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 DIY Seattle art-punk band. Though, if you’d ever had the chance to see his old outfit Thunderbird Motel, you’d know that Mike can play the blues—the area where his musical roots truly reside. When Devlin asked him to sit in on a rehearsal with a yet un-named trio, it all came together. Mike’s bright Telecaster bends sounded like a young Mike Bloomfield, weaving through the melodies, bringing the twang that brought it all back home.

In the first week of 2011, they got down to business and made the record that had been spinning through Devlin’s mind for years. The result was a sum of their parts: some rock, some blues, some R&B, some twang. By the time the boys released “Can’t Rightly Say,” they were already filling up clubs, playing festivals, and even garnering some national attention. The songs and Devlin’s efforts have found their outlet, and the boys in Smokey Brights have been more than happy to oblige.