As autobiographies go, David Lowery’s Fathers, Sons And Brothers (Cooking Vinyl) is an outlier. It’s more of a memoir—and even that’s playing a bit loose with the truth. Still, it can be a challenge to set even the most disparate elements of one’s life story to music.
On just his second solo album in the 40 years since Camper Van Beethoven’s debut, Lowery clears that hurtle, moving quite nicely between acoustic, narrative-heavy story songs and tunes with more conventional verse/chorus/verse structures. Some of the best moments among the 28 tracks blur the line between the two, subversively catchy numbers like “Mexican Chickens” and “Battle Of Leros.”
Though Lowery recorded much of Fathers, Sons And Brothers alone during the pandemic, it contains numerous contributions from artists scattered across five time zones and three continents. The list includes guitarist Jim Dalton (Roger Clyne And The Peacemakers), bassist Bryan Howard (Slackdaddy), vocalist Lisa Kekaula (Bellrays), keyboardist Jeremy Lawton (Big Head Todd & The Monsters), pedal-steel player Matt “Pistol” Stoessel and many others. The album was co-produced by Lowery and Drew Vandenberg (Faye Webster, Of Montreal).
On a beautiful day in his current home state of Georgia, Lowery made a quick roadside pitstop for a Zoom chat with MAGNET’s Hobart Rowland.
Listening to Fathers, Son And Brothers, it’s apparent you had a solid family life.
My family was great. We were close, and my parents remained married their whole lives. It sort of takes away one of the things that holds up a good rock autobiography. So that made it a little more of a challenge.
Are there distinct movements—or chapters—to Fathers, Sons And Brothers?
It’s more or less chronological, although there is some skipping forward and backward. Not everything I would’ve included in an autobiography is in there. It’s just the vignettes that worked—so it’s kind of spotty in a way. My grandfather was a good character study, but one of my sisters doesn’t get mentioned except in passing. I feel a little bad about that, but she was the most normal, solid person in my life, so it’s like, “Hey, you were never doing anything crazy. I’m sorry you got skipped over.” My other sister had an issue with her legs when she was growing up, but it was fairly mild. I mention her right away because it shaped a lot of what happened in our family.
How did you get into the mindset to make songs out of all the stories?
I listened to some classic musicals like Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair, stuff like that. I’m fascinated how, in musicals, they have to get the dialogue and the story across. There’s a lot weird patterns to how they’re singing in the verses. I didn’t borrow a lot of that, but I let that happen if I needed it to. One of the trickiest ones was “Giving Tree Father,” where I have a reference to The Giving Tree, the Shel Silverstein book. Then I make a reference to the cover of Rolling Stone—so I had to jam that in.
You’ve made a career of jamming stuff into songs with Camper and Cracker.
Well, yes, that’s true. I just had to do it more flagrantly here a few times.
Speaking of Broadway, the title track kind of drops in out of nowhere—this big production number with the Bellrays.
It could’ve been a Cracker or a Camper song—and it’s all chorus. It doesn’t really advance the story in any way. I imagined it as a sort of a ’60s pop thing. The connection with the Bellrays is that they’re from a town next to where I grew up in the Inland Empire, and Lisa is one of my sister’s friends.
Throughout the album, you tie monumental life events to what are initially fairly trivial things—like driving cross-country. “Piney Woods” is a good example.
“Piney Woods” didn’t start out as a story of my multigenerational Arkansas family. I was moving from Redlands to Virginia, so the original narrative was basically, “I’m going to get in the car, and we’re going to go someplace.” Then I realized, “Oh, holy shit, I stopped at my grandparents’ house. This is a great spot to introduce the fundamental tragedy in my family.”
My father’s brother was killed in a murder-suicide. A guy took him in a plane and tried to crash it into my grandparents’ house. It’s totally crazy. When I stopped and visited her in Arkansas, she told me the story, because I never actually knew what happened. It connects to this intergenerational trauma—how it affected my grandfather, how it affected my dad, and then how some of that got down passed to me … just sort of, you know, anxiety and almost like PTSD.
Where was your dad when it happened?
He was there—he saw it happen. Sometime after that, my grandparents sold their place in Arkansas. They went to the Coachella Valley as itinerant farmers, doing this thing where they would travel out there in the winter.
You’ve spent most of your adult life in the eastern half of the United States, but your formative years were spent out West. How has that shaped you?
The cities and towns often become important parts of the story. Early in my life, I also moved around a lot: Texas, Arkansas, England, Spain, Southern California, Santa Cruz. Where I lived affected the kind of music I did. There’s a lot of California—surf and a sort of bastardized norteño—in Camper. Then I went east and got in touch with the country and roots stuff. Richmond is an odd place in that it’s sort of the most northern Southern city—a decaying New England industrial town, you know. So there’s a lot of the North … Springsteen sort of rock … that comes into Cracker at about that point.
Is there still the potential for an actual memoir at some point?
I’ve been writing these Substack posts about each song, and some are like 3,000 words long. I don’t know—maybe I’ve backed into it.
