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Article published Jun 25, 2009 The Last Straw soldiers on with show at Big Daddy's
By Steve Wildsmith of The Daily Times Staff
If Kyle Daniel, lead singer of the Murfreesboro rock band The Last Straw, is a little off his game tonight when the band performs at Big Daddy's in Maryville, you'll be hard-pressed to notice.
Daniel, after all, is a rock 'n' roll professional. He spoke to The Daily Times this week after a doctor's visit to treat a bacterial infection from tick bites -- sustained at a Last Straw gig the weekend before.
It's all part and parcel of playing in a rock band. The show, he said, must go on.
"I remember one time I had walking pneumonia and played," Daniel said. "That was eventful. My throat was so sore it was starting to close up, so I dosed up on cough syrup before the show and got a little loopy. I felt like absolute ass at the end of the show, and I slept for two days, but we still played This is nothing. I got some antibiotics and some cough syrup, so I'll be good to go."
Daniel and his bandmates -- including co-founders Adam Botner and Quincy Meeks -- have come a long way since the three first came together in 2007 at an impromptu jam. All three brought previous musical experience to the table, and the chemistry was instantaneous. With a dirty, bluesy guitar attack anchored by keys, bass and drums, The Last Straw comes off as a distant cousin of The Black Crowes.
Back then, Daniel said, the group was a party band as much as a professional rock outfit. But with the release of "Brought to Life," the band's debut full-length released in February, the guys have turned a professional corner.
"The live show has honestly evolved in more of progressive-style setting," Daniel said. "We've gotten into this whole thing of running songs together and linking them and not stopping between songs. The shows have gotten tighter because everyone is concentrating on what we're there to do. Initially, it was fun-time, party-time rock 'n' roll. Now, it's more interaction.
"People stop what they're doing now and listen, as opposed to sitting at the bar drinking and not (caring). And instead of jamming on something and being in just one key, we're taking songs to different time signatures, modulating in different keys and doing things we weren't doing before."
With "Brought to Life," the band is capitalizing on its initial success -- within its first year, the group won two awards from Nashville's biggest rock station, WBUZ-FM 102.9 "The Buzz," for "Best Guitarists" and "Best Auxiliary Instrumentalists." It's no surprise, really, given the three founders' musical pedigrees -- Botner has played with Warren Haynes of Gov't Mule and Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers Band; Botner spent his formative years touring with bands in the Southeast; and Daniel was a finalist at the International Blues Challenge in Memphis when he was only 18.
The new album, Daniel said, presented new musical challenges.
"When we went into the studio, we talked about how we were going to cut it, whether to do it live or break it down," he said. "We went in for two whole days as a band and cut the entire album, and I went in on the third day and cut vocals in one day. Another day for solo guitar touch-ups, and it was a total of five or six days and we were done."
The end result is an album that draws on staples of the Southern rock genre -- "Eat a Peach," by the Allman Brothers Band and "Shake Your Money Maker," by the Black Crowes, to name a few. In the studio, Daniel said, the band ultimately decided to strip the songs down and establish them as building blocks for the live performance. On stage, they take those same songs, add in a lot of energy from the audience and a little jam-band spontaneity and sometimes even surprise themselves with how they evolve.
"We have alternate versions of the way we hit certain songs, whether we take melodies from other songs or jams that go from one place to another," Daniel said. "The other night we were playing and got locked down into this funky groove, and all of the sudden we were playing 'Push It' by Salt-N-Pepa. In the studio, we knew what we wanted it to sound like, but we didn't know how it was going to work until we got in there.
"We weren't necessarily trying to reinvent the wheel; we were trying to get out a good representation of the band live, minus all of the whooping and hollering. Live, I feel like the band has really opened up. We're all listening to each other and everyone is connected on stage. It makes a hell of a difference, man, and it allows us to do things as opposed to playing the same old stock versions of the songs."