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Dreadnaught scored a pretty cool gig as an opening band this year – it’s just that the people they’re playing with are at the top of the New York Times Bestseller List, instead of the Billboard Charts.
The New Hampshire guitar-bass-drums trio is the house band for the Music Hall’s “Writers on a New England Stage” series, a program the Portsmouth venue hosts. When you’re performing in between readings by world-famous authors, you’ve got to work extra hard to make sure the music fits.
“We write music specific to the particular events,” said Bob Lord, bass player and composer for the band. “We used a tune of Dan Brown’s
, who used to be a musician on the West Coast, and it was really funny. You should have seen the look on his face. John Updike had some great quote that we were ‘cooking up what I take to be the sound of terror.’ He was really, really nice, a very classy and funny guy.”
When they’re not hanging out with Pulitzer Prize winners and blockbuster authors, the band is playing semi-regular gigs throughout New England, including their show this Saturday at Carmen Verandah in Bar Harbor. The trio made up of Lord, guitarist and current Augusta resident Justin Walton and drummer Rick Habib, have been putting the finishing touches on their next album, due out in October: “High Heat and Chin Music,” a retrospective of 10 years as a band, featuring both new and old songs.
Their music spans the gaps between rock, country, blues, funk and experimental, noisy and avant-garde. Absorbing a bewildering array of styles and then spitting it back out into one complex, progressive sound is what Dreadnaught is all about – though they’re just as happy playing stripped down blues songs as they are highly orchestrated compositions.
“We’ve got a lot of crazy, funny instrumentals,” said Lord. “We’re really serious musicians, but at the same time, you’ve got to laugh.”
Habib and Lord, founding members of the band, have played together since meeting at the University of New Hampshire in 1996.
“I saw some pictures from back then,” said Lord. “Now I’m getting gray and I have a goatee. It’s crazy how fast 10 years goes by.”
A lot has changed for Dreadnaught. They used to be die-hard road warriors who traversed North America several times a year, but have traded life in a van for life in a studio – an exchange that Lord has grown to appreciate.
“We’re signed to a record label now,” said Lord. “We play fewer gigs now, which allows us to focus on recording, and also to get ourselves out to audiences all over the world. We have fans in Italy, in Uzbekistan, Poland, the Czech Republic.”
The band also was involved in a unique project earlier this year; the RPM Challenge (www.rpmchallenge.com), contest sponsored by the Wire, Portsmouth’s alternative weekly newspaper, asked participants to write and record a 10-song album during the month of February. Amazingly, over 200 bands and artists took part, recording in styles ranging from the blackest of black metal to Latin jazz to avant-techno-industrial-noise-whatever, which culminated in a huge listening party when everyone was finished.
Dreadnaught was the fourth band to sign up. With song titles like “Petite Portrait for Oboe, Bassoon and Grape Nuts” and “Aagah Eegah, Aagah Eegah Oogah Eegah,” and my personal favorite, “Talk is Cheap, Gimme the Meat,” it is left to the listener to decide whether the album they recorded for the challenge, “Pucka Pucka with Dreadnaught,” is pure silliness or pure genius.
“I write and record every day, so this was very natural for me,” said Lord. “But I think for a lot of bands it was something they’d never done. When you have a finite amount of time to do something, you don’t overthink it. Plus, it was a great excuse to write some new stuff.”
Dreadnaught will play on Saturday, July 29, at Carmen Verandah in Bar Harbor. Call the bar at 288-2766 about a cover charge and what time the music starts. For information about the band, visit www.dreadnaughtrock.com. Emily Burnham can be reached at eburnham@bangordailynews.net.
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