Hey that line you just threw away – that’s the line!’
“And the other way is where sometimes songs just happen, you’re sitting in a hotel room and somebody plays a D chord and someone starts singing a line and the next thing you know we’re scrambling to finish before it gets away from us.
“I like that irresistible temptation; I have to reach out and be able to touch people. You can’t get that outside of the smaller rooms. The tactile nature of what you get there, what I feel as a music fan, I enjoy going to shows like that. I’m very lucky that I’ve been able to do both, I hope I’m not ever able to not do both.”
Twin Forks play Communitea Café on Friday (Nov. 14).
