The Deslondes Un-Retire for "Ways and Means"

The Deslondes, by Bonnie Wearing

The New Orleans-based Americana band reunited for the best reasons.

By the spring of 2020, The Deslondes were done, but there was no drama. The New Orleans-based Americana band split amicably as life including parenthood made it hard for some members to commit to the band and touring the way they once had. They’re back with a new album though, Ways & Means, thanks in large part to COVID, which forced them to change the plans they had for a post-Deslondes life. When the idea of getting back together came up, the members couldn’t think of a good reason not to get together again for three days in Andrija Tokic’s Bomb Shelter studio in Nashville. The resulting album works in large part because it’s freed from expectations.

The New Orleans-based Americana band was never doctrinaire about genre and folded elements of folk, blues, country, R&B, rock and pop into their sound, but the results hung together because the synthesis felt organic. Their 2015 self-titled debut and 2017’s Hurry Home also sounded like the band did live, so much so that that quality felt like something important to them—that the records authentically reflected them. That’s exactly not the case on Ways & Means. “Five Year Plan” opens with a watery, less tinny upright piano—actually a Fender Rhodes and piano doubling the same melody—to set an uncertain mood for Sam Doores song about being asked by a lover to look ahead and see where he sees their relationship going.

The song is obviously a Deslondes song, but it’s more fully realized with a little more dimension, and that’s the case throughout the album. A Rhythm King or some similar early drum machine moves “Consider Me” out of an old dancehall without making it sound too contemporary. Riley Downing’s “Standing Still” begins with an organ and a synth that twinkle like fireflies behind his laconic vocal until strings sweep the song out of a timeless, uncertain space and into a clearer song structure.

Throughout, The Deslondes use the studio to shape the sounds of songs in ways that are right for the material but new for the band. Downing agrees that this approach might be because the members are less invested in The Deslondes as a concept and the vehicle to carry them into the future. “It made it easier to put everything on the table,” he says while warming a cup of coffee in the microwave. He thought the band was done when it split up and wasn’t even sure he’d keep playing, but he continued to write with Tourville until they had songs they liked enough to think that they should cut a single, and that impulse grew into Start it Over, the album he released in 2021.

COVID made it hard but not impossible to play and support Start it Over, but Doores’ self-titled album rolled out straight into the teeth of the pandemic. “He couldn’t have had worse time,” Downing says. The album came out on Friday, March 13, 2020, in time to play an album release party at the Hi-Ho before nationwide touring shut down. He had six months of touring planned out including South by Southwest and a Brooklyn folk festival to introduce himself to the world as a solo act. “People write a lot about a new album when it comes out, so there’s an opportunity for a buzz to start or momentum for an artist,” Doores said in 2020. “Usually that gets reinforced by performing a bunch, playing festivals, and selling albums in person.”

John James Tourville started the ball on Ways & Means. He had become an active session musician since The Deslondes hung it up, and produced A Walk Around the Sun, the recent album from Tuba Skinny’s Erika Lewis. At one point in 2021, he asked the band members if they thought they had one more album in them. Downing hadn’t thought about it and assumed that the others had, like him, moved on. He was a little surprised when everybody said yes, and came around. “I was never opposed to it,” he says. “We’ve been a band too long not to try to do one more.”

Doores was similarly caught off-guard by the idea, and he was even more surprised to discover that he felt positive about the idea too. That wasn’t part of his plan, “but by the time he suggested it I felt ready again to get the fam back together,” he says.

In ways, the reunion was a no-brainer. With no long-term future riding on the results, The Deslondes got to enjoy the fun, creative parts of making with friends without the burden of expectations and business imperatives. They brought the songs they had, and because it had been four years since they had recorded, everybody had songs, more than they could use. Bassist Dan Cutler has a few songs on the album, and Tourville had songs that he wrote with Doores and Downing’s voices in mind. Downing didn’t think about his own solo career and contributed the songs he had at the time as well. In retrospect, he says, maybe he should have held some back for his next album, but “I’ve always just thrown out what I had and what’s relevant,” he says. “That’s always how we rolled. I’m not that business-oriented to do that.”

The slightly psychedelic sonic touches paired with good, fundamental song sense give the tracks on Ways & Means a Beatlesque tint at times. That didn’t come from Downing, who admits that his musical sweet spot ends well before the British Invasion, but he agrees that The Beatles are part of the band’s collective musical vocabulary.

“I grew up with a dad who would regularly quiz me on Beatles trivia and only listened to the oldies station,” Doores says. Doores loved their music and reconnected to it recently after the release of Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary mini-series on the Let It Be sessions. He and Downing stress that the recording sessions were organic without any attempt to sound like anyone or anything, but Doores does hear familiar touches in the results. “The production on ‘Standing Still’ does remind me a bit of some of my favorite elements on Magical Mystery Tour,” he says.

The Beatles aren’t the only influence lurking in the background of Ways & Means. “Wild Eden” features a prosaic, Dylanesque verse-heavy structure mitigated by a guitar twang and a rhythm machine set on ‘bossa nova.’ Doores hears the connection, but he had a more direct reference on his mind: his great-grandfather, Henry Chapin, who wrote an epic poem titled “The End of the West” that Doores discovered during the pandemic. “I was moved by it,” Doores says. “The way he used words, and the way his brain organized the stories and images felt familiar to me. It starts out in Norse Mythology and ends during the gold rush. I got inspired to pick up where he left off.”

Now the band is preparing for a tour that will start July 30 in North Hillsdale, NY and finish its first leg on October 9 at One Eyed Jacks in New Orleans. This period and the first shows are as creative in their own way as the recording sessions because the new material “really takes shape when we play it live,” Downing says. That includes the songs from Ways & Means, all of which can be played live, he says.

Doores has plans to work on his second album, but he will wait until they finish the European and West Coast legs of the tour to get back to it. And even though Ways & Means was pitched as a one-more-time affair, he’s open to one more time after that. “I’m not sure if this is the last Deslondes record,” he says, laughing. “We’re just taking it one day at a time. We certainly feel less pressure now in many ways and that allows us to be more creative.”