“I use my gut, and my gut don’t lie to me” is more than just a lyric in Twin Forks’ exuberant “Something We Just Know,” it is a kind of
mission statement for the quartet. If you’ve ever been to a musical performance
that made you lose all sense of time and place and give in to the cathartic
feeling of clapping and dancing and singing along, you’ve already visited the
sweet spot where Twin Forks have made it their mission to reside. “Whatever
makes the audience stomp their feet and sing at the top of their lungs, that’s
what I want to be doing,” says singer/guitarist Chris Carrabba. “I want to be
generating that spirit from the stage.
Carrabba figured out the guiding principle for Twin Forks
before he even knew exactly what the project would sound like. During recent
solo tours, Carrabba -- whose Dashboard Confessional grew from an intimate
solo-acoustic affair to a bona fide arena rock band during the mid ‘00s -- says
he was reminded how important that audience connection had always been to him
as a performer.
He also knew he wanted to craft a sound closer to the music
he’d loved as a kid -- classic folk, country and roots music. Growing up outside Hartford, Connecticut in
an area he describes as “half-rural, half-city,” Carrabba developed an early
fondness for acoustic singer-songwriters he heard on the radio -- Cat Stevens
and John Denver and Gordon Lightfoot -- as well as the more obscure Townes Van
Zandt, Bob Dylan and Guy Clark LPs he found in his mother and step-brother’s
record collections. “At the beginning of Dashboard, I wanted to write an
acoustic record, but every time I played a D,C, or G chord -- which are called
the ‘cowboy chords’ -- I would think about how Tom Petty or Cat Stevens or John
Denver or Gordon Lightfoot did this already,” says Carrabba. “That’s when I
started tuning my guitars all to hell and back, just so they sounded weird to
me. I was probably playing DCG anyway, but I didn’t know anything about guitar,
and that was how I could get myself feeling like I was in new territory.”
“When I started playing acoustic-based music, I wasn’t trying
to avoid traditional folk because I didn’t love it -- I just loved it so much
and didn’t wanna do an injustice to it,” Carrabba notes. “And I had other
influences and I thought, why can’t I combine this punk and hardcore feeling
with this classic folk feeling -- because they were both such massive loves of
mine. But right now I’m more excited about utilizing the age-old, time-tested
thing and trying to excel within the parameters of a traditional template.”
He still wanted to be in new territory, though, so when he
started writing songs for the project that would evolve into Twin Forks, he
wanted to add a new twist. So Carrabba spent three years teaching himself
traditional fingerpicking technique. “There’s magic in that kind of playing,
where you’re managing two guitar parts,” he says. “I have always found it
fascinating and it just seemed like it was calling to me.” Equipped with that
new set of skills, Carrabba started writing his most delicate, musically
articulate compositions yet, temporarily setting them aside for
he-didn’t-know-what. In the interim, making his 2011 covers album, “Covered In
The Flood,” gave him the chance to explore his relationship with songs by some
of his favorite folk and country artists, both classic and contemporary,
including Clark, John Prine, Justin Townes Earle and Corey Brannan. He then
worked up those covers for a performance at San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly
Bluegrass festival.
The experience was a major awakening. “Onstage at HSB, we
were elated. All I want to be is elated while I’m performing. Why else should
we be getting onstage? We’re not up there to be some good-time charlie band,
but we are not hiding the fact that we are elated to be onstage with you and
we’re choosing the songs that are giving us the best edge to be able to do
that.”
After Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, Carrabba returned home with
a new sense of purpose and a clarity of vision for Twin Forks. In the previous
two years, he had been sticking to a temporary rule he’d imposed on himself as
a songwriter: “I had made this rule that I would not say ‘love’ or ‘heart’ in
my lyrics,” he explains. “I would talk about those things but I wouldn’t say
them. So when I came home from that festival and I did write the first song and
it did say both ‘love’ and ‘heart,’ they felt like the right words, after not
having used them for so long. I let the songs happen and found a tempo that
suits what Twin Forks became.”
“Something We Just Know” came to him first, and then, the
flood -- another eight songs in the following eight days. Twin Forks began
tracking the new songs whenever they could, between tours with other projects,
in a multi-purpose space Carrabba had converted into a studio. Over the course
of several weeks starting last fall, they managed to record more than twenty
tracks that they plan to whittle down to eleven or twelve for the debut LP they
plan to release later this year. “We tracked everything live, and I have this
tendency to get really excited about what everyone is doing and I’ll make a
little hoot or shout, and you can hear all those things in the final versions
of the songs,” says Carrabba. “On ‘Scraping Up The Pieces,’ everytime I listen
to it and hear Suzie laughing, I’m dying to remember what could have been so
funny. Then we additionally multi-track, which we figured was a thoughtful way
of approaching the record. You get the error-prone thing that has all the magic
in it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t chase a little more precision. But the
goal is always to do our best to get it right in the same room with each other,
looking at each other, laughing with each other. I think you can feel that all
over the songs.”
Originally recorded with musician friends including mandolin
player Suzie Zeldin, bassist Jonathan Clark and drummer Ben Homola, Twin Forks
has evolved as a live band to include Kimmy Baranoski on backing vocals, Kelsie
Baranoski on mandolin and Shawn Zorn on drums.