Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers:  Raw Music Well Done

Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers are on tour in support of their latest album, “The Bear,” and luckily for Fargo, they will be playing the Aquarium Tuesday night, November 17. 

Kellogg and the Sixers have a sound that can only be described as a mixture of Americana rock with a touch of folk and country, and whose beauty is found in its harmony and bare bones style. Think The Warren Brothers meet The Wreckers meet Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. Don’t forget to add some Casey Chambers and Shane Nicholson and the result is Kellogg and the Sixers and a sweet soulful sound that can bring you to your feet or bring you to your knees, take your pick.
One reason for “The Bear’s” raw sound is that it was recorded in an apartment in New York City and a house in Maine. For this album, Kellogg and the Sixers did not want to be tempted to alter their sound by modern recording studios. According to Kellogg, “Our band has been together six years and we’re coming up on our thousandth show, which we’re doing next year, and one of the things that we’ve heard from our fan base over the years is ‘I love you guys live and your records are great, more when you sound live.’ A lot of what The Bear was about was trying to get the performances that we felt were like how we really sound when we’re all in the room…hence some of the rawness because you don’t really make records like that anymore, where you just put mics up and try to all play together and get it right. That’s not something that we had not done much of and it made for something that really matched our aesthetic.”
For “The Bear,” Kellogg and the Sixers worked with producers Tom Schick (Norah Jones, Rufus Wainwright, Ryan Adams) and Sam Kassirer. “Tom is somebody whose work we had admired tremendously. We had owned quite a bit of his records so when we met Tom it felt like as a producer he was the guy that made us feel comfortable enough to just let it fly in the studios and take chances,”  Kellogg said. “He’s a tremendous asset to artists. He really brought out a lot of things we believed we had in us, so I have just a warm feeling for Tom. Sam is a different sort of producer who really kind of pushes artists to the edges of where they’re comfortable and that is equally valuable. It’s a different experience but for this record we were happy to work with both of those guys and get their different aspects.”  Their collaboration with Schick and Kassirer resulted in The Bear being their most honest and gutsiest album to date.
Kellogg and the rest of the band, Kit “Goose” Karlson on bass, tuba and accordion, Brian “Boots” Factor playing drums, banjo and mandolin, and their newest addition Sam “Steamer” Getz on pedal steel and guitar, all switch instruments and play different configurations in the spirit of The Band, who Kellogg also says is their greatest collective influence.

The guys met at the University of Massachusetts where they were “brothers in arms about the desire to find an alternate world for ourselves after college. We didn’t play music at the university together; we just knew each other and graduated and got jobs that we were less than passionate about. Out of that we formed our band and in a lot of ways the musical kinship and vision for the music came after the formation of the band. We put the band together almost as like just try to make something work here and gradually it became more and more focused as to what we were trying to achieve with our music,” said Kellogg.
Kellogg and the Sixers have had experience working with both large and not so large record labels. They seem to have found their niche with Vanguard Records and Kellogg explains their relationship this way: “Our first record that was released on a national scale was on Universal Records in 2005 and then we put out a record that was on a subsidiary of Atlantic. So we did do two deals with major corporations and then there’s Vanguard. What that whole experience has made really clear for me is that there is a right place for every type of artist…it’s not like Universal’s the best just because they’re the biggest. A label like Vanguard has allowed us to really keep our integrity intact. They are partners in the whole experience with us and it’s infinitely more fulfilling to be in a place where you can dream up ideas that are outside of the box and you can have partners in discussing them. We know that’s what the people who enjoy our music like but it’s tough to get that in sometimes to the bigger machine, which is not to say that bigger labels are bad. I don’t feel any bitterness or unhappiness – our career is made better by the great people that we met at those other labels. It’s just that to be the type of artists that we want to be it’s wonderful to work with a label like Vanguard. If we were Taylor Swift I would think that you really need the big machine that can get your music out to that audience. There’s the right place for everybody and I wish somebody had told me that earlier because I thought bigger has to be better and that wasn’t necessarily the case. We’re glad to be where we are now.”
With their tour in support of The Bear bringing Kellogg and the Sixers up on their thousandth show, it seems amazing that this band can bring the type of show they are known for to their fans every night. But by the end of last year, Kellogg says he felt like they weren’t anymore. 

“We’ve got this reputation as a live band and we got to this place where in our really big markets we were rolling out feeling not so satisfied,” Kellogg said. “The way we bring it to people is we try to stay in touch with that so we did the overseas tour [of American bases], we took a bunch of time off, we made a record and we did things to kind of get back in touch with what made us want to do this.  It comes down to being honest with yourself and you know when you’re giving people the best possible show you’re capable of versus phoning it in a little bit…the second we feel like we’re phoning it in we go somewhere else, we do something different, we change about seventy-five percent of the set list every night. We change the verses of the songs. I’ll play songs and the band won’t even know what I’m playing. We take a lot from Neil Young in that sense. That’s how we keep it real.”
Keeping it real. That seems to explain Kellogg and the Sixers and their approach not only to their music but also life in general. To check them out, catch their show at the Aquarium.

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INFO:

What: Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers
Where: Aquarium
When: Tues, Nov 17, 10 p.m.
How much: $5, 21+ID