Jesse James DeConto grew up in New England, with Dad’s guitar and Mom’s radio tuned to Soulsville, the Village, Liverpool and Laurel Canyon. Those inheritances mingle with foothills-folk in Durham, N.C., yielding songs Americana UK calls “anthemic.” Critics hear influences from Neil Young to The National. “You won’t be able to stop humming,” (I wrote on No Depression.)
The Pinkerton Raid has played with Illiterate Light, Ballroom Thieves, Lowland Hum and Noah Gundersen. Back-to-back releases in 2017 & 2018 brought them from Charleston to Chicago to Brattleboro, Vt., with slots at EnoFest, Shakori Hills and Daytrotter and acclaim from Paste, Popdose, Aquarian Weekly and more.
In 2020-2021, the band has been releasing a series of indie-rock singles. American Songwriter called “Dream the Sun” a “radiant … message of hope.” Glide Magazine said “Rebel Mama Blues” “purrs with the garage rock swagger of The White Stripes and the irritated kick of Cage the Elephant,” while The Big Takover called it “a blast of zeitgeist-capturing political garage-psych … Bowie-meets-Black Keys.” Their fifth full-length album is due out in 2022, and we can see how DeConto squeezes so many beautiful, complex ideas into his new song “(Not All) Boys Will be Boys.”
Who are some of your musical influences?
Sharon Van Etten, Mount Moriah, Brittany Howard/Alabama Shakes, Of Monsters & Men, Arcade Fire, The Head & The Heart, Lake Street Dive, Durand Jones & The Indications, Black Pumas, Lowland Hum, The Collection
Name a perfect song and tell us why you feel that way.
“We Don’t Need That Much,” Mount Moriah. Somehow this song reads to me like a romance song and an environmental-protest song at the same time, and that’s what makes a perfect song to me — the intersection of the personal and the universal or political. It has a gorgeous, gentle, catchy melody, and it could be nothing but a love letter about how the muse of the song is the only person or thing that songwriter H.C. McEntire really needs. And yet it’s more than that. It’s a call for simplicity. You could sing it to your lover, or you could sing it to the purveyors of the capitalist-industrial buffet: “Honey, we don’t need that much. A flannel shirt, coffee in a camping cup … a winter fire, a summer swimming hole.” The simplicity of the arrangement and the production really back up the sentiment. The song has integrity.
Explain the title of your album.
“(Not All) the Boys Will Be Boys” is ‘dad-rock’ in the most literal sort of way: It’s a letter to my daughter, written after a few days on the road together visiting colleges, when she told me how disgusted she was with men and how she could never be in a relationship with one. For those without children out there: You don’t usually get that kind of honesty, and it’s precious. I wanted to amplify what she was saying, because it was a feeling that so many other women were expressing, saying simply “no” to the sort of masculinity that the world had known. And yet, being dad, I was afraid she was making decisions and pronouncements based on a few bad experiences, and everything in me wanted to say, “but it’s not all men,” like some kind of right-wing blowhard on Twitter. Those lyrics never appear in the song; actually, the chorus says, “No, no, not if the boys will be boys.” Deep down, what I really wanted was for her to experience her gender and sexuality out of her own true, positive identity, whatever that might be, rather than out of fear or anger or anything negative. So the only ‘dadsplaining’ I could really muster in the end was to say, “You can love who you wanna love. You can love no one at all. But, darling, love, love, it’s all we’ve got. And trust is the life worth living.” My producer David Wimbish had the idea to put “Not All” in parentheses for the title, to reference the cheap, defensive masculinity while undercutting it at the same time.
Does your album have an overarching theme?
“(Not All) the Boys Will Be Boys” is the seventh single off the full-length album The Highway Moves the World. We’ve been releasing it in a waterfall strategy, single after single, since March 2020, and we’ll keep going throughout 2022. It’s an album about the complicated love we experience as part of a family. I’ve released songs at least loosely related to my sisters, a brother, my partner, my kids. It’ll include my parents and even our parents or grandparents collectively, the Boomers. Just like “(Not All),” The Highway looks at big-picture human experiences like politics through the lenses of one life or a few human lives. The Highway is about the social and geographic distance of modern life and the sacrifices we have to make in order to nurture our cherished relationships.
Who would you love to collaborate with? why?
This is probably cheating, but can I say Sharon Van Etten and also Shovels & Rope at the same time? I love what they do as distinct artists, and they recorded this epic cover of The Beach Boys’ “In My Room” together that just blows my mind. To build some massive arrangements with Cary Ann, Michael & Sharon and harmonize with those three soulful voices seems like a musical shangri-la. All of them make music that simultaneously sounds organic, familiar and rootsy while also modern and unpredictable. There are so many heroes out there, but these three would be life-altering, I think.