Quartet’s CD release party is part of the restaurant’s Monday Night Concert Series

Let’s face it … Maine has some wonderful local acts. One that has been mentioned here before is The J.T. Lockwood Band — their self-titled album was released in December 2012 with a CD party at Slates, in Hallowell, to celebrate. Well, the quartet are heading back to the popular venue for a special show March 24 in the Monday Night Concert Series. To that end, I reconnected with Joel Lockwood.

Q: I understand something special is happening at Slates on March 24?

Lockwood: Yeah, we’re doing our first ever live DVD recording — we’ll be putting it out as a “Live at Slates” show.

Q: You’ve played at Slates before, right?

Lockwood: Yeah, the last time we performed there was in December of 2012 when we released out most recent album — we had a great audience there. It was supposed to be in October of that year but because of the superstorm Sandy it got rescheduled to December … which worked out well because I think our turnout was a lot better. It was two tickets shy of selling out — when we actually went back and did the show.

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Q: And those kinds of numbers would lend themselves well for a live recording there, for sure.

Lockwood: It would and I’ve always thought of that (venue) as having a storytellers environment almost, so we’ll probably do some acoustic versions of tunes that have definitely been a little more edgy when we’ve been playing the live shows, so to speak, with our sound and just kind of our more rocking side.

Q: Could you run through who is in your band and their role there?

Lockwood: Absolutely! First there’s Bert Macdonald — he plays lead guitar and vocals. There’s also Justin Bureau on bass guitar and vocals, and Thomas Bureau on drums and vocals. And as far as the DVD recording goes, we’ve got Cartharsis Media — they’re coming in to do the video side of things … they’re out of the Waterville area and they’ve been doing a ton of great stuff. We’re also working with them to make a music video which will come out after the Slates show — the planning of that is definitely more in-depth than coming and recording a live show.

Q: When you last played Slates in December 2012, that was a CD-release show. Are you working on something new, album-wise?

Lockwood: We are, we’re in the process of writing right now — we wanted to do something new back at Slates so that’s why we’re doing the live DVD recording. We’ll do a mix of songs off that album and a previous album, and even some unreleased songs that we haven’t put out yet. But, yeah, our hopes are to be back in the studio no later than this fall, that way we have a follow-up for right around two years after our first album came out.

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Q: When will the DVD come out — after the new album?

Lockwood: No, I think it will be before. It all depends on how it comes together, we’ll look at the performance and Bob Colwell from The Root Cellar is doing the audio side of things so we’ll be piecing it together with Catharsis Media and Bob as far as the audio and video goes. I hope that is something we can put out no later than late spring/early summer. Oh, and Brad Truman will be responsible for the live sound at the boards that night — Bob will be taking the tracks and submixing them for the actual audio files for the DVD itself.

Q: So the folks will not only hear some of the older material but some of the new, as well.

Lockwood: Absolutely.

Q: Is there anything you’d like to pass on to the readers of this interview?

Lockwood: I guess what I’d like to convey within this article about the show is the fact that we are doing the DVD recording. That we’d love an audience that wants to be a part of a taping like that, and the things we’ve been doing like traveling throughout the Northeast —growing our fan base and playing in bigger venues, like the Hard Rock Boston and the Middle East downstairs in Cambridge and The Bitter End. We’ve been getting some pretty consistent radio play and in January we won the Katalyst Maine Music Hoodie with two other bands. I think this is the third year that they’ve done it — it’s basically a voting thing which really excited us because there was over one hundred bands and we were one of the top three to make it onto the hoodie. To get that kind of support from your fan base leads you to believe that what you’re doing is worthwhile and that we should continue!

Lucky Clark has spent 45 years writing about good music and the people who make it. He can be reached at luckyc@myfairpoint.net if you have any questions, comments or suggestions.


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