The Dead Tongues/Libby Rodenbough

Name: The Dead Tongues/Libby Rodenbough
Start: 2024-09-28T19:00:00-04:00
End: 2024-09-28
Location: Red Room at Cafe 939

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Saturday / September 28, 2024 / 7:00 p.m.

Red Room at Cafe 939

939 Boylston Street

Boston

Massachusetts

02115

United States

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Libby Rodenbough

Image courtesy of the artist

After five months of not picking up an instrument, The Dead Tongues’ Ryan Gustafson wanted to get rid of everything tied to his identity as a musician. He even considered changing his name. He was preparing to throw out old notebooks packed with years of material, but for some reason, he decided to stop and go through them, just to see if there was anything worth saving. And sure enough, he found images and lyrics—threads from former selves he didn’t want to lose. This was the catalyst for Dust, his fifth and best album as The Dead Tongues. Gustafson recorded Dust in nine days, the fastest he’d ever recorded anything. It was also the fastest he’d ever written anything; in the past, writing a song would take months, but this time he felt freer and wanted to have fun. The album was recorded at Sylvan Esso’s studio, Betty’s, in the woods of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He built it out with help from a number of his musician friends: Joe Westerlund (Watchhouse, Megafaun, Califone) on drums, Andrew Marlin (Watchhouse) on mandolin, and backing vocals from Alexandra Sauser-Monnig and Molly Sarlé of Mountain Man, among others.

Dust is meant to be listened to while taking a night drive—far-flung, roving, and existential. It falls somewhere between the expansiveness of American jam band and the banjo-centric folk songwriting of Gustafson’s Appalachian home. Gustafson explains the thematic throughline succinctly: “It’s this idea of uprooting and rebirth and cycles, and the past informing the future, and the future informing the past. There is no single story. Everything is connected."

Libby Rodenbough is from Greensboro, North Carolina, and has been a member of the four-piece folk band Mipso for more than a decade. Lyrical sleights of hand and thoughtful, twinging references tunnel beneath the surface of Between the Blades, her latest recording, which Rodenbough recorded at Bedtown Studios in Virginia with a close group of friends and collaborators in early 2022. It was an uneasy time for all the obvious reasons and some less obvious reasons, too, though this made the experience all the more precious. Outside, the cold was taut and bracing, as salmon-colored winter sunsets swelled above the lake; inside, there were warm meals, friends, and an understanding that this was a project that asked for communal responsiveness, playfulness, and creative risk.

Between the Blades is eight tracks long, but most songs clock in at around four minutes. It lingers in observant, character-driven storytelling and strays between diametrics—light and dark, cynicism and optimism, land and sea—as it makes its way toward the aching chords of closer “Waking World.” In that last song, Rodenbough imagines “reaching out” through the veil between dream states and touching a loved one's hand. Listening, it is easy to feel that you are in the same room, a hand reaching out to yours as it wades through the muck of the world we’ve been given, even as we look toward the possibility of another world.