Delta Rae: Carolina’s On Their Mind (Interview)

Delta Rae is a six-piece band formed around three siblings from North Carolina. In addition to Ian, Eric and Brittany Holljes the band features Elizabeth Hopkins as their fourth vocalist along with Mike McKee (percussion) and Grant Emerson (bass). The band has just released their second album, After It All. Delta Rae has just recently ventured outside of the United States and was touring in Australia, but have unfortunately missed New Zealand this time around. The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda spoke to Ian Holljes and got the lowdown on how After It All came together.

Click here to listen to the interview with Delta Rae’s Ian Holljes:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here:

MD: I know your new album is your second album After It All, but for a lot of folks you’re  a pretty new band. So you consist of yourself and couple of siblings and a few other members and you’re from North Carolina. First of all is the place where you come from significant to how you sound, do you think?

IH: I think the place that we come from is significant to how we sound. My family and I were born in the South. My brothers and sisters and I were all born in the South. My brother and I were born in North Carolina, my sister was born in Tennessee. My family moved around a lot from North Carolina to Tennessee, then to Georgia and finally out to the West Coast of America in California. So that’s where we met our fourth singer Liz.

MD: Right.

IH: So I think that North Carolina…we chose to come home to North Carolina and that’s always been the place that I felt most rooted because that’s where my mom’s family comes from, my brother and I went there to school at Duke and there was a sense of homecoming to being back there. And our music does sort of draw on the folklore of the region and some of the musical sensibilities that have grown out of the South, whether it be the kind of swamp blues music of New Orleans or the folk and soul music of James Taylor and a lot of Gospel as well which we grew up with in Georgia and that’s where we first sort of learned to sing and our first music teachers were African American, incredible Gospel singers, and that’s I think where we just got a major appreciation for that.

MD: Right, right. Like you say, you have a brother and sister in the group. I would imagine people tend to kind of lump the 3 of you together as kind of a unit but what would you say were the musical differences between the 3 of you?

IH: Oh that’s a refreshing question, I don’t think I’ve ever…..

MD: I try.

IH: Yeah we all kind of did grow up a little bit differently musically. I remember my big epiphany in high school was when I got the first Jeff Buckley album Grace.

MD: Right.

IH: And just keying in on that level of incredible male vocal and also the way that he combines pop music with also sort of choral and more, almost baroque style classical music, like he wove it all together. That really echoes a lot of my own interests. I really love choral music, I really love musicals, Les Misérables and that kind of more, almost historical ummm French sensibility, I really love.

MD: Right.

IH: My brother was the first sort of self-taught musician in our family. He started learning piano when he was 7 totally on his own and his first biggest inspirations were George Winston, the classical pianist and Billy Joel on the pop side of things. My sister had actually, maybe the best musical sensibilities earliest on, she grew up with Joni Mitchell and Fleetwood Mac and the Gospel group Sweet Honey In The Rock.

MD: Right.

IH: Always on her stereo. So the three of us do come at it from different places but we all have a shared love. I mean everybody that I just mentioned I know we all mutually love as well.

MD: I have to say after listening to the new album I could hear kind of all those little influences woven throughout that in different ways, sSo it certainly makes sense. The one thing I came away from listening to After It All was the fact that it seems like something more than just a collection of songs. So how would you describe how the 14 tracks on the album were kind of related to each other?

IH: Yeah it’s a complicated relationship because we actually, when we first started making the record, we were just pulling out, I think we were kind of in the classic sophomore position where we had poured so much of the song writing we’ve done from the very beginning until when we made our first record into our first record and then with the second one we were kind of scraping together all the songs that we’ve written in the last few years while we were on the road and all this stuff. The great benefit that we had with this record was that we were able to take our time and so after we made those first, we laid down like 16 songs in our first session and we were able to live with those for 6 months and we parsed through the ones that we thought were the best and the ones that we were resonating with the most and the storyline just sort of started to develop. For a while, actually, we were really considering trying to do a concept album about sort of a Bonnie and Clyde story of two lovers racing across the American landscape. But when we got to the end of making the record we actually felt like that was too cumbersome of a concept to try to carry all the way through and the song writing wasn’t happening quite as naturally as we would have wanted. So we ended up kind of taking one step to the side and just deciding to take all the best songs we’d written from both the concept album ideas and from the early session and stuff that we were working on even after that and pouring them all onto this record. So this record has kind of, it has a concept album almost continuity to it but at the end of the day we tried to just find the best songs that we had in our collection at that time.

