Smokey Brights

The original intention was to make a record. After years of touring and recording with the brash and energetic garage punk outfit The Whore Moans, songwriter Ryan Devlin had notebooks full of material that just didn’t fit: folk tunes that sounded more like the Bob Dylan and Paul Simon he grew up on; finger picking ramblers and Nashville style ballads. The songs kept playing through his mind, insisting he find an outlet for them. A year before Smokey Brights would play their first note together, Devlin sought out the musicians whose talents he wanted to help him realize these persistent songs: Jim Vermillion and Nick Krivchenia had been playing bass and drums together every week for the past five years for upwards of twenty hours—just the two of them—working on tight syncopations, in time signatures that read like long division. Their efforts had been under the names Armed with Legs and Kill Kill Orchestra. To have one in a band was to have the other, like brothers, or house players in an old soul studio. The duo agreed to try some songs out with Devlin, and work began in the summer of 2010. Mike Kalnoky was best known for his angular lead guitar lines in What What Now, the ... more...