Live at the Belly Up: Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors (Peaks and Valleys Productions, Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Friday, January 27, right after we saw the film Home Alone 3, my husband Charles and I watched a neatly engaging Live at the Belly Up episode featuring Tennessee-based band Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors. According to Holcomb’s interstitial interviews, he founded the band in 2007 after briefly pursuing a career as a solo artist. One of his band members was 17 years old at the time the band was founded and there were plenty of gigs he couldn’t play because he was too young to be in a place where alcohol was served. Later Holcomb attended the University of Tennessee, and by the time he graduated, his sideman was over 21 and could therefore play with the band as a full member. The musicians in The Neighbors are Ian Miller (the cutest one) on keyboards, Nathan Dugger on lead guitar and pedal steel guitar (this is one of those bands in which the lead singer plays acoustic guitar as a rhythm instrument and someone else supplies leads on electric guitar), Rich Brinsfield on electric bass and Bill Sayers on drums. Holcomb has a basically attractive voice, though it turns harsh when he goes too high or sings too loudly; it’s not a great voice (not even in the way Bob Dylan’s is; like Louis Armstrong, Dylan at his best brought a sense of dignity, commitment and emotional intensity that made up for the lack of true beauty in his voice) but it serves his material well. Holcomb recalled his early dais in the business playing gigs in which he was supposed to cover other people’s songs in front of bar audiences that weren't listening to him – an all too common sort of apprenticeship – and sneaking in a few of his originals just to see if he could get away with it. Audiences would usually react quizzically, trying to identify the song and saying, “Gee, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that one before.”

Holcomb has been married for 15 years to his wife Elle, who used to be a part of the band until she quit to raise their daughter Emmylou (as in “Harris”?) and,when she returned to the business, struck out on her own as a solo act, though she and Drew are still together and happily so. Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors played 13 songs on the hour-long Live at the Belly Up time slot, which indicates a relatively tight-knit band with relatively little instrumental jamming. The songs were “End of the World,” “Tennessee,” “Maybe,” “The Morning Song,” “American Beauty,” “But I’ll Never Forget the Way You Make Me Feel” (a rather odd song in which he claims that he will still love his wife even if they get Alzheimer’s or some other sort of age-related dementia that makes them each forget who the other is; well, there’ve been worse ideas for love songs than that), “When I’m With You,” “Family” (an infectious song he acknowledged was influenced by Paul Simon’s Graceland and which he used as the first song on his latest album, Dragons), “Bittersweet,” “You Never Leave My Heart,” :Shine Like Ligntning,” “Ring the Bells,” and his closer, “Here We Go.” Charles especially liked “Ring the Bells” because it’s an attack on all the people who have appropriated Christianity in general and Jesus in particular and turned it into a religion of hate; Charles described it as “liberation-theology Christian rock,” and I suspect he wishes there were more songs like that. So do I, even though Holcomb’s understandable passion for the message took his voice into the high territory where it becomes loud and strident instead of quiet and beautiful.