MD: And I’m guessing that the song Outlaws is one of the ones that came from that Bonnie and Clyde concept that you were originally working on cause that song has kind of a Born To Run vibe that we got to get out of here…

IH: Yes sir exactly, no that’s exactly what that song, kind of first half of the album has that feeling and then the second half of the album is a bit more romantic and I should say the first half of the album was where the concept album writing was mostly focused and then the second half was a little bit more romantic. I think in some ways a little bit more intimate about what our life on the road has been like for the last year, there’s songs that deal with break-ups, with long distance relationships, with death. I mean it’s, the second half of the album is a little bit more, all of the songs are personal but the second half I think is a little bit more intimate.

MD: Right. When you talk about the second half, track number 13 which is called My Whole Life Long, I think it’s a duet, I can tell. It to me usually, the catchiest, the most obvious single songs are usually at the top of CDs these days, that one really jumped out at me, it’s like ‘my God this must be a hit record somewhere along the way’.

IH: Wow, that’s such a compliment, thank you.

MD: Yeah, and I was wondering if that’s the way that you guys looked at it or if it was just another one of the tracks on the album?

IH: For me that song has really emerged as one that we will be really considering for a single release and I think that the label identified that one early on as well. Our current single is Scared.

Click here to listen to Scared from After It All: 

MD: Right.

IH: We are, as you might take from our influences, we’re in an eclectic band and so our songs that people know us best for, at least in the States heretofore, have been kind of the darker bluesier songs. So when we went with this single we wanted something that would tie this record to those other songs and I think Scared was a natural choice for that, but I definitely foresee My Whole Life Long being a contender for single consideration. We just felt like it fit better in the second half of the record cause I like records that sort of take you on an adventure and for me the first half of the record kind of punches really hard and the second half is a little bit more lilting and like I said more romantic and so that song just fit really comfortably in that second round of songs.

MD: I’m kind of interested in the production of the record, I mean it’s quite a big production, there’s everything in there and the version I have Is the streaming version. So I don’t know who’s kind of worked on it with you or if there are other people playing with you or produced it or whatever. So I mean there’s strings, theres horns, and there’s kind of a wall of sound happening sometimes, tell me what was going on.

IH: Yeah we did the album over the course of 3 different sessions. The first was in L.A with a production team that consisted of Rob Cavallo and Julian Raymond, two amazing producers. Rob has done all of Green Day’s album and worked with Kid Rock and Alanis Morissette and Dave Matthews. Julian Raymond just won a Grammy for best country album for his work with Glen Campbell. Those sessions were the first that we did and they yielded about 16 songs, very big production, big, bold, pop production and that’s the session that we had time to kind of sit with. I think when we spent time with those records, we loved a lot of the underlining foundation but we felt like we wanted to augment it and make the songs a bit more, a bit darker. So we, our second session, we did totally self-produced in Raleigh, North Carolina where we lived and we just took about a month and poured all of our kind of experimentalism into it for that month and that yielded songs like Outlaws, it really transformed songs like My Whole Life Long and Run and Chasing Twisters. Then our final session was up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, we were working with Peter Katis, who’s done all of the records for The National.

MD: Oh right.

IH: For Glen Hansard, he’s worked with Glen Hansard and he’s also known for his work with the band out of the, actually they’re from America but they’re named after… Interpol.

MD: Oh right, Interpol.

IH: He’s worked with Interpol from the very beginning. So his sensibility and he makes his claim, he very much owns this… is that his sound is a bit more melancholy. So he was our final producer, he mixed all the tracks he was just incredible to work with and he did add a little bit of darkness and melancholy to the songs that I think lent a sense of cohesion and just brought the whole thing together for us. So yeah, it’s a very eclectic record. We just kind of followed our instincts with each song and didn’t hold back. We love strings, we love horns and we like, we have 4 lead singers, we like variety. So we kind of just go for it.

MD: Is there going to be a different record to perform live to get that sound on stage?

IH: That’s a great question. We’ve been touring behind the record. We’d just done 3 kind of first test dates out in The States.

MD: Right.

IH: It’s actually been pretty thrilling because we’ve bought a violinist along for this tour and she is really lending that…obviously the kind of string quality to the songs to give them a punch.

MD: Right.

IH: And then other than that we’ve been performing a lot of these songs for a long time. I think that we have a strong reputation for our live show and we feel like the album has really come to life at our shows.

MD: Cool. Well it’s a shame that we’re not going to get to see you here in New Zealand this time around, but I’m assuming you’ll find your way over here eventually and we’ll get a chance to see how that turns out.

IH: I can’t tell you how much we regret not being able to come to New Zealand. We’re very anxious to get up to see you all. As I had to tell a couple of the Australian interviewers, it took us such a long time to break The States that we’re just now getting overseas little by little, but we can’t wait make to it to New Zealand.