The Smokey Lonesome – “Desert Run”
Americana Highways is hosting this premiere of the Smokey Lonesome’s song “Desert Run,” the title track from their forthcoming EP. Desert Run was produced by Dave Porter and Natalie Fratino; engineered and mixed by Kevin Jarvis at Sonic Boom Room in Venice, California; and mastered at D2 mastering.
“Desert Run” is Natalie Fratino on vocals, electric, and stand-up bass, percussion, and accordion; and Dave Porter on vocals and all guitar. This song launches with an up tempo bluesy groove on acoustic guitar and the antics of youth, highly creative and well-crafted and just thrilling. It feels like a summertime adventure.
I had the main riff that I liked and then I went through some writings and I’d written some stuff about some misadventures with a couple of my friends from teenage years. I think once again the bridge came later, it kind of summed up some things about then and now, and I made the story more about one friend in particular. The guy in the first verse, he was to go on to keep partying and get in some deeper trouble and he ended up dying sort of young, so it’s in memory of him that I found a way to work it with that riff. For the most part it’s not about his passing but more about the action and the freedom in the messing around, the adventure.
In the studio, the song went through some changes from how we’ve been performing it live, because we usually played it all electric, and kind of pumped up and rocking out, which we still do, but in the studio I thought it’d be cool to juxtapose the the rocking with an acoustic reading. To fill it out a little, we had Natalie play some accordion that we worked on at home; it helps drive it along a little bit and I think it adds some humor to it. Her mom was born in Italy and she has a cousin who’s a professional musician, a piano and accordion player, and her parents made her take accordion lessons with him when she was young. She learned some traditional stuff; she didn’t like it then, but she still endured it for five or six years and she’s never forgotten it and so she was able to come up with some really great stuff. – Dave Porter
Find the music here: https://thesmokeylonesome.com/
