The BoDeans

The BoDeans take the Main Stage at Music in the Park at 7:00PM on June 24, 2010

Twenty three years after their T-Bone Burnett produced debut Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams led them to win a Rolling Stone reader’s poll as “Best New American Band,”  The BoDeans are still rocking and harmonizing gracefully, touring the U.S. regularly and exposing the kids of their longtime steadfast fans to real, heartfelt and trend-free music. Best known for their mid-90’s Billboard Top 20 hit anthem “Closer To Free,” which became the theme song for Fox’s “Party Of Five,” the dynamic musical duo—Kurt Neumann (vocals and electric guitar) and Sam Llanas (vocals and acoustic guitar)—is still focused on, as Neumann says, “writing songs that bring good things to the world.”

Llanas insists that on the whole, the songs he and Neumann recorded over eight months embody the changing realities of their lives. “Let’s face it, we’re not kids anymore,” he says. “The first album came out in 1986 which is almost 25 years ago. The hope is that we’ve matured and aren’t writing about life from the same perspective. We can write about love and relationships but we’re drawing on a lot more experience and a whole different viewpoint than when we were 21. It’s great having younger fans but we’re also excited to make music for people our own age. Hopefully, if you’re trying to get better and evolve as a writer and artist, you evolve and write what you know about. Musically, the cool thing is, we’re not trying to reinvent ourselves. Between the two of us, we naturally cover a wide range of styles and have a nice palette of colors to choose from.”

For the BoDeans, the fact that their music was never easily pigeonholed into a specific genre or style was more a strength than a problem as their career developed. They followed their debut with Outside Looking In (1987), Home (1989), Black and White
(1991), and Go Slow Down (1993), which featured “Closer To Free” which became a massive pop and adult contemporary hit when the world heard it every week via “Party of Five.” In the late 90s, after the release of the 2 CD live set Joe Dirt Car and Blend
(1996), Neumann and Llanas took a break to record solo albums. Llanas formed the band Absinthe and released A Good Day To Die, while Neumann played all the instruments on his solo effort Shy Dog.

“I think the reason we’ve stayed popular with the fans all these years,” says Llanas, “is that we’re real guys, not trying to be anything special and worrying about our hair, clothes and getting into goth or another cool flavor of the moment. People who like us are the same kind of fans who are into Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and Tom Petty. We give them the organic truth. It’s fun to do shows and that’s what I’m best at. I’m not a studio rat for the most part. Onstage, we get that immediate reaction to what we’re doing and feed off the energy people give us. When you walk into a room of 500 people, something amazing is bound to happen. A concert is like a tennis match for us. We lob the ball into the audience, they lob it back, and as it goes back and forth it becomes more exciting for everyone.”

Neumann sees the enduring success of The BoDeans as a byproduct of making music that creates a special connection to moments in people’s lives. “It’s not always this dramatic,” he says, “but we do hear of stories where people are ill or dying and our songs give them a sense of joy and hope. It’s always wonderful to be important to people’s lives. We also saw this YouTube clip of two kids in car seats singing one of our songs on a family road trip. Their parents are playing our songs and we are a part of their world in that moment. I want to know someday that I’ve brought good things into this world, and this kind of fan response confirms that Sam and I have been able to do this.”

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 20th, 2010 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Artists, Sheila. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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