Interview: Avery Ballotta of DAMN TALL BUILDINGS Talks About Their Upcoming Show at The Sofia

Thanks to festivals and features in movies, bluegrass music is enjoying a rise in popularity that was originally eclipsed by the rise of rock music. The nostalgia for old-time America mixed with honest lyrics add to its appeal. Coming up on October 15, The Sofia is hosting Damn Tall Buildings. The group is comprised of only three members: Avery Ballotta, Max Capistran, and Sasha Dubyk. They’re a damn good bluegrass band, and BroadwayWorld spoke to violin player and vocalist Avery Ballotta about their tour, what bluegrass means to them, and how you'll have a damn great time at their show.

Hi! It’s so nice to talk to a new band. Damn Tall Buildings is a damn good name. How did you come up with it?

Thank you. It’s a play on a John Hartford song. We’re all fans of this great songwriter and he wrote this song called “In Tall Buildings” about a gentleman who cuts off his hair and goes to work in tall buildings. He got his start busking and we loved it so much we played on that. His most famous song Is called “Gentle On My Mind,” which was made famous by Glen Campbell. John was RCA’s response to Dylan in the 60s and 70s.

You all come from different places. How did you find each other?

We all met in Boston while we were going to school at Berklee. Max and I met in the cafeteria. We became friends and decided, why not play some music and ended up playing tunes on the street after classes. Max convinced Sasha to pick up the bass. We’ve been together for twelve years in January. We’ve carried on a wonderful continuation of our friendship. We were in Boston for five and a half years and New York City for seven.

This band is comprised entirely of strings. Is that usual for your style of music?

Yeah, a lot of time it will be a string kind of thing, bluegrass being a genre coined by Bill Monroe. He was a mandolin player and his band was a kind of Appalachian string band. Fiddle, banjo, mandolin, and the upright bass are usual. We do bluegrass and old-time music and write our own songs. Bluegrass, folk, world, and a lot of recent stuff is groove-focused with a really nice pulse. We have a lot of fun exploring different types of music, but put it in the lens of this tradition type of string band. We also perform around one microphone, which is traditionally how it’s done.

Can you describe your bluegrass for us? Who have been your musical influences and who do you like to listen to outside of your genre?

In our brand of bluegrass, one thing that overlaps is strong vocal harmonies. It’s two to three parts a lot of the time. The instruments themselves will act as drums and the actual beat comes from a lof of different things that we do with our instruments. An honesty to things and cleverness to the lyrics, simplicity, good humor. People who pick on their porch. It draws from a lot of different places in Appalachia, but it’s called bluegrass because it comes out of Kentucky. That comes back to the father of bluegrass, Bill Monroe. Folk traditions predate it, but the bottling of it came from the rise of popularity of Bill Monroe.

Your sound has been described by Saving Country Music as “bluegrass served with a little punch, attitude, grit and gravy.” I love that image, and you expand on that for us?

It’s a segue from the traditional nod, we definitely are those punk kids that love to push the envelope a little bit. We have a really good time. It’s not always raucous but there’s always a joyful feeling. We’re here to have a really wonderful experience together. The show is a very inclusive, collective, maybe that’s the gravy part, everyone is together feel. It’s very honest and straightforward and we love to make any room feel like everyone’s in it. There’s very little separation between us and the audience.

You have been on tour for a while? How has that been? What has been your favorite city to visit so far? Where is the most concentrated group of bluegrass fans?

It’s always encouraging to see how widespread fans of bluegrass are. Especially these days to see it transitioning from the parents showing their kids to now it’s a lot of younger folks deciding they might like it anyway. This genre has a wide range and it’s spreading across the world. It’s even in Europe now. It’s great to see the community part and that’s why people love it everywhere. The tour has been good. It’s always a wonderful trial on the body, speaking of honesty. We’re always figuring out ways to help our bodies to continue to work well on the road. We’ve been grateful to the festivals, workshops, and theatres we’ve been able to do. It’s been good to find a balance between the level of show we can bring and its ability to even out the hardship on the body. Overall, the tour has been great. Every audience has been different and we are always overwhelmed with the joy and love everyone opens up with. We love Chicago and the big cities, and there are a lot of really beautiful tucked away towns. It’s so hard to narrow it down. We find something to be happy with wherever we are. We like to find where the water is and that helps to give us a different perspective. We love Kansas. It’s beautiful, and there are little things that we could say we love about a bunch of different places. Good people are what keep us on the road. The connections we make restore our faith in humanity. Probably our favorite place is San Francisco. Every time we go we say we love San Francisco so much.

You come to Sacramento to play at the Sofia on October 15th. Have you been to Sacramento before? What are you looking forward to doing in California?

We have not played in Sacramento before, but we have driven through or flown out of it for other gigs. We know how beautiful it is. We are excited to go at this time of the year. We’re looking forward to getting out on hikes and seeing the ocean. We’ll be playing Tuesday-Friday all over California. We head to Thousand Oaks on Friday.

