Floating Rock and Rolling Folk
From year to year, over hundreds of live sets, Driftwood has proved a cohesive quartet since its members first gathered in Binghamton, NY in 2005. But the band’s sound, rather aptly, is a shifting, constant collision of styles, from old-time bluegrass and folk to country, punk, and rock.
“It’s sometimes tough to keep any sort of focus on style or sound when you have three different songwriters,” guitarist Dan Forsyth concedes in the band’s tour notes. “But it also allows us to branch out and explore in ways other bands don’t.”
“I consider our sound to be more of an attitude and an approach,” adds banjo player Joe Kollar. “The result of all of our influences in a completely open musical forum where the only stipulation is to use bluegrass instruments and create it from the heart.”
Driftwood’s fourth studio album City Lights, released in April, goes up in an easy blaze. “The Waves,” a wonderfully arranged Irish shanty turned break-up confessional, is a basket of floating falsettos, high-speed finger picking, twinkling bells, and catchy strings of Joey Arcuri’s upright bass notes. “Talkin’” starts as a bouncy jam akin to Blue Traveler’s “Run-Around” (but less annoying), then — under the command of violinist Claire Byrne’s reedy, Tracy Chapman-esque voice — kicks its way out of larger and larger boxes until it grows into a roaring, exultant pop song that would have blown Fleetwood Mac offstage.
“The life I led when I was lonely/ Things I done before I met you,” sings Byrne, “They do not hold me anymore/ and all of my time, baby, just for you/ and all my mind, I know it’s only you.” The rest of City Lights is just as joyous. Even lyrics about social anxiety sound fun when they’re packaged in a juiced-up folk foot-stomper like the song “Fishbowl.”
Byrne says she doesn’t know much about punk music, “but I do know that it gives me a feeling of tearing into something without inhibition.” She senses a similar spirit in old-time folk songs: “the music was a release for people living extremely hard lives in harsh conditions. In this way, the two styles of music are very similar: It’s digging in and making a statement. It’s rocking out and feeling totally reborn through the song.”