The Cave Singers

Rainer Werner Fassbinder t-shirts? Wacky facial hair conventions? Exotic food and drink every day of the week! Hanging out … lots of hanging out and laying around in flannel shirts. Beer and cigarettes, of course. Pretty girls … loads of very skinny, very pretty girls with tattoos. Every once and a while a guitar or drum pops up and very rarely do we see the same location twice. 

What, you ask, am I talking about? I’m talking The Cave Singers blog, which features photos of the above items - photos of every bit of the hip Pacific Northwest lifestyle imaginable, really. There you’ll find maybe a sentence or two every few weeks, but not much else aside from photos. In fact, if you drag the Internet (including their proper website and their label page), you’ll find very little written about the Matador Records band in question anywhere. Almost nothing, actually.

Knowing this in advance, I wasn’t too surprised when Cave Singer founder/guitarist/bassist Derek Fudesco flaked out on our scheduled phone interview. Fudesco, joined by singer/guitarist Pete Quirk and drummer Marty Lund, hails from Seattle, a city once known for its grunge scene and now known for often aloof indie Americana types with strange facial hair.

What I did find was a number of different bios for the band, all of which said the same six or seven facts, all presented differently. So, here’s what we know: Fudesco was in both The Murder City Devils and Pretty Girls Make Graves before forming The Cave Singers. Both great bands that sound nothing like his current work, which is dusty, delicate, twangy and full of haunting atmosphere. Singer Quirk was in a band called Hint Hint and drummer Lund was in a band called Cobra High. We also know that The Cave Singers have two studio records, 2007’s Invitation Songs and 2009’s Welcome Joy – both great. They like to take photos; they like to grow facial hair; and, given the lack of interviews found online, we can assume that they don’t want us to know too much else.

And, well, that’s about it. Cagey dudes.

But the songs are good. Some of them great, even. And, most importantly, they’re coming to Fort Wayne’s Brass Rail stage on Friday, March 26. So, since I wasn’t able to track down Fudesco (and, believe me, I left some pretty epic voice mails), I caught up with local musician C. Ray Harvey, the man responsible for booking the Singers.

Harvey, who also booked critical darlings Blk Jks not long ago, did respond to my inquires. Good ‘ol C. Ray.

“We worked hard to make the BLK JKS show a success,” said Harvey when asked how he came to book Blk Jks and The Cave Singers, two bands who would usually skip Fort Wayne and head for Chicago, Cleveland, Ann Arbor or even Bloomington. Turns out his uncle, who works for Billion Booking, decided to test the Fort Wayne indie waters with the Blk Jks show. Worked out well.

“Also, the fact that Fort Wayne is starved for bands that have national – or even international – acclaim helped make [that show] a massive success. It's tough to explain to bands with tour managers and agents e-mailing riders and contracts that The Brass Rail is a small bar with no hospitality budget, but they did very well in Fort Wayne,” Harvey explained. “We paid them almost all of the door. They stayed at the home of Eric, the drummer for Wooden Satellites [Harvey’s band], and drank for free all night. For a band of lower middle class indie rockers from South Africa to show up in Fort Wayne and leave after a packed house with several hundred dollars, a free night's stay and a lot of new friends ... well, that's a different treatment then you get in Brooklyn, but special in its own way.”

So, then, I asked, why The Cave Singers of all bands as a follow up?

“The Cave Singers aren't a really well-known or publicly lauded band at this point,” Harvey said. “They aren't pulling four-star reviews from Spin or Rolling Stone, they aren't a Best New Music band on Pitchfork. However, they get attention on blogs and smaller press publications, and I think that they are Fort Wayne's kind of band, especially considering the success of artists like Lee Miles [who will open for the Singers on March 26]. I wouldn't compare his music to theirs, but people are very receptive to folk music here, even if it doesn't sound like Devendra Banhart, and that's very cool.”

So, really, then, I suppose we nabbed this show because these guys don’t like to do interviews? Right? I mean, the records and great and the beards are pretty, but they don’t self promote. If they did, they’d be playing in Noblesville.

Or something. Okay, maybe not.

Really though, bands this good – especially ones on labels like the legendary Matador Records – just don’t play here. Or, I should say, they didn’t used to. Harvey already has another very notable show booked at the Rail on May 27.

“The next big show is The Tallest Man on Earth. His new album comes out in about six weeks and I fully expect it to get amazing reviews,” Harvey (whose uncle often supplies him with advance copies of albums) said.

But, for now, it’s all about the ever elusive Cave Singers. Three hairy dudes from the Pacific Northwest who play sturdy and sweet Americana and are signed to what might be the most influential and important American indie label ever. What more do you need to know?

Written by G. William Locke