You’re a fully independent band. What are the challenges of not going with a label? What are the benefits?

We’re definitely considering those questions a lot right now. We’re about four songs into a ten or eleven song album and it’s great because we get to set our own schedule. The creative freedom that we feel and act on is really good and that’s nice because we’ve seen friends and colleagues burn out on demands from labels. We find a different kind of burnout where it just comes to balancing everything. In order for us to be able to release music well, we have to act as our own label services. All promotion, back-end stuff, and the different industry things that go into that, so I find that is beneficial for any artist in general to know what’s going on. That has forced us to learn a lot that we wouldn’t have learned otherwise. That information creates value over and over again. Having external financial support that is directed at a project is always really helpful. I will say we have been really fortunate with all of our releases, including this one, with crowd funding. Our fans have really shown up and it’s been fully funded. When I say fully funded, there will be funds matched by the band. It takes so much pressure off of us. We’re trying to do a few different rounds of reaching out for funding for this next record. Everything donated on our website is going towards the initial production and mixing. Then we’ll be doing a pre-order for a brand-new live album from a show in Anchorage that we played. We work with an agent for bookings, so that is off of our plate and we self-manage on the road. A lot of it is very in-house and we manage pretty well and we’re honest and open with each other about what we need to do better. Honesty, openness and love is the way it works. We’re well-suited for independent setup due to our friendship.

I see that you’re based in Brooklyn. That doesn’t strike me as being a hub of bluegrass music. Is it easy to find places to play there and is there a market for that type of music in the city?

There is a great scene here and it’s really nice. There are a lot of touring folks that live in the city and, of course, since our weekends are Monday through Wednesday there are good jams happening at different bars throughout the city. There’s a weekly jam scene and some great venues. The Jalopy in Red Hook is a long-standing folk venue. We’ve been playing at a place called Café Wha? in the Lower East Side. When we first lived here, we played at Pete’s Candy Store. It’s very small and if there are 20 people it feels packed; it’s a great little spot. We tried jumping into things where we’d play monthly residencies and then we branched out. We’re always blown away by the showing. 

What are the costs associated with funding a record?

We invested in professional audio recording stuff and I’ve been doing it in various ways throughout the years. That cuts down on studio costs and, because we have the knowledge, we can produce ourselves, too. The costs come after that. We like to work with a mix engineer. We work with Dan Cardinal out of Boston. He did the last two records for us. That’s definitely a couple thousand depending on how many mixes you get. You get mastering, usually that’s $1500-2000, then from there a lot of it goes into marketing and design of the product and presentation. Then there are distribution costs, digital and physical. We have relationships built with independent record stores, which is a smaller pool than a record label does. We have to cover shipping and production, so then another big chunk is going to physical goods and merch, which we take on the road to keep the momentum going. We found that PR is really important. Radio is very much still alive and it’s been interesting to see that continue to just thrive in a way people learn about music and shows. As far as actually putting that all together, we would likely work with a publicist and, depending how we want to do it, we might also do a separate radio campaign. A good round number that we’ve found is around twenty grand for the whole thing. It’s a big ticket and that’s one of the reasons we’re ahead of it now. The last two we’ve waited until things were underway and so we’re trying to get ahead of it. We’re taking a different pace than we have in the past. We have a projected release of next spring/summer. We have the gumption to work on it anyway, so a lot of it is faith based. You have to trust that if it’s meant to come out it’s going to come out.

What can we expect from your new album ?

There’s a lot of new songs that we’ve been playing on the road, so audiences in Sac will get to hear them. Old varied with new ones. There’s a good mix and a lot of Sasha singing more, which is very exciting since she’s so good. There’s a lot more varied vocals. The lead vocal stuff and then we also like to have a great time having friends of ours on the record, too. Folks in Nashville, California, New York. We got to go to Ethiopia last May to tour with the State Department with an envoy program that we were awarded. We made a friend over there, Haddinqo, who plays the one-string Ethiopian instrument called the masinqo, and he’s given us his blessing to play his song on the record. We’ve taken a continual kind of cheeky look at how everyone’s doing. We’ve got to keep doing this and come together.

Where can we find your music?

All the streaming platforms. We have music videos on YouTube, all over. We do have albums that we have with us and we carry vinyl with us on the road.

What can we look forward to at the Sofia on October 15th?

Definitely a good mix of these new songs and some of our more, dare I say, classic ones and some true classics and great bluegrass stuff and covers we’re excited to hare. Overall, it’s an entertaining experience. It’s a really humorous and sincere feeling that we’re going to be able to bring to a stage. We’re excited for the show. We love California and we hope this is the start of something more.

Damn Tall Buildings plays at The Sofia on October 15th. More information on the band can be found at damntallbuildings.com. Tickets for the show may be found online at bstreettheatre.org or at the link provided.

Photo credit: Alexandra Galvis

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