Home starts off familiar and comfortable—a bit more charming and enjoyable too, like a college vacation spent at home. Not insignificantly, Midtown Dickens’ third long-player, released Tuesday, starts with a song called “Home All Ways” and ends with “This is My Home.”
The idea of stability works in the music, too. With the same band members—multi-instrumentalists Catherine Edgerton, Will Hackney, Jonathan Henderson and Kym Register—the arrangements and voices are recognizable, and not too much appears to have changed for the Durham-based band.
But the voices are less tremulous on Home than on 2009’s Lanterns; there’s less starry-eyed earnestness in the lyrics. The instruments are more restrained, too—when the voices belt out and shoulder the emotional heft, it’s not really necessary for a muscular horn section to augment.
So yes, this album is more mature, and Dickens’ trademark twang-and-pluck comes in clearer with crisper, autumnal production. But this is also more of a pop album, more immediate yet amenable to repeated listens.
This is all to say: the band has gotten better with age, and there’s a gladness in their story that permeates their music. “Home,” Triangle music, the Pinhook—the new album evokes all of these things.
I met the band after one of their twice-weekly practices, on the porch of the Trekky House (near the intersection of Mt. Moriah and Old Chapel Hill Rd), a “music house” for over a decade. Trekky is the record label founded by Will Hackney and Martin Anderson that primed the latest Midtown Dickens album for its release two days ago—the band practices at the house, Hackney lives here and they used to even have an in-house recording studio (until their friend took his hi-grade sound equipment with him and starting doing sound for Toro Y Moi). Right outside the back porch, tucked into overhanging tree branches, is the old tour bus that another flagship Trekky band, Lost in the Trees, used to tour with.
Lost in the Trees, The Mountain Goats, Bowerbirds, Megafaun, Mt. Moriah, Calico Haunts: for those who have followed Triangle music throughout the past decade, these names are familiar. “It’s a pretty tight community,” Hackney said. “We’ve known all these people playing music for five years or more in their various bands.”
Edgerton and Register are both from Durham and have played music together since they were in high school. They started Midtown Dickens together in 2006, and Jonathan Anderson (who’s known Edgerton since she was born) and Hackney joined the band in 2008 to contribute a litany of instruments to Lanterns—mandolin, drums, piano, guitar, banjo, etc.
Together, the quartet shares the perfect history to imbue their folksy ramblings and sky-directed ponderings with a central, Dickensean idea: growing up, but not moving on. Though Hackney denies any unifying message on Home, the opening track resembles a fairly literal thesis on friendship, home and family.
“It’s about how we’re supposed to be getting married, having kids, buying houses, creating new homes away from our families and friends—reacting to that social expectation and redefining what it means to be ‘home’,” Edgerton said. “It’s a pretty intensely recognizable feeling.”
Regardless of any flexibility in their definitions of family, the geographical sense of home has remained consistent for the band; all four members were born and raised in North Carolina. “I think a big piece of my own identity has to do with being from the South, and my relationship with Catherine feels like a really defining piece of who I’ve grown to be,” Henderson said. “These relationships are among a handful that really root me to North Carolina.”
Midtown Dickens enjoyed a whirlwind opportunity this past summer, as special tour guests on a three week West Coast tour with the Mountain Goats. That band is the vessel for the intense folk narratives of John Darnielle who, after more than a dozen releases, has become an elder statesman of Durham and independent music at large. The band was expected to fly out just a few days after the invitation, and recalled packing instrument cases full of merchandise to sell—they didn’t even have time to properly freak out with anticipation. The highlight of the tour was a show at the Fillmore, one of rock’s most legendary performance venues, in San Francisco. “I remember seeing Sonic Youth there and feeling like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe I’m in this venue.’ And then actually playing it!” Edgerton said. “That was the show I will never, ever forget.”
The opportunity didn’t come from left field—it’s the kind of gesture that local musicians are known for, in a place where artists don’t so much share an aesthetic “scene” as a community of friendships; where “bands that have had some sort of national success are able to pull people up,” Hackney said. “It’s sort of a lifestyle.”
Although the lifestyles of the members of Midtown Dickens include “day jobs,” their lives remain largely inextricable from local music. Register is a co-founder of The Pinhook bar in downtown Durham, which hosts touring artists several nights each week, and has recently hosted several Duke Performances shows. Likewise, Edgerton recently began writing for the Duke Performances blog, and also works with a cooperative group called “2 Sensitive Artists and a Chain Saw,” which mainly free-lances carpentry and electrical work. Anderson teaches a variety of music classes, including jazz history and music theory, at the Carolina Friends School in North-West Durham. And Hackney, alongside Lost in the Trees member Martin Anderson, dedicates his time to Trekky Records, which has represented close to 20 bands since its inception.
In 2009, Midtown Dickens hosted their album release party to a packed, sweaty crowd in the Duke Coffeehouse. For Home’s coming out party tonight, they’ll upgrade to the Cat’s Cradle in Carroboro, where they will co-headline with Diali Cissokho and Kairaba, a West African-inspired dance band that Henderson also plays for. After that, Dickens will head out to the road until late summer to plays shows throughout the East Coast and Midwest. The distant venues discerning enough to host will witness the band’s strongest tracks to date, like “Only Brother,” which was recently featured as NPR’s Song of the Day.
The unfortunate branding of “local music,” which too modestly designates some of the nation’s best music, was partially to blame for the Duke University Union’s recent dissolution of its Campus Concert Series, whose programming domain was divvied out to the more successful operations of the Coffeehouse and Smalltown Records. But for Duke students and Durham residents, the privilege of living among a thriving arts community is re-illuminated with new releases of this caliber—not that they’re especially rare in these parts.
“I’ve toured around and there’s great places for music, but the energy and amount of people constantly cheerleading it [make it clear] that it’s a very special place for music,” Hackney said. “If I didn’t grow up here I probably wouldn’t be running a label and trying to do this. Which isn’t to say that any of us are making money. But we’re able to get by happily, and we can always pretend we’re making money.”
Midtown Dickens will play at the release party of Home on Saturday, Apr. 7 with Diali Cissokho and Kairaba at Cat’s Cradle 9 p.m. Tickets are $5 and are available through the Cat’s Cradle website.
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