THE DESLONDES

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“This band feels like the old family farm,” says Sam Doores, one of five songwriters and multi-instrumentalists in the Deslondes. “It’s a place where we can meet for the Fourth of July, bring our families, grill some burgers, and make some music together. It’s always going to be there, and we know it’s going to work and feel good.” After more than 15 years together, four albums, and countless live shows, the five members have found new inspiration in the ties that bind them together as friends and collaborators, as something close to kin. That sense of comfort and commitment animates their new album, Roll It Out, lending it a quiet poignancy as they reflect on what it means to devote yourself to other people—whether it’s family, friends, audiences, or other guys in the tour van with you.

Founded less as a band than as a neighborhood hang at Doores’ home on Deslonde Street, the band devised an anything-goes philosophy that allowed them to incorporate sounds they picked up on their travels and everything they heard at home: classic country, hobo folk, crust punk, rural blues, Third Ward jazz, rockabilly, r&b, Fats Domino and Allen Toussaint but also George Jones and the Band. “We take turns giving each other somebody to lean on when it’s our turn and the freedom to express themself any way they want,” says Riley Downing, who usually plays guitar and sings his own and others’ songs. “That means we don’t have a particular genre. It’s a gumbo of all different genres and time periods. Everybody’s literally into everything.”

Roll It Out recaptures the crackling energy of the band’s early days but also reflects the new perspective of age and maturity. “We’ve had some of these songs for a long while, and fans who know us might well know some of these songs,” says John James Tourville, who plays electric guitar, pedal steel and occasionally the fiddle, and who writes songs but doesn’t sing them. “It’s about half and half old versus new, so it feels both fresh and familiar to us. It reminds me of back when we were starting out, before we were even the Deslondes—back when we were the Tumbleweeds. It’s like we’re moving forward to get to where we were.”

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