Band of the Week: The Weight

Photo by Glynis Selina Arban

Hometown: Brooklyn, N.Y.
Album: Are Men
Band Members: Johnny Carpenter (pedal steel), Fletcher “Poor Boy” Johnson (guitar, vocals), Will Noland (bass), Thomas Deacon O'Brien (drums), Joseph Plunket (guitar, vocals), Jameson Proctor (keyboards)
For Fans Of: The Replacements, Drive-By Truckers, Son Volt

Just before the Fourth of July, Johnny Carpenter, Thomas Deacon O’Brien and Will Noland are carpooling one hour north from their home base in Brooklyn to Bear Mountain, N.Y., for The Weight frontman Joseph Plunket’s engagement party. “Uhh, I got to turn the air conditioner off—my car’s gonna overheat,” Carpenter chuckles over the phone. “Hold on, change of plans.”

The Weight are used to not traveling in style. And until the money comes in for their work scoring a soundtrack to a documentary about bull riding—that'll finance a new van for their upcoming tour—the band's at the mercy of its current ride, which has lead to tales from the road that may rival your favorite slasher flick.

“We stayed in a blood-filled hotel room because there were no other options—in Gastonia [S.C.], of all places,” Carpenter recounts. “All the sheets were covered in blood and the bathroom was flooded and it was the only room [available] and we were shit out of luck because the wheel fell off our van.”

But things have mostly been looking up for the band lately, after the March re-release of sophomore LP Are Men (via Tee Pee Records) and a few well-received performances a SXSW later that month. The album marks a major transition for The Weight, with founder Plunket—long a fixture in the Atlanta and Athens music scenes—having relocated to Brooklyn and set up a stable band since the release of 2004's Ten Mile Grace.

A friend of the band hooked them up with the graveyard slot at a major label studio, but the new album still took a year to record. “We’d go in from 10 at night till like 8 in the morning once every couple of weeks and we’d always get bumped because Mariah Carey was in there or something,” Carpenter says. “Apparently, Mariah Carey won’t let anyone watch her eat.” Are Men is Southern-fried goodness by way of Brooklyn—straight-up, stripped-down tunes that feel right at home perched on a barstool (or in a run-down old car).

In January, The Weight traveled to Atlanta to cut a new record with Ed Rawls and Justin McNeight at The Living Room. With the recent additions of Jameson Proctor on keyboards and drummer Thomas O'Brien, cuts from the new record sound like a growing band becoming more and more comfortable with its mixed-bag style of country-rock tinged with pop.
 
“I think we’ve definitely matured,” Carpenter says of the recent recordings. “The songs are a little more complex, a lot more going on, a lot of layering in most of ‘em. Stuff on top of other stuff because we’ve got a lot of dudes in the band.”

The Weight will hit the road in late August, touring mostly through Southwestern cities they’ve never played before—including Flagstaff, Ariz., at an allegedly-haunted venue called the Hotel Monte Vista. “Part of the deal of the show is they’re paying us but they’re putting us up in the hotel, too,” Carpenter says. “Hopefully there will be blood in that Flagstaff hotel too, but this time it will be haunted and not some weird meth guy bleeding from his open sores onto the bed or whatever that shit was.”

Listen to "Had It Made," from The Weight's Are Men: