Smoker Dad is a Seattle-based indie band that describes their sound as “deep-fried Southern Rock,” and it’s hard to argue with that. The attitude and slightly humorous feel of that description are also part of their identity. Consisting of Trevor Conway on vocals and guitar, Teagen Conway on lead guitar, Chris King on vocals and keys, Derek Luther on bass, Adam Knowles on drums, and Chris Costalupes on pedal steel, the latter has been a decisive factor in shaping the “twang” in their music. It accompanies a steady foundation of Rock ‘n Roll and an enthusiasm for 70s intersections between Roots music and Rock.
Smoker Dad, who are a very experienced live band, have released their single and video “Rollin’ On”, which previews their upcoming album, Hotdog Highway, expected sometime this Fall. The new batch of songs more accurately reflects their developing sound than their first full-length album which, given covid delays, was actually recorded several years ago. Current to their interests and recorded fresh off of a Spring tour, the songs on Hotdog Highway were tracked live at their core with a goal of capturing their identity. I spoke with Trevor Conway and Derek Luther about Smoker Dad’s sound and evolving interests, as well as some surprises that made their way onto the finished album.
Not only have I heard and seen the video for “Rollin’ On”, but I’ve gotten a sneak peek at the upcoming album, Hotdog Highway, so I have a sense of how it might fit in with your work lately.
Derek Luther: We don’t have a set date yet for it, but we’re aiming for Fall.
I heard that “Rollin’ On” was written while you were out on tour, but how long have you been working on Hotdog Highway?
Derek: For a lot of the songs at the beginning of the album, we’ve been working on them for a while, probably two years. That’s for the first half of the album. Then, right after we got off a four-week tour last April, we went into the studio a week after we got home and just recorded everything because we were so tight from playing every day. This song I actually wrote on that tour. We had another song in mind that we were going to record in the studio, and it just did not work out, so we tried “Rollin’ On”. It was a little shaky at first, but after a few more takes, we got it!
Did you have a sense that it would be something that would be a friendly introduction to the album?
Trevor Conway: I think it’s a little more relatable, a little more matured. We’re not just talking about partying, it’s shit that we go through, and all of our friends go through. I really like the song since it’s different. I thought it would be nice to have something fresh.
Derek: It’s a big shift from our first record, too, so it kind of reintroduces everyone to our music. The first record that we did is kind of like a pandemic record. It was recorded before the pandemic, but then we just sat on it for so long to wait for release. Now, we’ve matured musically, so it’s nice to show people a bit of a different sound.
Trevor: It’s a musical shift because in that song, everything drops except the pedal steel, and most of our songs are just going, going, going, and Rock ‘n Roll. Everything is usually loud all at once, so this one has a more dynamic feeling.
My impression is that it would be a great song live, that lots of people would enjoy, because it creates a lot of atmosphere. It’s not a driving, heavy sound, but is more like a song you’d hear at early evening in a small venue. Everyone’s starting to feel mellow on a Friday night. It has that laid-back feeling.
Derek: It’s like the first beer of the night.
It does suggest how you are as a live band, and it’s talking about that, too.
Trevor: We’re definitely more of a live band. Everyone should see us live!
Derek: We certainly have that reputation of always going last, a blessing and a curse, where Smoker Dad plays the midnight set.
Did you play some of these songs on the previous tour?
Trevor: A lot of them have been written for a while. Maybe three or four were fairly new and had to be worked out in the studio. But we had been playing them live, and that tour is where everything started coming together. We realized, “These are feeling like real songs now.”
It’s interesting how different that is for different artists, when a song becomes “real.”
Derek: Totally. I think this song is one of those where I had a guitar riff planned out in my head for a while, but I didn’t think it was going to work. Then, when I wrote some lyrics, I still didn’t know if it was a song for Smoker Dad. But we pulled it off!
I noticed that the different band members have all had various band experiences and genre explorations before now. For Smoker Dad, is this a sound that you’ve settled on as your main focus?
Derek: I think this is a sound that we’ve kind of stumbled onto. Prior to the pandemic, we were just playing Rock ‘n Roll music, and also close to that time, we invited in our friend, Chris Costalupes, who plays pedal steel, on the album. That was where we had the “Ah-hah!” moment. We weren’t writing songs with pedal steel in mind, but implementing pedal steel into songs that we had already been fleshing out. I still remember the first time that he started playing, and Trevor and I looked at each other, thinking, “Whoa!” That is what Smoker Dad is.
It might get lumped into a Country Rock thing, or a Punk thing, though I don’t know that we ever fit in one of those genres. But that is what our Smoker Dad sound is. Once we found that, we’ve leaned into it. Everyone in the band is a fantastic musician, and we all enjoy setting up a riff and seeing where the music takes us in those songs. Having that kind of twangy feel shaped a lot of what our sound is that we’ve been making up as we go.
I met Chris during the pandemic, and there’s not a lot of people who play pedal steel in Seattle, so it was in the back of my head that I wanted it.
Derek: He had only just figured out that instrument, and it’s all come out of jamming. The difference between our first record and the next one is that it captures what our live energy is. Garrett Reynolds, who we recorded with, has seen us live for years, and he’s always wanted to record us on tape live, reel-to-reel. That’s always worked best for us, trying to get as much as we can in one take. It’s hard, but the pay-off is worth it when you get it right.
Did you record all the instruments at once?
Trevor: We did all the rhythm section, and my guitar, on the live tracks. Pedal steel and vocals were overdubbed, but the core of it is live.
I don’t think that your sound is like any other particular thing that I’ve listened to, but there is a crossroads in 70s Rock where people are bringing in different influences. I guess The Byrds had something to do with that, when they started heading into Cosmic Country. I think there’s a lot of opening up of genres right now, and you all are right in the middle of that. I don’t think that you’re copying any particular era.
Derek: [Laughs] I think that we tried, but we just couldn’t do it! We love 70s Rock. We love all those bands. There’s no doubt that if we could sound like The Byrds, we’d love to sound like that. Trevor is our frontman and leader, and he writes a lot of the songs, but it’s never been an environment when we’re writing music where we say, “This is how the song has to go.” Instead you say, “I’ve been working on something…” And it kind of goes from there.
Trevor: I would say that our engineer, Garrett, when we’re in the studio, does say, “Well….I don’t know about that….” [Laughs]
You have some guiding principles. You know what flavors might not work together.
Derek: Exactly.
There’s room for solos on a lot of the songs, and that brings in other band members, making it feel more like a collective voice, too. You also literally use a collective voice a lot, with multiple vocals.
Trevor: We did a lot of that with “Rollin’ On” where I double-tracked the vocals, and then Chris King, who does some of the songwriting, and plays piano and harmonica, also does vocals on a lot of the songs. Sometimes we sing together.
Is there a feeling that you have about why those stacked vocals work for you all? It does make it sound more like a group of people.
Trevor: I don’t know if that was a goal that we had in mind, we just think it sounds better. I think we have insecurities about being on the stage alone, and I always like being in a band. I’m not a trained singer, but Chris King definitely is, and everything that he sings on, he makes better. It’s a no-brainer.
This is not a serious question, but I have to ask, where is this giant cowboy boot sculpture in your press photos and video for “Rollin’ On”? That is nuts!
Derek: It’s really cool. It used to be a gas station in Seattle in the 70s or maybe earlier. It was called “Hat and Boots” and it had a convenience store under the hat, and the boots were bathrooms. It sat there, vacant, forever, and I’m pretty sure that Thrasher has a whole page of somebody skating the hat. Somebody in the community in south Seattle got people together and saved them. They moved them from their original spot and put them into the park where they are now, and used original paint samples to bring them back.
Trevor: They are a spectacle to see, that’s for sure!
Derek: There aren’t a lot of Country bands in Seattle, so we had to do it.
It’s perfect! And it’s so weird. Jumping into a couple of the other songs on the album coming up, is “Armadillo” a kind of a love song? It seems to have that feeling.
Derek: The first two songs on the album are the most collaborative between band members, where we all took part in writing the lyrics. It’s definitelt a love song. There’s some homage to Big Star and I really wanted that 70s driving guitar riff. It just sounds cool.
It’s almost like a dance song. What’s the significance of the armadillo itself?
Trevor: That one definitely gets people on their feet when we play it live. There’s a lyric in the chorus that says, “Your heart is armadillo skin, softer at the core,” so I think that we just had one of those moments where we looked at the lyrics, and said, “Armadillo, okay.”
Derek: During the walk-up part, we used to all yell at each other, “I’m an armadillo!” That’s how we’d know that’s the song we were going to play. [Laughs]
Trevor: We actually first wrote that word on a white board with other words as ideas, and I think Chris King then worked “armadillo” into his lyrics!
Derek: Yes! Armadillos are cool.
It’s a weird word and a cool idea. It’s a strange creature, but it fits with the desert and highway travel, too. Related to that, what does the song title and album title Hotdog Highway mean?
Derek: That one was definitely a song from the road. When we were in the van on tour, we were calling ourselves “hotdogs rolling down the highway.”
Trevor: We were mulling over titles for the album forever. I originally wanted to call it “Party Jail”, [Laughs], but that got vetoed. Then we realized, it was Hotdog Highway, duh. Because we wanted to call the album that, we needed to write the song. Chris came into the studio and showed me the lyrics and his voice recording of him playing it at home on the piano.
The piano is big in that song.
Derek: Yes, and this is the only song on the album that we hadn’t played live before.
Trevor: But we recorded it live in the studio. We were crammed in there and had the piano miked up.
Derek: When Chris started playing it, it was difficult, because the lyrics would make us all laugh pretty quickly. But it’s so serious and tender. But it’s just so hilarious and silly. That’s our “Tiny Dancer”!
There are totally Elton John vibes to that song.
Derek: It’s our “Freebird”. We wanted to have something big and epic, but it also plays to our duality. We want to be a big, hard Rock band, but we’ve never taken ourselves seriously. We’re the most approachable people who just want to play fun, loud music.
Trevor: We want people to dance! When Chris brought that song into the studio, there were so many chord changes, and it was kind of a mess. We kind of gave up on it and went home for the day. When I had just fallen asleep, I was thinking of The Who, in “Teenage Wasteland” where they do the whole sonic thing in the beginning. Then I realized that we would play these separate parts as the band, then he’d do the solo parts. When we came back to the studio the next day, it worked. We figured it out and it sounds fucking awesome!
Derek: It’s unlike anything else on the record in that way. It’s unlike anything else we’ve ever done.
Trevor: I think that’s why we put it last on the record, too. We open things up, and you go on this little road trip with us, then we send you off on the Hotdog Highway.
It also makes for some hilarious cover art.
Derek: That was definitely in our heads at the time!
