Great American Taxi

Great American Taxi rolls out new album and prepares for Vann Benefit

:: Great American Taxi ::

:: Agave :: December 14 ::

:: Three20South :: December 15 ::

:: Boulder Theater :: 9th annual Mark Vann Foundation Benefit Concert ::

:: December 16 ::

:: Hodi’s Half Note :: December 17 ::

By Brian F. Johnson

Great American Taxi has always had a simple plan behind their band — don’t make any plans, just see what happens.

That’s not a tough concept to grasp for anyone who has ever seen vocalist and guitarist Vince Herman play with Taxi, or with his other band, Leftover Salmon. Herman has always approached performing in his relaxed style of ‘just jump out of the airplane and I’m sure you’ll find a ’chute before you hit the ground.’

“As far as planning ahead for a music career and setting out to do a certain genre in a certain type of way, to attract a certain kind of crowd? Fuck that noise!” he said in a recent interview with The Marquee. “That’s just no way to do it. You do what comes out of you musically and what is legit to your soul, and that’s the only consideration I’ve ever had, and luckily, that lets me do whatever the fuck I want.”

That lack of following some sort of business plan has let the band very organically find its own way since they set out on the trip more than six years ago, and most recently, it resulted in having a long-time Taxi friend, singer/songwriter Todd Snider, act as producer for their newest album, Paradise Lost.

Taxi keyboardist and co-founder Chad Staehly, explained in a separate interview with The Marquee that getting Snider on board with the album was just another happy accident along the Taxi route. “Last Halloween — Halloween 2010 — Todd was in Colorado and we played shows with him, the last of which was supporting Salmon at the Fillmore. Backstage after Todd’s set, we were hanging around and talking about Taxi wanting to make a record and just as typical as anything goes with Great American Taxi, it was like we stumbled into it. Todd was like, ‘Hey, I’d love to help you guys out with that,’ and we started sketching ideas right then and there,” Staehly recalled.

Snider immediately had the guys start firing lyrics off to him, and began helping to craft the album in a way that Taxi had not done on its previous efforts. “Todd’s a lyrics guy, first and foremost, so we started with sending him lyrics. There was a lot of attention paid to the script of the album and how it all fit together,” Staehly said. “I don’t know if that’s anything that any of us in Taxi had considered before. In the past, it was always us having a pile of songs that we’d been playing on the road, and then we’d record them. This time around, it started with this concept of “paradise lost,” kind of about how elusive the American Dream has become and the tough spot that we’ve landed in with corporate greed taking over and running rampant in this country.”

After working to craft that theme, the band traveled to East Nashville to record at engineer Eric McConnell’s victorian home, the same place where Jack White produced Loretta Lynn’s last record. “We must specify that it’s East Nashville,” Staehly said. “There’s a huge difference. The real artists live on the other side of the river in East Nashville, a whole scene in and of itself that’s been garnering more attention in the last few years. As Todd puts it, they’ll sit at a green light a little bit longer over in East Nashville and they’ll only cross over the bridge every once in a while if they’re going to be able to sell a song. East Nashville is definitely its own scene.”

Partially due to Snider’s pre-recording coaching, and partially because Taxi is more solidified as a group than it’s ever been, with this current lineup being its longest run to date, each member of the group ended up with at least one song on the new album.  “This wasn’t like before, when Vince and I did all of the writing” Staehly said. “This was a full-on collaborative effort.”

The result is one of Taxi’s most cohesive albums to date, but also wraps up an unintentional trilogy of sorts with Taxi’s two previous efforts. In a press release that accompanied the album, the band wrote: “These three albums loosely sketch out three periods in American history. People came to this country to carve out their Streets of Gold (Taxi’s debut release in 2007), got caught up in a bunch of Reckless Habits (2010), and ended up with a sense of Paradise Lost.”

The album is available digitally and through Taxi’s website, and a brick and mortar release is scheduled for February. Their tour through the state this month is what Staehly called “the maiden voyage through our home state with the new record.”

In addition to that voyage, the band will also host the ninth annual Mark Vann Foundation Benefit Concert this month. Vann, a co-founder of Leftover Salmon, passed away in 2002 at the age of 39 after a battle with cancer. “Mark got so much done when he was with us and we really just want to help keep people thinking good thoughts about our brother who gave us so much, and endured his battle with cancer with such style and grace and love for those around him. We just want to shine some of that back,” said Herman.

The benefit concert, which raises funds for a number of charitable organizations including There With Care, Care Connect and VanGo Mobile Arts, has become a holiday celebration of sorts and Herman said doing the show over the years has been a wonderful experience. “It never really feels more community than it does on that night.”

:: Great American Taxi ::

:: Agave :: December 14 ::

:: Three20South :: December 15 ::

:: Boulder Theater :: 9th annual Mark Vann Foundation Benefit Concert ::

:: December 16 ::

:: Hodi’s Half Note :: December 17 ::

 

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• Leftover Salmon

• Gram Parsons

• The Band