The pandemic proved to be a difficult time for Reverend Peyton. First and foremost, there was quite a scare when his wife (and washboard player in Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band), Breezy, fell ill soon after the country shut down.
Peyton, who brings the band to Alex’s Bar in Long Beach on June 14, doesn’t know for sure if Breezy had COVID or pneumonia. But she had it bad.
“She had a 102 temperature for over a month. It was unbelievable. And her lungs will be permanently scarred. She has been going to get treatment at a lung COVID center. She’ll have lingering effects from being sick,” Peyton said in a recent phone interview. “We had a doctor at the hospital who told me when he sent us home, ‘I’ve never sent anybody home as sick as your wife is.’ He’s like, ‘I just don’t think you want to be here. We think we’re going to be inundated with elderly people. We don’t know what we’re going to do. So you just go home, and if she gets any worse, you’ll need to bring her back or call 911.’ I was just like ‘Uh, what?’ So we went home and I thought, ‘Well, she’ll be better in a few days.’ Then a few days turned into a few weeks. It was just like ‘Oh my God, what are we doing? What’s going to happen here?’ That was the scariest thing for me.”
Breezy did eventually recover. Peyton himself didn’t get so sick, but he had a health issue for a time that left him baffled.
“I had this weird, the best way I can describe it is like this fog on my brain for six months,” he said. “It just made me, well, it’s kind of like when you first wake up in the morning and your brain is not all the way awake, that’s what it felt like.”
Peyton doesn’t know for sure what ailed him, but he suspects he had a mild case of COVID.
“I’ve had so many friends who had a similar experience with the early variants of the coronavirus that I think that’s what it probably was,” Peyton said.
Another unsettling issue was whether Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band, which also includes drummer Max Senteney, would survive the pandemic.
“I told Breezy at the beginning, I said, ‘Man, if everybody goes and gets a different job, they’re going to start getting back to landscaping or whatever they’re going to do, then we’re not going to have a band,” he said. “We’re going to lose our crew and our band, and when it comes time to actually doing something again, everyone’s going to have roots taking hold in another business or job situation.”
Peyton, though, figured out ways to generate enough income to pay the group’s crew and keep the organization intact until touring could resume. He set up a Patreon account in which fans donated money for a variety of special band items and the group played monthly livestream shows that also generated funds.
If serious health issues and career uncertainty made life hard during the pandemic, one thing that came easily was new music, in the form of the studio album “Dance Songs For Hard Times.”
Peyton had returned home from touring before the pandemic had hit, and as usually happens when he’s on tour, he had amassed a collection of song ideas that were in various stages of completion. He planned to finish those ideas and make a new album in what he thought would be a normal year of 2020.
But the pandemic prompted Peyton to set aside the vast majority of song ideas he had cataloged on tour. During March and April of 2020, he split much of his time between caring for Breezy and writing the songs that would go on “Dance Songs For Hard Times.”
“When everything got shut down, everything changed. It just felt like none of this stuff (I had been working on) made sense. So I would say it’s at least 80 percent (of the album) was just written in a two- or three-week period,” Peyton said. “It just felt like I had all this emotion inside of me and the world had changed, and I just felt like I needed to express that.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever had so much come forth so fast that was so good, right in such a short period of time,” he said. “It just felt like there was this whole record that was pouring out of me.”
Later in the year, the Peytons and Senteney got together with producer Vance Powell and recorded “Dance Songs” in a lightning-quick five days.
The band’s 10th full-length album, Peyton said “Dance Songs For Hard Times” was the easiest recording project of the Big Damn Band’s career. It was recorded live in the studio to eight-track analog tape, although Peyton said he and Powell took advantage of recording technology if a certain song needed an additional part or an overdub, and they also put a good deal of thought into the tones and song arrangements before hitting record.
The result – perhaps surprising given the difficult times in which the songs were created – is a lively and decidedly upbeat album. Yes, there are some serious lyrics, such as “Ways and Means” (about financial struggles) and “No Tellin’ When” (about the uncertainty and isolation of the pandemic). But much of the album provides an emotional lift.
With their sound still firmly rooted in the classic earthy blues style that’s characterized all of the bands’ albums and centered around Peyton’s highly accomplished playing, which moves easily between finger-picked and slide guitar parts, the Big Damn Band comes out rocking on the boogying “Ways And Means” and the frenetically fun “Rattle Can.” The energy only occasionally wanes from there, as “Too Cool To Dance,” “‘Til I Die” and “Sad Songs” offer more gritty high points on the “Dance Songs For Hard Times” album.
“It’s the best record we’ve ever done,” Peyton said. “It’s not just me saying it. Literally every review that mentioned it said that.
“I think the hardest thing to do in music is to craft a good song. That’s the thing on this record I think I’m most proud of is the actual songs,” Peyton said. “I mean, the band played them good. The performance is good. Vance Powell, (the producer) who we worked with on this one, we were in his studio, he was awesome to work with, just had a great time, the easiest we’ve ever felt in the studio, the most relaxed, the most comfortable. But at the end of the day, I think the songs are the thing I’m most proud of.”
Peyton and his bandmates plan to showcase a good number of the “Dance Songs” tunes on the current tour, but the show may come with a few surprises, too.
“It definitely is going to be pulling from (“Dance Songs”) for certain, but at the same time, there’s enough time in the set that we can sprinkle stuff in from a lot of other records, too,” Peyton said. “And then also, too, I like to put stuff in the set that you can only see if you come to the show, things that aren’t on any record. I think that’s sort of a bonus for the people that are coming out and paying that full ticket price to see the show.”
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