“At the height of the pandemic it t became clear to me that—with everything we’d been through—there was going to be a different mind coming out the other side. As a band, we decided we weren’t going to try to go back and replicate who we were, or the reality we were living before covid, before all the civil unrest and the national racial reckoning. A lot of people were fixated on getting back to quote-unquote normal, but to me it seemed pretty obvious that wasn’t even on the table,” says Nick Dittmeier about life in summer 2020.
Good thing his band Nick Dittmeier & the Sawdusters is certainly equipped to musically address our state of the world affairs and always let us forget them, with its mix of explosive guitar rock and alt-country leanings. With their third LP Heavy Denim, the band has not only expanded their roots sound with new textures (drum machines, loopers, synths) but it has made its own Damn The Torpedoes, a brazen song-oriented effort that can fit any decade of back to basics rock music. And like the pre-mentioned Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers album, this band never bores us and takes us right to the chorus.
“So much of trying to make this record, and intellectualizing what it was gonna be—it was all about thinking outside the box, and not making the move you did before,” Dittmeier says. “Though I don’t feel like I’m fundamentally changing who I am. I think you could put Springsteen in that category. I was listening to Tunnel of Love the other day—in a similar way, a lot of what we did on the album was almost hidden, sleight-of-hand stuff. Just using different types of equipment we weren’t using before, trying to develop those tools and make them our own.”
Glide is premiering the gritty “Save Me From Myself,” (below) which is a righteous guitar rocker that is both thematic and rejuvenating. This therapeutic rocker is sure to cast a bluesy spell and sure to stick in your head in the best ways…
“Save Me From Myself” was one of the last songs written and demoed, but the first we worked on for the new record. We rehearsed it and hashed out a basic song structure right before we left for our Europe tour in 2021. So it was the first of the new batch of songs to be performed live with this new lineup. And the reaction it received in front of audiences over there—and then again when we got back to the States—was really strong; unlike any song we’d ever played live before it was released. So that gave us the confidence to move ahead in this new direction, and let us know we were in the right neighborhood of where we wanted to go,” adds Dittmeier
