INTERVIEW: The Devil Makes Three

The Devil Makes Three takes the form of Pete Bernhard (vocals/guitar), Cooper McBean (guitar/banjo) and Lucia Turino (upright bass). Originating from the U.S state of Vermont, the trio offer an unconventional approach to music, with often eerily-chilled offerings that leave you in full-scale reflection, making them an intriguingly unorthodox band indeed. We caught up with Pete ahead of kicking off their tour in Dublin on March 18th (today!): 

Hi Pete, what are you doing at this moment in time?

I’m actually in Dublin right now – we came in early for tomorrow’s gig and obviously it’s St. Patrick’s Day, so it’s pretty crazy here. We’re just getting ready to do a bit of a rehearsal but other than that we’re just hanging out.

Like you already mentioned, the tour kicks off tomorrow (today) – what are your feelings approaching it?

We’re playing a lot in the U.K, which we’ve never really done before so I’m not really sure what to expect, but so far so good – the shows we’ve been playing are going really well. Last time we did a European tour we actually only played two shows in London, but both were really great and they both sold out, so we have high hopes for these dates in the U.K, which is why we’re back so soon.

With the tour being predominately in the U.K and Europe, what’s it like playing away from home?

Oh it’s great, I love it. This is our second European tour and like I said the last one went really well, we’re trying to make a habit of touring Europe once every year if we can. We’ve been playing in the states for a long time now and we love playing in places like Europe.

The Devil Makes Three are definitely quite unique, so how would you summarise yourselves to people who have never come across you guys before?

I’d say we do a bit of everything really, my best recommendation for people is to come and see us live in order to truly understand what we’re like. A lot of the time we sort of defy description, but we do a lot of old rock ‘n’ roll, some blues, some country and some bluegrass as well, and even some swing and gypsy-jazz – so I’d say we definitely draw from a lot of influences.

There isn’t actually a drummer in the band, what was the reasoning behind this?

Well, most of the bands we like don’t actually have drummers so it didn’t seem as though we needed one either. We do actually use a bit of percussion on our albums and we would definitely consider having a percussionist when we’re playing live, but we just haven’t found the right person yet, but we discovered that music can be very rhythmic without a drummer.

I’m A Stranger Here is the new album, and your fourth studio album – what were the inspirations behind the album?

I’d say it’s definitely a darker album than any of our other ones. It’s definitely inspired by some of our heroe, but it was only inspired by the fact that we’d sort of had a rough year, and I think that just naturally came out in the album. We demo’d a lot of songs for this album and the ones we ended up choosing were definitely those darker ones. We recorded the album with Buddy Miller as our producer, and he also chose those songs to use.

You actually recorded this album at Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys’ Easy Eye Sound Studio in Nashville, what was that like?

It was really cool, it was our first time recording at that studio as well as our first time working with Buddy. The studio itself was extremely cool – it had just one live recording room kind of in the style of Sun records and those similar old-school recording studios, so it pushed us to do most of the recording almost live, which was our preference anyway. Of course they had some really great equipment and guitars and amplifiers and stuff like that, so overall it was really, really cool.

You actually toured with Willie Nelson as well, what was that like as an experience?

Aww, that was great. It was definitely a big dream come true for us – we’re all huge fans of Willie Nelson of course and obviously he’s a huge legend so it was really special. It was actually a great trip too, we made friends with everybody in Willie’s crew and he actually invited us up on stage to play with him, it was great.

What made you want to pursue a life in music in the first place?

I’d definitely say my family: my dad and brother were both guitar players and my aunt and uncle were both musicians as well. Obviously I grew up with a musical family, my dad bought me my first instrument when I was like 9 or 10 years old.

Are there any current bands that are impressing you at the minute?

To be honest I don’t actually listen to a lot of current bands, I tend to listen to a lot of older music. So I couldn’t really say, but we tour with a lot of new acts so that’s how I tend to be introduced to them; we just finished touring with someone called Joe Pug who’s a singer/songwriter who I think is really great.

What else can we expect from The Devil Makes Three throughout the rest of 2015?

After this tour we’re going to go back to the states to play a lot of festivals, but during the summer we’re really hoping to do some more recording if we can, we’re hoping to demo a new album during the summer and we have a lot of new songs. Other than that, we’ll hopefully be coming back for another European tour sooner rather than later so hopefully you’ll be seeing a lot more of us.

A huge thanks to Pete for taking the time to speak to us – wishing The Devil Makes Three all the best on their tour!

 

Find out where you can catch them on tour by looking at the dates below:

March 18 // Dublin, Ireland @ Whelens

March 19 // Bangor, UK @ Ballyholme Yacht Club

March 20 // Glasgow, UK @ King Tut’s Wah Wah

March 21 // Manchester, UK @ The Ruby Lounge

March 23 // Leeds, UK @ The Wardrobe

March 24 // Birmingham, UK @ Rainbow

March 25 // Bristol, UK @ Bierkeller

March 26 // London, UK @ Scala

 

James Cummins.

@CummyBear

 

James Cummins

James Cummins

James Cummins

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